Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles Read online

  Anne Tyler

  Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Tyler is the author of twenty novels; her eleventh, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1989. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

  BOOKS BY ANNE TYLER

  If Morning Ever Comes

  The Tin Can Tree

  A Slipping-Down Life

  The Clock Winder

  Celestial Navigation

  Searching for Caleb

  Earthly Possessions

  Morgan’s Passing

  Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant

  The Accidental Tourist

  Breathing Lessons

  Saint Maybe

  Ladder of Years

  A Patchwork Planet

  Back When We Were Grownups

  The Amateur Marriage

  Digging to America

  Noah’s Compass

  The Beginner’s Goodbye

  A Spool of Blue Thread

  Vinegar Girl

  Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles

  Anne Tyler

  A Vintage Short

  Vintage Books

  A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

  New York

  Copyright © 1974 by Anne Tyler

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This story originally appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine in December 1974.

  Ebook ISBN 9780525565079

  Cover design by Adalis Martinez

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.3.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by Anne Tyler

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles

  The first thing I tell people is, I’m just an ordinary woman. I’m just like you, I say, I can see they don’t believe me. They have all these preconceived notions. Maybe they expect me to be tall and blonde and beautiful, maybe in a long white robe or something of chiffon, loose and floating. The fact is that I am five foot two, a little overweight, my hair is gray. I generally wear a nice flowered dress and a string of pearls. When I am working out at the church I add an Orion cardigan. The church is apt to be drafty, and I am subject to colds. Wouldn’t you call that ordinary? But nobody wants to hear me say it. I am just like any one of you, no different in any way, I tell them, standing in front of the pulpit instead of behind it and holding out my hands to show them. They only wait. They fix their eyes on mine. They have so many hopes of me, they can’t afford to think that I’m not special.

  All my life my hands have been unusually wrinkled. Not every part of them (at least not when I was young), but just the finger joints, great folds and pouches at each knuckle as if my skin belonged to someone else, a very large man, for instance. I might have been wearing gloves that were too big for me. When I was a child I thought I would eventually grow into them. When I was a teen-ager I used to beg my daddy for all kinds of creams and salves and oils from his pharmacy. Every night I pinned my hopes on some magic potion. I sat at the window of the room that I shared with my sisters: I kneaded each finger separately and then all of them together while I gazed out into the dark, like a maiden in a fairy tale wringing her hands and waiting. I was seventeen at the time.

  One Saturday in the spring of my seventeenth year I was tending my Aunt Eunice, my father’s spinster sister who lived with us. She was subject to migraines. My mother had asked me to help out because I had a way with sick people. (If times had been better, I would have liked to be a nurse.) I was folding a cold compress for her, working in the dim green light that shone through her drawn curtains, listening to her soft crying which sounded something like the flickering of a fire. It would break your heart to hear her. Aunt Eunice was a taking-charge kind, always running around organizing some committee or church group—but here she lay all puffy-faced and tear-stained, stretched out on her precious crocheted bedspread with her shoes still on.

  I said, “Aunt Eunice, honey, don’t you want to get more comfortable?” She didn’t answer. I wished I could think of something real to do for her. I laid the compress on her head. I took her shoes off and covered her with an afghan. I adjusted the curtains a bit. Then I sat down in the rocking chair and looked at my hands, which still smelled of lilacs from the last cream I’d tried. Of course the wrinkles were as deep as ever. My little gold finger ring was buried in them, like wire grown into a tree trunk. But it came to me how cool my palms felt—wouldn’t they soothe poor Aunt Eunice? I reached over and pressed her forehead. It seemed my hand needed to be laid there, it seemed all that coolness was begging to be poured into somebody. Then Aunt Eunice said, “Oh!” and her eyes flew open. I snatched my hand away. “It’s gone,” she told me.

  “What?”

  “My headache’s gone.”

  I thought it was a fluke. I thought it was just a pause in the pain, and while she lay there I went to run more cold water on the compress. But when I came back she was sitting up and smiling. She waved the compress away. “I won’t be needing that,” she said. “You’ve removed my headache totally.”

  “Oh no, Aunt Eunice! I didn’t remove it!”

  “Well, you’re right of course, it was Someone higher. But you were His instrument. Did you know you could do this sort of thing?”

  I said, “Aunt Eunice, really I—”

  “I’m going to say a prayer of thanksgiving,” Aunt Eunice said. “Now I know I am free forever. Whenever that old migraine comes back I’ll run to you, Susanna.”

  “No, please,” I told her. “There’s been some kind of mistake somewhere. I’m sure it won’t happen again.”

  But she wasn’t listening. It didn’t matter, anyhow. Aunt Eunice lived fourteen more years after that and never once, in all that time, did she have another migraine.

  This was during the Depression. There were a lot of people sick back then. Men snuffled into my daddy’s pharmacy bowed down by months of barely managing to endure; their skin was raw, their coughs were hacking, their children’s faces were pasty and dull. Where once they would have gone to a doctor they turned to Daddy instead, hoping for something cheaper that would work just as well. He did his best for them. Some didn’t pay for months, for years; still he carried their accounts and fixed them more bottles of whatever might help. My sisters and I worked the cosmetics counter, taking turns after school. We saw how many accepted their little brown parcels and left, mumbling promises, not a penny changing hands. They said they would pay when they could. My daddy said he knew they meant it.

  Aunt Eunice brought in Mrs. Leila Fortney, her very best friend. This was a few days after the migraine. I was sitting behind the counter dusting off the perfume bottles that no one could afford to buy anymore. When the bell tinkled over the doorway I looked up and saw Mrs. Fortney walking toward me in that special way she had, holding her two fists out in front of her as if she was being towed. That was her arthritis. Her hands were so swollen and twisted she couldn’t bear to let them swing at her sides. Sometimes she came to ask Daddy for glycerin, which she warmed over a candle before rubbing it in, but that
day it was me she headed for. Aunt Eunice was at her elbow. “Susanna, dear,” Aunt Eunice said, “will you lay hands on Mrs. Fortney’s arthritis?”

  “Lay—?”

  “I told her about the migraine.”

  “Oh, Aunt Eunice,” I said. I knew my face had turned red. In front of Daddy (who simply stood behind his counter staring, although of course he had heard about the migraine, too) I felt I’d been caught lying, or boasting, or making false claims, even though Aunt Eunice was the one to blame. “Mrs. Fortney, I wish I could,” I told her. “If there was anything to it at all, I would do it.”

  “Just try, that’s all I ask,” Mrs. Fortney said.

  “But it wouldn’t work.”

  “I’ll do anything you say,” she told me. “I’ll get down on my knees, I’ll pray, I’ll read the Bible all the way through not skipping the begats. Or I’ll tell you what. If you won’t cure me, couldn’t you give me a breather? Just a tiny period every day when I could be free of the pain? I’ve said it to Eunice, time and time again, if I could just have a little rest from this, I tell her. Just an hour a day, just half an hour even. Then I could gather myself together, don’t you see. Is that too much to ask?”

  “But I can’t. I don’t know how,” I said. “I want to. I wish I did.”

  “Then do it, honey,” Aunt Eunice said, and she leaned across the counter and took my hands. “Just trust in the Lord. What harm will it do?”

  She pulled me out into the aisle. She guided my hands to rest on Mrs. Fortney’s, on all those lumps and bulges and knots of pain. It would make you ache yourself just to touch them. Her fingers were like tree roots. What they needed was warmth, not coolness. I folded them between my palms, pouring in warmth, wishing it were true I had the power to heal them. I even prayed, but silently. Then Mrs. Fortney’s breath snagged. She looked at me with that sudden, startled, recognizing look Aunt Eunice had had when her headache left. “I feel it!” she said.

  I felt it, too. Heat tingled out of my fingertips, her hands loosened and then uncurled. “Praise be!” Aunt Eunice sang out. I turned toward my father. I thought surely he would have some explanation. But he was staring at me with his face stunned and blank, as if he didn’t know me. “I don’t understand,” I told him. “I don’t—”

  “I feel that we should pray,” Aunt Eunice said.

  They came one after the other, first occasionally and then every day, then several a day. I wondered how they had heard my name. Could Aunt Eunice have spread the news so quickly? I didn’t know, back then, how sharp-eared people get when they are desperate. If your child is sick, you hear every whisper that might offer hope, you catch it on the breeze, you pluck names and places out of strangers’ conversations overheard in railroad depots. You travel by any means you can manage, however long it takes you, to whatever creaky-floored little pharmacy might hold the cure. You ask the counter girl, “Is there a Miss Susanna here? The one that lays on hands?” Often it was me they asked, never guessing. I was plain even then, short and stocky with a large, pale face, nobody you would expect a miracle of. “I’m Susanna,” I told them. But I hadn’t lost the feeling that I was acting under false pretenses, and when I laid my hands on them I was always self-conscious.

  They brought me a man with a great soft lump sticking out of his forearm. I still don’t know what it was. I laid my fingers on it and prayed and it shrank, but it didn’t disappear. He and I stood staring at it, waiting. Nothing more happened. “I’ll come back then,” he said. “I’ll come tomorrow. Then you can finish this thing up.”

  “But maybe I won’t be able to,” I told him.

  “Yes, you will.”

  And the next day when he came it was only to show me that the lump was gone, it had vanished in the night. “I woke up and it was like it had never been there,” he said. “What do I owe? I’m not a rich man but I’ll do my best.”

  I wouldn’t take payment, though, not ever. I knew it would be wrong. Not even gifts, not even offerings that they wanted me to pass on to my favorite charity. Although many times, over the years, I have wakened to find a jar of homemade peach preserves on my front porch, or a basket of tomatoes, or one of those pink satin pincushions sewn up to look like a lady-doll.

  They brought me a baby with croup, so sick he could barely breathe. I laid a hand on his chest and took him to the back of the store to rock in a rocking chair. When it came night-time my daddy said, “What do you want me to do? I have to lock up now.” “Let me stay awhile,” I said. I loved children more than anyone; I spent the most time and care on them. I rocked him till he was limp and asleep and his breathing was perfectly clear. It was midnight by then. When I gave him back to his mother, I was so tired I don’t even know what she said to me or what I answered back.

  I cupped the ears of a five-year-old, and when I let him go he could hear although he had been deaf since he was three. I saw how his face screwed up with shock when the first sounds came, as if they hurt. I cooled the burning in a man’s leg, where he had carried a bullet for twenty-seven years. I soothed Mrs. Moffat’s lower-back pain, and she never again had to come to the pharmacy for the liniment that she had used.

  I would take away all his business, Daddy said, laughing, but I could tell I made him uneasy. He didn’t know how to treat me anymore. None of them did. My sisters and I didn’t talk the way we used to or giggle together after lights were out. My mother watched me too closely and was always suggesting wholesome activities—picnics, hayrides, taffy pulls—which required friends that I didn’t seem to have anymore. By then I was through school, working full-time in the pharmacy. I hardly ever saw people my own age. Yet how was I any different? I was the same as ever, it was my family that had changed. I wanted them to act the way they had before, but it never happened.

  Peculiar thoughts used to strike me back then. I wondered: When I cured the sickness, where did it go? Into me? Would all those aches and pains and fevers and swellings blossom forth in me someday? I wondered why God had singled me out, what He knew about me. I had never been more religious than anybody else, though of course I was baptized and attended church and had always tried to do my best. Then there were times when my hands seemed so foreign. When I had stopped the bleeding of a wound, or the labor pains of a woman only six months pregnant, I would raise my hands and stare at them and wonder whose they were, mine or someone else’s. Did I have the right still to use them for my own personal life? Should I go on blowing my nose and stacking talcum powder boxes and knitting myself a sweater?

  But worst of all, in those early days, were the times when the healing didn’t work.

  For it seemed that just as soon as I had gained some confidence, little failures started happening. I might cure two people of rheumatism and then with the third, nothing; he left the way he came. A lump might remain. A sore might stay on, even fester and grow worse. “See?” I told Aunt Eunice. “It was nothing. I was right.” But then the next man I might heal outright, before everyone’s eyes: a miracle. I couldn’t understand it. The only explanation I could think of was, God was warning me against conceit. He was reminding me that the healing was His doing, not mine. “Wouldn’t that be why?” I asked Aunt Eunice. “He wants to keep me humble.”

  This was when I was still very young, of course. Back then I thought I understood nearly everything.

  Times got better. Now when I healed I told people, First it’s best to see a doctor; doctors are God’s instruments, too, you know.

  The town started growing again, my daddy enlarged the pharmacy, my mother developed an ache that I could only ease temporarily and she had to have her insides out. My sisters got married, first Sally and then Diana. I was a bridesmaid at both their weddings. Now the bedroom we used to share was mine alone. At night the three of us ate our supper in the kitchen—Daddy, Mother and me, while Aunt Eunice tended the store. We didn’t have much to talk about. There wasn’t all that teasing and ch
attering we used to have when my sisters were home. Where did I go wrong? I wanted to ask. Isn’t anything going to happen for me, ever? My mother offered me second helpings in a tender voice, as if I were sick. My father patted my shoulder when he rose to listen to the news.

  I met Ben Meagan during the second week of a tent revival. I had gone to do some healing for Reverend Epsom. To tell the truth, I am not much for the shouting kind of religion, and besides, they had made me put on this white gown, something like cheesecloth, bunching over my gathered skirt. But I did want to do what I could. I stood down at the front, under Reverend Epsom’s rubbery-smelling canvas, and watched the people filing toward me on crutches, or in wheelchairs, or hanging on to other people’s arms. One big, dark man came alone. He wore a blue suit, but you could tell he was more used to work clothes. I noticed him because he looked so steadily into my eyes. I thought he must be very much in need. When it came his turn I said, “Where is your trouble?”

  He spoke in a mumble. (Some are ashamed to name their ills out loud.) I bent farther forward, smelling Wild-root Hair Oil. “Don’t be afraid, this will be in confidence,” I told him.

  “I love you, Miss Susanna,” he said.

  I straightened up.

  “I been coming here nightly,” he said. “I don’t know what you did to me. You’ve worked in under my skin. I can’t sleep anymore for thinking of you.”

  “But—don’t you have any sickness?” I asked.

  “You are my sickness,” he said.

  He came every night for the rest of the week. He came each night to the front. Knowing, now, what he would say, I tried not to think of him but to pin my mind on the prayers instead. I passed him without a glance when I moved through the sufferers. Still, no matter how I kept my distance, I always felt his blue-flame eyes burning into me.

  On the last night of the revival he said, “My name is Ben Meagan. I ask permission to come calling.”