Free Shift by Jennifer Bradbury Page A

me a little uncomfortable, as if the whole thing were some kind of stupid destiny.
    “Listen, boys. We don’t usually have church on Saturday night—it being reserved for the sinning and all,” he said, laughing, “but we’re at the end of a revival. Got a potluck supper. Lot of good food. Pies.”
    He let the lure of pies sink in. Shrewd.
    “Would you like to join us?” he asked.
    I responded out of habit. Out of politeness. Possibly out of something that didn’t want to go to this church with the nice people. “We couldn’t impose—”
    But Win, who hadn’t said a word until now, piped in. “We’d love to.”
    And strangely enough, he sounded like he meant it.
    A couple of hours later my stomach was stretched tight. I’d eaten third helpings of almost everything—including that weird Jell-O salad with the marshmallows, four pieces of fried chicken, and half a key lime pie. Between mouthfuls we’d answered a lot of questions about why we’d decided to ride our bikes to the West Coast and whether or not we’d been baptized. It was the last question that had made me favor the dine-and-dash. But they were only asking out of curiosity, in the same sort of tone that you might ask someone if they’d ever had sushi or broken a bone.
    So we ended up in the sanctuary. I was so tired that everything seemed louder—the music, the lively preacher who’d been dancing around the little stage area for nearly an hour, the three hundred or so people amening on cue from the packed pews and folding chairs that had been brought to fill in spaces around the aisles. I was on overload.
    “Jacob’s name meant ‘deceiver’! And let me tell you people, he’d done some deceiving in his day,” hollered the preacher, wearing a bolo tie, from the altar. “He stole the birthright of his brother, ran away, got deceived himself. But did he learn?No! He just went on out and fooled some more people.”
    He paused and let the weight of Jacob’s sins sink in on us. “And do you know what he wanted then?”
    “Tell us, Pastor!” shouted someone from the back.
    “He wanted to go home! He wanted forgiveness. But did the Lord just let him waltz back and get it?”
    “No, sir!” another voice shouted.
    “No, sir, indeed!” the preacher shouted as he stalked back and forth on the carpeted platform. “Jacob had to wrestle with that angel, had to wrestle with his God,” he spat. “And he was changed!”
    Win slouched next to me. I knew I would fall instantly asleep if the room would only quiet down for a second. But that had more to do with the miles we’d covered and my full belly. The story was actually pretty interesting.
    What I’d managed to piece together was that it was about Jacob, who’d done a lot of bad stuff in his life, and then wanted to go back and make up for it. Then God sent an angel down to wrestle with him. Only Jacob was strong and wouldn’t let go. They fought all night; all the while Jacob said he wouldn’t let go until he’d received a blessing. So the angel did it, but not before he’d jacked Jacob’s hip all out of place and they’d trampled the entire field down to nothing.
    An organ began to play. “Some of you are wrestling with the Lord
right now
,” the preacher intoned. “And this moment—this very minute—he wants to bless you. It’s time to get changed,” he concluded as an organ and a piano on either side of the church fired up. The congregation began a marathon version of “Just as I Am”—the only hymn I knew by heart from our biannual visits to church.
    I stood, swaying on my feet, drunk with saturated fat and exhaustion. A legion of people poured forward to the altar, some fell to their knees and wept on the carpeted steps. Some started waving their hands in the air and babbling words that I’m pretty sure weren’t even an attempt at singing along.
    “Dude. This is starting to freak me out a little,” I whispered, before I realized I was talking to a skinny woman