Revival Season - Monica West (recommended ebook reader TXT) 📗

answer when doubt crept in. But belief didn’t work that way, not for us. It wasn’t the answer to an on-demand question—Lord, please give me more belief—and then bam. Belief required trial and prayer and faith and conviction. But all the Bible verses that I knew by heart were retreating the more I tried to remember them.

I sat up slowly, my head still swimming. Ma must have seen the questions that flashed behind my eyes because she crouched on the parched grass next to me.

“What’s going on?”

“It’s hard to be back here with everything. I thought it would be easier to be home, but it’s harder.”

Hannah held a dandelion inches from my lips as though a wish could make my uncertainty and anger disappear. When its thin stem bent in the slight breeze, I blinked for a stutter longer than normal and then pursed my lips. With one blow, tiny, cottony puffs scattered in all directions; some went overhead, where I traced their trajectory until they got lost in the sun’s blinding rays. A few remaining puffs hovered close to Hannah’s face before landing on her skirt and my nose. She burst into laughter and something rumbled deep inside me too before pouring out—the first laugh in weeks.

On Sunday, the morning of Papa’s triumphant return to the pulpit of Living Waters Baptist Church, we dressed for what always felt like an unofficial holiday. We knew that there would be crowds that rivaled those of Christmas and Easter, with overflow in the multipurpose room. I wondered if Papa would give the deacon board specific numbers about how many he had healed this summer, ignoring the ones he hadn’t.

Papa slowed down at the stop sign at the end of the street and waved to Mr. Finley, who was walking his dog. “See you at church today.” Papa’s voice didn’t rise at the end of the question because it wasn’t a question at all.

Mr. Finley nodded. Mr. Finley was a heathen, and we had two options when encountering heathens: we delivered them the word of God or we kept our distance—there was no in-between. Papa had been inviting Mr. Finley to church for years, and even though he never came, Papa never gave up.

Papa pulled into the parking lot of his new church that had been built last fall. I waited for the familiar feeling of pride to churn in my chest, but a weight tethered me to the ground. I wanted to roll down the window and tell everyone what had happened, to tell them to go to one of the other churches in town because the person they’d put all their faith in wasn’t who they thought he was, but then Papa put the car in park and we all got out.

With an hour to go before the start of services, the church was still almost empty. But Mrs. Cade, the senior usher and resident church midwife, was there setting up. She smiled as she saw me, and I relished seeing her familiar face that was the color of Papa’s perfect cup of coffee with a swirl of cream. With a hurried pace, she shuffled over to the door where I was standing and ran her gnarled hands across my face, as though my moles were braille. Her knobby fingertips stroked the bridge of my nose and ran across the Cupid’s bow of my top lip. Her movements were steady, methodical, as though she were trying to keep track of how much I had changed in the three months since she’d seen me.

“Miriam,” she finally said. “Welcome home.” She pulled me close to her chest, and I inhaled her strong scent of lavender. When she released me, she reached into the pocket of her suit jacket and unearthed a few peppermints. She passed them to me like contraband, and I shoveled them into my pockets.

“Hi, Mrs. Cade.”

She leaned in close and pressed both hands against the sides of my face. She had been one of the earliest members of Papa’s first church when he was a twenty-year-old preaching prodigy, following him across Texas until he arrived in East Mansfield. As kids, Caleb and I made a game of guessing how old Mrs. Cade was, but we knew better than to ask. From our estimation, she was about sixty, because not only had she delivered me, Caleb, and Isaiah, she loved to brag that she had also delivered Papa.

“How was revival this year?”

I wanted to tell someone, anyone, about what I had seen in Bethel, someone who wouldn’t pretend that it was an anomaly. Mrs. Cade kept my secrets—she was the only person I had told about the dark days in the house after Isaiah’s death. She had known Papa before he was a holy man; surely, she could know the depths to which he had sunk in Bethel.

“Great,” I began. Words stirred below the surface, but I swallowed them.

She tilted her head to the right as though to spur me on. I gave her a wan smile instead and turned down the long hallway toward the multipurpose room before she could ask another question. The hallway’s bright walls were lined with pictures of Papa and awards he had won: “Texas Baptist Preacher of the Year” from 2010 until now. There were polished plaques from ceremonies he’d attended and pictures of the old church back in Midland—the one that he preached in when Caleb and I were born. I stopped in front of the final picture, of Papa with a big pair of scissors in his hands the day before this building held its first Sunday service. We stood next to him with our faces permanently frozen in expressions of delight. He had come so far in a short amount of time; there was so much to lose. Scandals had rocked other churches around this area, leaving large shuttered buildings where vibrant, bustling congregations used to be. In no time, we could lose this church and be back in the storefront