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

What were you trying to prove? He didn’t say anything at all; he just laid his heavy hand on my head. It wasn’t Ma’s soft caress, but it would do for the moment.

The next morning, an unfamiliar weight made one side of my bed sag. I opened my eyes and saw Caleb, splayed on his back next to the wall. He must have fallen asleep there the night before. We hadn’t shared a bed since revival years ago, before Hannah was born. I slid closer to the edge of the bed, careful not to wake him. A slight snore, a little louder than a breath, escaped his mouth. On Sunday morning, he would once again be in the pulpit behind Papa, but for now, he was in my room, among my yellow walls and daffodil sheets. I pulled my prayer quilt from undermeath his heavy legs and spread it over him, leaving him to sleep.

FOURTEEN

Over the next few days, Papa and I were like two billiard balls—never actually touching or interacting. I entered a room, and he left it. In the places where he couldn’t avoid me—like church—I knew how to stay out of his path. I lingered in the back of the sanctuary until he was done shaking hands with the few families who were left. When he finished and went into his office, I came to the front of the sanctuary to clean up after communion—the task that Micah and I once had down to a science took twice as long alone. But I could only complain to Hannah, who played behind me as I watched the blood of Christ seep down the drain.

It should have been freeing to be in church without supervision, but even though Papa had been avoiding me, I could feel his judgment and sense him staring me down when he thought I wasn’t looking. It was hard to understand how he could simultaneously ignore me and watch me like a hawk, but somehow he managed. In the hallways, I received more notes asking for healing, but I felt Papa’s eyes on me and knew it would be too risky to try.

In homeschool, the pain of Micah’s absence was still acute, even though things had ostensibly returned to normal. Ma circulated through our sections—tapping my shoulder when I got a math problem right, whispering good job in my ear, and I knew that her gentleness was her way of showing me that Papa’s distance from me hadn’t spread to her. I watched Isaac grow and learn the nuances of Ma’s face while strapped to her chest; the ache in my lower back was still present from all the days when he had been strapped to mine.

There were no more dances or visits to my room at night to read library books—Ma seemed to want to make up for the weeks she’d missed with Isaac. She reveled in each announcement of a new milestone: Isaac just smiled for the first time. He’s holding his head up. The fact wasn’t lost on either of us that just because those milestones were new to her didn’t mean they were new at all.

Nothing lasted in our house for too long—even my anger at Papa ebbed as winter released its hold to spring, but it never fully went away. As warm air crept into the open spaces and buds formed on dormant trees, Easter came with its renewed promise of resurrection. Ma and I stood side by side in the kitchen the Saturday before Easter, a table with meager groceries in front of us. All of the preparations for Papa’s service had already been made—he was going all out this year in a thinly veiled attempt to lure more people to the church. The dwindling tithes barely covered enough for supplies, but the Sunday school classes had created a life-size cross out of plywood beams and a rock out of papier-mâché that the deacon playing the angel of the Lord would roll away. For the dramatic moment when it was revealed that there was nothing in the tomb, Papa and the deacons had rigged the pulleys behind the pulpit that would lift him into the air, mimicking Jesus’s ascent into heaven on the third day. The only thing left to do was prepare the Easter feast that we would eat as a family when all the festivities were over.

Ma opened bags next to me, pulling out onions and celery for the dressing, a can of pineapple, and a ham wrapped in white plastic. Her stilted words recited the recipe that we’d been using for years, but I wasn’t listening to her at all. Above the sound of a rolling boil on the stove, Papa’s last-minute stumblings through the rehearsal of what should have been his best sermon of the year floated down to the first floor. I tried to summon a feeling of pity, but I couldn’t muster it. As Ma whistled to fill the space, I grabbed the onion and placed it on the cutting board, slicing through the middle with the gleaming blade, remembering the sweet release as the shard of glass plunged into my flesh months ago. As I hacked through the white orb again and again, I fought the urge to turn the knife on my arms.

My hands went through the motions of cooking. And even though they had given life and health back to people, they were expected to go back to the muscle-memory motions of chopping, bathing, and stirring, like a rubber band returning to its original shape. It was like falling from a mighty height and crashing back into what was familiar—the fall was supposed to kill you before the landing, but in this case, the landing seemed even worse.

After dinner was prepped and stored in plastic containers in the refrigerator, I ran a bath and dipped Hannah into the water—a baptism of sorts. She let her body go limp—her trusting head was heavy in my