I should have known Pop would be disappointed in me. Oh, he tried to hide it, to pretend he didn’t care one way or another. But I could tell it really bothered him that I went and got myself saved.
And that hurt me.
I knew what Rufus said was true, that it wasn’t any of my business how my parents thought about God, but that didn’t change the way I felt deep down. And deep down, I wanted them to be like me. Pop especially. Pop was always a hard nut to crack—never could tell just what he was thinking—but church would at least have given him and me something in common. Without it … well, without it, he wasn’t anything like me at all.
I knew Mother had told him about me that evening, the second night of the revival. I was planning to go to church—I wanted Preacher Man to set my soul spinning again—but at supper I could tell Pop was troubled, and that changed my mind.
Mother and Pop were so quiet, it was like somebody had died. I felt like a fool, because I knew they were both thinking about me and not knowing what to say. I sure didn’t know what to say. Mother would look at me a second, her eyes all soft and sad, then she’d look away. She had left a brand-new Bible in my room that afternoon, so I knew she wasn’t mad about my being saved, but then again, she sure wasn’t jumping for joy.
And Pop. Pop just fiddled with his food. It wasn’t like him. If one thing made Pop happy, it was eating. And we were having fried chicken, his favorite. But he just fiddled.
So we sat like that for a time. Then Pop said, so fast it made me jump, “Are they going to dunk you in the river?”
Pop nodded. He looked at Mother and she looked at me and I looked at the chicken.
Then all of a sudden, Pop grinned. He said, “Remember when your granddaddy was dunked?”
Pop’s grinning made me grin.
“Yep,” I said.
Pop chuckled. “Old man wouldn’t take off his glasses. Preacher tried to take them off him, but nothing doing. Dad said if any angels were coming, he wanted a good look at them.”
Pop thought a second, then grinned again.
“Took his hearing aid off, though. I guess he figured whatever angels came along wouldn’t be worth listening to.”
I laughed and Mother laughed and Pop chuckled.
It was like things had never changed.
Pop grew quiet again, though, and awfully sad. I could tell. I thought maybe he was thinking about Granddaddy. Maybe missing him the way I’d miss Pop if he died. Or maybe he was thinking about me. But the look on his face made me want to stay home. I hated to leave the house when he was sad.
So I hung around. We three sat on the porch and watched the cars go by, commenting on this piece of gossip and that. We were all careful not to mention the revival or my salvation, and I wondered when it was that I learned not to talk to my folks about certain things. I mean, when I learned to be careful around them. Was I six? Or nine? Was it just last year?
When did that change? I looked at them and wondered.
Pop decided to turn in early, and Mother followed him, so that left me sitting alone about nine o’clock. I felt so depressed about everybody, I decided to go on over to the church anyway.
The place was packed. By the time I got there, Preacher Man was calling people to be saved, and they were surely coming. I stood in the back of the church, the heat hitting my face and the sweat starting to bead up under my nose. I stood and felt like somebody who had just walked into a stormy sea, with the waves coming in hard and sudden and trying to take you away.
They were up there, the sinners, crying and wailing and hanging on to each other. Some had fainted already. Most of the choir was crying so hard they couldn’t sing. Joanie Fulton, her heavy feet pumping and her eyeliner running over her fat cheeks, sobbed and pounded at the organ. The place rocked.
And he was in control of them all. He was walking through them, his face burning and his hands reaching out. He smoothed the gray hair of the old ladies. He hugged the women. He hugged the men. He held the girls like he loved every one of them. He held them longest because they cried hardest.
I watched him move through them all, and I knew there was nobody like him on the whole earth. I wanted to run up and be saved all over again. I wanted him to see me, to look at me. I wanted to be special to him.
The tears came up in my eyes as I stood there, singing with the church.
And in my heart, I prayed it would go on forever. I prayed it would always be like this. I prayed things would never change.