“Oh shit,” Mr. Redding says. “Oh damn oh hell oh shit.”

“Baby?” Flenco says. “Don’t you think you ought not be cussing so bad when you’re like this?”

“Li … iii … iiike what?” Mr. Redding spews out.

“When you’re coughing so bad and all. I bet if you’d quit smoking them cigarettes you wouldn’t cough so bad.”

She pats him on the back like she saw the respiratory therapist do and feels she knows a little about medicine.

“Oh crap,” Mr. Redding says. “Oh shit! ”

Flenco mops his sweaty head and fans hot air with her hand. She has heard that the healer drives a long black Caddy. They say he refuses to appear on network television and will not endorse products. They say he comes speeding out of the dusty fields in his dusty black car and they say the wind his machine brings whips the trousers of the state troopers before they can get into their cruisers and take pursuit. They say he lives only to heal and that he stops on the roadsides where crippled children have been set up and where their mothers stand behind them holding up cardboard placards painstaking printed healer heal my child. They say that if the state troopers catch up with him while he is performing some miracle of mercy on one of God’s bent lambs, the people pull their cars out into the road and block the highway, taking the keys out of the ignitions, locking the doors. It’s said that in Georgia last year a blockade of the faithful ran interference for him through a web of parked police cars outside Waycross and allowed him to pass unmolested, such is the strength of his fame. Flenco hasn’t a placard. She has rented a billboard beside the café, letters six feet tall proclaiming healer heal my husband. Telephone reports from her sister-in-law in Bruce confirm the rumor that he has left Water Valley and is heading their way. Flenco imagines him coming down out of the hilly country, barreling down the secondary roads and blasting toward the very spot where she sits fanning Mr. Redding’s feverish frame.

“Oh shit,” Mr. Redding says. “Oh God … dang!”

“Just rest easy now, honey,” Flenco says. “You want me to go get you some Co-Coler?”

“Hell naw, I don’t want no goddamn Co-Coler,” Mr. Redding says. “I want some … want some goddamn … I want some … shit! Just carry me … back home and … goddamn … let me die. I’m … goddamn … burning up out here.”