RELIGION/Stark to get a drink from the community dipper. I wasn't anymore! I walked toward the front of the building again wishing Max were by my side. I tried to kill time but there wasn't much to do, except feel out of place. Children, clean and neat only an hour before, were fast getting their freshly washed and ironed "Sunday" clothes dusty from the loose red clay dirt they kicked up as they ran and clowned between the parked cars. Fat babies' legs dangled limply from their young mothers' arms, unless they were straddling a hip of an already frustrated older brother or sister. Suddenly the area was filled with the rinky-dink sound of an old tinny upright piano playing "Shall We Gather at the River?" Max looked up as he heard the familiar hymn, and we entered the chapel together. The pews filled rapidly. The piano continued loudly. The air was filled with the sweet aroma of freshly picked wild Jasmine and Honeysuckle which the ladies of the church had gathered for the altar. The preacher, a smiling boyish looking man, stood behind the varnished plywood pulpit beaming broadly, waving a Bible in his hand and expounding resonantly on "the gathering of the Saints." As I became more aware of the steady whir of the giant belt-driven window fan, my mind wandered from the immediate message of the day. Occasionally, however, I took note of the fact that the now coatless Brother Taylor raced back and fourth on the podium shouting and yelling to such a degree that sweat formed droplets on his forehead and dripped from the tip of his nose onto the Scriptures, as he remonstrated on the seeming preponderance of the Devil's ways upon our daily lives. His thick blond hair, groomed immaculately only minutes before, now flounced furiously as he electrified the room with his exuberant and dramatic message. His eyes blazed like a man incensed. He was no longer boyish and disarming. The people reacted to the emotionally charged atmosphere and punctuated his diatribe with "Aniens" and a periodic "Hallelujah" when the preacher described the powers of the Lord to overcome their iniquities. The fervid orator, his voice hoarse from the strain, now fairly whispered as he pleaded with his audience to come and kneel by the altar and repent their sins so that they might come to the Lord. I stood by my husband as the singing resumed. He sang out lustily, and I marveled at his overt pleasure. I then sat quietly astounded as the altar rail became crowded with participants, and more kneeled by their respective pews, with their heads in their hands. Some moaned and groaned; some cried aloud; others laughed joyously. There was a hushed silence and then a frail white-haired elderly woman arose and commenced to chant loudly in a monotone garble of words. They were unintelligible, but seemed to be an utterance of a foreign tongue. I looked at my husband quizzically. "She was talking in the unknown tongue of the Holy Ghost," he whispered to me, as she was seated once again. She sat there sobbing prayerfully. Another sister of the church arose and brought forth a message of good tidings from the Lord as she laughed joyfully and praised the name of Jesus Christ, her arms outstretched, palms upward. Exhausted moments later, she too was seated. Max nudged me. "She interpreted the tongue message by Aunt Nattie." While I was lost in thought, the piano resumed, now with guitar accompaniment. Soon the little chapel resounded with the jubilant voices of all the praising and pleading sinners and saints. They cried; they laughed; they stomped their feet and clapped their hands; they shouted and danced, sang and prayed. Abruptly the hall became peaceful and quiet. The piano's keyboard stood mute once more. The people around me, as if aroused from a trance, looked about, smiled and hugged one another. They filed out the single door, shaking hands with the preacher as he stood there, again composed and saying softly "God bless you," to everyone who passed. 34 LOUIE/Dean Hughes "Hey Louie, ain't you goin' to eat today?" Vern yelled. A hammer stopped banging in the other room and then Louie yelled back, "It ain't noon yet." Vern looked down at his watch. He was sitting on the floor with his legs straight out in front of him. "The hell it ain't. My watch says two minutes after." He waited and Louie didn't answer. "I already brought your lunch bucket in, Louie. Come on and eat." Louie walked through the door into the bedroom where Vern and Jerry and Dennis were sitting with their lunch buckets, leaning against the plastered but unpainted walls. He stopped and held up his arm and squinted to see his watch. "My watch says one minute to," he said. Jerry looked up as he unscrewed the lid from his thermos bottle. "You worried about the afternoon being too long?" Louie reached down slowly and picked up a piece of one-by-eight off the floor and grunted as he straightened up again. "Damn rights," he said, and then he leaned the board up against the wall. He reached down with both hands and let himself down to his knees and then slowly twisted around and leaned back against the board. Then, taking a deep breath, he brushed a lock of white hair off his forehead. Vern had been twisting the knob on a transistor radio and now he had found Paul Harvey News. He turned up the volume and Harvey's nasal voice echoed through the empty house. The four men paid little attention to each other but sat eating their sandwiches and listening to the news. Louie was the old man of the crew. He was seventy-two and had worked as a carpenter most of his life. He had blunt teeth, stained brown, and bushy eyebrows that hung down over his eyes. His skin had a stiff look to it, quite brown and wrinkled but not loose at all. For eight or nine years, he and Vern had worked on the same crew. Vern must have been around forty but he looked younger even though he was almost completely bald. His eyes were a clear and bright blue and his skin was very tan. He had a strong jaw and chin and a slow smile that always seemed very confident. Jerry sat not far from Vern. His legs were pulled up so that he could rest an elbow on his knee. He had taken off his hat and laid it on the floor, and his hair was matted down with sweat. A line was visible around the front of his forehead where a light coating of sawdust stopped and the whiteness of his usually covered head started. He too was losing his hair, but he was much younger than Vern. The freckles across his forehead and on his cheeks and his quick grin made him seem especially young. He had worked with the crew only for a little more than a year. Dennis sat at the opposite end of the room. He wore a pair of carpenter overalls which were much too short for him and were frayed around the bottom. He worked with the carpenters only during the summer when college was out and Vern had loaned him an old pair of his overalls. Dennis was a good looking boy with a distinctively square jaw (continued on next page) 35