Chapter 3 3

"Alright, alright!" I shut my bedroom door and quickly start yanking on the white sundress.

Twelve minutes later,papa's pickup truck bounces off the dirt road onto the little patch of grass where the other townspeople are parked.

"He's the real deal, honey," papa gushes as he puts the rumbling truck in park and turns off the engine. "Gene Parsons said this guy visited his cousin's town up in Tenseness last summer?" papa whistles. "Said it was the best dang sermon he ever did hear. Moved him in ways the Lord is supposed ta move ya."

Papa reaches up with his perpetually grease-stained hands from the garage and puts a hand over his heart. He doesn't show it much, like he doesn't really show much of himself that a shirt with rolled up sleeves would show, but I know he's touching the crucifix tattoo over his heart. Canaan isn't exactly a place you'd find much tattoo ink, and if you didn't know my father all that well, you'd never guess that he does, either.

But papa spent a number of years when he was young and before he met our mother in what they both call a "bad crowd." He calls it his dark past, or his "forty years in the desert" before he met mama. There's a lot more tattoo ink besides a crucifix under his shirt, but he doesn't like to talk about it, at all. To papa, all that matters is that he found my mother and found the Lord's salvation along with her.

Then came Paul, and then dad's mechanic's shop, and then years later, me.

We bustle across the field towards a gathered crowd standing in front of a Winnebago with a trailer hooked up to the back of it.

"Don't preacher's usually come with a church?"

Papa chuckles. "Very funny, sweetheart," he pants, tugging me across the field and puffing hard. "God's great green earth is a church, Delilah. And blessed men like Preacher Gabriel here are His humble servants, wandering His realm bringing salvation and comfort upon thems without."

I smile. That does actually sound really nice, and like a really amazing, selfless thing to do. We're closer now, and I can hear the voice of Preacher Gabriel calling out scripture, and I can already feel the comfort of it. As we get closer and closer, I can spot the dripping wet, beaming townspeople standing at the back of the crowd.

"Mercy," papa puffs. "I surely hope we ain't too late!"

He taps a few people we recognize on the shoulder, who turn and smile and gladly let us through. All of them looks so serene and peaceful now that they're dripping wet in the Lord's salvation and love, and my heart beats faster. Of course, I'm already baptized, and even if there's no church in Canaan, on the Sundays we can, we pile into the pickup and drive over to Huntington Parish for a service.

But today is special. Word of Preacher Gabriel's moving sermons hit our town like a wildfire before he even got here. And even if you're already baptized, papa says, there's no harm in "getting good with the Lord all over again." Can't really argue with that.

My heart beats a little quicker as I hear a deep, melodic and booming voice proclaim "And ye! Thout shall be clean and loved by me anew!"

My, Preacher Gabriel has a lovely voice-strong and confident, and yet so gentle and soothing. It's sounds like woodsmoke and leather, and maybe a bit like the whiskey Paul keeps hidden in his room above the garage.

"Step forth from the healing waters of His Glory, brother Joseph!" he booms, and my heart flutters as we start to push through the last of the already-dunked crowd.

Papa taps Mary-Beth Coleson's shoulder, and she turns with a big smile and nods before she steps aside.

"Oh he's wonderful, Jedediah!" she gushes quietly.

My heart beats faster, and my grin spreads over my face as the excitement grows. Papa takes my arm and pulls me through, and I smile brightly as I look up at the man standing waist-deep in the slightly raised baptism tank.

...My heart skips a beat.

My legs lock.

My smile falters.

A ball of white-hot heat begins to burn inside my very body, and a shiver unlike I've ever felt teases over my skin.

The man standing in the baptism tank is dripping wet. Water runs in little drops and rivulets over bulging, rippling muscles-arms like the arms of Samson wielding a jawbone. A chest like Jacob, straining to wrestle God's own angel.

But that's where this man of God ceases to be Godly. My eyes drag over his huge form, and the white, see-through undershirt clinging to his muscles, and I feel nothing but sin. I look over the pulse-quickening swirls of tattoo ink across his chest, shoulders, and arms, and my heart skips. I look higher over his chiseled, perfect jaw, and that hard, smirking smile. I look higher, my body trembling, and my eyes finally land on his gorgeous blue ones.

...And he's looking right at me, with the most intense, piercing, fierce gaze that I've ever felt in my entire life.

"You," he growls softly. I gasp, and my heart feels like it's creeping into my throat. A heat I've never known before tingles through my body in wicked, sinful, impure ways, and I swallow tightly.

"Come here." The man stares right at me, and he raises a hand to crook two fingers, beckoning me foreword.

I falter for one moment. No shepherd should make his flock weak in the knees with just a look. No man of God should be built for sin, like he is.

...A preacher shouldn't set the most sinful places of my body aflame with the most wicked, impure desires I've ever felt in my life.

His eyes blaze into mine, and he smiles. I can't tell if it's an innocent one, or one that says he knows damn well that he's corrupting my mortal soul with one look. But either way, when he crooks his fingers again to beckon me forward, God

help me, I do.

Come what may.