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

while they’re preaching,” she’d once tried to explain with a straight face. I had stared at her until she seemed to hear the ridiculousness of her words coming back to her like a boomerang, and her lip twitched before she broke into throaty laughter. Soon we were giggling at the absurdity of a then nine-year-old pair of knees being a distraction for grown preachers and deacons. Nonetheless, I did as I was told from that day on.

Later that night, Ma, Hannah, and I emptied out of the house in our Sunday best, even though it was a Monday. The car ride over was silent. At each stoplight, Ma picked invisible pieces of lint from her dark gray skirt. The week before, it had just been a pattern on newsprint; this would be its revival debut. At a stop sign, I squeezed her hand. It’s going to be fine, I wanted to tell her. But her eyes were on the road as she turned right and the revival tent appeared—first a speck that slowly swelled until it took up the whole windshield. It had the same alternating yellow and white colors of the one last August in Brownsville, Tennessee. There was no way Papa had approved this, and though we didn’t believe in the superstitions or bad omens that godless people did, my stomach fell to the rubber floor mat.

I blinked the yellow-and-white pattern into a beige swirl, and suddenly the stillness in the van became the same eerie calm of the tent last summer when a family of three had stepped out of the rain and into the back of the tent. A teenage girl close to my age was sandwiched between the twin pillars of her parents, her impassive face damp from tears or rain. The girl’s parents linked their arms in hers as the girl shook her head and held her stomach, protesting something that they ignored as they jerked her forward. When she finally stood in front of the crowd, her parents released their grip, and the girl’s hands fell away from her lower abdomen. Exposed in front of us, she looked even younger. Thirteen years old, maybe fourteen, seven or eight months pregnant. My brain made calculations as I looked away from a chubby face that hadn’t shed all of its baby fat, letting my gaze land on the smiling unicorn on her dingy T-shirt instead.

Papa continued his sermon as the family stood in front of him until he couldn’t ignore their unmoving presence any longer. When he glanced over the edge of the pulpit, his stoic healing face cracked when looking at a girl whose slender, birdlike body didn’t seem like it was big enough to carry the weight of her stomach. Papa rushed to the ground and spoke a few quiet words to the girl’s father while she strained against her father’s tight grip like a chained animal.

“Young lady, what ails you?” Papa held out his hand to touch her forehead.

“Don’t touch me, you fake.” She backed away, leaving his hand suspended in midair. “What did you do to make them all believe in you? Or do they just give you money and you make them believe? Is that how it works?” As she spoke, the practiced calm of Papa’s healing face flashed murderous. Papa took a breath, seemingly to calm himself, but his hands were shaking.

“How dare you? You come here for my healing and insult me? Who do you think you are?” The deacons crept in from the sides of the tent to protect Papa, but Papa held out a hand to keep them back.

“Who do you think you are?” he asked again, inching closer to her and exaggerating their dramatic difference in height. “You are nothing but a sinner. You need me.” As Papa placed a hand on the girl’s forehead, she swatted it away. Rage swept over him again, and, seemingly as a reflex, he pushed her. She stumbled backward, almost in slow motion, landing on the grass as her parents looked on, horrified. Papa seemed horrified as well, but the look of guilt that had passed his face as the girl fell quickly morphed into more fury. He dropped to his knees beside her and pinned her shoulders to the grass with his massive hands.

“Stop,” the mother yelled as she hit Papa’s back, “you’re hurting her.”

But Papa, impervious to her screams and blows, stayed on top of the girl. The congregation fidgeted as they watched the revival preacher violently subdue this tiny pregnant child.

“I will heal her sin.” Papa healed ailments, not sins, but he seemed to have forgotten that fact as he continued to shake the girl. He punctuated each of his words with a punch of his right fist into the grass next to her body.

The girl slid to the right to get away from him; as she moved, his fist drove deep into her abdomen with a sickening thud. She wailed, and her body folded on itself. Papa released her and jumped up, staring down at his hands as though he didn’t know what they were capable of. Her parents rushed to her, shoving him into the front row on the way to their daughter. They picked her up from where she was curled in a fetal position on the ground, screaming. Her mother shouted at Papa before she hurried her daughter out of the tent, and her final words—You are a monster—were shrill in the surrounding silence.

The light at the intersection turned green, but the van didn’t move. Flashes of last year must have been dancing in the windshield for Ma also. I placed my hand over hers as cars sped by us. It was the new shorthand for what we couldn’t say: that the night’s revival attendance would determine how far-reaching last year’s news had really been or if people’s attention spans were as short as we needed them to be.

The car jolted back into motion, and Ma returned her eyes to the road.