“You’ll be a sinner if you don’ go,” she said, pointing her finger at him with great gravity. “You’ll go to hell, sure enough.”

Thomas felt doomed already. He had told the worst lie in the world in the worst place in the world and he knew that going back to church would not save him now. He knew that there was a hell because the nuns had told him about it, and he knew that he would end up in one of the little rooms in that place. But he still hoped for some time in Purgatory, with a chance to move into a better room later, if he could be very good for a while before he died. He wanted to be very good and he tried all the time very hard not to have to go to the bathroom. But when his mother talked about hell, he thought again that perhaps he would have to spend all his time, after death, in that great fiery hot burning room she talked about. She had been raised in the Southern Baptist Church and had gone to church, to the same minister, all her life; up until the time she had to start working on Sundays. But she still maintained her faith and never talked, in her conception of hell and how it would be for sinners, about the separate rooms for certain people. Listening to his mother talk about hell in the kitchen while she cooked supper and sweated, Thomas thought that perhaps she did know more than the nuns because there were so many people who believed like her, including the bald Reverend Stone in their church, in that one great burning room, and the Judgment Day.

“The hour’s gonna come when the Horn will blow,” his mother told him while he cowered in the corner behind her stove, feeling the heat from it on his face. “The Horn’s gonna blow all through the world on that Great Morning and all them in the graves will hear it and be raised up,” she continued.

“Even Daddy?”