V O L U M E

F I V E

P A R T

E I G H T

8 A Covenant God

The weeks that followed her return were wretched, but as the world erupted with one trouble of Jacob after another Heloise was glad she had found shelter even of the sort Anna provided. While cleaning or caring for Anna, sometimes she noticed news on the television that was always on in the sitting room. It happened to be CNNC Primetime News, and she was startled when she saw her own features show on the screen. She nearly jumped and threw the mop across the room, but controlled herself somehow. The news anchor was giving a whole hour to Heloise Turnbull—and the name—sprinkled throughout the report rang in the room like a shot gun blast to Heloise’s ears every time it was uttered. Her ears ringing, every nerve tingling, Heloise stared at the old woman dozing in the chair before the television, but she never seemed to notice what was being said.

“Thank God, she’s deaf!” she thought. “But what about the daughter? She’ll recognize me for sure! What then?” Even though she had become a shadow of her former self, with her broken nails, her drab clothes, and straggly hair, her face was the same. All she could do was finish her work and then go and lie down in her rooms, and wait. The next day Esther came by. Heloise darted a glance at her, and their eyes met. Esther’s look of mixed puzzlement and pity confirmed Heloise’s fear—she had caught the broadcast and recognized her. The moment she could speak to Esther she confronted her. “Please don’t tell your mother anything—it will be all over for me then. I might as well tell you. I am an illegal alien, and the Shin Bet know all about my case. I must have a place to stay, while somebody decides, maybe the Israeli cabinet, what do about me. Maybe they think I could be more useful to them, left alone. After all, they know I was their chief supporter in the past, and made big grants to their hospitals and to various refugee building projects from my ministry. Please don’t tell anyone I am here. I will help your mother all I can in exchange for what privacy I have left. Will you allow me this?”

Esther, with her dark, Gentile-trodden eyes full of "always being put upon Jewishness," paused in the doorway as Heloise pleaded with her. Slowly, she nodded her head, and left without a word. Afterwards, Heloise leaned against the wall, feeling for having imposed so much on innocent Jews. But what else was she to do? Run into the street and say, "Here I am, Heloise Turnbull, come and get me!"

Neither of them spoke one more word about Heloise Turnbull the disgraced American televangelist who had fled to parts unknown—supposedly, according to CNNC reporters, seeking out millions in jewels, gold, and bonds stowed away in secret Third World bank accounts. Grateful, Heloise tried harder to please the old woman and her daughter. It was difficult to do, since she had never done so much menial drudgery for anyone so old and temperamental as this ancient Auschwitz survivor. Nothing she did could pass without criticism or a lot of verbal abuse. Could an American do anything right? Absolutely not! The old woman held the Americans primarily responsible, along with the British, for Auschwitz too, and never let Heloise forget it one minute, even though it was Americans who liberated most of the camps in Germany, where Anna and thousands others her age had been transported when the Russians took Poland from the Nazis.

“Ach! You blood-sucking, rich Americans did nothing for us! Nothing! We suffered and died in the camps in [she spat to one side] Poland, and you sat in your warm houses over in America, eating chocolate and ice creams, while we starved and—“ It went on and on until the old woman exhausted herself. Once or twice Heloise corrected her, reminding her that Americans had liberated the Nazi death camps in every area of Europe they occupied, saving as many interred Jews as they could with food, clothing, and medical attention, while the Russians had no love for Jews and let them do for themselves, which meant most of them soon perished miserably from sickness and malnutrition. But the old woman had an answer for that too.

“But you waited too long!-—we were all nearly dead by that time even if it was Germany where you found us! The truth is you wanted us all to die before you came—to save yourself the trouble of feeding us poor Jews and giving us medicine and clothes and shelter. I was one of the few who was alive when you came and opened the gates. You stared at us, with big, stupid cow eyes, as if you had never seen anything like us before! Imagine that! Liars! Liars! You knew all along what the Nazis were doing to us, treating us like animals—ai! ai!—worse than animals! Worse!”

She would then repeat story after story of Nazi brutality and how dirty the camps where, and how they suffered from the lice and bedbugs and the various skin diseases and discharging lesions and infectious fungoids that come from unwashed bodies packed together in the barracks, thousands of bodies where only a hundred people could fit. Ah, the stench and the dirtiness! No wonder they sickened and died in vast numbers even before they could be gassed and cremated! And then there were the Nazi doctors, devilish fiends in human flesh who seized young girls and boys, cutting off this part and that, laughing to the attending nurses while they mutilated the innocent Jewish women and children… Heloise had to stop her ears with her fingers before the old woman would relent and stop torturing her with details.

Unable to stand it any longer, Heloise turned to Esther one day. "Your mother has a terrible list of grievances, of the things they did to her at the camp." Esther remained silent, looking down. Heloise persisted. "These crimes against her, it is almost unbelievable that so many could have happened to one little Jewish girl, though I can tell they were real events by the details she gives, so they couldn't all be made up."

Esther put her hand over her forehead for a moment, as if to shade her eyes, then sat down, and looked up into Heloise's gaze. "Yes, they happened," she said slowly, "but not all to her as she thinks. Many things happened at the other camps, and the Warsaw uprising, she wasn't ever in Warsaw, we found out through family friends whom we got in contact with eventually. She was so little then, and she was told by people from other camps what went on there, and she remembered them--but now, they have all run together into her own experiences, and she doesn't know the difference anymore at her age."

Heloise relented and let Esther go. It seemed too much to talk about at the mment. So that was it! The old woman was a rememberer for her Jewish race, who was faithfully transmitting the experiences of so many hundreds of tortured and gassed Jews. She hadn't necessarily experienced so much pain and agony, but she thought she had!"

After a day's rest on the subject, she returned to Esther. She laid her hand on the daughter's. "Thank you for telling me about your mother. I am so grateful." She paused. Esther's face, full of her mother's lifelong misery, seemed concerned instead for Heloise. "Yes? There s something more you wish to know?"

Heloise nodded. "Why can't she forget at least some of it? Why does she have to torture herself and everyone about her almost constantly with these tales, though we know they are various persons' true accounts. It makes life hell for her loved ones, does it not? I know she can make me feel pretty miserable at times listening to her. How must it be for you?"

Esther's hand pulled away as if she were offended. But she began speaking, her head lowered. "Yes, it has been hard for us, but she is my mother. I must not resent her, the way she is. I have never known her act differently, as this is something we must bear. She is so old now, it is a burden she will bear to her grave."

Heloise went back to her room, to sit on her bed and think in order to relieve her whirling brain of so many feelings. It was almost overwhelming, what happened next. The realization struck her that made everything so clear she could cry out to herself in the room's privacy, "Yes, that is what she is! A rememberer for the Jewish race! The Jews do have a gift, a special ability to remember the significant things they suffered at the Gentiles' hands, and these lost Jews are all speaking through her, hundreds of voices still crying out through Anna, so she cannot rest, she cannot forgive, she cannot put the past away and go on with her life." How clear it was! She had no other life, really, but to remember and recount to every ear available the persecutions and tortures and indignities inflicted on the helpless Jews by their enemies, thereby transmitting them to the younger generation in the process! It did not matter that she couldn't have suffered all those terrible things, she was telling the stories of real people. What did it matter if they weren't all her experiences? Those things happened and needed to be addressed somehow, somewhere. She had only done what she had been destined to do, only in Christ--in Christ--

Heloise's whole outlook on Anna and her people seemed to expand to the horizon at that mment. She saw the Jewish experience as a vast pageant or tableux spread out before her gaze from the beginning in Ur of ancient Chaldea to the present day under the reign of terror unleashed by MJ. The vision, if that was what it was, consumed her body and spirit so that she couldn't think of anything else. Afterwards, she sat breathing heavily, sweat droping from her forehead, wondering what to do--though she sensed that was the most stupid reaction. Could anyone do anything, if Christ hadn't done it on Calvary?

Day followed day, and Heloise wondered every moment when there would be a knock at the door, with someone come to take her to an unmarked car and spirit her away the Shin Bet. Maybe it wouldn’t happen like that. She might be going to the market nearby for groceries, as Anna had her do at least once a week, and she would be grabbed by a couple of “women” and pulled back into an alley. Then what? She wasn’t going to be handed over to the infamous “cherry unit,” the “Duvdevan” elite executioners of the Shin Bet. She knew she had done nothing to compromise Israeli security to warrant liquidation. No, if the Shin Bet was handling her case, they would be more apt to just track and observe her, watching her for any movements that might mean she was going for her “hidden assets.” How could they know she didn’t have any? Everyone would think she was just very good at hiding them, since none so far had been tracked down! Of course, Israel was just as interested as the Palestinians in her assets—and wanted them, if they could be found and seized without attracting too much world attention.

Nobody, she knew, would believe the truth, that she had no assets abroad whatsoever. The U.S. government had seized everything. Finding that she could do the work for Anna helped her own frame of mind somewhat. When she did it “right,” strictly according to the old woman’s specifications, she was left alone when she had finished the day’s work. If she didn’t do the work right for some reason, then the old woman was up in arms, and turned abusive. Heloise learned that it was best to try to please Anna and avoid her furious temper if possible. It was hard, though, since Heloise really knew nothing about domestic Jewish life and how a household was run day to day. Anna had to show her everything in detail, and there were many, many episodes when Anna blew up. It could happen anywhere, anytime. At the grocer’s, it was most embarrassing. If Heloise failed to buy the right vegetable, she was towed back to the store by Anna herself and shown the vegetable, while Anna ranted and raved, drawing a crowd around them.

Anna expected her to cook Israeli food too, though Heloise was no cook. The old woman threw one dish after another Heloise prepared right on the floor. Nothing she cooked was right. But Anna would not let her off. She was determined to make Heloise cook good kosher food as she arbitrairily defined kosher food. Fortunately for her, Heloise thought, Anna wasn’t particularly religious. She wasn’t one for keeping any religious traditions other than cooking "kosher." It was Heloise who discovered that she knew more about Judaism than Anna and her daughter did. She mentioned the various feast days being celebrated, and they stared at her blankly. Anna challenged her to explain what they were, and she did, and that made Anna furious. “So you think you are more Jew than I?” she spat at Heloise. “Why, my—[pointing to her own behind]—is more Jew than you! You read these things in a book someplace, because you went to school, but I had to wipe the stinking buttocks of Nazis in the camps when they were finished—“

Heloise sometimes couldn’t hold her stomach’s contents, when the old woman pulled such details from her terrible past to fling in her face. Anna herself smelled none too good. Did she ever bathe? Heloise wondered. Whenever she went to do the woman’s housecleaning, she never found the bathtub wet or with water in it. The towels were always dry. One day the daughter came in, and when Anna was snoring in her chair, turned to Heloise with the answer. She seemed very distressed, to be speaking such things publicly to someone outside the immediate family. “We try to get her to bathe, but she won’t do it. She says the water will make her heart stop, and she fears drowning worse than anything. She won’t listen to us saying we will help her, because she said never again would she let anyone touch her body.” “But she was married!” Heloise protested. “How could she have submitted to normal relations, to being touched by her husband?” Esther seemed to forget Heloise was a stranger and smiled grimly. “She didn’t do it very often, that is for sure! My father died young, he—“ Tears stopped her for a moment. “I think she broke his heart, the way she treated him. He was such a gentle man, people tell me. He didn’t know what he was marrying. The camps—she could never forget—they tortured her day and night, and she tortured him too.”

Heloise went and put her hand on Esther’s arm. For a moment, it was like she had touched a long, lost part of herself and-—was she mistaken?-—Esther seemed to respond like a daughter. Heloise also felt the Spirit’s sanctioning presence, which she hadn’t felt in a long, long time! Was it all right, or was she presuming and stepping somehow over the line God had drawn for her? Was she being checked, or encouraged? Her hand burned like fire, turning back on her own flesh, and she still couldn’t discern what was happening to her. Tears spurted from her own eyes. “I understand,” she said, taking that moment to flee back to her own rooms, though she knew she didn’t understand at all.

The next day she looked at Anna with different eyes, and that night she dreamed a very strange dream. She saw women in a marketplace, the women robed and selling various items to passers-by. It was a scene right out of an Arab marketplace, and it could have been a time thousands of years before or even in modern towns in the Palestianian districts that had not changed for centuries.

“Cassia—-500 shekels worth,” one woman said to a buyer, as she measured out the cassia and weighed it carefully, before taking the money and then putting the cassia in a bag for carrying away. Another woman sold Sweet Cane, or Calamus. “250 shekels,” she quoted to the buyer after weighing out the correct amount. The same buyer paid for olive oil from the woman selling oils. “A hin,” the woman quoted him, handing him the container that looked as if it held several quarts. The myrrh dealer sold 500 shekels worth to the buyer, and the cinnamon dealer sold her spice, 250 shekels worth.

Next she saw the buyer mixing the ingredients. He was a holy priest, for he robed himself in beautiful garments belonging to the time of Moses and then went into the Tabernacle. There he anointed the tabernacle of the congregation, the ark of the testimony, the table and all its vessels, the altar of incense, the candlestick and all its vessels, the altar of incense, the altar of burnt offering and all its vessels, the laver, and its foot, and, lastly, Aaron the priest and his sons. Then it was Moses she was viewing! But there followed more.

God commanded Moses, “This shall be an holy anointing oil unto Me throughout your generations. Upon man’s flesh shall it not be poured, neither shall you make any other like it, after the composition of it; it is holy, and it shall be holy unto you. Whosoever putteth any of it upon a stranger, shall even be cut off from the people.”

Moses, Aaron, and his sons faded away, and then Heloise saw variousl members of her family. First was Cassia, then Myrrha, then Aloes. She also saw Harry Billy Sunday Turnbull, son of Oliver and “Cinny” or Cinnamon Turnbull, a half-German, half-Cherokee woman of God who named him after the revivalist, tent-meeting Pentecostal preacher, Billy Sunday. Lastly, she saw herself in the dream, Heloise Turnbull (nee Heloise Trask Kane, after her grandfather, Moses Trask Kane, a Pentecostal revivalist, prophetic voice in the Church, and tent meeting preacher who ministered from the 1920’s to the 1970’s.). She, then, represented the ingredient of the holy anointing oil that was called Sweet Cane, or Calamus. But the dream was not through. She saw a batch of sweet cane being beaten by the perfumer, and the fragrance was wonderful!

She tossed in her sleep. The fragrance seemed to lift her into the clouds. Then she saw two angels standing and speaking as if they were in a debate. One angel, she noticed, had features that were like hers. The other angel was mightier, most impressive, even fearsome. Was he Michael?

The Michael-like angel spoke first. “What are the names of God that you see in God’s Books?” “What names?” the Heloise-type angel replied dumbly. “Speak the names as I name the books,” the Michael-like angel commanded. He began with the first book.

“Genesis?”

“Stone of Israel, Jehovah-Jireh, Adonai, and Jehovah,” the Heloise-type angel replied.

“Exodus?”

“Jehovah-Rapha , Jehovah-Nissi , Jehovah M’Kadesh, I Am That I Am, I Am…the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”

“Leviticus?

“Jehovah M’Kadesh—“God my Sanctifier.”

“Numbers?”

“Star.”

“Joshua?”

“Captain of the Lord’s Host.”

And so on it went, from Joshua to Revelation.

The Michael-type angel paused, then asked the Heloise-type angel which names she preferred to anoint with the flask of oil she was carrying.

The Heloise-type angel replied, right out of Isaiah, names such as “Wonder,” “Hero God, “Counsellor, “Everlasting Father,” and then from John, all the names referring to the Lord as Redeemer and Servant, but the Michael-type angel corrected her.

“These names you will anoint with the holy oil, as you stand before the people of God, the remnant of Israel, will be these!”

Then both head a thundering voice, declaring the names found in Revelation:

“Alpha and Omega, Beginning of the Creation of God, Faithful Witness, First Begotten of the Dead, First and Last, King of Saints, King of kings, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Morning Star, Offspring of David, Prince of the Kings of the Earth, Root and Offspring of David, Word of God, Amen.”

Heloise awoke, falling out of bed! What did the dreams mean? How in the world was God going to blend her own family somehow into a “holy anointing oil” with herself ? And how would it be used? There was no Temple! There was not even a Tabernacle! She could only tell for sure that God hadn’t forgotten his Book, the Bible, and He also had not forgotten his people.

"Who am I anyway, and what could my family mean in the vast scheme of End-Times? She wondered.

As if God was waiting for just that question, her following dream dealt with that specific subject.

Again, in her sleep she seemed to awaken and she sat up, viewing two angels having a conversation. Again, it was Michael, or an angel that look like him, and another angel that had her own facial features. Michael spoke first, as before.

“Who are the Lord’s servants for the former days?” The second angel named, “Paulus, Petros, Mattathiah, James son of Zeb edee, James son of Alphaeus, Bar-Tolmai, Johanan, Jude, Judas brother of James, and Simon Zelotes.”

“But there are others,” Michael said.

The second angel continued, “…Timotheus, Eleazar, Barnabus, Lucanus, Johannan the Baptist, Judas the Lord’s brother, Simon the Lord’s brother, Joseph of Arimathea, Mary the Lord’s mother, Mary the Magdalene, Martha of Bethany, and Mary of Bethany.”

“You need to name yet another, who will stand in the latter days” declared Michael. “For the first will be last, and the last first, as it is written, and they will be great who suffer last.”

“Heloise Turnbull, with her whole family,” replied the second angel. “They will anoint the holy instruments of the service of the Lord for the time of His glorious reign over the whole earth.”

Heloise awoke weeping, crying out, “No! No!” Yet even as she wept, she realized she didn’t have much to say about it. Chosen is chosen-—Israel was a Chosen People, and she, for some reason, was woven into their unique destiny—-chosen to bear bear and apply the holy anointing oil.

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