Free The Neon Bible by John Kennedy Toole

we got the movies about a month after they played in the capital, and the bill was changed three times a week. We saw a lot of black-and-white movies too, but Bette Davis seemed to be in every one of them. Mother and Aunt Mae liked her, and I heard them crying next to me when she played a twin who was drowning while the other twin pulled a ring from her finger so she could pretend she was the one who really drowned and marry the drowned one's boyfriend. They had Rita Hayworth too, but she was always in Technicolor, and her hair was the reddest I ever saw. We saw Betty Grable in this movie about Coney Island. It looked like a wonderful place, and Aunt Mae told me she had been there and that it was down on the Gulf.
    After a while signs began to show up all over town about a revival that was coming. It wasn't sponsored by the preacher like he usually did, because he was mad about the attendance at his church. This seemed like a mistake to me, because the people in the town liked revivals and never missed one. They came from out of the hills too, and from the county seat, when the preacher had some evangelist every year.
    Across Main Street they had a rope hung from a building on one side to a building on the other. From the rope hung a long canvas poster that read:
     
    SALVATION! SALVATION!
     
    Come hear a stirring message each and every
    night.
    BOBBIE LEE TAYLOR
    of Memphis, Tennessee
     
    TWO WEEKS! TWO WEEKS!
    2000 seat tent Empty lot foot Main Street
    STARTING MARCH 23 7:30 P.M.
     
    The stores had signs in their windows too, so it was hard not to know anything about it if you knew how to read. The preacher was mad, and the town knew it. He didn't notice the sign hanging over Main Street. He never looked at the window displays where they had a sign. In the paper a few days later there was a notice that starting March 23 and continuing for two weeks the preacher was holding Bible conferences at the church every night at seven-thirty and all were invited to attend.
    I knew no one in the valley was going to go to one of the preacher's Bible conferences when they could go and hear good music and have a better time at a revival. March 23 was about two weeks off, and every day the preacher ran his ad saying that he was going to have Bible experts from all over talk on the Bible and explain the full meaning of the Scriptures. And every day more big posters showed up all over town telling about Bobbie Lee Taylor's great revival.
    One day some colored men turned up in the empty lot at the foot of Main and began clearing the stumps. It was right next to the schoolhouse, so Miss Moore, who always liked to take field trips, let us go outside to see what she called the stumps' "root formation." We were watching the colored men for about an hour when the preacher came by and told them to get off the public lands or he'd get the sheriff after them. They got scared and dropped their tools and went off. The preacher looked at our class sitting under the trees for a minute and went off too.
    The next day the colored men showed up again, but this time there was a white man with them. The preacher didn't show up, so by the time school was out all the stumps were out and the lot, which was more like a big field, was all cleared and level. Big trucks began to come the days after, all with "Bobbie Lee Taylor, Boy Who Has Seen the Light, Wonder Evangelist!" written on them in yellow letters with a black shadow on one side. The colored men brought poles and big sheets of canvas out of the trucks and began to set up the tent. It went up pretty high and covered almost the whole field when they were finished. The ropes they had tied to pegs in the ground came all the way into the schoolyard it was so big. When it was up a smaller truck came with sawdust to throw on the ground on the inside.
    They left it like that for about a week before the chairs came, and every day at lunchtime and when school was out, the boys went into the tent and had fights