Chapter 1

“LUKE!”

“LUKE! WHERE ARE YOU?”

The taste of dirt in my mouth and the pain in my leg confused me. Why would I wake up with a mouthful of dirt? Did Becky play a prank on me? That was so not like her!

“LUKE! THIS ISN’T FUNNY!”

Wait, that was ... it was Becky. Why ... what?

I tried to sit up and had to bite my lip to keep from crying out. Father was of the mind that children are to be seen and not heard, and any loud noise was bound to bring him stomping in to my bedroom, belt or switch in hand.

I finally pried my eyes open and got even more confused. Around me, almost within arms’ reach were dirt walls that extended up to a leafy roof.

I had been ... yeah, I had been walking to the creek. Becky was going to meet me there after she finished her cereal. There had been a sound, a whine. It had sounded like a small animal, maybe hurt, and I left the well-worn trail trying to find it, then ... I woke up here.

It was dim in here, what light filtered down through the leaves was minimal, but I was able to make out that I was in a hole of some kind. It was about eight feet or so across and a bit longer and, above with the slight breeze ruffling the leaves, I could see patches of blue.

I must have fallen!

Trying to move again, the pain returned and I looked down. I suppose I should have been horrified, but I felt like my head was stuffed with cotton. There, on my shin, was a gash and a bit of bone sticking up. There was blood and bits of what looked like muscle. I had definitely broken my leg and done a darn good job of it too.

Shit. Becky!

“BECKY!” I called out.

“LUKE? LUKE, WHERE ARE YOU?” she sounded frightened.

Becky was different from other kids. It was like she had this whole world in her head that kept her busy most of the time. It seemed like I was the only one she would talk to, even refusing to speak to our mother and father. I adored my little sister and had spent a lot of time in trouble trying to protect her, but that was my job. No one else would do it if I didn’t.

“I AM OVER HERE. I FELL IN A HOLE!” I called out.

Wait! That wasn’t a good idea. She was fragile, slight and the sight of blood would make her withdrawn and incommunicative for days. I remember once when she jabbed her finger on some barbed wire out by the property line. She took one look and fainted!

I carried her home and up into her room, laying her on the bed and sitting with her until she woke up. When she did wake, she rolled off the side of the bed and dashed to the closet where she hid for two days. I even had to bring her food and clean up after her!

“GO AND FIND JOSHUA!” I called out, hoping to distract her, to keep her away from the hole. Joshua was the ranch foreman, a quiet, thoughtful man who seemed to know how to fix just about anything.

“NO! WHERE ARE YOU!”

I was feeling the beginnings of panic now. If I was laid up, who would protect her?

I looked closer at my leg, wondering if I could cover it with some dirt, or some leaves. There was movement overhead and I thought I could see her blonde hair at the rim of the hole.

In a panic, I pressed both hands over the broken bone to hide my injury and bit my lip, trying not to scream. It felt hot and seemed to be getting hotter and hotter until I thought my leg and my hands would burst into flame, but I couldn’t let go, I couldn’t let her see me like that!

The world seemed to go dark for a bit and, when I could see again, I was back flat on my back and Becky was looking down at me.

“Luke! Why are you down there? You scared me! We are supposed to go swimming!” she called, sounding pleased that she had found me but confused about the change in plans.

Something was different ... something wasn’t right. I still felt confused and a bit distant.

“I fell down, Becky. I’m sorry I scared you, baby.”

“That’s okay Luke, but you need to come up now so we can go swimming like you promised,” she said brightly, shaking her finger at me.

Without even thinking about it, I got my feet under me and stood. Then it hit me! MY LEG!

I bent down and there was nothing there but a smear of blood. No bone, no gash, no red muscle or white tendon. Just a bit of blood. I quickly reached down and wiped it off, feeling around my shin.

Nothing. No pain, no cuts, no broken bone, not even any heat.

The top of the hole was only a few feet above my head so rather than dwell on the impossibility of what I thought happened, I jumped and caught the lip, grabbing a tree root and slowly pulled myself up.

Flopping over the edge I lay on my back for a moment to catch my breath, then laughed when Becky appeared above me, looking like she was upside down.

“Good thing we are going to the creek, you would get such a whooping if you came home all covered in mud like that, Luke,” she told me seriously.

“I guess I would, Becky, I guess I would.”

Now that I was in the light, I took a closer look at my shin before I got up and there was a faint scar there, one I hadn’t had before.

Unable to think, unable to face this right now, I got up, took Becky’s hand and we retreated from the hole. When we reached the trail, we turned and headed for the creek.

Later that night, after dinner and our nightly bible lesson, I managed to get some quiet time in my room. I examined the scar on my leg closely and it looked a lot like the scars on my back and my butt. It looked like it was months old, not just hours.

Try as I might, the only thing that came to mind was divine intervention and that just pissed me off. That is something that my father, the Right Reverend Jeremiah Mason would say, the bastard, not something that would ever come out of my mouth. I despised the man and his fake religion!

My father was the stereo-typical Southern preacher man, righteously calling down the retribution of an angry and petulant god on the heads of sinners in his congregation. In a single minute he could be the soul of understanding and supportive love, as long as it wasn’t to his family, and then turn around and promise eternal damnation and the fires of hell to anyone who dared cross him.

He was a big believer in corporal punishment for the sins, both real and imagined, of his children. He rarely struck Rebekah, Becky, instead choosing to believe that her sins were a case of me leading her astray.

Many was the morning I woke, stuck to my own bed sheets by dried blood, from the wounds on my back, butt and legs. I never went without a shirt, taking the heckling for being ‘shy’ and odd, even being called gay for refusing to shower naked with the other students after gym class. To remove my shirt would be to bare my shame to the world, etched in the thousands of strokes of my father’s lash into the skin of my back.

Were I ever to be so careless as to expose our family shame to public ridicule, I doubt I would survive the next encounter with his ‘teachings’.

My mother ... my mother was so cowed, so meek that she might as well be an automaton. Any individuality, any personality she once had was beaten out of her long ago. She existed to tend to the house, in exactly the manner prescribed by my father, and no(thing?) more.

I forced my thoughts away from him, and back to the events of the morning. Something had happened. Something significant.

As I sat on my bed, my eye fell on a small pocketknife sitting on my dresser. It wasn’t much, a little two-blade folding knife that had seen a lot of use. It was as much a part of my daily life as breathing was, something no Southern boy would do without.

From picking a rock out of a horse’s hoof to cutting the twine on a bale of hay, there were a million uses for a small blade on a farm, and I think I had done them all at one time or another. I kept it nice and sharp too, using the big whetstone in the barn that Joseph used on the axes and other tools.

I slid off the bed and took the two steps to the dresser, picking up that little knife and pulling out the shorter of the two blades. Before I lost my nerve, I jerked my hand down and buried the little inch and a half blade into the meat of my thigh.

I had lots of practice being silent through the pain, so I didn’t cry out, but I could feel my eyes water. It was harder to pull out than I had imagined it should be, feeling like it was stuck in molasses.

When the blade came free, I sat down on the floor and watched the blood pool, then start to run down my leg. Afraid it would drip on the floor, I slapped my hand down over the hole tightly, putting pressure on the wound and thinking of my leg that morning.

It happened again.

There was warmth that soon transformed into a burning sensation that I could feel in the palm of my hand. It only lasted a couple of seconds, but I pulled my hand up and expected to see a blister. It was exactly as before.

When I finally worked up the nerve to look down at my leg, there was a pale, pink crease of scar tissue, just a line less than half an inch long, in the spot where there had been a hole just moments before.

I had done it! I had no idea how, or how it even worked, but it worked!

But what did it mean? Could it work for others? What would people think if they knew I could do this? We lived in a puritanically religious community, and anything different, anything new was looked at with suspicion. I was more likely to be denounced as a witch or a demon than I was to be treated as though this was something godly.

I shut off my lights and climbed into bed, but it was a long time before I fell asleep.

I didn’t try any more tests, almost afraid of what I would find out, but I did try to learn more about the body in general, and healing in particular.

As the school year passed, I found myself more and more in the library instead of on the playground and had even started eating lunch quickly so I could spend the remainder of the lunch break in the library.

The librarian, Mrs. Pendegrass, became a co-conspirator of sorts after a few weeks, always searching for more books on anatomy and physiology once she had seen where my interests lie. She had even drafted the school nurse, Nurse Wilson as her comrade.

At least once a week, either Mrs. Pendegrass or Nurse Wilson would hand me a new book, or a new periodical and be sure to let me know that they were available if I had questions.

In the beginning, I had thousands of questions! “Why does a wound feel warmer than the skin around it?” “What is that smelly white stuff that gets in a cut when it is infected?

Eventually the questions grew less frequent, not because my thirst for knowledge dimmed, but because I had raced beyond what they could reasonably be expected to know.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t as if I became a doctor overnight, nothing could be further from the truth, but I wanted detailed descriptions and explanations of the most intricate details on the human body but didn’t care a bit about how to actually treat injuries or sickness conventionally.

What I wanted most of all, and was most afraid of asking, was knowledge on how I had healed myself. It wasn’t just the ankle or the knife cut, it was a host of other, minor scratches, illnesses and infirmities that any teen is heir to. I had healed them all. I had even healed Becky a half-dozen times, though I had taken pains to disguise what I was doing at the time.

For instance, the heat I had felt when healing my more serious injuries was easily explained by the biochemical processes natural to the body, but greatly accelerated. A slow healing of a cut, spread across several days, was barely enough to warm the skin at all. I could even, when I concentrated, increase the healing on an injury without repeated treatments, encouraging the body to perform greater feats than it was capable of, if left to itself.

The school year passed quickly, and I found a hundred excuses to spend time in the town library over the summer. In fact, whenever I could escape the farm, and my father, I would be found there.

This sudden studiousness had not gone unnoticed by my father. He even gave me a compliment of sorts, at least in his mind. To me, it was a curse.

“You keep up the hard work and school and continue to get good grades, I might even be convinced to pull some strings, maybe get you into the Divinity College.”

Over my dead body. No, make that over his.

My fourteenth birthday was the day after school ended and, as usual in my family, went completely unnoticed. In fact, the whole day might have been a total non-event except for the accident that showed me how much I had really learned, and where I unwittingly exposed myself and my ‘talent’ for the first time.

Our town sat on a state road that connected Knoxville to Chattanooga, and that road had been the primary link between the cities until the interstate was built 10 miles west. What traffic we saw in town tended to be local, with some overflow from the interstate when things got busy over there.

State Route 11 ran right through the middle of town and right outside the front doors of the town library. Only two lanes wide, it wasn’t like we had a rush hour, but there were times during the day when traffic was a bit heavier.

I had finished my daily chores of mucking out the stalls in the barn, feeding the livestock and running the tractor across what we laughingly called the yard, before I headed into town. It was only about a mile and a half walk and the weather was nice, so I was in a good mood when I turned onto Route 11 for the final leg to my destination.