The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors Read Online Free PDF

wrong with you?” Winter said to Buckley. “That man offered you a candy. You say no thank you if you don’t want it. You don’t just leave it in his hand. You’re ungrateful.”
    As the reverend drove away from the Pitanks’, Buckley set his empty bowl on the kitchen counter. He wasn’t hungry anymore. He was mad. He pulled one of his Sears and Roebuck cowboy boots off and flung it against a bottom kitchen cabinet. He threw the other one thumping against the cabinet and waited for his grandmother to shout at him. Instead, the metallic pipes shuddered and squeaked. She was already running water for her bath.
    That same night, he asked his mother, “Why are there blind people and deaf people if there’s a god? Why would God do that to someone?”
    His mother said, “I think
Perry Mason
is on.”
    Buckley changed the TV station.
    Abigail said, “If you read Job, it’s to test a person’s faith, but that’s Old Testament. I think more likely it’s to work miracles through people, to show what they can do in spite of their setbacks.” She clicked on her table lamp. “We’ve got a Bible, Buckley.” She pivoted in the recliner. “Somewhere.”
    That night, Buckley found the King James Bible stacked under a pile of old phone books. He took the Bible to bed and read the book of Job, but he still didn’t understand. There was something very wrong with this god and with Job. This god was petty. This god wagered on a man’s life as if it didn’t matter. Buckley didn’t think the reverend’s and Job’s god was his god. He placed his two dollars in the Bible and slid the book under his bed.
    The Pitanks did not go to the Holy Redeemer revival on Saturday or on Sunday, but in a month’s time the reverend cameback to them to tell them that work was under way to erect God’s own house.
    Abigail, who had always been leery of preachers, instinctually thought to turn this preacher man away, but she had recently been to see Buckley’s teacher. At the teacher’s request, she had gone to the five-room clapboard school, where she could not sit down because the chairs were too small. She had heard her own heavy breathing trapped within the thin walls, the concrete floor, and the low ceiling.
    The skinny Miss Johnson was holding detention. Two boys, both Buckley’s age, but neither of them resembling her pale, wide-hipped son, were washing Miss Johnson’s faded chalkboard. They dipped their foamy yellow sponges in a bucket of gray water as Miss Johnson, sitting in a student’s desk, insisted that a male influence was what Buckley needed. She said, “He needs a father figure. Plain and simple.” Abigail did not agree, but she didn’t speak up either. She would do what ever was necessary to help Buckley grow up to be a good man.
Teacher knows best
.
    Of course, Miss Johnson had no children of her own and only one degree in home economics with a minor in art history from a rural women’s college in Mississippi. Abigail did not know that Miss Johnson had every intention of leaving teaching after she was married.
    So, at his mother’s urging, Buckley helped the reverend pick up trash on Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons, and Abigail promised herself and Reverend Whitehouse that she would attend the Holy Redeemer services after the real church was finished, and thus, Abigail, Winter, and Buckley got to know the reverend.
    Part of getting to know Reverend John Whitehouse was getting to know what he liked to eat, which included pork chops and buttered corn on the cob, fried chicken and macaroni and cheese, deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika, cornbread, biscuits with thick, heavily salted slabs of ham, Vienna sausages, iced oatmeal cookies, cherry Kool-Aid, white rolls, the number-five-dyed red sausagesyou fish from a jar with your fingers, fried bologna, meat loaf made with six eggs and a half a bottle of ketchup, tuna fish sandwiches with Miracle Whip and relish, homemade apple pie, and green bean casserole made