The Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival

Terry Roberts

Description

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AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award for That Bright Land, the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction and Sir Walter Raleigh Award for A Short Time to Stay Here.

REGIONAL: Appeals to public intrigue of stories set in rural Appalachia.

MASTERFUL STORYTELLING: Cross-over appeal to secular and religious audiences, with mythical and allegorical elements, such as the personification of Death.

Sujets

• Historical
• Society of Independent Brewers
• 1920s
• Syndicat intercommunal du bassin d'Arcachon
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 21 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781684421657
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE HOLY GHOST SPEAKEASY AND REVIVAL
THE HOLY GHOST SPEAKEASY AND REVIVAL
a novel of fire and water
TERRY ROBERTS
TURNER PUBLISHING COMPANY
Turner Publishing Company
Nashville, Tennessee
New York, New York
www.turnerpublishing.com
Holy Ghost Speakeasy and Revival
Copyright 2018 Terry Roberts
All rights reserved. This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover design: Maddie Cothren
Book design: Tim Holtz
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Roberts, Terry, 1956- author.
Title: The holy ghost speakeasy and revival show : a novel of fire and water / Terry Roberts.
Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Turner Publishing Company, [2018] | Identifiers: LCCN 2018007090 (print) | LCCN 2018012539 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684421657 (epub) | ISBN 9781684421633 (softcover) | ISBN 9781684421640 (hardcover)
Classification: LCC PS3618.O3164 (ebook) | LCC PS3618.O3164 H65 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007090
9781684421633
Printed in the United States of America
18 19 20 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The words of the Preacher, The son of David, King in Jerusalem.
E CCLESIASTES 1:1
To Lynn whose essence is kindness
Contents
Acknowledgments
In the Beginning
Part One August 1926
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Interlude
Part Two April 1927
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Interlude
Part Three May 1927
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Interlude
Part Four December 1927
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
In the End
About the Author
Acknowledgments
T HERE ARE TWO HISTORICAL CHARACTERS -and I do mean characters-who make an appearance is this novel and must be acknowledged. Jedidiah Robbins s Courthouse Sermon is based on Billy Sunday s infamous The Saloon in a Coward diatribe and, I hope, reproduces much of Sunday s fantastical invention and full-throttle spit and spittle. Similarly, H. L. Mencken s determination to expose our Preacher as a fraud as well as his later backhanded endorsement is entirely typical of Mencken. It was no end of fun both to reshape Sunday s words and write in Mencken s voice for a few pages.
One other historical note worth mentioning here is that the high water mark of Ku Klux Klan activity in America occurred during the 1920s as a violent sideshow to Prohibition, and indeed, those two historical phenomena crawled out of the same puritanical and self-righteous hole in the American psyche.
When it comes to Jedidiah Robbins and his fellow travelers, I owe my agent Emma Sweeney my deep and abiding appreciation for believing in their story. In addition, the team at Turner Publishing-especially editor Jon O Neal-has been nothing short of brilliant in presenting them in the best possible light.
A number of friends have read this book in its various stages, but most importantly, I have to thank Wendy Ikoku for repeatedly bringing her kind but sharp editorial eye to bear.
I want to also thank my children-Jesse, Margaret, and Henry. My sincere hope is that their characteristic humor and patience shine through these pages.
And finally, I have to mention my mother, Helen Roberts. Fifty years ago, when I was a boy, she would sit by my bed each night in that old farmhouse at Sanders Court while I recited the 23rd Psalm and repeated the Lord s Prayer. If not for her, neither Jedidiah nor I could even begin to convey the poetry of the King James Bible.
THE HOLY GHOST SPEAKEASY AND REVIVAL
IN THE BEGINNING
August 1904
T HE THING THAT HAS STAYED WITH ME for the rest of my life is the smell. It has haunted my sleeping and waking dreams for these many years since.
The farm pond where my wife died stank in that midsummer with a fecund richness-duckweed, rotting cattails, and a green cloud of pond scum. There are always dragonflies floating in the thick, radiant air of my memories, and the memories themselves are running with sweat.
So wretched is that day that it remains fully present in the depths of my mind. Even now.
My wife s screams, and those of her sister, silence the surrounding world. Birds and crickets and the very moles under the ground cease, for a moment, to be. Screams surrounded by dead silence as I turn away from the picnic strewn over the blanket in the field above the pond. Silence as my heart stops beating in my chest and my limbs chill for want of blood. Silence except for the shrieks of sister Isobel as I sprint down through the thick, sharp stubble of freshly mown hay. A yellow jacket s sting that I won t notice till later, much later.
Silence except for the hoarse voice of Isobel, tearing her throat out as she screeches for help.
I am ripping my shirt off as I scramble over the barbed-wire fence at pasture s edge and leap far out into the flat below. Stripping my pants down to my knees and abandoning them in the sucking mud. Struggling against the whole desperate weight of the world to get to the water.
The water where my sister-in-law clings to a downed tree, pointing with an algae-stained arm to the center of the pond. I see beyond her flung hand the upturned rowboat that the two had gone exploring in. Neither girl a swimmer, neither with the sense to wait for me to come back with their jar of wine and a piece of cake.
Finally I am in water deep enough to wrench my feet from the mud, and I am swimming free from the gasping, clinging clutch of earth. Swimming high in the water, yelling now. I call out her name. I cry, from the pit of my lungs, as if to tear the air. Thinking that she can hear me, even deep in the water, even deep beneath the blue-green surface of pond scum and water beetle.
I see nothing when I reach the rotten boat. Not her arm or her hair. Not her hand flung high or the bubbles of her breath. And I dive straight down, my eyes open in the slant, green light beneath. I am twisting my head madly side to side, searching in the underworld till my lungs sear and burn. Up again, I scream her name.
Diving again and again until it is all I can do to cling to the upturned shell of the rowboat. Weeping now into the water beneath, my skin, my heart, my guts logged with filthy water. My arms and legs weak from lack of air, my brain stunned into silence so that I can only whisper her name. Rachel.

It takes them two days to drain the pond. They find her body at the upper end, tangled by her muddy dress in the limbs of what had been a submerged tree. Her fingers scraped raw from her struggle to escape and climb into the light. Her mouth gaped open in silent wailing.
My name? I would wonder later as I lay all night alone in our bed. Was she screaming my name or that of our daughter? Was she screaming for her baby? What was she calling out as the blind water seeped down her throat and into her bloody, pulsing lungs?

I refuse to have her embalmed. The law decrees that if she isn t embalmed, she must be buried immediately-within two days. I refuse because I know that she s pregnant. Not far gone but with child nonetheless. Full with-dear God-our second child, a copy perhaps of two-year-old Bridget, the sweetest and kindest to bird or beast. Perhaps it is a boy. I dream that it is a boy, but how to ever know?
Refuse because I cannot bear the thought of a stranger s cold hands cutting into her, draining her blood, filling her and the babe with a wash of icy chemicals.
On the day of the funeral, I fling myself into the open grave. I am distraught, crazed such that suddenly and irrationally I am convinced that she yet lives. Might rise up if I can only tear the lid off the coffin with my bare hands. With the strength of ten desperate men, I might retrieve her from the depths of the dirtstrewn world beneath the grass.
Later, they would say I fainted or even that I was drunk. They would say that I was lost to the rational world and torn by grief.
Two strong deacons dragged me from the grave. Deacons of her parents church who find my uncontrollable weeping and savage fighting against them a sort of demonic possession.
But they don t know death. Don t know its naked, intimate touch, as close as a tongue-locked kiss or a whispered secret. They don t know death as I will come to know death. The rasp of bone on bone. The frigid embrace.
They drag me away before filling in the grave, convinced that I have lost my mind and might harm myself or attack them. And so in this long-ago season of weeping, I lose her body to the underworld.

It was she who thought I would become a preacher. She hoped I would become a devoted man of God, like her father. And, in so doing, make her proud in the years to come.
PART ONE
AUGUST 1926
CHAPTER ONE
H E IS PREACHING FROM P ROVERBS , as he so often does on the second night in a small town. He has star