I was ten years old when I was saved for the first time.  Even though Jesus Himself never had much to do with religion before He was twelve, I had prayed and prayed to be saved so that I wouldn’t go to Hell.  Mama had never mentioned Hell to me, but the summer after my tenth birthday, on the night before the yearly Three Gum Revival and Camp Meeting, my daddy told me that I might have to go there.  He said that’s where sinners went, and that everyone was a sinner until they were saved.

“Have I been saved?” I asked him.

“No, Velva Jean.”  He was polishing the handheld pickaxe he sometimes used for gold mining.  The front door was open and a faint breeze blew in off the mountain.  It was still hot, even at 10:30 at night.  Somewhere, far away, there was the high, lonesome cry of a panther.

 “Why not?”

 “I don’t know.  Maybe you ain’t opened yourself up to the Spirit.”  Daddy’s face was quiet and blank so I couldn’t read it.  His one good eye—the one that wasn’t blind—wasn’t dancing like it normally did.  It was always hard to know if he was mocking or serious on the subject of religion.

“How do you know I ain’t saved?”  I asked a lot of questions, something my daddy never had much patience for, especially in the heat.

“Because you’d know it if you was.”

I thought about this, trying to remember a time when I might have been saved without knowing it.  I couldn’t think of one and suddenly this worried me.  “What happens if I don’t get saved?”

“It means that you’re ‘astray like a lost sheep,’ and that after you die you’re going straight to Hell.”  Daddy laughed.  “That’s why your mama and me prays every night for our children.”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak.  What did he mean I was going to die?  What did he mean I was going to Hell?  I didn’t want to go to Hell.  Hell was for the convicts down at the prison in Butcher Gap or the murderer who lived on top of Devil’s Courthouse.  Hell wasn’t for decent people.  I was sure my mama wasn’t going to be there, or Daddy Hoyt or Granny or my sister Sweet Fern or Ruby Poole or Aunt Bird or Uncle Turk or Aunt Zona and the twins.  Probably my brothers Linc and Beachard weren’t going to Hell either, but I wondered about Johnny Clay.  And then I began to cry.