Pecos Valley Revival by Alice Duncan

Author:Alice Duncan [Duncan, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781641199124
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing
Published: 2019-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Myrtle stopped by the house a little after five that evening, and we walked together to the revival tent, which was set up a few hundred yards west of the last house on Second Street. Rosedale wasn’t much of an urban metropolis, being small and dull. Not that our size had anything to do with the revivalists, except that I always got the feeling folks like the Stricklands preferred hanging out in smaller towns rather than larger, more sophisticated ones. Not that we were inherently more gullible or stupid than any other population group, but, as demonstrated by Miss Strickland’s comments about Blue’s Dry Goods, folks thought we were. I resented their attitude.

Anyhow, you can probably tell that I wasn’t looking forward to the revival meeting one little bit, and not only because I wasn’t fond of Esther Strickland and her brother, the velvet-voiced Milo Strickland. I still felt sick about Kenny Sawyer.

That funeral had been truly awful. The deep and honest grief of Mrs. Sawyer and Sarah Molina had affected me strangely, making me feel as if the least little thing would set me off on a crying jag. That would be very embarrassing, mainly because people would probably think I was crying over Phil. And part of any crying jag in which I might wallow would have been that, but most of it would have been because thinking about life and its inevitable consequence—death—was really uncomfortable. Heck, I was only nineteen years old. I should live for years and years.

Yet Kenny had been in his early twenties, and he was as dead as the proverbial doornail. The notion made my tummy hurt. Or maybe it was my heart. Whatever it was, I wished it would stop.

“I love going to these meetings,” Myrtle said, as we watched my obnoxious brother Jack and a couple of his friends from school racing on ahead of us toward the big tent. He was swinging his stupid baseball bat, and I wondered what in the name of Glory he aimed to do with a baseball bat at a tent revival meeting. I’d bet money that Ma and Pa didn’t know he’d brought his bat along.

“Hmm,” I said, thinking maybe Jack would be saved and behave like a human being for a couple of weeks. That would be nice, even if I wasn’t anticipating much along those lines, Jack thus far in his life having proved himself impervious to most forms of discipline and spiritual enlightenment.

Besides, I had a sneaking suspicion that Jack and his pals had devious plans for the evening and that this plan didn’t include religion. It wouldn’t have surprised me any if they aimed to duck out of the revival, have a little game of baseball outside the tent, and let the rest of the town get themselves saved while they played ball—if they could see to play. It was pretty dark by then, and nobody had strung electrical wires around the tent as they had around the Gundersons’ pasture.

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