When I finished unpacking, I changed Hannah into her pajamas and helped her into bed before climbing in beside her. Her body grew still, and I leaned closer to the curved cartilage of her right ear to tell her my favorite bedtime story: Miriam and Moses. I invented details about the way Miriam’s mother’s fingers bled on the papyrus reeds as she wove a basket to save her newborn son, Moses, from Pharaoh’s proclamation that all baby boys should be drowned. As I spun words into the dark cove of her ear, I imagined my namesake watching over her baby brother in that basket, doing as her mother told her.
Hannah’s body grew heavy as it leaned into mine; her snoring, full and sonorous, cut off the end of my sentence. I nestled behind her with my arms around her expanding and contracting chest, playing the rest of the story out in my head, even as I kept the ending pressed behind stilled lips—about how Miriam’s actions saved her brother and how her bravery was overshadowed by Moses’s later success. I told Hannah the story the same way Ma had told it to me—with Miriam as the hero—even though Papa always emphasized Moses. When Hannah’s breathing was slow and steady, I slid out from behind her, careful not to wake her.
The cloistered room blocked out the noise from outside. I knelt beside the patchwork spread that Ma had given me five years ago for my tenth birthday. I brought it on every revival trip—it took up the most space in the single duffel bag that each of us was allowed to shove in the back of the van. It was the only quilt I had ever prayed on, and Papa had once told me that the best thing I could do for revival was to pray every night. There was so much that we didn’t have control over during these trips—summer thunderstorms, low turnout. So I took that charge seriously. When we had standing-room-only crowds that were packed inside the tent’s vinyl walls, I knew I had some role in it.
I ran my finger along the jagged seams where each memory shared borders with another. In the middle of the quilt was a heart patch where I placed my elbows—close enough to each other so my hands could make a steeple with the pads of my fingers pressed together. The narrow space between my palms was the perfect size for my nose. I closed my eyes and exhaled the day. I filled my lungs with air that I liked to imagine was purified by the Holy Spirit, even though it smelled just like the old air. Back out and then in. After the third exhale, it was time.
“ ‘Our Father, who art in heaven,’ ” I began. The words of the Lord’s Prayer spilled over the quilt. As I prayed, tension that I hadn’t even known had built up in my shoulders and back released. I stayed on my knees until I had covered everything—healing the world, watching over my family, blessing this revival season, making me obedient. Some of those requests seemed harder to grant than others, but I had to ask anyway. God didn’t ask us to limit His power, and when we only ask for things that feel achievable, we question Him. And questioning God is the root of evil.
“Amen.” I ended the prayer and rose from the side of the bed. My legs felt heavy when I stretched them, but the evening’s devotions had just gotten started. Climbing into bed, I opened the Bible and skimmed the chapter in Proverbs that I knew by heart before ending with a prayer of gratitude for arriving safely in Americus. I flipped open my prayer journal, past the scrawl from several years ago when I wondered if Jesus loved Baptists more since that’s what we were. Papa said that even though all Christian denominations were equal in God’s eyes, God looked on our family more favorably because we traveled around the South each summer, bringing the word of God like manna to the starving.
I closed my Bible and journal. For a few moments after I finished reading, a feeling of warmth settled over me. In our house, God was more than the being that people blindly worshipped on Sundays and forgot about until they needed something else. To us, God was more flesh than spirit, more being than ghost. Each morning when I thanked Him for a new day, I didn’t just speak into an echo chamber. As I lay in an unfamiliar bedroom, I felt God right next to me, His breath in my ear like wind.
Even though our God saved souls and healed bodies, He needed someone on earth to be his intermediary—that was where Papa came in. There were always doubters who shut doors in our faces as we tried to bring them into the light, but they didn’t know what we knew. That the “song and dance” that they swore was a performance for money was real. All across the South, Papa had touched people and removed incurable diseases from their bodies. And those people who swore God wasn’t real, who claimed that we were deluded Jesus freaks, had never set foot inside a revival tent and felt the spirit of God descend when Papa began to heal. And even though he hurt that girl last summer—something I could barely even admit to myself—that one failure didn’t negate the fact that countless people who had been wheeled into the tent had walked back outside after Papa had touched them. If the naysayers had seen him when he was on fire, he would have turned them from skeptics to believers in one service.
I woke up disoriented and bleary-eyed in the unfamiliar bedroom, its paisley wallpaper
