Send Me Down a Miracle Read Free Page B

they got there and become a preacher lady, just like you said. Remember?"
    "Sharalee, hush."
    "Remember you said you had the Holy Spirit come over you in that church in Atlanta where your father preached once? The big one with all the stained-glass windows? Remember you said how the sun shot through one of those windows and burned down on your head as if God Almighty Himself were breathing down on you?"
    "Seems to me you forgot about the flat tire we had on the way back home from there and how all that Holy Spirit just whooshed right out of me like the air in that tire."
    "I remember, all right, but you were so full of being holy you went and told your daddy right off and now he's spread it all over how you're going to follow in his footsteps, and just see if you don't."
    "You'll be the one who sees, Sharalee. Did you know Adrienne ran off to New York City when she was just sixteen? That's just two years older than us. She moved out from New Jersey and went to live with her aunt."
    "Alabama isn't New Jersey."
    "So?"
    "So you think you can just move on to New York just easy as pie? Who would you live with? All your kin's right here."
    "Adrienne. She said I could. She said when Casper just got too small I could stay with her in New York and really discover myself and my art. She calls me 'soul of my soul.' Did you ever? We're artistic soulmates. And soon as she's done with her sensory deprivation project she's going to give me an art lesson. She said for me to be drawing and practicing all this month so I'll be ready. Isn't it just so splendid? Really, Sharalee, isn't it marvelous?"
    Sharalee stuffed another cookie into her mouth and rubbed her greasy hands on the sides of her shorts. "If you're such soulmates all of a sudden what are you doing out here with me? Anyway, I'm the artistic one. I make all my own clothes and you don't even know which end of the needle is—"
    "Law, Charity, you better git on home, Daddy's pitching a fit!"
    I turned around and saw my sister, Grace, and her best friend, Boo, standing in the hole in the wall, panting.
    "What's going on?" I asked, already hurrying around the coffins to the hole.
    "All's I know is Daddy saw Mad Joe tending that Miss Adrienne's yard, 'cause Miss Adrienne hired him to do it, and Daddy went and said something to him and then Mad Joe said something that got Daddy plenty mad and he came home and said for me and Boo to find you and he said, 'This instant!'"
    Boo nodded his head in emphasis.
    I didn't even say good-bye to Sharalee. I ran along to the house with Grace and Boo, and there was Daddy waiting for me out on the porch, pacing and jingling the change in his pockets.
    He stopped when he saw us coming. "Boo, you run on home now," he said. "And, Grace, you git on in the house and have yourself a bath. You look as if you spent all day in the mud."
    The two of them scattered, leaving me to face my daddy. He stood looking down on me from the top of the steps and his face wore such a dark fury I scrunched my toes down into the dirt to keep his look from knocking me over.
    I cleared my throat and spoke up. "Grace said you were wanting to see me, so I hurried on home."
    "You went to see Miss Dabney?"
    "Yes, sir. You never said not to, did you?" I tried to remember. I tried to think back to what he said after Adrienne left that afternoon. I remembered him watching her step off the porch and walk out the drive. I saw him shake his head when she met up with Mad Joe and the two of them started talking in the middle of the road.
    "Isn't it fitting," he had said. "The two of them meeting up." He shook his head again and said, "That woman's of the devil."
    Then later at dinner he said something about not consorting with the devil and he pounded the table, but I was thinking he was meaning in a general sense. Lots of times he worked on his sermons in his head at the dinner table and he'd just blurt out a sentence he was wanting to use and wouldn't even realize he'd spoken out