Mr. Fowler was barking again.

It was loud and frenzied, like you'd get if you teased a bulldog or yanked a Doberman's chain. Mr. Fowler was a large man, and when the spirit moved, he would dance and quiver and get circles of sweat under his arms. If the night was warm and the moon was just right, he would bark.

It wasn't so unusual, really. Mr. Bunn hopped. Mrs. Greeley chirped like a bird. Constance Carpenter, a girl not much older than me, babbled in a language no one had ever heard, except for those of us who showed up every Saturday night at the Church of Consecrated Heaven and Satan's on the Run.

Does that sound crazy to you? It did to me. The whole thing — the barking, the babbling, the hopping, the church itself, if you could call it that — had sprung, fully formed, from Daddy's head into the world. It was as if he had reached inside, grabbed the twisted part, and held it up, writhing and sputtering, for everyone to see. And the people had come.

Of course, they might never have known it was a church if it hadn't been for the sign, made by my father in a fit of holy painting. Put plainly, it was a tent.

Daddy had spotted the tent in a catalog, placed a phone call, and a few weeks later, a truck backed up to our house and unloaded a wooden crate bigger than my room.

Daddy paid the driver with what I later found out was the last of our savings. Then he got a crowbar and a couple of hammers, and the two of us set upon the crate. By the end of the day, using printed instructions and the occasional shouted tip from my little brother, Arnie, we had put up the tent in the empty lot next to our house.

That evening, as the sun set, Daddy called Mama, and the four of us stood at the entrance while he prayed. This wasn't one of your sentence prayers, or even paragraph or chapter. It was a volume prayer, one you could set right up next to A–Z in Collier's Encyclopedia. He prayed us up and down, back and forth, in and out. He started at the beginning, which for him was the typhoid fever that had descended like Moses's locusts one terrible day and carried my big sister, named Sister, off to heaven.

We had lived in North Carolina at the time, in a town called Deep Gap, but I didn't remember any of it since I was barely two years old. Even so, that day was fresh in my mind because Daddy talked about it all the time. He got stuck on that day, in life and in his prayers. Mama told me it nearly killed him. Until finally, one night in the pouring rain, he disappeared and she found him in the cemetery, hugging Sister's grave, trying to climb in.

It was clear that Daddy needed strong medicine, so Mama packed the two of us in the car and drove to Bristol, Tennessee, where a famous traveling preacher named Billy Sunday was saving souls. She found where he was preaching and marched up to the front, dragging Daddy with one hand and me with the other, and she asked for a healing. Billy Sunday prayed over Daddy, and for good measure, he kissed me on top of the head, or so I was told.

Maybe the healing worked. Maybe it was just a band-aid on a gaping wound. Whatever it was, Daddy decided he wanted to live after all. But he didn't want to do it in North Carolina because of all the memories and the pain. He and Mama liked Bristol, so they decided to move there. They found a little wooden house that had a fresh coat of white paint, never mind the crooked floors and leaky roof. It had a kitchen for Mama and bedrooms for them and for me, though I had to share mine with Arnie when he came along a couple of years later.

We started going to a little church down the block, and sometimes during the service Daddy would sweat and mumble, talking to Sister like she was sitting there beside us. The church closed a few years later, but Daddy kept reading the Bible by himself. He would look up, wild-eyed, quoting scripture at us.

Mama would say, "That's fine, dear," but I can tell you it wasn't fine. It was dark and scary, and so was he, like maybe he'd been sucked into that grave after all. He had never beenvery religious, but now he took his Bible everyplace, and Jesus was his best friend.

Daddy worked at the lumber mill for a long time, and people there started calling him "the reverend." They would smile and shake their heads when they said it. In those days everybody went to church, but Daddy was something different, something strange. It made life hard sometimes. People would ask me about him, and I'd just chuckle or change the subject.

It wasn't easy being part of that family. We were an unusual group — odd to look at, odder still in what we did. Mama and Daddy were like the mismatched dishes we ate out of — his chipped and flawed, hers delicate and perfect, nearly weightless, so thin and fine that you could hold it up to the window and light would shine through.

Daddy was big, with ruddy skin, ears that stuck out, and an expression that made you either want to hug him or hit him. Mama was lovely, with white skin and long, black hair, but her rough hands showed that she wasn't afraid to work, and she did plenty of it when Daddy was off in the clouds. I don't know how they met, and they didn't like to talk about it. I do know they were devoted to each other in a way I never understood.

I got to be ten years old, then twelve and thirteen. Arnie made it to third grade, propelled by Mama's casseroles and a spirit that she said could be bottled and sold. He started off little and stayed little, with sandy-blond hair and freckles, and from the beginning, he followed Daddy around like a miniature shadow.

Then one day at the mill, God spoke to Daddy in a buzz saw. A few weeks later he quit his job, ordered the tent, and we had a new life.

Only it wasn't a tent. It was a church. Daddy made that clear from the beginning. A few days after it arrived, when the spirit grabbed him and stuck a paintbrush in his hand, we learned the name, which he said had come to him in a fever dream.

"Satan's on the run!" he told us at breakfast that morning.

"We know, dear," said Mama.

"No, I mean it's the name. That's what we'll call the church."

I must have rolled my eyes, because Mama kicked me under the table. Arnie, meanwhile, was hanging on every word. Within a few weeks he would be cooking up ways to help Daddy and even outdo him, eventually succeeding in a manner that scared the town half to death and nearly ruined everything.

"Wait!" said Daddy. He cocked his head, like he was picking up signals from outer space. "Poor, sweet Sister says she doesn't want to be left out. We also have to name the church after her home."

"Her home?" I asked.

Daddy looked at me like I was slow. "Consecrated heaven," he declared. "The Church of Consecrated Heaven and Satan's on the Run. That's what we'll call it."

He jumped up from breakfast and ran out to the garage, where he kept his paint. Next thing we knew, the church had a name. It was outlined in red to remind us (said Daddy) of Jesus's precious blood.

Soon he was praising the Lord, spouting scripture, and welcoming people into the tent, where they got his version of torture and salvation. Somehow they loved it — not all of them, but enough to fill the offering plates and pay him more than he'd ever made at the lumber mill.

I lived in Daddy's world, but not by choice. Like the tent in summer, it was a hot, stuffy place that threatened to smother you. It was a place where Jesus was king, but Daddy was...