During revival trips, long before the sun could tint the horizon with waxy crayon shades of maize and rose, my first chore was always Hannah. I stumbled out of bed and filled the bathtub with lukewarm water just high enough to cover the nubby bottom. I eased Hannah into the tub, first by swinging her knees over the edge and then lowering her into the water. Her bent knees touched each other above the water’s surface, and I gently pressed them down. While I rinsed her lathered hair, I could hear Papa and Caleb through the thin walls—Papa’s loud voice speaking the words of Christ, the ones that were typed in red on the tissue pages as another reminder of His sacrifice for us. Caleb’s voice as he repeated Papa’s words was less confident.
“ ‘They who wait upon the Lord,’ ” Caleb began. Then he paused one beat too long.
“ ‘Shall renew their strength. They shall mount up on wings of eagles. They shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.’ ” I whispered in the blanks where Caleb couldn’t finish Isaiah 40:31. Isaiah—the name of the baby Ma had two years ago. As the word stillborn had drifted to where I was standing, I wondered why people couldn’t be straightforward and say that Isaiah was born dead. And why they had named him after my favorite book in the Bible.
For months afterward, a ragged hole had ripped through all of the verses I had known and recited, burning everything in its proximity. I knew that trials were a part of life, but rationality seemed impossible in those days, especially because my mind kept floating back to the idea that the same God who had promised us a baby—another son for Papa to groom into ministry—had snatched him away from us before he had even taken a breath.
I straightened Hannah’s limbs and lifted them out of the water: first her arms and then her legs. Minuscule soapy beads formed on her skin as I glided the washcloth over one arm and then the next. She closed her eyes in delight as I cupped warm water in both hands and spilled it onto her back, so I did it a few extra times just to hear her squeal. She followed the squeal with a labored grunt—the doctors had told us that it was the closest that she would ever get to speech. When she was clean, I spread her towel on the floor by the tub and guided her out of the water—only then could I lift the lever on the drain. If I did it in the wrong order, she would shriek and only stop when I let her touch Tiger’s sightless plastic eyes with her forefinger.
When she was fully dressed, I loosened the Velcro straps from her thick plastic leg braces and fitted them around her calves. Lifting her from the floor, I slipped her forearms into her crutches. As she stood, her joints preferred to stay bent rather than straightening, so I ran my palm over her elbows and then down to her knees, stopping to massage the knobby joints with my thumb and forefinger. She liked when I made a whooshing sound as I did that, like I was the one who magically helped her walk a little taller.
I brought Hannah, clean and dressed, to the kitchen. Papa always waited until we got to the new revival site to tell the host pastor about Hannah. Maybe he thought it would ruin the reputation he’d worked so hard to perfect—the flocks of people who crowded into tents would never believe that a man with healing powers could have a daughter like Hannah.
Caleb bounded down the stairs last, already wearing his suit and tie. He flopped into the chair, right in front of the stack of pancakes. During revival season, I only got to see glimpses of Caleb in passing before Papa whisked him off to meet the elders or the deacons. He was fifteen, too—younger than me by ten months—yet it felt like years divided us when I had to watch him straighten his tie and leave with Papa to do “men’s work.”
“Let’s start breakfast with a prayer,” Ma said.
I knew the revival prayer by heart—it came from Matthew 28:19. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
As Caleb scarfed down spongy triangles of pancake, I reached for the Bible in the middle of the table. It was Ma’s Bible—the one she carried with her everywhere. Ma’s and Papa’s names and their wedding date were written in cursive inside the front cover: Joanne Renée Taylor and Samuel David Horton, July 11, 2002. It was hard to imagine that they even existed a year before I was born—when Ma was just Joanne—but I’d unearthed the wedding picture from a shoebox in the attic while packing for this revival. In it was a faded photo of an eighteen-year-old Ma, her face a carbon copy of mine. Through the sheer cream-colored veil that partially hid her strained smile, the lonely, distant look in her eyes reached back to me.
Behind the only picture of their wedding was a black-and-white local newspaper clipping whose edges had started to curl. When I flattened it, there was a small, grainy photo of Papa with bushy eyebrows and a head full of hair—his lips protruded around his mouth guard in a grimace as he held boxing gloves in front of
