Witness to a Miracle

Guys I’ve Done Time With: Houston Marshall 1948-2017

Hootie Marshall was just a guy: if I’ve ever known anyone that phrase applied to, it was him.  I met him when I was five years old and we were in day camp; while the initial experience was bewildering to me (though I eventually loved camp), he showed up as if he owned the place, and knew everything there was to do.

He had a shock of reddish hair that he never bothered to comb, a face splattered with freckles, and he always seemed to be on his way somewhere, doing something.  On Wednesdays we had hot dogs and baked beans at a cookout down by the gym, and three counselors stood at the end of the line holding mustard, ketchup and relish, asking which we wanted.  When it came time for Hootie, he stood there dumbfounded by this question, and the three men gathered around him.  “Let’s give Hootie everything,” one of them said.  “Yeah, Hootie gets everything.”  They stood there and, much to my horror (I was strictly a ketchup man at the time) gave him a hot dog all the way.  At least as it was defined at that day camp, in what would have been the summer of 1953.

(The counselors picked us up at our houses, in cars.  Talk about coddling.  It was a thirty-minute ride each way.  My brother and I were seven and five.  My memory is that Mr. Gregory, who ten years later would be my nemesis as an English teacher, drove a VW bug, a kind of vehicle I had never entered in my life.  On one famous occasion, he stopped at a Dairy Queen on the way home, and when I proceeded to drip ice cream all over his car, repeated again and again the phrase, “Davy Guy doesn’t know how to eat an ice cream cone.”  He said it five times if he said it once. He explained that you should keep licking around the circumference of the cone, constantly, so no ice cream drips.  It was like that grammar fanatic to think that there was actually “a way” to eat an ice cream cone.)

Hootie was responsible for one of the strangest evenings of my life.  It is especially strange because no one else seems to remember it (did I dream it?).  In our sophomore year at Shady Side Academy (which was the site of the aforementioned day camp; we spent our whole early lives at that place) Hootie left for Mercersburg Academy, where he would have encountered one of my great friends, Gordon Hughes, and one night when we were sixteen or seventeen, and on break—this is my memory of things, anyway—a bunch of us went out on the Allegheny on a boat, a small cabin cruiser, that Hootie was piloting.  It was his father’s boat, but he could use it.

We went to an island in the middle of the river and disembarked, and when we walked around we found a couple of guys camping out with their girlfriends on a beach in the island.  It couldn’t have been all that late—maybe 10:00 PM—but they were already under some blankets, or towels, with the girlfriends.  One of them made a point of pushing away the towel and scratching his ass, to show us they were naked.  These guys were having sex with their girlfriends, something I longed to do (first I had to get a girlfriend).  They were doing it within a few feet of each other.  There was something sinister and exciting and frightening about the whole thing.  It was a weird transgressive night, not like something I would have done.  I think that was the last time I saw Hootie.  I have those two memories, from when we were five, and when we were seventeen.

Otherwise I only remember glimpses of him, playing some sport—football or soccer, though he never became a notable athlete—hurrying to class, goofing around in the locker room (some guys had a way of flooding a hallway adjacent to the showers, running and sliding down through the water on their asses, and Hootie was an expert practitioner, as I remember).  I don’t remember actually being in a class with him.

But I vividly remember one conversation we had.  I would guess that we were in the middle school, eleven or twelve years old.  I don’t know why we were talking, or talking so intimately.  We got along fine but weren’t especially friends.  He told me a story about when he was a kid—back there around the time we were in day camp—and he’d broken some bone, I think it was his ankle.  The doctor had set the break, but he’d somehow done it incorrectly, and when Hootie went back after a period of weeks the bone was healing crookedly.  The doctor would have to break the bone and set it again.  He would have to start all over.

I can imagine that, for an active kid like Hootie, breaking an ankle was a catastrophe.  He was the kind of kid who ran around constantly.  Hootie in a cast would have been a handful.  I can understand how annoyed his mother must have been, let down by Western medicine.  But what she did at that point, by any standards that Hootie and I had, or anyone else at that school, seemed strange.  She took him to a faith healer.

Hootie was telling me this as a confidence; if I’d dropped this story around school he’d have been heckled unmercifully.  There was a woman in Pittsburgh named  Kathryn Kuhlman who did healings on a radio show, and who, to everyone we knew—especially to my mother and physician father—was a charlatan and a fake, preying on ignorant people.  According to my parents, she made Oral Roberts—at that time a television faith healer—look totally legit.[1]  Hootie’s mother was a Pittsburgh society woman.  What kind of crowd did wander into with her child?  What must that whole scene have looked like?

Except that the woman healed him.  He went back to the doctor, and the man took another x-ray, and the bone had healed correctly.  Hootie was fine.  The doctor didn’t need to break the bone after all.

“I don’t know what happened,” Hootie said.  “It wasn’t like I believed anything.  I didn’t believe or not believe.  I was just a kid.”

He didn’t even know what he wanted on his hot dog.  He stood there and let things happen.

Except that this time what he let happen was a miracle, in his own body.  He carried that around for the rest of his life.

I’ve always wondered what that was like.

[1] I must admit that, when I watched Oral Roberts on TV, which I did just for kicks, in those tents in Oklahoma or someplace where people were sweating and emotional and tearful, there was a part of me that wished it were all true.  There was a part of me that wanted to believe that.  I can understand how people buy it.