began. Fly put the basket out, and peo-
ple just started filling it with bills. As
if they’d been waiting, ready to unbur-
den themselves. The basket could never
hold enough, kept overflowing no mat-
ter how many times Fly emptied it.
Like a mirror to the one that had car-
ried the loaves.P
astor John the Baptist saved souls
and souls that summer. He sang
his coon songs and told his Jesus sto-
ries that no one could ever quite find
in the Bible. “Your mind,” he sang one
Sunday when summer was almost over,
“is your spiritual organ. That’s where
God is.” Fly’s mind felt sane and filled
with God. Whenever the pastor left
singing “Oh! Susanna,” Fly was sure
that Susanna was the name of the girl
he would love. He wanted to sing that
song for a pretty girl the way Pastor
sang it to God.
But then one Sunday Pastor didn’t
show. And then he didn’t show the next.
And then Mr. Dick stopped lowering
his ice-cream music. And then summer
came to an end and Fly flew back to
Atlanta. Later, Brent called to tell Fly
the rumors that Pastor had first comeTHENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019 65this part before. Even the nurse started
screaming up and down that you were
dead. What a fool, that woman. Your
father held you and told you square in
the face that it was time to stop this
nonsense. Right now, he told you. And
you came to. Just like that.”
Then Fly heard his mother start to
cry. He remembered that Jesus wept,
too, and so he cried with her until his
father came on the line and asked what
was going on. “Fly,” he said. “Do not
have your mother crying.”
T
he next Sunday, Fly showed up early
and alone. When Pastor John the
Baptist came into view, Fly walked to the
edge of the road to meet his Caravan.
This time Pastor turned on a little
lamp, so there was light as they searched
together for the basket. The back of the
van was filthy. One fluffy chair with its
soft guts bursting out, dust on the floor
so thick that Fly felt his shoes slipping
in it. Fly was confused by the mess—
wasn’t cleanliness next to godliness?
“Pastor, why did you come here?”
“For you,” he said.
“Why me?” Fly asked, unsurprised,
but unsure.
“Why you what?”
It took Fly a minute to think about
this. The ice-cream truck wasn’t there
yet. The marble-playing boys and their
families were gathering in the yard,
but for now it was just Pastor and Fly.
The question felt to Fly like a riddle.
Like the kind of thing Jesus would ask
the disciples and hardheaded Peter
would always get wrong. Fly and Brent
were smoking up every Sunday before
church now, like a regular sacrament.
It made Fly feel smart, so now he could
sense the angle here. A kind of aim he
had to take.
“Why am I here?” Fly asked, keep-
ing all the words flat the way Pastor did,
so the meaning couldn’t be obscured.
“Oh, that’s easy, acolyte.”
Pastor bent to touch each of Fly’s
eyelids, and to Fly it was as if the pas-
tor’s finger contained the brightness of
a wand. “Love,” the pastor said. “That
is your purpose.” And Fly, for the first
time, felt that particular possibility swell
in him. Love was his calling.
“But now it’s time for another pur-
pose,” Pastor said.
And that day the money collection
from New Orleans. Not Alabama. There
God’s Caravan had been the Cathedral
Cruiser and Father John had performed
High Catholic Mass from the back.
He’d placed a dark curtain in his driver’s-
side window. People would just line up
at the car and whisper their confessions
through a hole in the cloth. After Mem-
phis, Reverend John moved North—so
Brent said. Became the Jehovah Motor.
As Fly listened to this story, his
fingers pressing the phone to his ear,
Brent’s voice sounded distracted, as if
he were solving a Rubik’s Cube, or some-
thing even more complex. Fly felt like
a fool. The most foolish. His fingers on
the receiver were grasping so tight they
hurt. But he couldn’t hang up on his
cousin, who was killing Fly’s greatest
possibilities just by telling the truth.
Fly had left his marbles in Memphis
that summer. He never played again.
Never really learned to dance. And yet
Fly could never say that he stopped
believing. Could never renounce the
man, not his father, who had saved him
that summer. ••
THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
Tiphanie Yanique reads “God’s Caravan.”