Read The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival for Free Online

the large ceramic bowl on the table. The chicken’s been shredded down almost to a paste, just the way I like it. She grabs two plates and a loaf of Evangeline Maid bread and is making the first sandwich when someone knocks on the door.
    “Miss Velma, what you doing in there, girl?”
    “Oh, it’s Vicky,” Miss Velma says. But I’d recognized the voice immediately.
    “Well, that’s nice,” is all I can think to say.
    “Come in, come in,” Miss Velma says.
    “Hey, folks. Hey, Padre, thought I saw your car out there. Figured I’d stop in and see what kind of party I was missing.”
    Miss Velma giggles. “Father Sibille, Vicky stops by all the time to say hi,” she says with a hint of pride.
    “Really?” Well, there goes my beatification, I guess.
    “We’re just having some lunch, Vick, so you gonna have to stay and eat you a little something,” she says, grabbing another plate from the cabinet.
    “Okay, but only if you sit down,” Vicky says, pulling a chair from under the table and motioning to Miss Velma, who doesn’t put up an argument.
    With that, Vicky takes over, makes two sandwiches for each of us, fetches a pitcher of iced tea from the refrigerator, and lunch is on. Smiles all around. It’s that simple.
    Following lunch, Miss Velma and I are enjoying a post-meal smoke and Vicky is washing dishes when she suddenly says, “Little Red Riding Redneck!”
    I practically fall out of my chair. “What?”
    “A little girl in a red hoodie just rode by on her bike,” she says. “Red jacket and long skirt. Weirdest thing. I’ve never seen her around here before.”
    “Which way was she going?” I ask, already at the door.
    “Toward Ville Platte,” she says. “Steve, what’s the matter with you?”
    “Bye, yall,” I shout, and offer no further explanation before running out to the car and nosing it onto the road heading toward Ville Platte. I’m not even a mile down the road when I see her ahead of me, steering her bike with one hand and swinging a stick at the tall grass growing from the ditch running along the shoulder. I drive by at forty miles per hour and glance at her through the rearview mirror. She looks like a normal kid riding her bike on the side of the road. A ghost, she’s not. But Pentecostal she does appear to be.
    The long hair tied up in a bun. The ridiculously impractical denim skirt. Where the hell did she come from? I didn’t think there were many—or any, for that matter—Pentecostals back here.
    I keep on driving. I never come down in this direction. All of my house calls so far have been in Grand Prairie proper (as loosely as that’s defined) or on the road toward Washington. I slow down to thirty and keep an eye out for a house or gravel road heading off into the woods that could conceivably harbor a nine-year-old Pentecostal girl.
    I’m about to turn back after four miles when I see in the distance a large yellow bulldozer worrying a mountain of dirt off the side of a newly laid gravel road in a recently cleared field. A handful of trees—four stately oaks and three pecan trees—have been allowed to live. The trunks of the fallen—those that haven’t been hauled off yet—are stacked neatly on timber-hauling beds waiting only for the trucks to come and cart them away. Toward the back of what appears to be a twenty-acre piece of land are the burning remains of pulled stumps.
    Sitting under the biggest oak is a double-wide trailer. In front of it are a wine-colored Cadillac, a brand-new Chevy Suburban, and a child’s jungle gym. Swinging from the monkey bars is a small, pale redheaded boy.
    “What is this all about?” I ask myself.
    I’m not exactly proud to admit it, but Pentecostals bug me. Unlike Baptists and Methodists or any other Protestant faith, they simply strike me as traitors. Why? Because my perception, right or wrong, is that many of them—the ones in south Louisiana, at any rate—were born and raised Catholic and then, one day, they turned