grown structure did he permit himself to think about that awful day in April when he'd seen Billy's schoolbooks lying on the front steps. The boy still had occasional nightmares, but he never explained them and John didn't want to know, anyway. Something in Billy's face had changed since that day; his eyes were troubled, and locked behind them was a secret that John found himself afraid of. More than anything, John wished there was a real minister in town, someone who could fathom this change Billy was going through; the whole town was in dire need of a preacher: Saturday nights were getting wilder, bad words brewed into fights, and there'd even been a shooting over in Dusktown. Sheriff Bromley was a good, hard-working man, but Hawthorne was about to slip from his control; what the town needed now, John knew, was a strong man of God.
He had wanted to be a minister himself, a long time ago, but the farming heritage of his family had rooted him to the earth instead.
At a tent revival one hot August night, he'd watched his father spasm and roll in the sawdust as people screamed in strange tongues and others shouted hallelujahs; the unnerving sight of the lanky red-haired man with his face contorted, veins jutting out from the bullneck, had stayed with John all his life. John feared the blue evening twilight, when—his father had said—God's Eye roamed the world like a burning sun, in search of the sinners who would die that night. It was understood that Life was a gift from the Lord, but Death was Satan's touch in this perfect world; when a man died spiritually and turned away from God, physical death was sure to follow, and the pit of Hell yawned for his soul.
His father had been a good family man, but privately John was told that all women, like Eve, were cunning and deceitful—except for his mother, who was the finest woman God had ever created— and he was to beware of them at all times. They had strange beliefs, could be swayed by money and pretty clothes, and they bled once a month to atone for the Original Sin.
But, at a barn dance when he was twenty, John Creekmore had looked across at the line of local girls waiting to be asked to dance, and his heart had grown wings. The tawny-skinned girl was wearing a white dress with white honeysuckle blossoms braided into her long, shining russet hair; their eyes had met and held for a few seconds before she'd looked away and trembled like a skittish colt. He'd watched her dance with a boy whose clodhoppers kept coming down on her feet like mules' hooves, but she only smiled through the pain and lifted her white hem so it wouldn't get dirty. Rosin leapt from the fiddlers' bows, dusting the tobacco-stained air, as the dancers stomped and spun and bits of hay drifted down from the loft like confetti. When the girl and her partner had circled close enough, John Creekmore had stepped between them and taken her hands, spinning away with her so smoothly Old Mule Hoof grabbed for empty air, then scowled and kicked at a clump of hay since John was twice his size. She had smiled, shyly, but with true good humor in her sparkling hazel eyes, and after the dance was over John asked if he might come see her some evening.
At first, he'd never heard of Rebekah Fairmountain, Ramona's mother. Later, he dismissed the tales he heard as idle gossip. He refused to listen to any more wild stories and married Ramona; then it was too late, and he turned alternately to moonshine and the Bible. He could never say, though, that he hadn't been warned about how things were; he remembered several times even Ramona trying to tell him things he couldn't stand to hear. He clung to the Bible, to the memory of his father once telling him no good man would ever turn tail and run from a woman, and to God. And life, like the seasons, went on. There'd been two blessings: the birth of Billy, and the fact that Rebekah Fairmountain, as tough as kudzu vine and alone since the death of Ramona's father, had moved to a house fifty miles away, on land with a better consistency of clay for her pottery.
A man John had never seen before—city man, he guessed, from the looks of the clothes—was nailing up a poster on a telephone pole near Lee Sayre's store. John slowed the Olds and gawked. The poster showed a righteous-looking man lifting his arms to Heaven, and read: >the south's greatest evangelist, jimmy jed falconer! one night only! come and get close to god! Beneath that, in smaller letters, was: >and witness the god- given healing gifts of little wayne falconer!
John's heart thumped. Praise the Lord! he thought. His prayers had been answered. He'd heard of Jimmy Jed Falconer before, and the tent revivals that had saved hundreds of sinners; he'd always wanted to go, but they'd always been too far away before. 'Hey, mister!' he called out. The man turned around, his sunburned face bright red against the whiteness of his sodden shirt. 'When's that preacher speakin'? And where's he gonna be?'
'Wednesday night, seven o'clock,' the man replied; he motioned with his hammer in the direction of Kyle Field. 'Right over there, fella.'
John grinned. 'Thanks! Thanks a
'Sure thing. Be there, will you? And bring the family.'
'You can count on it!' John waved, his spirits buoyed by the idea of taking Billy to hear an evangelist who would really put the fear of the Lord back into Hawthorne, and drove on to work.
Standing on the porch in the Wednesday evening twilight, Billy itched in a dark gray suit that was at least a size too small; his wrists jutted out from the coat, and the necktie his father had insisted he wear was about to choke the breath out of him. He'd accompanied his daddy to Peel's barbershop just that afternoon for a severe haircut that had seemingly lowered his ears by two inches. The front was pomaded enough to withstand a windstorm, but a disobedient curly cowlick had already popped up in the back; he smelled strongly of Vitalis, an aroma he loved.
Though the suit made him feel as if bumblebees were crawling over him, he was excited and eager about the tent revival; he didn't fully understand what went on at one, except that it was a lot like church, but people had been talking about it for several days, planning what to wear and who to sit with. As he and his father had passed Kyle Field that afternoon, Billy had seen the huge tent being staked down by the workmen, and a truck filled with sawdust to be used for covering the ground had rolled up into the grass like an enormous beetle. The tent, crisp- looking, brown and peaked at the center, took up almost the entire softball field, its folds stirring in the dusty breeze as another truck with a heavy-duty electric winch played out thick black cables. Billy had wanted to stay and watch, because he'd never seen such activity in Hawthorne before, but John had hurried him on; driving back home, they'd both glanced silently at the ruin of the Booker house, and Billy had squeezed his eyes shut.
A white full moon was rising in the darkening sky, and Billy watched with fascination as a long beam of light swept in a slow circle from the direction of Kyle Field. He heard his parents' voices from within the house and almost flinched, but then he realized they weren't arguing; everything had been fine today, since his mother had agreed to go to the tent revival with them. But when she'd at first refused to go, John had made the flimsy walls tremble with his shouts of indignation. The fighting had gone on for two days, usually with Ramona coldly silent and John circling her, trying to bait her into anger. But now, Billy thought, they were all going to the tent revival together, like a real family.
In another few minutes, John and Ramona came out on the porch. He was wearing an old brown suit and a black bow tie on a slightly yellowed dress shirt. His face and hair were freshly scrubbed. He carried his Bible pressed to his side.
She wore a dark blue dress and a white shawl around her shoulders; her hair had been brushed until it shone and was allowed to tumble freely down to the middle of her back. It was not for the evangelist, or to placate John, that she'd decided to go, but because she'd been in the house so long; she wanted to see people—not that people would be overjoyed, she knew, to see her.
Tonight, she decided, she would make herself be very strong. If she happened to see the black aura, she would quickly look away; but she probably wouldn't see it, and everything would be just fine.
'Ready, bubber?' John asked his son. 'Let's go, then!'
They got into the car and drove away from the house.
Cars and pickup trucks were parked in rows all around the huge peaked tent, and there was a line of cars waiting to turn in beneath a long banner that read >revival tonight! everybody welcome! Men with flashlights were waving the vehicles into parking places, and John saw that school buses had brought whole loads of people. A gleaming silver Airstream trailer sat just behind the tent, separated from the parking lot by sawhorses. The air was filled with dust and voices, and John heard the banner crackle above them as he pulled the car onto the field.
A man with a flashlight peered into the window and.grinned. 'Evenin' folks. Just pull on over to the right and
