Free A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash Page A

about how pink and wrinkled Pastor Chambliss’s body looked when he came around the corner of the house with no shirt on. I sat there and looked out the window and thought about that, and it made my neck feel hot and I could feel my heart beating hard and I felt the blood pumping in my hand like my heart was jammed up under that splinter. I wished I could go back and stop myself from seeing all the things that I’d seen in the past two days, but I knew there wasn’t no way that I could undo any of that now, no matter how bad I wanted to.
    Mama put on the brakes at the stop sign at the top of the hill, and then she gave it some gas and we turned left onto the highway and headed toward home. Once we got going faster, the wind blew into the window even stronger and it flipped open the pages of her Bible where she’d sat it up on the dash. I looked at those pages while the wind turned them, and I saw that just about every page had Mama’s handwriting on it. She rolled her window up and then she reached out and closed her Bible and squeezed it down into the seat between her and Stump.
    â€œJess,” she said again.
    â€œYes, ma’am?”
    â€œThere’s something I need to talk to you about.” I turned and looked out my window again because I didn’t want to look at her when I already knew what she was going to say. I knew she was going to ask me about Mr. Gene Thompson telling her that he saw me and Joe Bill spying on them in the church, and then she was going to ask me why I lied about how I got that splinter. I tried to think about whether or not I should just go ahead and tell her about it all so I wouldn’t have to worry about it no more, just so I knew for sure that I’d finally done the right thing. I figured Joe Bill was in the car with his mom and dad on the way home from church right then, and he was probably telling them all about us seeing Stump inside the church anyway, and his mama had probably already called over to the house and talked to Daddy and he was going to be waiting for us on the porch when we pulled up in front of the house. If Joe Bill didn’t tell his mom and dad, then he’d tell Scooter for sure, and who knew what would happen after he did that.
    I put my good hand on the dash and leaned forward in the seat so I could look past Stump and see Mama. I wanted to think of exactly what I should tell her about what all I’d seen, but when I looked at her I saw that she wasn’t even mad. She smiled like she was happy even though she had tears in her eyes.
    â€œWe had us a healing in church today,” she said. She looked over at me, and I watched two big tears run down her cheeks, and then she wiped her face and looked back at the road. I leaned back in my seat and felt light-headed because my heart had been beating so fast just the second before and now it felt like it had stopped cold.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” I said.
    â€œWe had us a healing,” she said again. She wiped a tear from her cheek. “This morning, during the service, Pastor Chambliss invited the deacons down front and they all laid their hands on Christopher and prayed for his healing.” I heard her reach out and pat Stump’s leg, and I looked over and saw her give it a little squeeze. “I tell you what,” she said. “God answers prayer. We’ve had us a miracle.” I thought about what Joe Bill had said about them trying to heal Stump by laying on him and putting their hands on him, and then I thought about how Stump had tried to stand up and run away while they were doing it and how much watching it all happen had made Mama cry.
    â€œHow do you know there was a miracle?” I asked her.
    â€œBecause he spoke,” she said. “He said the only word he’s ever said, and he said it this morning in church with the deacons laying their hands on him and praying for our family.”
    â€œWhat did he