“Hey!” the boy called.
He turned and looked at the boy. The boy cradled the dog in his arms. Its body was turned in a way that he could see fresh blood where it soaked the fur around its tail. For a moment he feared that the dog had died in the boy’s arms, but then he saw it move.
“Why you got that chair around your neck?” the boy asked.
He looked down at the tiny wooden chair where it hung from the leather strap in the middle of his chest. He lifted his hand and fingered it for a moment before letting it go. He looked up at the boy, considered the difficulty of explaining the story of the chair, where it had come from, what it meant. He decided against it. Instead he raised his hand, waved.
“Blessings,” he said. “Blessings to you, friend, and Roscoe there too.”
The boy turned, carried the dog south, in the direction he’d said was home.
He walked west with the satchel’s strap over his left shoulder, the chair bouncing against his chest with each step. Years had passed since he’d threaded this same strip of leather through the chair’s spindles and tied it around his neck, since he’d learned that he could effect great change with a small seed that continued to yield an enormous crop in not only his life, but also the lives of others.
It had been late summer in 1920, just outside of Augusta, in eastern Georgia, when he saw her for the first and only time. Of all the things he could not or would not remember about his previous life, before he became a wanderer, this was the one memory to which he had fiercely clung. He’d been standing on the sidewalk outside a barbershop. He’d asked the barber if he could sweep the floors and wash the windows for whatever change the barber could spare, but the barber had told him that he smelled awful and was indecently dirty, and that the sheriff would be called if he did not leave the barber and his patrons in peace. He’d been hoping the barber would change his mind, for it was a small town and he’d run out of businesses in front of which to beg, but the longer he stood there, his hands shaking and his throat dry, the more he doubted the barber would budge and the more the threat to call the sheriff seemed certain to be carried out.
What finally caused him to turn away from the barbershop’s window was the reflection of her black convertible Packard with its top down as it rolled past on the street behind him. A banner stretching along the side of the car read jesus is coming soon—get ready. An older woman sat in the driver’s seat, gripping the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. On the back of the Packard’s folded top perched the most regal young woman he’d ever seen. Her skin was white and fine, and her dark, shiny hair was piled atop her head. She wore a white dress with long sleeves, and she held a megaphone and called out to people on the street. She waved, handed out flyers, said, “Hope to see y’all this evening!” in an accent that sounded distant and strange, but her voice rang true and clear, and he wanted to hear it again.
He left the shop’s window, walked to the edge of the street, and stood in the Packard’s wake. He watched as it rounded the corner. A half-dozen flyers lay on the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He crossed over and stepped up onto the curb and picked up one of them.
SALVATION AND HEALING ON OFFER THIS EVENING
Sister Aimee Semple McPherson Brings the Good Word Public Fairgrounds 7 o’clock
“White and Colored Are Equal Before God and Beneath My Tent.”
Perhaps it was the haunting image of her sitting atop the Packard that took him there that evening. Perhaps it was mere curiosity. He could hear her voice and the shouts of the crowd before he entered the fairgrounds. As a child and as an adult he’d attended tent revivals in fields just like this one, had found himself moved by the spirit on quite a few occasions, had even slipped a coin or two into the offering plate as it made its way through the audience. But even with those experiences he was not prepared for what he found: an open field full of what seemed to be hundreds if not thousands of farmers and businessmen and housewives and children, white and colored alike, all of their arms raised, their hands upturned, many of them dancing or twitching or simply running in place, their eyes closed as if to shut out the world. Beneath the tent, this woman, this Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, stood atop a stage in a silken white dress and long white gloves. If he had not known this was a revival, he would have thought her a sorceress and the crowds before her the victims of a powerful spell.
Sister, for that was what she’d told the crowd to call her, spoke of her childhood in Canada, how the spirit of God had come upon her as a teenager as a warning against even entertaining the idea of evolution. She told of how she’d met an Irishman named Robert James Semple at a revival just like the one she now led, how his clean mind and pure heart had so impressed her and had so delivered her unto the Lord, and she realized that the Lord had delivered them unto one another.
She and Semple had traveled as missionaries to China, where he’d died of an illness, but not before giving her a daughter. She’d come home from China, raised her child, given birth to a second child after remarrying a kindhearted, decent man. She did her best to embrace domestic life, did her best to be what a woman should be, but it would not stick. She felt a call to wander the land like John the Baptist, a peripatetic prophet in a black convertible driven by her elderly mother while her children stayed at home with her husband. She’d preach and heal. She’d change the world with her kindness and sense of justice and her cry for the equality of all people.
Never before had he heard someone tell a story that so closely resembled his own. He too had tried to embrace domestic life, had tried and failed to be a worthy Christian and good husband, had tried to stay clear of whiskey and loose women and the men who peddled both. He had failed. He had hurt innocent people. He had destroyed lives. He no longer gave a damn about being holy. He just wanted to be good, and there, in that field outside Augusta, good is what he decided to be.