Volume 2, Issue 8, page 3
"Don't Call Me Quack1 Warns ARTHUR J. BURKS
The Man with
Hands
METHING was being done to
me. I didn't know exactly
what. And after 14 years of
it I still am not sure. I
had smoked; cigars and pipe,
since I was eight. I had
chewed tobacco equally long.
I'd gone on binges -- some of
them tall ones. I had been more than average sexy.
One day I realized a most remarkable
thing: I hadn't smoked all day. I never
smoked again, nor wished to. Nor chewed.
Tobacco became distasteful to me from the
standpoint of what had once been "fragrance".
I turned a glass bottoms up, the
first time I ever did. I've done no
drinking since, not even beer.
I decided against being further led
around by sexual urges. I became celibate, and that was the most difficult,
especially since I didn't know exactly
why and the urge remained. Later I understood; the sex urge gradually manifested
as something else. Like this:
I was training officer during World
War II, or much of it, at the Marine Corps
Base, Naval Operating Base, Parris Island,
S. Car. Among other grim items I taught
bayonet, with naked bayonets used in personal combat. Eventually I taught about
150,000 leathernecks. I'd never had an
accident. One day one occurred. An erstwhile farmer boy took the tip of a bright
bayonet across his forehead, above his
left eye. Someone yelled for "the Major",
me. I got there fast. The boy was bleeding a lot. When we went to Sick Bay, many
questions would be asked by my superiors,
most of whom felt that bayonet was no
longer required of fighters; most of whom
believed, if bayonet was taught at all,
that scabbards should be kept on.
"Put your hand on the wound!" I didn't look around to see who said it. With
the fingertips of my right hand I drew
the boy's wound together.
Instantly, the bleeding stopped, and
there was no wound. Startled, I looked at
my hand. It was charged with blood, inside, not outside. It tingled. I loocled
around at other Marines. The amazing
thing was that nobody saw anything unusual. Marine training officers, apparentIt is a strange gift -- these "red hands" of
Arthur J. Burks, whose prolific pen has turned out
several million words of published fiction. In
this article, he does not try to explain his gift,
but those interested may find a clue in a companion piece, "Monitors", running currently in ORIOI
Magazine, 521 Central Av., Charlotte, H. Car. In
it, Mr. Burks. an officer in the Marines during
World War II, tolls of his contact with his "Guardian Angels", or "Monitors", as he prefers to label them.
Although Mr. Burks has had some success healing at a distance, and makes no charge because "if
I did, the 'gift' would be a 'gift' no 1 r", we
hope readers of The ABgtdSB will understand if he
does not, eagle handedly. try to put all the auditors t of business. Thed. DO (or some think
they do) have to charge in order to survive.
ly, cured recruits by the "laying on of
hands". Nobody around me -- officer, noncom, or enlisted -- had told me to put my
hand on the wound. I never learned who
did, if anybody. I may have imagined it.
A short time later the wife of a brother officer,
with whom I had discussed the case of the bayonetted
Blaine, bore my godson by Caesarian section. The captain came to me.
"She simply can't sleep," he said. "Come and see
if you can do something."
My wife and his wife's mother went with us to the
hospital.
"No nurse or doctor is going to make it easy for
me to put my hands on your wife's bandage, over her
wound," I told the captain.
"Maybe we'll get a break," he said.
We did. The nurse tidied the women's bed and
left us. Her mother arranged her nightgown, or bed
jacket, so I could get my palms flat over the bandage,
as near the wound as possible. The woman closed her
eyes.
I thought: "It would help if her husband put his
hand on my shoulder."
Before I could say it, her husband put his hand
on my shoulder. Both my hands -- and wrists, as far as
I could see-were fiery red. The woman began snoring.
She did not remember being awakened at any time during
the next ten hours.
As we left the sleep ing woman, her mother asked:
"What did you do to her?"
"I don't know," I said. But I was beginning to
learn. I knew there must be rule , and began to assemble them as t came to me. (1) I did not volunteer
my "gift"; (2 If I were asked must give, and only
if asked; and 3) I seemed to be more effective with
women, though st at this point I hadn't too much to
go on.
I put a few babies to sleep on request of parents. I "worked on" a houseful of kids at a distance
of two blocks; they all had colds. Next morning, they
didn't have colds. I closed my eyes and in imagination
put my hands on the shoulders of each child. Never
since, however, have I been able to knock the common
cold.
In Cuba for 20 months,'until after the war's end,
I was asked but once. I put my hands on a seven-yearold Mongoloid who was as strong as a man. I got nowhere with him until later, when he was asleep. Then
I put my hands on his chest, and told him softly to behave: not to cling to the hand of his nurse like a
hulking ape, not to run mry, not to leave the border
of his father's yard. Next morning he began obeying
orders. When I last heard, he was still halting, walking ~r ee
of his nurse, reasonably erect, and as
The ABERREE, December, 1955