Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [37]
I reached out and put my hand on my father’s knee. “In the name of Jesus Christ and William P. Markham, rise up and walk. Leave this wheelchair. Reclaim your senses. Bid good riddance to this institution of despair. In the name of William P. Markham, rise up and be a man again.”
I’d like to be able to tell you that my father stood up and said, “Thank you, Son. I needed that little three-year rest. Thanks for bringing me around. Now I can go get a fine potato salad lunch with crab legs and French mustard and a cream soda and be on about the Lord’s work.”
But you and I both know my father didn’t budge. My father wasn’t getting out of his wheelchair on his own steam because I’d knelt on the floor beside him and uttered words from Psalms. My father was never getting out of that chair on his own steam.
Faith was what made prayers work. At least that was the conclusion I’d reached over the years. Religion needed to be backed up with faith, and the remnants of my faith had eroded eighteen years earlier.
From the day I was old enough to talk, I’d said prayers over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I’d prayed next to my father. I’d prayed next to my mother. At bedtime. Upon rising. We’d prayed aloud on the street, and we’d prayed while strangers gawked. Even if I hadn’t dodged a life of belief eighteen years earlier, the past few years would have shaken my faith.
How could I pray to a God who let Lorie abandon our two beautiful children? Or a God who’d allowed my father, surely the most righteous of individuals, to end up staring at a heat register for ten hours at a pop? How could I pray to a God who would let Joel McCain and Holly Riggs live out their lives as vegetables? Or who’d let Stan Beebe’s four kids become fatherless in the blink of an eye. Maybe you could believe in God if all that had happened, but I couldn’t.
I couldn’t drum up a thimbleful of faith to save my life.
19. THE SIXTH ELEMENT OF THE SAINTS OF CHRIST; OR,
HOW TO PRAY FOR ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING AND NOT GET IT
My mind was racing as I climbed into my truck and headed for Tacoma, the visit to my father igniting the wildfires of memory.
Until I ran away from home at sixteen, we’d lived on Capitol Hill in a huge, rambling showplace initially owned and built by one of the Mercers, an early pioneer family who now had a traffic-clogged Seattle street named after them.
A doctor owned the mansion today, but when we lived there it was called Six Points and was the official residence of the staff and founder of the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ, the minimalist cult religion my father had adopted in his late twenties and clung to until the church virtually disintegrated around him like a cheap suit in the jungle. In those days the neighborhood was riddled with Saints, eight or ten families—the cognoscenti—living in the mansion at any given time, additional acolytes in nearby houses.
It was only a week after my father met my mother that he quit his engineering job at Boeing, sold his house, his car, his personal belongings down to his Boy Scout knife, and signed the proceeds over to William P. Markham, simultaneously becoming a pauper and a board member of the church. As with many religions, the engine of the Sixth Element was fueled by cold, hard cash.
My father had been toying with the notion for months, maybe years. For reasons that were never clear, my mother embraced the religion, too, and they moved into Six Points.
It took decades for me to figure out my father’s interest in religion was predicated on a fear of death, on an unwillingness to believe death would be the end for him, his initial donation part of a long religious tradition of paying now for a cushy spot in the afterlife. Nobody feared death more than my father, and Markham had convinced his followers he knew the secret of everlasting life.
Being raised around Markham was like living with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and one of the apostles all rolled into one. Until I was sixteen, my stolen glimpses into the