Mystery Ways

My father was a religious man, a pentecostal. His church didn’t go in for saints and icons. No singing either. “Singing don’t save,” my father liked to say. His way was darker. We moved to Indiana the summer before my eighth birthday. One hot Sunday in July, without telling my mother, he took me to a brush arbor revival meeting. My father didn’t take us on outings, least of all me by myself, so this was something special. I knew this and I made a point of being on my best behavior, sitting in the exact center of the passenger seat, sitting silently, my hands folded in my lap. I didn’t want to do anything that would unleash the animal in him. But more than that, I wanted my father to be proud of me. I wanted this to be the first of many times he and I went out by ourselves. Maybe the bad times—the hard hand and voice—were over. Maybe tonight was the first step in showing me that I was worthy of his love. It was a hot night full of locusts and spinning with stars. The heat was worse inside the arbor, even though the thing was little more than an arrangement of poles with a roof of pine boughs. Wooden folding chairs were set out in the dirt to hold the thirty or forty people who had come. We came in at the back and took seats somewhere toward the middle on the right side of the aisle. In front of the seating area was a cleared space with a wicker trunk sitting in the center. Mystery Ways