When I looked out the school window, I imagined a nebulous future that lay somewhere beyond the fields. I fantasized about being either a librarian or a gypsy on the open road. With my platinum blonde hair, pale skin, and blue eyes, I couldn’t pass for a gypsy, which seemed truly unfair. Yet my gypsy soul might be nurtured by becoming a librarian. I was enamored with the town librarian who, contrary to stereotype, wore short, short skirts and sported poufy, brittle bleached-blonde hair, had talon-like, blood-red fingernails, and whose eyes, lips, and cheeks bore the unmistakable stain of forbidden, harlot-ish makeup. The librarian clearly hadn’t been called by God. At this point, the church’s position on makeup was set forth in another booklet, Truth About Makeup:
. . . the act of painting the face (whether eyes, cheeks, or lips) is falsifying, intended to DECEIVE, an expression of VANITY which is the very basis of all sin, and therefore it becomes, with a plain THUS SAITH THE LORD, a SIN!
What I would be when I grew up and where I would live was, however, probably a moot point. The world was going to end in just a few years, in 1975, and I would not have time to get married, have children, travel, or become an adult. Live a life.
From 1969 to 1972, Abby was homeschooled. She had lain in a hospital bed in the living room much of the time, and my father often had to carry her to the bathroom. She looped her stark, skinny arms around his sun-weathered, strong neck, and he set her down gently in the bathroom, returning to carry her back to bed when she’d finished.
I missed the person she had been, my playmate. Seeing Abby so weak, so ill, was unbearably sad. I often wanted to turn away from her. Looking at her, I felt the same constriction in my chest as when the ministers screamed and shouted about the End Times.
She had to use a wheelchair, and I pushed her around the house, as if I were pushing a small child on a swing. There were more prayer cloths, more anointings, and then, a few months later, she seemed better. Abby was out of the wheelchair, and we baked oatmeal cookies together. Sometimes she ventured outside, a white wraith, and though she was not allowed to run, she sort of chased me, and I ran slowly and let her catch me.
Social workers came over to check on her, and my mother warned us not to answer questions. The social workers asked my mother if Abby had seen a doctor lately, and she said yes, she had, though I didn’t recall Abby having seen a doctor in the past few years. In fact, the talk at home was all about God healing her.
The church’s publication Does God Heal Today? claimed that the medical profession was pagan in origin. Armstrong preached that “Poison plus poison equals poison.” If you had faith and adhered to church doctrine, you would be healed. If you weren’t healed, it indicated a lack of faith or having done something that displeased God and made God vengeful enough to choose not to answer your prayers. Armstrong’s son Richard had died after an automobile accident in the 1950s because he hadn’t received medical care. His wife, too, died because she refused to go to a doctor when she suffered from an obstructed bowel. No one mentioned that faith had not healed either Armstrong’s son or his wife.
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In 1972, it appeared as if our prayers had been answered. Abby was well enough to attend sixth grade with me. Boone Township School had ceased operating, and we transferred to the middle school in Ireland, a few miles away.
In the spring of 1973, Abby joined us mushroom hunting in the woods behind our house. In May, around Abby’s thirteenth birthday, she walked along with us behind the barn and down the path to the mulberry tree, then back into the woods to the creek where we’d built our intricate sand castles, and we checked our brothers’ raccoon and mink traps. Next to me, I could see that Abby was happy, even if she was breathing hard. There was a trace of healthy red in her pale cheeks, and just for a moment, I had a brief glimpse of the girl who’d sat companionably with me, coloring our Disney workbooks.
At my brother Jim’s high school graduation party in June, even our grandparents, looking at Abby, had to admit that a miracle had occurred. Our faith had been rewarded. She’d been healed. This would be the third time God had intervened on our behalf—after Sarah’s birth, and when I’d had pneumonia.
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On the morning of July 2, 1973, our mother took us to town. Mary was attending a drivers’ training class, and Liz, John, Sarah, and I were enrolled in a summer arts and crafts program. Abby was tired. She didn’t want to ride along. She’d been more tired than usual the past few weeks. The heat, we figured. My mother said, “Sugarplum, are you sure you’ll be okay here by yourself?” She muttered yes. My brother Ed, who was sixteen at that time, would be home later in the morning, my mother reassured Abby.
I went into the room Abby now shared with Mary, to borrow her sandals. On their walls were David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman posters that they had pulled out of the centerfold of 16 magazine; a Lee Majors poster hung on the door—every night, Mary and Abby kissed the Six-Million-Dollar Man goodnight. “I’m taking your sandals, okay?” I grabbed them. Abby simply looked at me from the hospital bed. Didn’t respond. Grouchy, I figured.
The summer program was for poor kids, and we played games sometimes, but this particular day, we were learning about the food pyramid and how to cook healthy foods. Popcorn didn’t need to be slathered in butter, and we should have something green on our plate each meal. I felt like the teacher was talking down to us, as if we were not only poor but stupid.
When we returned home in the early afternoon, I bounded into the house after Mary to tell Abby a joke I’d heard at the summer program: “What’s green and red and goes sixty miles an hour?” Answer: “A frog in a blender.”
Mary went in first, put her books on the dresser, then screamed, “Mother! Mother!” Our mother, Liz, John, Sarah, and I rushed into their bedroom. Abby sat in her chair, her head tilted back. Her eyes were wide, the irises rolled up. Her mouth was slightly open. Her hands lay limply on the armrests.
Our mother went straight to the chair, felt for Abby’s pulse, her heartbeat, pressed her hand against Abby’s forehead, and said, “She’s dead.”
“She’s not dead!” Mary kept saying. “Do something, you have to do something!”
“There’s nothing we can do.”
I turned away and went out the door and into the kitchen, such a normal kitchen, dirty plates from breakfast in the sink, towel hanging over a chair, wastebasket half full, wall calendar scribbled with my father’s notes about how much it had rained and the daily temperature. Tupperware container of food scraps for the compost pile. Everything was the way we’d left it, the way it should be. And the clock was ticking. I was mesmerized by the second hand. It was a little after one. It was now seventeen minutes since we’d found Abby, and the second hand simply went ’round and ’round, as if nothing had happened. A normal kitchen, and Abby lay dead in the next room.
My mother called our father at work and, since we shared the same party line with several families on the Portersville Road who, if they picked up their phone quietly, could listen in on whoever was using the phone, pretty soon all of the neighbors had heard the news. My mother called her parents, Grandma Himsel, and the aunts and uncles, and in that same calm voice delivered the news. Sarah, John, and Liz sat together on the couch, sometimes crying, then silent. Ed came home—he’d been back for lunch before going to the woods to set his traps, and had checked on Abby then. “She was okay when I left, I gave her some Sprite. She seemed okay,” he repeated. “What happened?”
“We don’t know these things,” our mother said. “God doesn’t always tell us.” This had long been my mother’s standard answer for anything we didn’t understand,
