The Visibility of Things Long Submerged by George Looney

Author:George Looney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.

Like they told you, sir, he said, I used to heal people. I traveled all around back in the day with a preacher and some singers. We’d set up tents at the edge of a town and put up posters all over, brightly-colored posters so as to get folk’s attention. The posters, they’d proclaim, in big letters, a faith-healing had come to town, and they’d include the time and the place when the healing would commence.

Even before the posters went up, Jebediah said, I’d have gone out into whatever fields or forests I found near where our tents flapped in what wind there was and, with my old canvas sack in my hand, I’d start to humming.

Humming? I said, looking up from my note pad.

Yes, sir, humming. No doubt the guard warned you about that, he said.

I nodded. Go on, I said.

There I’d be, out in some field or among some trees, with my sack, humming. I can’t tell you, sir, why it was snakes came out to my humming. All I know is that whenever I went looking for snakes for the show and started in to humming, the snakes came up out of their holes in the ground and let me pick them up and place them in the sack. You need to understand, sir, these was harmless snakes, mostly garter snakes or rat snakes. Never any snake that was poisonous. The humming just brought out the harmless ones. Don’t know why, sir. Just the way it was.

Rachel never did care for the snakes, he said, though she never told me why.

Rachel, I said. That was your wife’s name?

She was my wife. Yes, sir. Though I can’t say now that I ever really knew who she was when she was with me. We was married more than three years, and not once did I ever touch her, sir. You know, in a sexual way. I thought she was too good for that sort of sweating and such, sir. Turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong. But back then, I believed things more easily than I do now.

So, during the healing them snakes would become vessels to hold the sins of the folks I was healing and would turn poisonous with them sins, and I’d have to snap their necks soon as they’d absorbed all the sin there was in a person. After a show, I’d dump the dead snakes in some ditch and forget about them. They was just snakes, after all, sir. Just instruments to be used in the name of the Lord.

Rachel and me done this healing gig a few years together. She’d play the organ for the singers and as a kind of background for the healings, too. She could bring a music out of any old organ that was just as sweet as heaven itself must be. Proof of her goodness, I thought, of her purity. Now I know music comes from something other than purity.

Was your wife unfaithful? I said.

Can’t say as I can answer that question, sir.

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