The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell(106)

“A forgive-your-sins assembly line. They should just have a drive-through window,” I said, which generated a frown from my mother but a grin from my dad.

We wheeled my parents to the next available priest, and Mickie and I looked for a place to catch a short nap. My mother, never one to miss an opportunity to save my soul, grabbed my arm. “Go for me,” she said.

“Where?” I asked.

“Don’t be insolent. You know what I mean. Go to confession.”

“You’re pushing it, lady,” I told her, but ever the dutiful son, I agreed.

In a mild protest, I avoided an American priest and found a Spanish-speaking priest from Mexico. Just my luck, he spoke better English than I did. I probably could have talked to him for several hours, but I gave him the abbreviated version and, my sins absolved, I returned to find Mickie waiting with both my parents.

“Had a long list?” she asked.

“Couldn’t remember the bloody Act of Contrition,” I said.

Mickie and I wheeled my parents into the grotto of Massabielle, a place of incredible beauty. Atop a hundred-foot escarpment, where once stood a fortified castle, was the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, a white-and-gold Gothic cathedral with multiple spires and elaborate carvings. At its base, on the banks of the river Gave’s flowing bluish-green waters, dozens of candles flickered beside a natural cave perhaps fifty feet in length, ten feet high at its tallest, and five feet in depth. Just above and to the right of the spot where the spring emerged was a cleft in the stone. In it was a statue of the Blessed Mother to mark the location where Bernadette saw her apparition. It struck me that I had seen this statue before, though I could not place where.

We pushed the wheelchairs closer to the escarpment. The ground on which Bernadette had knelt had been paved with asphalt and the hole she had dug covered by a thick sheet of Plexiglas. The water flowing beneath that glass was illuminated by light. As we passed, my mother made a sign of the cross with her rosary. Water also trickled down the stone escarpment, and my mother asked that I stop just below the statue of the Blessed Mother.

“Give me your arm,” she said, and she used it to stand and touch the rock, wiping the water over her face, then over my father’s face. As she leaned forward and kissed the stone, Mickie gave me a look, but I had no answer for how my mother was accomplishing these feats. I knew it wasn’t a drug that had relieved her considerable pain and allowed her to do this, because she had refused to take any. “One does not see the Blessed Mother on drugs,” she’d said.

“I’ll bet some people have,” I’d joked.

“Don’t be sacrilegious, Samuel,” my mother had replied.

She set her hand on the wet stone and rubbed the water over my face.

“You’d at least think the Blessed Mother could have used warm water,” I said.

“The warmth comes later,” my mother said. I had no idea what she meant.

The baths were our last stop, and despite the collapse of my own faith, I could not deny that a part of me had brought my mother to Lourdes hoping for exactly what Mickie had warned against—a miracle. The lines were long, but again the faithful willingly stepped aside to allow the sick to proceed first. Mickie took my mother to the side of the grotto with small underground pools reserved for women. I took my father to the pools reserved for men. We entered a small, dimly lit, cave-like room, where an elderly Italian volunteer assisted me with the task of removing my father’s clothing. Then I removed mine. We both wrapped cold, damp towels around our waists, and then the Italian volunteer and I helped my father stand from his wheelchair and step down into a sunken stone bath, which was perhaps seven feet long, three feet wide, and a couple of feet deep. We held my father while he prayed to a tiny statue of the Blessed Mother at the foot of the bath. When he had finished, the volunteers instructed him to sit. My father complied. Having never lost his sense of humor, he looked at me and spoke the clearest words I had heard him speak since his stroke.

“You’d think the Holy Spirit could have at least heated the water,” he said, mimicking me.

Then he fell back and was submerged. My father surfaced with an expression like a child who had just walked in on his own surprise party. After a moment, he began to laugh, giddy, looked at me and said, “Warm.”

I thought he was making another joke, because when I entered the bath, the water made my ankles and calves go numb. I faced the tiny statue uncertain what exactly to say. So I said what I had said throughout the trip. “For myself I seek nothing. Grant my mother and father peace. May all my mother’s novenas not have been in vain. Give her a sign that her prayers have not gone unheard. And bless Mickie.”

No sooner did I sit, however, when I heard a voice. I know how that sounds, but trust me, that voice was as clear as the bells ringing in the steeple of OLM church.

Have faith, Samuel.

The words were spoken so clearly that I looked to the Italian volunteer, who was waiting for me to give a signal that I was ready to be submerged, but he showed no sign of having heard them. I held up my hand for a second and looked again to the tiny statue. “Help me to understand,” I said. “I want to believe. Help me to believe. Help me to have faith.”

And I was submerged. Surfacing, I felt the strange warmth my father had spoken of. It radiated from the center of my chest down each limb. The Italian volunteer, who had undoubtedly witnessed thousands of similar expressions, smiled knowingly at me, then he bent close to my ear and, speaking quietly, as if sharing a secret, he said, “Spirito Santo. Spirito Santo.”