Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism by Jennifer Percy

Author:Jennifer Percy [Percy, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Veterans, Psychology, Neuropsychology, Psychopathology, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Social Psychology, Religion, Christian Theology, Angelology & Demonology, Psychology of Religion, Social Science, General, Sociology of Religion
ISBN: 9781451661989
Google: KBiFAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1451662068
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2014-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

PART IV

THE WAR ON TERROR IN BIBLICAL TERMS

Bobby says he was bullied in elementary school, middle school, and high school. He has a sweet, singsongy voice. He says nobody liked him.

Vivian, Bobby’s wife, a woman with dreams of becoming a dancer, says she cannot dream any longer because her legs cripple and her heart beats too fast.

A man named Walter sits wide-legged on a chair. He’s wearing snakeskin leather boots and a camo bandanna wrapped tightly around a mop of silky hair. He has a handlebar mustache. Walter doesn’t want to talk about what he did in Vietnam.

A man with a greased pompadour and a turtleneck sweater steps shame-faced into the room. He has dark, shifty eyes. On his forehead deep lines curve like claw marks. He sits next to me. He smells of whiskey and baby powder. “I’m late,” he whispers. “Call me Brother John.” The Holy Spirit, as far as he knows, has never baptized Brother John. When someone put their hands on him for the baptism he saw dark, ugly faces on the back of his eyelids. He’s never known what that meant. “I think those ugly faces are me. I tried to see a picture of Christ and I could not. I only saw me. Ugly me.”

Noah, a bearded man in a hoodie, wants to smooth over some marital issues he’s having with his wife, Mary.

The professor has the voice of a man with a weak throat. He says his father once wrote the word stupid on a gingerbread cookie and gave it to him. He teaches literature at Georgia Southern.

A seventy-three-year-old man named Ezra says he’s a pretty capable person but that he should have accomplished a great deal more in his life. He says that when he was five years old his pastor raped him. “I thought it was because the Father didn’t love me.” Ezra has been traveling around the country since he was fifteen seeking deliverance, getting different kinds of exorcisms. Nothing has worked. They told him his faith was weak. Ezra thinks it’s because Jesus hates him. Ezra’s mouth opens and closes. “I’m here and I’m alive. I think I’m barely sane. Sometimes I just think this is what life is about. That I’m just going to hang around and wait to die.”

• • •

It’s February, and snow falls for three days in Portal, hiding what people know of the land before it melts in a single day, sucked back into the earth. Outside, horses seek ways out of muddy fields, birds bathe in snowmelt, and grass has rotted flat. The continuous thaw of earth.

We are all at the Bible Covenant Institute in downtown Portal, a drab one-story building with a sun-faded roof. One side of the building borders Main Street. It’s not a Bible institute but a local couple used to run a Bible college out of the building, and the name stuck. Now the Portal community uses it for different events, and the Mathers hold deliverance retreats here when it’s available.

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