Revival
A world by Ari Weaver
Revival
Summer 1974 in Laurel Fork, a coal camp in an eastern Kentucky holler. A young preacher named Brother Amos Pruett has put up a tent on the ball field, and the sick people he lays hands on get well. Your cousin Darlene threw her leg brace in the creek the first night. Now the healed don't sleep, and after midnight they stand in their yards in their nightclothes, facing the ridge where nineteen men were sealed in a burning mine in 1931.
Playing as Traveler·
The generator behind the tent coughs and catches, and the strings of bulbs come back up over two hundred people on funeral-home folding chairs. Lottie Pruett holds one long chord on the organ while her brother kneels in front of Euell Caudill, who has been blind since 1958.
Brother Amos has both hands over the old man's eyes. He's been praying ten minutes in a voice that never gets loud, only bigger, and his white shirt is soaked through down the back. The sawdust smells of spilled Juicy Fruit and sweat.
“Euell,” he says. “Euell, I want you to look at me now.”
Euell looks. Then he grabs Amos by both wrists and starts naming the colors of things: the brown tent, the bulbs, the preacher's shirt, the red dress on Inez Sizemore two rows up. A woman screams. The whole crowd comes up off the chairs at once, and the chord on the organ breaks off in the middle.
Lottie has taken her hands off the keys to look at the back row, where your cousin Darlene stands clapping on the leg that was four inches short last Sunday. Then Lottie looks at you, and looks away fast.
Amos gets up out of the noise with Euell still hanging on him. He searches the crowd like a man who was told who to find, and stops on you.
“You,” he says, and holds out his hand. “Come on up here. You've been carrying something a long time, haven't you?”
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