A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash Page A

to school that day when I asked her about Pastor Chambliss’s hand, and, instead of hanging it up, she just held it out in front of her and stared at it like she was looking to see how clean she’d been able to get it.
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘What happened to his hand?’” she asked. She finally put my shirt on a clothes hanger and hung it in the closet. Then she reached down into the laundry basket again.
    â€œHow’d it get that way?” I said. “Why’s it all pink?” She turned around and looked at me. I saw that she was holding the blue jeans that I’d gotten wet and muddy down at the creek.
    â€œWhat’s got you thinking about that?” she asked.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “I was just wondering.” She turned back toward the dresser and folded my jeans and opened a drawer and put them inside. She sighed.
    â€œWould you believe that once upon a time, back before the Holy Ghost got ahold of him, Pastor Chambliss was on fire for the world and the things of this world burned him up?”
    â€œWhat does that mean?” I asked.
    â€œIt means that he wasn’t living for the Lord,” she said. “He was on fire for the world. But now he’s on fire for the Lord Jesus, and nothing in this world can ever burn him again.” She kept on folding clothes without looking back at us. Down the hall in the living room I heard the sound of Daddy reclining in his chair. Then I heard the television set turn on.
    â€œWhat’s the rest of him look like?” I asked. “Is it all burned up too?” Mama grabbed the rest of the clothes out of the laundry basket and stuffed them into one drawer without even folding them. She picked up the basket and turned around and stood by the door and looked at me and Stump where we were laying in the bed.
    â€œWhy would you ask me that?” she finally said.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “I just wondered.”
    â€œI’ve never thought about what the rest of him looks like,” she said. “And you shouldn’t be thinking about things like that either. Go to sleep.” She turned off our bedroom light and closed the door. I heard her walk down the hall to her and Daddy’s bedroom, and I heard the door close and the sound of her kicking her shoes off onto the floor. The bed springs creaked when she laid down.
    I laid there in the dark with my eyes open and stared up at the ceiling. Then I rolled over on my side and looked across the bed at Stump.
    â€œStump,” I whispered. He opened his eyes slowly and looked at me. “What did you see when you were up on the rain barrel?” We stared at each other for a minute, and then he closed his eyes and turned over on his other side. I laid there and looked at the back of Stump’s head, and I pictured Pastor Chambliss coming around the corner of the house and asking him the same thing: “What did you see?”
    I rolled onto my back and stared up at the ceiling again, and then I closed my eyes as tight as I could and tried to say my prayers, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t help wondering if that pink, burned-up hand had touched my mama.
    B UT NOW P ASTOR C HAMBLISS HELD HIS B IBLE IN THAT BURNED-UP hand inside the church, and I remembered what Mama’d said about him being on fire for the Holy Spirit, and I thought about him bursting into flames and giving off all kinds of heat, and how that air conditioner might just be pulling it out of the church and blowing it right onto me and Joe Bill.
    The air conditioner and that piano were going too loud for me to hear what Pastor Chambliss was saying, but it looked like he must’ve been preaching into the microphone because he had his Bible in his hand and he raised it and pointed it at everybody. He walked back and forth, and for a few seconds I couldn’t see him, but then he came back to where I could watch him and when he did he