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Pentecostal who believed in original
     sin and the laying on of hands, and that some were moved by the Spirit to speak in tongues. As a girl, she was baptized in
     a white dress in a real river, her head shoved under by the preacher, who stood by her, waist-high in the water in his good
     suit. They didn’t baptize like that anymore, at least not at the Gospel Lighthouse, where the baptismal font sat in its own
     room behind the pulpit and a screen of deep-blue curtains. It was sort of a little swimming pool, and shallow enough that
     the baptizee had to lean way back to get his or her head under, like limboing without the stick. When I made this observation
     to Granny, she shushed me, saying that Limbo was the dwelling place for the poor souls stuck between heaven and hell and that
     I’d best start paying attention.
    If the devil was alive and well in the world, and I had every reason to believe he was, then the most likely place for him
     was the women’s bathroom at the Gospel Lighthouse, which you could only get to by leaving the building and going clear around
     the side of the church where the Sunday-school classrooms met and where the preacher’s voice, as you sat trying to pee, sounded
     like a yellow jacket smacking into stained glass. The bathroom floor was laid out in a pattern of cracked gray tile that sloped
     toward a dram hole the size of a baby’s head. Somewhere under there, who knew how far down, the devil slept fitfully. I tiptoed
     around that hole in my patent-leather shoes to the stall where the door creak sounded human, then to the sink to wash my hands.
     I’d have skipped that last step in a hot minute if it weren’t for Granny, who always asked to sniff our palms after to see
     if she could smell soap.
    One Sunday when we were still living with Granny, the preacher was hollering, doing his usual mad–string puppet routine, and
     Penny started hollering back. Within seconds, Teresa was crying too, and then I started in, all of us louder than the choir
     that had been humming “Shall We Gather at the River?” as background. Granny fastened us with a look that said she was about
     to drag us out by our ears and give us something to cry about, but then the preacher broke in with a “Praise the Lord!”
    “Jesus is here,” he said, throwing both arms up and out as if to catch something bigger than himself. “Here in this cursed
     room. It’s His little finger that’s reached out to touch these children, and with that touch they have been saved from a life
     of eternal damnation.”
    Granny started crying then, and people all around her in the pews reached out to pat her on the shoulder, saying how blessed
     our lives were going to be now that salvation was in the bag. The sermon was called short because of the miracle, and we had
     a party. Each of us got two frosted cupcakes, which we ate sitting on the church steps. Granny beamed and beamed, and it was
     easy to believe her face: we were Saved. This was the big time, the big top, Jesus’ best hat trick. Our souls would be preserved,
     put up like peaches in a Mason jar, stowed safe until we needed them, until happy was an actual thing, as sound and solid
     as Granny’s two hands on her Bible, as King James doing Jesus in red, as the cupcake that dropped frosting in my lap — something
     sweet for later.

B UB L INDBERGH WAS RAISED Protestant, Hilde was raised Catholic, but both converted to Mormonism soon after they were married. A team of missionaries
     had come to their door wearing sharp navy suits and name tags, and Bub, always eager to learn more about anything at all,
     had asked them in. The missionaries came every day for a week, giving their testimonies, and at the end of that time, Bub
     and Hilde were convinced of some things — that Joseph Smith had been visited by an angel in the form of a great white salamander,
     for one, and that he had somehow learned overnight to translate Hebrew, a shocking display of intelligence