was known as Miracle Salve.
At dinner my first night on the peak, Dad described the explosion as
a tender mercy from the Lord. “It was a blessing,” he said. “A miracle.
God spared my life and extended to me a great calling. To testify of His
power. To show people there’s another way besides the Medical
Establishment.”
I watched as he tried and failed to wedge his knife tightly enough to
cut his roast. “I was never in any danger,” he said. “I’ll prove it to you.
As soon as I can walk across the yard without near passing out, I’ll get
a torch and cut off another tank.”
The next morning when I came out for breakfast, there was a crowd
of women gathered around my father. They listened with hushed
voices and glistening eyes as Dad told of the heavenly visitations he’d
received while hovering between life and death. He had been
ministered to by angels, he said, like the prophets of old. There was
something in the way the women looked at him. Something like
adoration.
I watched the women throughout the morning and became aware of
the change my father’s miracle had wrought in them. Before, the
women who worked for my mother had always approached her
casually, with matter-of-fact questions about their work. Now their
speech was soft, admiring. Dramas broke out between them as they
vied for my mother’s esteem, and for my father’s. The change could be
summed up simply: before, they had been employees; now they were
followers.
The story of Dad’s burn had become something of a founding myth:
it was told over and over, to newcomers but also to the old. In fact, it
was rare to spend an afternoon in the house without hearing some kind
of recitation of the miracle, and occasionally these recitations were less
than accurate. I heard Mother tell a room of devoted faces that sixty-
five percent of Dad’s upper body had been burned to the third degree.
That was not what I remembered. In my memory the bulk of the
damage had been skin-deep—his arms, back and shoulders had hardly
been burned at all. It was only his lower face and hands that had been
third-degree. But I kept this to myself.
For the first time, my parents seemed to be of one mind. Mother no
longer moderated Dad’s statements after he left the room, no longer