Free In the Wilderness by Kim Barnes Page B

about my waist, double-crossing my legs, something escaped to betray me: I stuttered out the wrong chapter and verse when asked to recite Scripture; my stomach growled in the quiet between prayers; sweatpooled in my palms and beneath my arms. Surely he and everyone else could see how imperfect I was.
    Sometimes, after church, after the foyer had emptied and the adults had gone to the parsonage to drink coffee, he’d teach me the chords of a forbidden song—“Hey Jude” or “House of the Rising Sun”—and I’d plunk along on the old upright, filling the sanctuary with wanton rhythms. When he lowered his eyes and sang, I felt dizzy with a feeling I could no more identify than the taste of sugarcane. It was a tingling in my belly, a lightness in my bones. It felt like sin and I knew it.
    What I did not know, could not foresee, none of us could, was how the church would cleave, how the congregation would be divided by the new preacher, this man of God come to the wilderness to save us. Then our numbers would grow, drawing converts from the camps and near towns until the pews filled with believers. The building itself would be torn down, a new one built. The old woodstove would be hauled across the creek and dumped; a new oil furnace would blow its warmth into the church. Our circle would once again tighten, drawn together by the Langs until our lives—theirs and the lives of my family—became meshed, inseparable. We rocked in the comfort of their ministry until those last few months when one died, another dreamed of demons so horrible he purged his body of food and trembled in his wife’s arms to stand and sing God’s praises and another locked himself in an earthen cell with only a few jugs of water and a Bible, praying for a sign, deliverance for us all.
    Tuesday night, Pathlighters. Wednesday night, prayer meeting. Thursday, men’s Bible study, women’s Aglow. Sunday school, church, choir practice, evening service. In between wegathered informally, sharing dreams and Scripture, passing out tracts in town, witnessing to our few and patient neighbors. And every few months,
revival
.
    The revivalist would arrive, bringing with him an air of excitement, the anticipation of a circus or carnival. We held meetings in our church, in the grange halls of other small towns or, most memorably, in huge tents set up in mown fields and vacant lots. If a creek were close by, we had full-immersion baptisms, sometimes so spontaneous the women had no time to don double slips beneath their dresses. When they surfaced, hands raised to heaven and speaking in tongues, translucent pink showed through the wet cloth. Their skirts floated up like lilies.
    Meetings lasted for hours, every night, beginning with the opening prayer, a few answering amens, then singing. As our voices rose, people began to clap, then sway, palms raised to the ceiling. When the missionary took the podium, we were primed for his outpouring of God-given wisdom and spiritual insight. By the time the sermon ended, the pitch of our praise had built to the point of drowning out his closing words, and he called on us to confess and be reborn in loud outbursts that sounded more like commands than entreaties. Finally, the entire congregation shouted and stomped, those gifted in tongues adding their heavenly language to the booming chorus.
    Each preacher was different. One might holler and wave his arms; another pounded the pulpit with his Bible until the spine broke and pages flew. The missionary from down south danced in the aisles, twirling with his arms outstretched, head thrown back, heels clicking the wooden floor in the measured beat of flamenco. The first man to prophesy my future was a grandfatherly missionary with hair the color of new dimes, who sold us beautiful wooden boxes carved by the natives ofHaiti. In our second week of revival, two people had been healed: one of an ulcer, the other of a slow-knitting rib, cracked when his saw kicked off a limb and