“I’ve missed that voice,” said Wilmer. “By god, I heard it every night in my dreams.”

“He has come back,” said the woman with the ponytail, tears filling her eyes. “He truly is the second coming of Jeremiah.”

Cass just smiled at me, the light of the whole world in her eyes.

“We will be a family again,” said Grandma. “It’ll be just like things used to be.”

Murphy stared up at me, wonderstruck, dumbfounded, while the rest of them gathered around me.

These were my people, my family.

I would lead them, and it would be glorious.

Chapter 37

It was only six days until our first gathering—which was what they called Farm meetings, where I would talk about my visions and address the whole congregation about our future—and I was pretty nervous about it. I still had so much more to learn and only a week to do it. Frankly I didn’t know how that would even be possible.

People were already showing up too. The night after we discovered the church, fifteen people had come to live at the Farm. It wasn’t just old folks, either, the leftovers of the original congregation. It was their children and grandchildren, even a few people Murphy’s and my ages. All those people bustling around the house that first day, setting to work in the fields, was almost like having a big family full of cousins and aunts and uncles like people always had in movies. Grandma set up a big table in the living room, and she had food cooking all day, the fridge stocked full. Everybody was given a task. It would take a long time to get the Farm self-sustaining again—years, maybe—but it would be worth it. And all of it depended on me, on my ability to lead, to let the Spirit move in me. Like I said, I was pretty fucking nervous about it.

So I decided to run off that first afternoon and hide at the tenant house. At least I already knew those guys liked me.

I walked up as Cass and Luther were arguing about politics. Stephens sat in a lawn chair watching them, looking bored. I took a seat next to them, all of us gathered around the dormant fire pit. I had no idea what Cass and Luther were talking about, but I heard words like “egalitarian,” “proletariat,” and “pseudo-Marxist bullshit,” so I knew pretty immediately that I was in over my head. I didn’t care, though. I loved the language of it, the big ridiculous words that concepts carry. Cass was so beautiful and so much smarter than me. I could have listened to her talk for hours. She was clearly winning the argument. You could tell by how hard Luther was puffing on his pipe, great big dragon plumes of smoke pouring out of it. I was a little concerned their conversation was going to break out into a fistfight.