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from the first Sunday’s rodeo, but that his legs were perfectly normal. He said nothing. She came behind him. She touched his shoulder, leaned him forward, brushed her hand across the back of his rib cage. “It’s going to be all right,” she said, calmly as the best mother would, before groaning, “We
adore
you, O Lord.” She stepped around to his row, moved the empty chair in front of him, and, bending, held one whiteleather Converse in each hand, drawing his feet toward her on the floor. She paired them, and revealed that the left did not reach as far as the right. The bottom of its sneaker did not match with the other but came only to the seam where leather and tread met. “It’s going to be all right,” she said again.
    She returned to the pulpit and asked the minister in floral to bring Terry up to the front. He didn’t need the help, though his thighs felt watery. He laughed to himself. Nothing was going to happen. Sister Jackie asked the other minister to bring a chair, and told Terry to sit down. She told him to stretch out his legs. She told him to lift his arms above his head. She straddled his shins, her black skirt touching them like the hem of a curtain. She prayed half intelligibly, half in that other language. She stepped back, took his ankles, slid his legs apart on the tile. She brought them together. He saw that now they matched exactly. She straddled him again, large body tipping forward, glistening neck near his face and breasts close to his shoulders and palms pressed to the sides of his ribs. His arms in the air were shivering. He felt his chest vibrating, his lips trembling, his chin about to shatter. She hugged him. “It’s going to be all right,” she said once more, “that’s just the Spirit moving through you.”
    The next day, the third Sunday in October, without pain in his ribs and, conceivably, with legs more evenly aligned, Terry Hawkins won the Guts & Glory. Whatever the physical improvements wrought upon him, they played no role in his triumph. To grasp the chip he simply let the bull knock him down—and was lucky enough to come up in one piece. But he felt himself to be a slightly different person, with different prospects. The money was part of it. “What you need?” he joked with a guard behind the stadium. “Fifty bucks?” The money may also have been the least of it. He felt that between Rev and Sister Jackie he had been drawn down a new path. He wasgoing to “get off into that Bible.” He was going to please Ora. He was going to become a good person. And for this, and for his bravery in winning the Guts & Glory and, earlier, the Bust-Out, he would be rewarded. Warden Cain and all the assistant wardens had seen what he could do, what he was willing to do, with those bulls. He would be made trusty. There would be a job with the range crew. He would be assigned his own horse and the freedom to ride along the levee at the edge of the prison grounds. He would rise to the top in this life he was sentenced to.
    That Sunday and the next were filled with promise. The sun was bright, and the crowd, overflowing the bleachers, claimed the dirt beside the ring. Earlier they had thronged the hobby-craft tables, bought the cowhide belts, the strange sculptures—shaped like a giant’s fingers—made from cypress limbs and etched with scenes of leaping deer, the wallets, the birdhouses. The inmates would make enough money to order wood and leather and dye to last most of the next twelve months. Even the convict who told me his customers haggled over prices as though he were subhuman, as though “something gross” were attached to his body, seemed to be enjoying his brisk sale of zodiac key chains.
    And over at the photo concessions, where the fans got themselves locked in that freestanding jail cell—young couples; fathers and sons; toddlers coaxed to press their noses to the bars—the convict photographer looked pleased. In this way, he raised money for the Angola Sober