Chapter 2

Cassie

I was born the year Ronald Reagan won the presidential election. And that's my sole connection with greatness, I suppose, unless you consider my parents great, which I do, though what I think of them and what everyone else thinks of them might not be identical.

I live in the city where I was born and grew up – Albuquerque, New Mexico. That's New Mexico, not "Old" Mexico. We've been part of the United States since 1847, and a state since 1912, but still there are people who think we're a foreign country. I guess if I ever visit New York I'll have to have an English Customs officer stamp my passport, because York is an English city, right?

Maybe I'm a little bit touchy. Daddy says I am, and I suppose he knows, since he's raised me since I was a baby, which isn't surprising since he is my father.

When I was born he and Mama named me Cassandra Dearborn Morrison, Dearborn being Mama's maiden name. But no one ever calls me that unless they're mad at me. I'm just Cassie.

I've been in Hopeful Church all my life. It's a little church in the Northeast Heights, nondenominational, with people from all sorts of backgrounds. Daddy and Mama joined it when they were newlyweds, just a couple of years before I was born, when the church was only about five years old. They've been there ever since, while people have come and gone. People change churches a lot, I guess, just like they change jobs and cities and even states, but we've been there all along. I guess we're not pioneering types, because I think that even if the west opened up wide again we wouldn't throw anything in a wagon nor take off for anywhere.

I'm going to stay here in Albuquerque forever I guess, because I like it here and I have no desire to see what it's like anywhere else. I've been out of town – I've gone as far as Denver, and over into Texas and Arizona, but I always come back to Albuquerque and stay. For a while I had an apartment just a couple of miles from Mama and Daddy's house where I grew up, which they've owned since I was a little girl and which isn't far from the building where the church has met for years, but I even moved back in with them after a while.

Well, I'm saying all this in present tense, but really that's not the way it is, because it all was in the past. Things aren't exactly, now, the way they might appear to be just from all that I've said so far. It's how they got to be different that is so important.

It was November of 2002, and now I'm using the proper tense, the past tense, when one of our people who'd been in Texas visiting relatives came back raving about a preacher he'd heard. We were without a pastor at the time and we'd been trying out preachers from all over Albuquerque, and Los Lunas, and Belen, and Bernalillo, and even from outside the Albuquerque area, but hadn't found anyone we really believed was right for us. But Deacon Jamison – Deacon is his name – came back from Cisco and told us about this preacher with an odd name who preached so strongly and so freshly that he just couldn't get enough. It was the first time any of our people had been excited about a preacher since Pastor Ron had retired six months before.

Mr. Jamison talked to everyone he could find, or he could stop long enough. The way Daddy put it was that he buttonholed everyone, some of them two or three times. I know Daddy talked to Mr. Jamison about it at least two times, because it happened right there in the church while we were visiting before or after the service. And eventually the whole church decided they just had to hear this preacher who'd gotten Mr. Jamison so excited. I called him Mr. Jamison because he was so much older than me. Mama and Daddy taught me that kind of manners, and being such a home girl – I mean a girl who likes being at home, not whatever they mean by it in today's slang – I kept the manners I grew up with.

We sent an official letter to the church back there in Texas, and invited that preacher to come and preach for us. Mr. Jamison said that the church in Cisco was small, meeting in a converted house, but it had been even smaller every other time he'd been there. He said that there'd been a lot of conversions there in just six months or so since that new pastor had come. We wanted the same thing at Hopeful Church, not that we wanted to be a mega-church or anything like that, but we wanted to see people coming to the Lord and getting excited about Him and living for the Lord. Pastor Ron had been a good man and a good shepherd and we all loved him, but the five years he'd been there we'd only seen a couple of people saved and it was pretty much "moving right along" and that's all.

It was the middle of December when the preacher came. He was a young man, younger than I was I thought, and boy was he a hick! He had a thick Texas accent, and he wore a western style suit with a string tie, and he even had a Stetson had that he wore. He had a dark suntan and there were calluses on his hands, and scars too. I asked him about those – while Daddy glared at me, thinking it was bad manners I suppose – and the preacher told me that he'd worked all his life on a farm and scrapes and cuts were just part of his life.