In the Wilderness by Kim Barnes Page A

her. Heal her, Lord! In God’s name we pray.”
    The chorus grew loud and encompassing, until the body I touched and the hands touching me melded. I floated in a swell of sound, a humming of breath and blood.
    “You will be healed!” I demanded it, surprised by the volume of my voice. The woman shuddered and groaned. The heat from her ear spread from my fingers into my arm and shoulder—my neck and face flushed with it. I opened my eyes and found myself in that room, the chicken half-eaten, gravy scumming the plates. The woman shivered in my hands.
    Later, I played with the other children in the barn. The woman’s one daughter and I hid from the boys in the stubble, giggling with pleasure at their blindness. We rooted tadpoles from the shallows and stabbed them onto rusty hooks. The creek held catfish and we bobbed for them in the manuresilted water. Each one we pulled from the muddy stream seemed a miracle, so different from the blazing trout I caughtin the clear runoff of Reeds Creek. I held their sleek black bodies in my hands, smoothing the spiny backs, careful of their poison.
    We trapped the big green frogs that huddled beneath the overhanging grass, and while the girls swaddled them in the hems of their skirts the boys got a hammer from the barn and made little crosses of split barnwood. Holding the struggling frogs by their tiny wrists and ankles, we drove small nails through each webbed foot, then studied them for a while. Their white bellies spasmed, their mouths opened and closed. They looked like rotund little men with their legs stretched straight. Someone suggested making miniature crowns of nettles but no one wanted to be stung.
    We planted them in the muddy creek bottom, three frogs hanging above the water, arranged to mimic the painting we had seen of the crosses on Golgotha: Christ, the largest frog, in the middle, the two thieves on either side. Something about the symmetry of the martyred frogs seemed targetlike and the boys ran to the house and came back with their BB guns. Bulls-eye was the belly, and we all took turns until the frogs sagged on their crosses and we lost interest in the game.
    That night, after evening service, Sister Baxter slipped into bed beside her already sleeping husband. When she woke the next morning her pillow was sticky with pus. The fever was gone. Whether it would have been so had I not touched her, I don’t know. I can explain the progress of illness and infection but not that moment when her pain took hold of me as though it were my own affliction.
    She testified at church that a miracle had been wrought, and only then did I feel the weight of expectation fall upon me, heavy as the missionary’s hands. My parents allowed me to walk in front of them. The other children began to resentthe way the adults nodded whenever I spoke. The attention made me aware of how seriously everyone looked upon my gift, yet I wasn’t sure I could do it again. If I failed to discern an illness, or if I prayed for someone to be healed and nothing happened, would it mean I had sinned, that I was unworthy?
    And then there was Luke. How did he fit into the maze my life was becoming? Somewhere between a child’s innocent cruelty and her coming initiation into the world. When I thought of Luke’s hands, how they touched me accidentally or on purpose but always in a way I remembered for days, I was filled with more emotion than I had ever experienced crucifying frogs or healing the sick.
    Many Sunday afternoons my family spent at the parsonage. While the women made stew or fried venison dusted with flour, Matthew, Luke and I hunched together on the narrow stairway leading upstairs, sharing the dirty jokes we had heard at school, guessing what went on in the bed of their sister.
    It was always dark there, and we spoke in whispers. The closeness of our bodies took my breath away. When Luke’s leg rested against mine I could no longer hear what was being said. When he put his hand on my knee, the