at a red light, on the road from work to her night-school computer class at the University of Northern Iowa, when she accepted Jesus Christ as her personal lord and savior. She immediately recited the sinner’s prayer, as her minister had advised her to do. “Jesus, I admit to you that I am a sinner, in need of savior.” The light turned green, but she continued. “I repent of my sins.” The driver behind her honked his horn, she waved to him to go around. “I believe that you died on the cross and rose from the dead as a substitute for our sins, and accept that you have come into my life, amen.”
Her words were as honest as any she’d ever spoken, but the woman who drove on was still the same Quinette Hardin, twenty-four years of age, a saleswoman at The Gap in the Cedar Falls mall, a recent divorcée temporarily living with her elder sister and her brother-in-law on Hyacinth Street, in a new subdivision across from a cornfield. Passing the UNI-Dome, lit up for a night basketball game with Illinois Wesleyan, she found herself, just as she always did, looking forward to going out for a drink after class, hoping to meet a cute, intelligent guy tall enough to date a woman who stood six foot one in her bare feet. If she’d been saved, and she was sure she had been, why was she eager for the taste of a bourbon and Coke and an encounter with some dude in a bar? She was as disappointed as she was baffled. The moment that was supposed to change her life forever had been no more thrilling or transforming than when she’d grasped how to do square roots in freshman algebra. She pulled into an Amoco to call Pastor Tom Cullen on the pay phone. When he answered, she told him that Jesus had come into her life. (Tom had asked her to call, no matter what the hour.) In his staccato voice, he said he was very happy for her, this was as joyous an event for him as it was for her. Picturing him in his old frame house, his narrow head, topped by a peninsula of flaxen hair, leaning into the phone, Quinette didn’t have the heart to tell him that she did not feel joyful or different, so she pretended that the experience had been like everyone else’s, laid it on with a trowel, affecting a breathless voice as she told him that the Holy Spirit had swept her into a whole new life of the soul. She felt a little the way she had faking orgasms with her ex, part of her hoping that the real thing would somehow, some way arise out of the deception, if it were done well enough, disgusted with herself afterward, angry at life for denying her what it gave to other women (unless they were all lying). It was kind of like that, and it wasn’t fair.
“I thought it would be bigger than this,” she said to Jim Prewitt, sitting next to her, his forehead spangled with sweat.
He looked at her questioningly. She pointed at the river.
Jim took off the short-brimmed hat and ran a bandanna through his damp hair: sparse strands of brittle gray, like the bristles on an old paintbrush.
“You should see the Jordan,” he said. “First time I did, oh, it must’ve been twenty-five years ago, I was really expecting something. All those stories in Joshua, all those hymns. Turned out to be not much more than a muddy creek. We crossed it by way of the Allenby Bridge. Took about five seconds. We’d gone over Jordan, and everybody on the bus looked at each other and you could tell we were all thinking the same thing—Is that it?”
Jim was also a reverend. At one time he’d led tour groups on trips to the Holy Land. Now he was chairman of overseas missions for a family of ministries in California.
“Know what you mean,” she said, and then told him about the first time she’d laid eyes on the Mississippi.
Well, things always look bigger to you when you’re a kid, Jim remarked, as if she didn’t know that, then informed her that the river before them was the Upper Nile, the White (as if she didn’t know that either). After it joined the Blue in Khartoum, it got bigger, and by the time it made it down to Egypt, he would bet it was