Christian motions to his legs, lumpen underneath the blanket swaddling the lower half of his body. ‘I fell off a swing,’ he says, ‘when I was three. I broke my back.’ He smiles, full of trust. He makes a motion with his hands, as if he were breaking a pencil between his fingers.
‘You broke your back. And the doctors have told you you’ll never walk again, that’s right, isn’t it?’
Christian nods, slowly. ‘But I know I will,’ he says, his face peaceful.
‘I know you will, too, Christian, because the Mother has shown it to me.’
And the people who curate these events for her and make sure that the nerve damage isn’t too severe for her to be able to do anything. Christian had a friend from the same hospital; a nice kid, even more of a believer than Christian himself, but, unfortunately, the break was too profound for them to be sure she’d be able to cure it. Besides, he wasn’t right for this televised segment. Acne.
Allie lays her palm at the top of Christian’s spine, just at the back of his neck.
He shudders; the crowd gasps and goes silent.
She says in her heart: What if I can’t do it this time?
The voice says: Kid, you always say that. You’re golden.
Mother Eve speaks from Allie’s mouth. She says: ‘Holy Mother, guide me now, as you have always guided me.’
The crowd says, ‘Amen.’
Mother Eve says: ‘Not my will, Holy Mother, but Thine be done. If it is Your will to heal this child, let him be healed, and if it be Your will that he suffer in this world to reap a great harvest in the next, let that be done.’
This is an exceedingly important caveat, which it’s as well to get in early.
The crowd says, ‘Amen.’
Mother Eve says, ‘But there’s a great multitude praying for this humble and obedient young boy, Holy Mother. There’s a great crowd here pleading with you now, yearning for Your grace to fall upon him and Your breath to raise him up as You raised up Mary for Your service. Holy Mother, listen to our prayers.’
The crowd is full of people rocking back and forth on their heels and weeping and muttering, and the simultaneous translators at either side of the stadium are racing to keep up with Allie, as Mother Eve’s words spill from her faster and faster.
While her mouth is moving, Allie’s tendrils of power are probing Christian’s spine, feeling out the blockage here and here, and where a boost would get his muscles moving. She almost has it.
Mother Eve says, ‘As we’ve all lived blessed lives, as we all strive every day to listen to Your voice inside us, as we all honour our own mothers and the sacred light inside every human heart, as we all worship You and adore You and love You and kneel before You. Holy Mother, please, take the force of our prayers. Please, Holy Mother, use me to show your glory and heal this boy now!’
The crowd roars.
Allie delivers three swift pinpricks to Christian’s spine, flicking the nerve cells around the muscles of his legs into life.
His left leg swings up, kicking at the blanket.
Christian looks at it bemused, startled, a little afraid.
The other leg kicks.
He’s crying now, tears pouring down his face. This poor kid, who hasn’t walked or run since he was three years old. Who’s suffered the bedsores and the muscle wasting, who’s had to use his arms to carry himself from bed to chair, chair to toilet. His legs are moving from the thigh now, jerking and kicking.
He levers himself up from the chair with his arms now, his legs still twitching and – holding on to the rail put there for the purpose – he walks one, two, three stiff and awkward steps before clinging there, upright and weeping.
Some of Mother Eve’s people come to take him off stage, one on either side of him, and he’s saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you,’ as they lead him away.
Sometimes, it sticks. There are cases of people she’s ‘cured’ who are still walking, or holding things, or seeing months later. There is even starting to be some scientific interest in what it might be she’s actually doing.
Sometimes, it doesn’t stick at all. They have a moment on stage. They feel what it’s like to walk, or pick something up with a dead arm and, after all, that’s something they wouldn’t have had without her.
The voice says: You never know; if they had more faith, maybe it would have stuck around longer.
Mother Eve says to those she helps, ‘God has shown you a taste of what She can do. Just keep praying.’
They take a little interlude after the healing. So that Allie can get a glass of something cold behind the stage, and to bring the crowd down a little from its fever pitch and remind them that all this has been funded by good people like them who opened their hearts and their wallets. On the big screens, they show a video of the good works done by the Church. The screens show Mother Eve giving comfort to the sick. There’s a video – it’s an important one – of her holding the hand of a woman who was beaten and abused but whose skein never came in. She’s crying. Mother Eve tries to wake up the power inside her but, though she prays for help, the power won’t come to this poor woman. That’s why they’re looking into transplants, she says, from cadavers. They have teams working on it already. Your money can help.
There are friendly messages of greeting from chapter houses in Michigan and Delaware with news of saved souls, and from missions in Nairobi and Sucre, where the Catholic Church is eating itself alive. And there are videos of the orphanages Mother Eve’s set up. At first, there were girls set loose by their families, wandering, confused and alone, like shivering stray dogs. As Mother Eve’s power grew, she said to the older women, ‘Take in the younger. Set up homes for them, as I was taken in when I was weakened and afraid. The least you do for them, you do for our own Holy Mother.’ Now, a scant few years later, there are homes for young people all over the world. They take in young men and young women, too; they give them shelter; they give them better outcomes than state-run facilities. Allie, passed from pillar to post throughout her life, knows how to give good instruction in this matter. In the video, Mother Eve is visiting homes for abandoned children in Delaware and in Missouri, in Indonesia and in Ukraine. Each group of girls and boys greets her as mother.
The video ends on a musical trill, and Allie wipes the sweat off her face and goes back outside.
‘Now, I know,’ says Mother Eve to the crowd, full of crying, shaking, shouting people, ‘I know there’s been a question in some of your minds for these long months, and that is why I’m so happy to be here today to answer your questions.’
There’s another round of shouts and ‘Praise!’ from the crowd.
‘To be here in Bessapara, the land where God has shown Her wisdom and Her mercy, is a great blessing to me. For you know that Our Lady has told me that women are to gather together! And to perform great wonders! And to be a blessing and a consolation to each other! And’ – she pauses after each word for emphasis – ‘where have women gathered together more than here?’