Holy Ghost Girl by Donna M. Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

in the chest of drawers and chifforobes, and smoothed our sheets on the stained yellow mattresses of the beds. Once we settled in, the hours and days turned tedious. It was Saturday and the revival didn’t start until the following Friday night. We were people built for the mountaintop experience, not the humdrum routine of everyday life. The mundane grated on us, and we in turn grated on one another.
    Everything turned hard. One night as Brother Terrell worked to help lower the tent before a windstorm hit, the winch he turned flew loose and pummeled his arm. Within minutes the arm had puffed up like an inner tube. He prayed for it, and without a call to the doctor, put it in a homemade sling. The tent men dropped one of the big speakers while setting it up under the tent and argued over who was to blame. The house key disappeared and Brother Terrell had to drive across town to pick up another one. And that was just the beginning. The newspaper ads had the wrong dates, and since it was the advance man’s fault, we had to pay to run them again. The constable showed up and informed the tent workers that we had filed the wrong permits. My mother went with Brother Terrell to the courthouse to help him read and figure out the permits. They were gone a long time. When they returned, Betty Ann wouldn’t speak to either of them.
    The four of us kids took refuge in the falling-down barn behind the house and tried to figure out what to do next. We sprawled on the hay and went through our list: Play church? We had exhausted ourselves on that one. Red rover? Not enough of us for two teams. Randall suggested husbands and wives, a variation on doctor that was always his favorite game.
    Pam groaned. “We played that yesterday.”
    He sighed and walked around the barn, hands deep in his pockets. “I got it. We’ll play sinners!”
    As sinners, Pam and I bunched our dresses into our long white panties to make shorts and stood on street corners holding little sticks between our fingers and blowing imaginary smoke through pursed lips. We thrust our chins out and dared passersby to look at us. When they did, we stared them straight in the eye. Only true Jezebels wore shorts and smoked. We had played sinners all that week, so there wasn’t anything new in that idea.
    Pam looked hard at Randall, trying to figure out his angle. “We’re not playing sinner husbands and wives, Randall.”
    “I’m not talking ’bout that , Pam. I mean we’ll be real sinners.” Randall paused and looked up at the barn eaves. When he spoke again, it was in a hushed voice.
    “We won’t play sinners. We’ll be sinners, real sinners. And we’ll smoke real cigarettes.”
    I took matches from the kitchen, Pam stole money from the piles of change her daddy left on the counter every night, and Randall went to the store to buy the cigarettes.
    Pam and I traced with our fingers in the air the flight of two flies as they rose through the shafts of light streaming through the holes in the barn roof. We licked each other’s arms to see whose were the saltiest and practiced arm wrestling. Gary fell asleep in the corner, sweat trickling down his face, a fly on his lip. Finally, the barn door creaked open and Randall appeared.
    “Anybody want an ice-cold cocola?”
    “What took you so long?” Pam ran to take the paper bag he carried under his arm. It was wet with the condensation from the bottles of soda, and ripped as she pulled it from him. Four RC Colas, a bottle opener, four slightly melted candy bars, and a pack of Lucky Strikes spilled out onto the hay. Randall ripped open the cigarettes.
    “What comes first, cigarettes or candy bars? I vote cigarettes.”
    Pam held the matchbook in the air. “We vote candy, and I got the matches, so we win.”
    Randall doled out the chocolate bars and pried off the tops of the sodas with the bottle opener. We took big bites of the chocolate and washed it down with RC. In the rush of sugar I forgot all about the