Revival Season - Monica West (10 ebook reader .TXT) 📗

to his chest. “Why do you have to ask so many questions? I have a question for you. Why isn’t breakfast ready yet?”

“Samuel, what’s gotten into you?”

Papa took another step into the kitchen and slammed his hand on the back of the chair next to where Caleb was sitting. Caleb jumped from the table, knocking over his cereal bowl; pink-tinged milk spilled on the table’s wood grain before it dripped to the floor.

“I’m not going to ask again. Where’s my breakfast?”

Ma leaped back a couple of floor tiles. Her mouth was agape as she opened the refrigerator; the carton of eggs slipped out of her tenuous grasp and onto the floor.

“Look what you did. Clean that up. Now.”

He stayed standing while she bent to scrub the gelatinous mixture of golden yolks and milky whites; with each circular motion of the dishcloth, the stain inched closer to Papa’s shoe. I pressed my back against the hallway wall, out of Papa’s line of sight, unable to move to help her, even as the ragged hem of my nightgown tickled my kneecaps and urged me forward. I pulled at a loose thread and wound it around my thumb a few times, creating a sudden marble of pain at the tip that was white before turning red and then purple. The strained string broke off in my hand and sailed to the floor, immediately alleviating the pain that I desperately wanted back.

The house held its breath between Papa’s solo breakfast and the late-morning hour when he and Caleb should have left for the revival site. I crept past Ma and Papa’s ajar bedroom door—a sliver of him sat at the edge of the mattress with his head pressed between his palms, his fingers palpating the quarter-size bald spot at the top of his head. If he would look up, he could explain to me what was going on, why he hadn’t told Ma what had happened.

A minute later, the phone blared in the house, but he didn’t move to answer it—he hadn’t answered it all morning and had ordered the rest of us not to either. Instead, he unwrapped and rerolled the gauze from his knuckles like he was preparing for a fight. In the echoing silence after the phone stopped ringing, the word fraud from last night pricked the air like lightning. It wasn’t the first time he’d been called a fraud, but Papa had ignored those previous accusations, especially since they’d come from heathens. Something about his response outside the tent made the accusation feel different. Truer somehow.

“Papa?” I said when I’d been standing in his doorway for several minutes. My mind had been a jumble of questions, but when I reached for them now, they hovered out of grasp. Then the words from all of his sermons came back to me. “You said that it’s not in God’s will to heal everyone. So it wasn’t God’s will to heal that man. Right? And you hit him because he lied about you. You were angry. I get that.”

I nodded, hoping to coax his response out. “Right, Papa?”

All he had to do was say one word. Right. But he kept his head in his hands, not even looking up at me.

“Right, Papa? Answer me!” My voice was rising, frantic.

Papa knew all the verses in the Bible and could recite them on command. He could make small talk about everything, from the weather to car engines. Now he sat in the middle of the sagging mattress, completely silent.

In the empty hallway, the phone started ringing again. As I closed my eyes and knocked the back of my head against the wall, fuzzy images from the night before took shape on the darkness of my eyelids. Bloody knuckles, the screaming man, the semicircle of deacons’ hunched, suited backs. The hollow sound of my skull against the wall was like the sound last night when Papa hit the man square in the jaw. I had tried to imagine it any other way, but without an answer from him, the only thing I could believe was that he’d done it on purpose.

He couldn’t be a fraud like the man said—fraud would mean that he’d known all along that he hadn’t been able to heal. And he’d healed thousands of people in ways big and small. But the Papa I saw now, the one sitting silently on the edge of the mattress with his head in his hands, didn’t look like the same man who’d made a boy walk earlier this summer.

We took one van to revival that night—no separate caravans with men in one car and women and children bringing up the rear hours later. Papa put the air-conditioning on full blast and then rolled down the window. Ma always griped about his habit—Do you want to cool the outside too?—but she held her tongue today. A few stoplights away from the revival tent, Papa’s commercial came onto the Christian radio station, proclaiming him “the Faith Healer of East Mansfield.” Papa turned the volume dial all the way to the left, and we rode the rest of the way in silence.

A low layer of thick gray clouds pressed against the sky like the heel of God’s hand. As we pulled into the space in the lot cordoned off for the revival pastor, I saw that the parking lot was half as full as it was the same time the night before. I watched in the rearview mirror as Papa set his jaw, each muscle in his face straining to make the “faith healer” expression that had been effortless only the previous day. He stepped outside of the van and rested his hand against the top of the open door. As the night air came inside, he leaned over. Finally, he was going to say something. He had found a way to explain it all.

“See you inside.” He had shrunk since I saw him earlier on the bed—a child in a man’s suit.

I took a deep