“I won’t,” I said. “I promise.”

“Good boy,” said Grandma. “Now get these dishes done before too late. We got us a big day tomorrow.”

After Grandma went to bed, I finished cleaning up and headed to my room, Murphy already sleeping in her bunk. I pulled out the tape recorder and laid my ear against the speaker and pressed play. The tape garbled and moaned for a moment, and I was afraid the player would eat it, spew out a bunch of tangled black ribbons. But after a second it caught itself, and soon I heard Jeremiah’s voice belting out into my ear. I wanted to hear everything, to memorize it, to take it into my heart like Gospel. This was my truth now too, wasn’t it? The first part of the sermon was lost to time and distortion, so this one started somewhere in the middle.

“The greatest threat to the human soul is loneliness. Yes, I’ll say it again—loneliness is the scourge of the world. For people were not meant to live apart. Separate, cut off from the light of community. Have you not felt this longing in your own soul? Light calling out to light, even as the darkness of the world seeks to swallow you whole?

“Friends, that is not our destiny.

“No, we have found each other, and the light inside us has answered the Spirit’s call. We are being gathered together, swept from all across the world by the winds of the Spirit, our burning lights stitched into the sky. We together have become a new constellation, a sign for the world to see. A world that is not worthy of us, that never understood us in the first place, and we will change that world, transform it in our own image. Because we are one here, all of us—one body, one soul, one mind, one family.

“And together we will do magnificent things.”

The tape ended with shouts and applause from the congregation, or whatever they were. I mean, people were going nuts. And how could they not after hearing something like that? Because it was true, everything Jeremiah said about loneliness. I knew that pain, I knew it in my heart and bones. And if what he said about loneliness was true, wouldn’t he also be right about community, about the power of all of us together?

I wished I could have seen him speak. I wished I could have been there.

I waited until I thought it was around midnight, when it would be time for me to go to the tenant house. I hid the tape player and slid out of the bunk as quiet as I could. I pulled on my clothes and snuck out of the bedroom.

Chapter 28