Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer Read Free Book Online Page A

to stern, scrambling up and down ladders. On the voyage before ours, they had been hit by a hurricane and a huge wave had smashed one of the windows on the bridge. Flying glass sliced open a sailor’s face. The first mate told me about how he stitched up the sailor while getting medical instructions, stitch-by-stitch, over the radio from a seaman’s medical station broadcasting from Rome.
    We sailed into New York past the Statue of Liberty.
    “We’re home!” said Debby.
    Those words didn’t resonate with me. Home was our Swiss village. However, I was excited. America was where most of our guests came from. Each Christmas, we got boxes from friends and relatives. In the boxes were candy corn and “trashy American children’s books”—slick Golden Books—some with characters like Donald Duck, that gave me a little glimpse into what seemed like an easygoing glittering world of entertainment and abundance.
    I had a mental list of treats that I had seen or tasted in small quantities and now wanted to get my fill of: candy corn, root beer, TV, if possible, and a comic book. We headed to Pittsburgh, where I was to have surgery at the children’s hospital.
    I was taken to a Pittsburgh Pirates game (they won that game and, later, the World Series). I remember the feeling of stepping into the huge stadium in Pittsburgh, and being very embarrassed that I knew nothing about baseball! Was I a real American or not?

    Dr. Ferguson was to be my surgeon, and he was going to do a “muscle transplant” to move one less-atrophied muscle (maybe a tendon) from the front of my left leg to the calf where everything was shriveled up. This was to give my foot more mobility.
    I remember waking up after the operation as if surfacing from deep under the ocean, and seeing the spreading bloodstain on the heel of my elevated cast. I had the sweet cloying taste of ether in my mouth, nose, and throat and could taste it for days. My leg hurt, in a hot dull way. There were three incisions; a long one from just above my ankle up the side of my leg to my knee, one across the back of my heel, and one along the side of my foot above the arch. I had asked the doctor if I could stay awake so I could watch the operation. The answer was no. On my chart, Mom proudly showed me that in a box reserved for “patient disposition,” the nurse had written “cheerful male.”
    After the operation I had to wear a cast for the rest of the summer. We were to stay in America that whole time, three months until the cast came off. Then we would know if the operation had “taken.” Until then I was to stay off that leg! I was told that the transplanted muscle was fastened to my heel with a “single stitch” and that under no account was I to walk on my cast because if that stitch came loose, the whole operation would have been in vain.
    Maybe this was true, or maybe I was being given extra motivation to stay off that leg. Mom prayed loudly and fervently for that “single stitch, that it may hold, O Lord!” until I could just about picture an angel somehow reaching into my heel and holding the stitch in place. But that didn’t stop me from walking without my crutches and often forgetting to stay off the bad leg and then worrying myself sick about the single stitch.

    For most of that summer of 1960, we lived on Long Island with “old Mrs. Johnson,” as we all called her, the wealthy mother-in-law of Dr. Keyswater. The Keyswaters were a family of “real bluebloods,” according to Mom. Dr. Keyswater was a surgeon and born-again. He was a member of our “Praying Family” of supporters and had arranged the operation for me. Some years before, when Susan was seven, she had been visiting their house and had knocked over a four-foot-tall Ming vase and broken it. The Keyswaters had been very gracious about this, Mom said. But I was to touch nothing in the house, because “it is filled with priceless treasures.”
    I remember begging Mom not to go out one evening