Byrne stood there, his tall frame silhouetted against the stone backdrop. As Jessica descended the steps she felt a new chill, even deeper than the cold of the unheated church.
When she reached the last step Jessica pointed her flashlight at the opposite wall. The basement was entirely empty, save for an object on the floor, perhaps directly underneath where the altar was on the main floor.
‘What is it, Kevin?’
Byrne didn’t answer. Jessica saw the muscles cord on his neck. She had seen it happen many times before, and it never bode well. Byrne took out his cell phone, stepped toward the stairway.
Her flesh rising in goose bumps, Jessica glanced at the box on the floor. It was not a box after all. It was, instead, an old washing tub, oval in shape, about twenty inches across. It reminded her of the brushed aluminum tubs in which her grandmother would let her and her brother Michael sit on the hottest days of August, the South Philly equivalent of an above-ground pool.
This tub was covered with a worn and laundered burlap cloth. Jessica snapped on a latex glove, gently peeled back the burlap.
What she saw took her legs from under her.
There, inside the tub, suspended in a crystalline block of ice, was a newborn baby.
TWO
His eyes were as a flame of fire,
and on his head were many crowns.
FOURTEEN
Along the cornice of a hill overlooking a deep green valley, three miles south of Bruceton, West Virginia, sat a golden pavilion, a beacon of light in the sweltering summer evening. Mosquitoes and fireflies danced and swirled around the structure in a graceful ballet, making the large, luminous tent look as if it were itself moving to the rhythm of the joyous music coming from within.
But it wasn’t the music that drew the girl near.
It was the cross.
The back-lighted cross inside the tent painted a soft cruciform on the ceiling of canvas so that anyone seated inside could look above their heads and know that their souls were rising toward salvation.
For twelve-year-old Mary Elizabeth Longstreet it was magic. She knew that the revival — the Holy Thunder Caravan it was called — was going to be in town for only three more days. In that time she knew she had to work up the nerve to cross this field and enter the tent, or she would never forgive herself.
Although she had been baptized Mary — named for the Blessed Mother herself — everyone called her Ruby, due to her beautiful auburn hair, hair that would seem to catch fire in the late-summer months, turning a rich and vibrant red.
Ruby Longstreet was the middle child of five, a waif-like girl with inquisitive blue eyes and a shy smile. She had two brothers and two sisters. They lived in Jefferson County, West Virginia, not far from the Maryland line.
From the time she could talk Ruby could recite the Word. At two she said grace at her family table, a rough plank slab which rarely bore anything more than boiled potatoes or, on Sunday, a piece of boiled lamb shank.
For most of her childhood she kept a dog-eared copy of the King James Bible on a cloth on the floor next to the bed she shared with her sisters Esther and Ruth. In the night, when she could not sleep, she would read the Word by moonlight, and it would give her comfort, easing the hunger she had in her belly, the longing of her spirit.
As she and her sisters grew toward adolescence, their father would come into their room and sit at the edge of the bed, smelling of motor oil and sour mash, each night drawing closer. Elijah Longstreet was a coarse man, ill-mannered and quick to anger.
On the night he came for Esther, Ruby pretended to be asleep. She kept her eyes open, watching the shadows rise and fall on the wall, her ears filled with her sister’s muffled pleas, the smell of liquor and body odor filling her world.
A month later Esther went away. For days Ruby would walk to the end of their long, dusty driveway and watch for her sister. Esther did not return.
Has she gone to the Lord? Ruby wondered. She had no idea, and she dared not ask.
On the night her father came for Ruby he sat on the edge of the bed for the longest time. That previous winter Elijah Longstreet had lost half his weight, so much of it that by the time he came for Ruby he was skin and bones. But still he came. The need the devil had planted in his soul was powerful.
Before he could mount Ruby he began to cough so violently that not only the bed, but the entire room seemed to shake. Ruby had never forgotten that sound, that sodden animal grating.
By dawn, his daughter untaken, Elijah Longstreet was dead at the foot of the bed, Ruby’s Bible clutched in his hands, the index finger of his right hand stuck between the pages of Revelation, a pool of foul blood and bile around his head.
Everyone knew what Elijah Longstreet had been doing in Ruby’s room, but it was never spoken of. On the day he was buried, in the small family plot behind the outbuilding, Ruby’s mother watched from the parlor window, but did not set foot on the gravesite.
That day was six months before the caravan came to the valley, and in the intervening months Ruby Longstreet had sprung up, if not out. She was tall for her age, and had begun to bud, but she still had about her a little girl’s awkwardness, all elbows and knees and shoulder blades.
Finally, on the last night of the revival, Ruby crossed the field, toward the tent, the sound of ‘Give Me Oil in My Lamp’ — a song Ruby knew by heart — filling the summer night, echoing off the surrounding hills.
As she approached the tent she was noticed by two men leaning against an old, fender-wired pickup. One of them looked at Ruby the way she had seen her daddy look at her, all wet-lipped and fake smiley. The other one, the older man, just nodded toward the opening. Ruby could smell the roadhouse whiskey all the way across the road.
Ruby gathered her courage, her heart fit to burst with fear and excitement. The sound of joyous singing was thunderous. She parted the flaps, stepped inside, and saw the Preacher for the very first time.
The Preacher stood before the crowd of a hundred, divine and young and handsome in his white linen suit and lemon yellow shirt. He was willow-slender and graceful, and moved minklike around the area at the front of the church, just below the cross. He projected a lightning force, an energy that came across even when he was just standing still. Ruby imagined it was the Holy Ghost that filled him, pure and simple. Behind the Preacher’s head the bright light over the makeshift pulpit created a golden aurora.
Ruby knew all about the Preacher, knew of his hardscrabble past, not that different from her own. She knew these things because the Preacher had written a book about his life — I Am the Spirit — and Ruby read it so many times that the words were now starting to fade from the page. She once dropped the book into a rain puddle and ran home, drying it before the fire, ironing each page flat with her aunt Hazel’s dry iron.
In his life, in the days before the light, even the Preacher knew darkness. A backwoods boy, a son of Appalachia born in Letcher County, Kentucky, he had survived the devil in two fathers, and a mother whose mind was taken by Satan himself.
When the Preacher was still a boy his stepsister Charlotte was murdered. Many believed it was this terrible tragedy that put him on the path to salvation.
The Holy Thunder Caravan traveled all over, passing through northern Kentucky, southern Ohio, southwestern Pennsylvania. The Preacher also appeared on the radio. When Ruby knew that his program was going to be on she would park herself at the table and listen, letting his beautiful voice fill her with the Spirit.