Free The Stones Cry Out by Sibella Giorello Page B

stage and moved through the perspiring crowd. Her voice rang out in shouts.
    "God can heal any wound! Any wound. Give it to him! He’s ready to heal you. Do you hear me? He wants to make you whole again!"
    She walked down the front line of worshippers. Preaching, blessing, laying hands, and when she reached my mother, the woman’s thick fingers wound into the dark spiraling curls. Cradling my mother's pretty face, she shook her and cried out to God, praying to God for healing. In one split-second she drew back her hand and slapped my mother’s forehead.
    My mother fainted. She dropped like a cut tree.
    And she was caught by the people standing around her. Backing up, they laid her on the floor. The large woman was continuing down the line, laying hands, slapping more foreheads. The crowd moved around the supine like a river flowing around boulders.
    Standing up, I tried to see my mother's face. As the crowd parted around her, I could see her lips moving. I was too far away but continued to watch her, hoping for the impossible.
    Hoping to hear the words she murmured.
    ===============
    It was nearly midnight when we got home. My mother seemed pleasantly tired, and after getting her settled into her bed, I staggered across the courtyard and collapsed in my own. It was earned sleep, deep slumber, and my dreams seemed to revolve around an onyx sky dusted with quartz stars.
    In one dream a charcoal mist veiled the courtyard between our two houses, but I could see the goitered woman was there too. Only this time my mother was laying hands on her. Tenderly she touched the bulb on the woman's neck and lifted the woman's face, calling on God to heal her, to mend a broken vessel.
    I was leaning against the brick house, feeling the heat of the day radiated from the stone through my shirt, into my skin. My mother cried out with clarity, with conviction. I hadn’t heard that tone of voice in years. And suddenly Wally was there. He was taking pictures of the women who also appeared suddenly. A chorus around my mother and the goitered preacher lady. I looked around, expecting Madame to come next.
    And then I saw my father.
    His seersucker suit was wrinkled, the way it looked when he spent long hours at his desk. He stood directly across from me on the other side of the courtyard, but he was watching his wife. His blue eyes sparkled like topaz. I started to walk over to him, but I couldn’t move. The wall gripped my shirt, holding me like hands. I stretched out my arms. My hands scraped the night air, but the wall wouldn’t let go. I cried out for help, but the camp women started singing, rattling tambourines, drowning out my voice.
    "Glory, glory, glory!" they sang.
    My father turned. He looked right at me.
    “Dad?”
    He nodded, smiling. Then reached out his hand.
    But I couldn’t move. “I can’t --”
    He suddenly disappeared.
    "Hallelujah!" the women sang. “Praise God!”
    I felt a stab in my heart, like a spear, and started crying. The woman sang louder but the pain grew worse, until it was so severe I woke up.
    My face was wet. And when I reached for the clock beside my bed, my hands were shaking.
    3:33 AM.
    I lay down, closing my eyes. I tried to see him again. Those blue eyes, that wrinkled suit. But all that came back was the expression on his face. Serenity, I finally decided. He looked like a man experiencing perfect joy. And I remembered the first time Helen and I met him. I was five, she was eight, and later she said our birth father looked nothing like David Harmon. I didn’t remember --our dad was gone by the time I was two.
    "What do you mean?" I asked.
    "He never looked like that,” Helen said. “Nice. Happy. In love with Mom."
    I lay there for almost an hour but the dream refused to come back, and the loneliness refused to go away. Finally I threw back the cotton blanket and padded through the carriage house, turning on as few lights as possible in case my mother happened to glance out her window.
    In the