A lady with rheumatism came to Marigold next. She touched the woman on the shoulders. The woman tried to stand upright. She smiled and cried beneath the pain. But Marigold knew nothing had changed inside the woman. Marigold felt no buzzing in her head, no vibration in her hands, no heat in her palms.

A man with bad hearing followed the lady. Marigold touched the man’s ears. The man claimed he could hear out of his ear once again, but Marigold knew it wasn’t true. There were no healings, no miracles. There were only people who wanted to be whole. People who wanted someone to understand them.

It was over. She knew she was not the woman she’d been the day before. She knew something in her had shifted. Something in the sky had shifted.

The sun set like it always did that night, and the stars came out to play. The large crowds of people left, one vehicle at a time. And after a few hours, the entire place was nothing but a peanut field again.

“What’s wrong?” Coot finally asked.

She looked at his kind eyes and said, “For once in my life, nothing.”

Ninety-Nine
Tearing Things Down

The world came alive with the insect sounds of early evening. The sky was smeared with the colors of sunset. And men labored beneath it, deconstructing the wood stadium. It had taken two days to tear down the structure.

Coot enjoyed the sweat and task of loading large planks of wood into a truck with Pete and Joseph too. Coot couldn’t believe he was seeing the old man moving his limbs beneath the load of work, sweating. Joseph worked beside Coot, wearing a sweat-stained white T-shirt and work gloves on his hands. They hurled the wood planks like spears.

“How’re you doing?” Coot asked Joseph.

“What do you mean, how am I doing? I got raised from the dead, that’s how I’m doing. How are you doing is the better question.”

“I’m doing fine.”

“Well, I’m doing better than you.”

Joseph lifted a large plank of wood and shot it toward the truck with the strength of a teenager. The old man’s short-sleeved shirt revealed a skinny arm, loose-skinned but muscled.

One of the workmen whistled, then shouted, “Supper’s here!”

Coot stood straight to see a chain of automobiles winding through the empty dirt prairie. One car following another. The cars stopped, and women wearing cotton dresses emerged from them. They were all carrying casserole tins and covered dishes and baskets.

“The food wagon,” said Joseph. “Thank God, I was about to starve.”

“What’re you talking about?” said Coot. “You’ve done nothing but eat jerky and crackers all day.”