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

“I’m so sorry you’re sick again, Micah. I really wanted you to be healed.”

“Me too.” The words had barely left her mouth before heavy, racking sobs filled the room. I stood up and bent over to put my arms around her. She curled her body into mine as I stroked the oiled spaces of scalp between her orderly cornrows.

“Can I be alone for a bit?” she said when my knees cramped from crouching beside her. Every joint ached as I stood up and walked toward the door.

“I’ll see you back downstairs.”

“Miriam,” she eked out at the crest of another sob. “Don’t say anything to your dad.”

EIGHT

The night before the first healing service, Ma, Hannah, and I sat at the table with orderly rows of small white bottles between us. Forty was the magic number of bottles to fill—the same number of days and nights that Moses was on the mountain with God. Ma looked at me from the other side of a thin, gold ribbon of oil that flowed from the industrial-size bottle of Crisco into the smaller bottles.

There was no special ceremony as we filled each bottle, stopping when they were about three-quarters of the way full. I wondered if the people who lined up for healing knew that the cross Papa traced on their heads was really Crisco. Papa said that the power came from the prayer, not the oil.

Wordlessly, Ma and I finished and placed the bottles into the cardboard box that Papa would take to church with him tomorrow. Before Bethel, Ma and I used to play a game where we guessed who would be healed by this oil. A woman with cancer, I sometimes offered. An older man with arthritis, she would say. But I was too busy thinking about Bethel to bring up the game.

“That’s forty,” Ma said as she folded the box’s cardboard flaps closed. She drummed her fingers on the lid like there was more to say. At the table, Hannah lifted the bottle of vegetable oil in front of her face. She shook her head, perhaps in disbelief that the table and chairs could look so distorted behind the viscous yellow substance, or perhaps she thought that there was magic in the liquid somehow.

Later that night, I heard three soft raps on my door. Before I could answer, Ma slipped into the crack that let the light in. She approached my bed with her arms behind her back—a sly smile spreading across her face as she presented the newest library book on outstretched palms. She hadn’t come for our secret reading sessions since Bethel, and the fact that she was back meant that things had returned to a semblance of normalcy. I put my prayer journal on my nightstand and straightened in bed, holding her elbow as she climbed over me. She’d been slowing down more now than during her pregnancy with Isaiah, but I tossed the thought aside.

“Look what I have,” she whispered, her eyes darting to where Hannah was sleeping a few feet away. “It’s the one that you requested a couple months ago. It just came in.” I held the cellophane wrapper and fingered the embossed letters on the cover. Song of Solomon. It crinkled open and I pressed my nose against the new pages. Even though we were surrounded by books at home—Bibles in multiple translations and biblical commentaries—those books weren’t mine. And though I loved the stories of Miriam, Moses, Deborah, and Esther, the books that I got with Ma from the library were different. It felt good to try on lives that weren’t mine, lives that didn’t involve traveling every summer. I fell in love on those pages and felt the ache of heartbreak that I’d never experienced.

“When did you get it?” A pang of jealousy rose in my throat, and my words came out more accusatory than I intended. The library was a place we went together when Papa was at the church for trustee meetings. Under the guise of getting more Christian books to replenish the homeschool baskets in our basement, we always chose one secular book that we hid in the middle of the larger stack to read late at night. The title of this one made things easier, though—if Papa saw it, he would never suspect that it wasn’t about the Bible.

“Let’s read a couple of pages,” she said. “We have some time.” She glanced at her watch as I slid closer to the nightstand to give her more room.

In the puddle of light from the desk lamp, I read aloud, letting my tongue taste words that Papa could never know I was reading. I felt the slip of Mr. Smith’s blue silk wings on my bare arms, imagining his leap to his death and the way his stomach must have plunged to his feet on the way down. Ma leaned her head into my shoulder and nodded with pride when I read words like bereft and transfixed—and in an instant, I was five again, only this time her finger wasn’t dragging beneath letters on the page, bouncing each b or releasing a tiny spit stream with each p. And since she wouldn’t read these books aloud herself, she got some joy at hearing me tell her about a life that she had once lived. A life I never had.

My face grew warm as I read about Macon undressing his wife, Ruth, and my words halted.

“Did you fall in love before him?” I asked the wall. I crossed my legs to quell the tingle in my crotch that rose when I thought about Jason Campbell, but the feeling dissipated soon thereafter when I remembered Papa’s withering gaze.

Ma paused for a minute, seeming to weigh whether to answer me. “My first love was when I was twelve. He was my next-door neighbor. Curtis.” His name was closer to a giggle than a word when it came out of her mouth.

“Anyone