The whole summer had passed by without revival coming to Red River. That was fine by me. I never much cared for them anyhow. All the strangers setting up in town and the big tent pitched in one of the old fields. The preachers hollering about the wrath of God and how we all deserved the fires of hell. Then they’d collect the money and move on to the next county.
It seemed that year all the traveling preachers had forgotten about us, and most of the town didn’t miss the to-do.
Meemaw, though, she’d gone on and on all summer about it. She determined that a week of revival would come to our small town even if she had to bring it herself.
When Meemaw made up her mind on something, it was near impossible to convince her otherwise.
She’d even invited Pastor Ezra Anderson and Mad Mabel to dinner to talk it over with him.
“This town needs getting brought forth to life,” she’d told him, spooning a second helping of peas on his plate. “We need ourselves a great awakening.”
“That’s true, sister. It is.” Pastor paused to push his peas into a line on his knife. He stuck his tongue out the side of his mouth in concentration. “Trouble is, we don’t got the money to pay anybody to come out here to preach.”
Mad Mabel stabbed her peas with a fork, stacking them one on top of another.
“Then you do the preaching.” Meemaw refilled Pastor’s coffee cup. “You want a little sugar in that?”
“No thank you,” he said, lifting the knife of peas to his mouth and letting them tumble to his tongue. He chewed a minute and then sipped his coffee. “I guess I could do the preaching. Problem is, we don’t got a tent to meet in.”
“Yes we do.” Meemaw’s whole face wrinkled with her smile. “Rather, you do.”
“Sister …” Pastor shook his head and then glanced at his wife. “I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t like it all that much.”
Mrs. Anderson’s eyes switched back and forth, back and forth like she was seeing something swing in front of her face.
“Brother. Pastor. I got plenty of thread. I don’t mind patching that old thing up.” Meemaw spread a little soft butter on a slice of bread and put it on Pastor’s plate. Then she sat next to him, leaning close toward him. “Pastor, we got all kinds of folks coming through town these days. They ain’t staying but a night or two, maybe a week. But they’re all hungry. Hungry for bread of flour and yeast and for Bread of Life. Mary and me will make plenty of the rising kind, you got to provide the life-saving one.”
Pastor folded his bread in half before taking a bite.
Meemaw’s prayer circle planned a revival like our town hadn’t seen in twenty years. Not that I would have known the difference, but that was what they told everybody. They had arranged for Mama to play the piano and lead the hymn sings. Each night, all the folks that came would take home a loaf or two of bread.
They had it all figured out. The last part was the tent.
Less than a week before the revival was to start, Meemaw had Millard and Daddy drag an ancient, shredded tent into our living room.
“Now, you boys spread it across the floor,” she instructed, a large grin spreading on her face.
“Yes, ma’am,” Millard said, bundling the edges so they would fit within the walls. “This old thing’s as dusty as—”
“I won’t hear no complaining. I ain’t asking you to do the mending, am I?”
“Where’s this from?” I asked, stooping so I could touch the edge of the tent. It was thick canvas, worn soft by use.
“Oh, Pastor’s had this old thing up in the church steeple since, heavens, I don’t know how long.” Meemaw made her way to the rocking chair and stuck her needle between her lips when she steadied herself to sit. “Hand me that edge, would you?”
I lifted the canvas, draping it on her lap like a blanket.
“Thank you, darlin’,” she said. Then she made her fingers busy, threading the needle. “I reckon he put this up there right before he went off to fight in the war.”
“Tell her how he got it,” Millard said, crossing his arms and grinning. “Pearl, you’ll never believe it.”
“I’ll tell her soon’s she starts patching this up with me.”
I crawled closer to the tent and took a needle and some thread from Meemaw’s sewing basket.
“Back before the war, he traveled around with a circus.” Meemaw’s eyes twinkled.
“He did?” I was sure my eyes would pop out of my skull and my mouth would get stuck open.
“Yes indeed,” Millard said. “And I’ll leave you ladies to cluck about it.”
Millard nodded for Daddy to follow and they left the house. I pushed my needle through the canvas, feeling the thickness of the fabric.
“Back when we were all much younger, Pastor was the ringmaster of a circus that went all over the country. Never did see such a good show.” She stuck out her tongue, working a difficult spot. “He had a couple clowns and an acrobat and a bearded lady.”
“Was her beard real?” I asked.
“Mind your stitches, Pearl.” She nodded at my idle hands. “Yup, her beard was real, all right. It grew right out of her face like a man’s. Always had somebody pull on it to check. She didn’t mind knocking them out when they done that.”
“What is going on in here?” Mama asked, standing in the front door.
“It’s Pastor’s revival tent.”
“It looks like a circus tent.” Mama knelt on the floor beside me, checking my stitches.
“I was telling Pearl about Pastor’s circus. And the bearded lady.” Meemaw pulled on the tent. “A few of the fellas asked her to prove she wasn’t a man. I do believe she broke a couple noses for that.”
“Mother,” Mama scolded.
“There was even a two-headed cat for a while. Never knew if that thing was real or not.” She closed her eyes and chuckled. “I guess one of them heads was real, at least.”
While I pushed my needle up and down through the old tent, I thought about how much more folks would enjoy church if Pastor had his bearded lady there and the two-headed cat.
“Mrs. Anderson used to read tea leaves,” Meemaw whispered. “You know what that means?”
“Now, don’t fill her head—”
“She’d tell people’s fortunes,” Meemaw interrupted.
An awed gasp pulled into my lungs.
“She believed in witchcraft in those days. Not no more, I reckon.”
I thought of the snakes turned belly up on her fence and wondered if that wasn’t witchcraft, I didn’t know what was.
“Pastor married her before he found Jesus.” Meemaw went back to her quick stitching. “Both of them turned from their ways. But then Mabel lost her mind.”
“Is she a witch?” I asked.
“Pearl, that isn’t something for a girl to say,” Mama said. “Mrs. Anderson isn’t a witch. She’s touched.”
“You ever have her potato salad?” Meemaw asked. “Takes witchcraft to cook like that.”
“How did Pastor find Jesus?” I asked.
“Well I don’t know exactly. But it happened after the war,” Meemaw said.
“He find Jesus in all that fighting?” I asked.
“Nah. I don’t reckon he seen God in any trenches.” She shook her head. “I suspect he found a place God wasn’t.”
“God’s everywhere,” Mama said.
“Well, I guess there’s some places He’s harder to see.” Meemaw clucked her tongue. “We never do find a need for Jesus until we’re some place where we can’t find Him so easy.”
The three of us sewed for a good time, none of us finding a word to say. The sounds of people walking past our house caught my attention. I tried to see them out the window, but they’d already passed.
What I did see outside was Red River. Streets lined by boarded-up buildings and dead dreams. Ruined fields and falling-apart lives.
“Meemaw?” I asked, easing back down, the tent weighing heavy on my lap.
She responded with a humming sound.
“Is God in Oklahoma?” I half feared she’d get upset at me for the question, but I had to know. “Or did He leave?”
She lowered her sewing and her hands to rest on her thighs. Then she smiled at me so that I could feel the warmth of it.
“He didn’t go nowhere, Pearl. He’s here. All’s I got to do is look at you to know it’s so.”
“But He’s real mad at us, isn’t He?”
“Well, that’s a question, ain’t it.” She licked her lips. “What makes you think God’s mad?”
“The dust.” I shrugged and pushed my pin into the canvas. “Pastor says God sent it to punish us.”
“Darlin’, the dust just came. It’s a thing that happened, that’s sure. But it ain’t judgment, honey.” Clearing her throat, she winced and touched the spot on her neck below her chin. “Pastor says all kinds of things, don’t he? He ain’t right about all of them. He means well. It’s just …”
I waited for her to finish, not wanting to break the idea she had in her mind.
“It’s just when a man’s done as much wrong as Pastor did in the old days, he wants to make sure he’s right with God. I think he’s so scared of being wrong, he’s got to be loud and holler to convince himself he ain’t going back to his old ways.”
Mama tsked and didn’t look up from her stitches. I wondered what that could mean.
“We all done wrong, Pearlie. It’s the way of people,” Meemaw said. “But the gospel good news is that Jesus come and took the load of what we done.”
“I wish Jesus could come and take all this dust from us,” I said, feeling the sting of tears in my eyes.
“He will, darlin’. One of these days, He’ll save us.”
Meemaw went right back to patching up the tent.
With only a few days until the revival, Meemaw sent me around, knocking on doors, to invite folks to come hear the Word of the Lord.
“In case any of them haven’t heard about it,” she’d said.
She said this as we stood on the porch, looking out at the big, newly mended tent sitting in the middle of a field. I thought if anybody didn’t know about the revival, they were most likely blind. The green-and-orange-and-red panels of the tent broke up the tan landscape so you couldn’t have missed it if you wanted to.
Daddy and Millard had set it up the day before with a crowd of kids gathered around their heels, thinking the circus was coming to town. They were more than a little disappointed when they found out it was just a revival.
“Go on and tell them that meetings start at six on Sunday evening, hear?” Meemaw said, pushing me down the steps. “And don’t forget to tell them about the bread.”
Most folks met me on their porches and nodded when I told them all about the revival and the bread. They thanked me and watched to make sure I made it to the next place okay.
I was tired and hungry and thirsty by the time I got to the sharecropper cabins. But not too many of them still had people living there, so I got from house to house real quick.
I saved the Jones’s house for last, hoping Ray would be there.
I’d hardly seen him since Rosie died. When I did, all he wanted to do was walk. It was on one of those walks that he told me his father wasn’t right in his mind for all the moonshine he drank. He said that was why he’d get so mean.
Knocking on the door of the Jones’s dugout, I got a nervous stomach, worrying that Ray’s father would answer and that he’d be mean to me. Stepping back, I waited. No one came to the door, so I knocked again.
I heard coughing from out back behind the dugout, so I followed the sound.
Mr. Jones sat on an overturned bucket, his hands holding the weight of his head. The whole of his body shook and jerked. He moved so strangely I wondered if he was having some kind of a fit.
I didn’t know what I could do for him or if I should. He looked so much smaller than I’d ever seen him look before. That man who had swelled his wife’s eye with a strike of his fist. The man who poured all the money they had down his throat in the form of whiskey. That man sat behind his broken-down house and cried like a little boy.
He sure seemed weak to me.
The stronger part of me wanted to kick a toe-full of dust at him and tell him he had no right to cry. To tell him that misery was what he deserved because it was what he’d dealt to his family for years.
But a weaker side of me felt soft toward him. I hated that side of me and wanted to shut it up. I just couldn’t, though.
I gathered up my breath and took a step toward him.
“Mr. Jones?” I said.
He tucked his head tighter to his body.
“You okay?” I took another step.
He waved me off with one of his floppy hands.
“Go on,” he said. “Get.”
When I didn’t move, he lifted his head. Crooked lines of red cut through eyes stained yellow where they should have been white, and his face looked like it could use a good shave. All of him was filthy. I could smell him from where I stood.
“Please,” he hissed at me through broken and tobacco-stained teeth. “Get.”
I never did invite Mr. Jones to the revival. Instead, I ran all the way home, more angry than sad.
It took Daddy and Millard plus a couple other men from town to move the piano from the church to the revival tent and put it on the makeshift stage. Then they set up benches and hung a couple lights from the ceiling.
Meemaw had her table of bread all set up, and Mama put hymnals on each seat. Beanie and I had paper fans to hand to everyone who came in, and Pastor stood at the door of the tent to greet the arrivals.
I watched his face as the folks came in. He started with a big smile and bright eyes that fell into half a grin and droopy eyes as only a few people came. Most of those who took seats on the benches were of gray hair and wrinkled faces. Not a one of them was from the Hooverville.
“Well,” he said, slapping his hands on his thighs. “I guess we’ll get more tomorrow night.”
Mama started off pounding out the songs on the piano. She didn’t have to look at the music in front of her—she’d played those hymns all her life. When she’d get to a part of the song that touched her, she’d close her eyes. I liked to think that was because she felt the music all the way down to her toes.
The last hymn on the list for the night was “Amazing Grace.” All the voices around me shook out the words. Meemaw hugged the hymnal to her chest and closed her own eyes, swaying a bit from side to side.
Daddy had told me once that Meemaw had been a Holy Roller back in the old days—that was why she rocked when she sang. Mama just said it was how the Spirit moved her.
Whatever it was, I always got a bit choked up when Meemaw did it. It seemed she understood God in a way I never would. I figured if Meemaw loved Him, He must be somebody worth paying attention to.
Mama got to the last verse, the part that said, “The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,” and she stopped playing. The few around me kept on singing even without the piano. She closed the cover over the piano keys and stood up from the bench.
I didn’t think she wanted everybody seeing her cry.
When I looked around, I saw that she wasn’t the only one.
The third night of the revival, a family from the Hooverville showed up. I figured it was for the bread, but they sang all the words to the songs without having to look at the hymnal. And they even closed their eyes during the prayer time.
Mama put her hand on my leg to let me know I should stop staring and pay attention.
Pastor went on about the parable Jesus told about the man who stored everything up in his barn. He had so much, he built another barn so it would all fit. Pastor hollered about how the man had done all that saving and packing away just to have his life required of him.
I didn’t have one idea why Pastor was hitting so hard on his Bible as he told us that story. There wasn’t a single person in Red River or even all of Oklahoma who had built a second barn to hold all their extra food. The barns they did have were full of nothing but dust, and I knew for sure they wanted to get rid of that soon as they could.
I snuck a few extra peeks at the Hooverville people. A man, woman, and three boys. All five of them with eyes half closed with tired. Those ten eyes stayed stuck on Pastor as he went on preaching.
Then, one of the boys, the smallest of the three, caught me watching them. He watched me back.
When I smiled, he lowered his eyes, but I could see the corners of his mouth turn up and his cheeks grow red.
I figured if my barn was stuffed to overflowing with crops, I would share with the shy, smiling boy.