Healing of Jean-Pierre Bély at Lourdes

The wheels of the chair caught on a loose stone near the entrance to the esplanade, and I had to lean hard on the handles to keep it from tipping. Jean-Pierre Bély sat with his head tipped back against the canvas, eyes half-closed against the morning light. His legs lay straight and useless under the blanket. We had come down from Angoulême together on the diocesan train, eight hours of rattling sleep and whispered rosaries, and I had already learned the exact angle that let him breathe without coughing.

That Friday the crowd moved slowly toward the Grotto. Priests in white albs carried the monstrance under a canopy. The sick were arranged in rows on either side of the path, some on stretchers, some in chairs like Bély’s. A volunteer handed me a small plastic bottle of water from the spring. I set it on his lap and he managed to lift one hand to hold it.

The blessing began at ten. The bishop’s voice carried over the loudspeakers, steady and measured. Bély’s fingers tightened on the bottle. I watched the line of his jaw. Nothing changed in his posture. When the rite ended the helpers began to move the chairs back toward the hospitals. I stayed beside him because the train back to Angoulême would not leave until evening and the ward was short of hands.

He asked for the sacrament of the sick that afternoon. A priest came to the small room where we had parked the chair beside a narrow bed. Bély received the anointing on his forehead and palms while the oil ran down the creases of his skin. Afterward he asked to go to confession. The priest stayed another half hour. When they finished Bély looked only tired, the way a man looks after a long argument he has finally put into words.

We ate a little bread and cheese in the refectory. He could not lift the cup himself, so I held it. The light through the high windows had already turned the color of late afternoon. Someone said the evening procession would begin soon. Bély wanted to watch from the square rather than from the hospital window. I wheeled him out again.

The candles were already lit when the first decade started. The crowd answered the prayers in one voice that rolled across the open space. Bély’s lips moved with the words. Midway through the third decade his right foot slid forward an inch on the footrest. I thought it was the motion of the chair over uneven ground until the left foot moved as well. He looked down. His hands left the armrests and pressed against his knees.

He stood.

The blanket slid to the ground. He took one step, then another, holding the back of the chair for balance. People nearest us stopped praying. A woman in a blue coat crossed herself. Bély walked the length of the row and back without falling. His steps were short and uncertain, but they were his own. The rosary continued around us, the sound of it unchanged.

I stayed with him through the rest of the procession. He walked the final circuit holding my elbow. When it ended he asked to return to the Grotto. We went alone, the chair empty between us. He dipped his hands in the water and drank. The lamps along the path had come on by then, and the rock face above the spring looked wet and black.