Sauntering at a pace slowed by my parents’ social greetings while adeptly avoiding the preachers’ outstretched hands and children’s sticky fingers, I enter the Old Time Religion Baptist Church on the first night of Peasy’s revival circus. This church is first in line; my parents are Methodists, but their church was first in queue the previous year. The rotation system works as intended. If any pious believer or humble backslider within a sixty-mile radius misses a chance inside three weeks of revival meetings to get Right with the Lord, he prefers to be wrong. And because the Lord might not hang around for the next twelve months, anxious family members will carry or wheel their frail and sick to at least one meeting. The oldest farmer in our tri-county area was born before the Civil War; t
