But Ferree broke with UCMA after a year and a half, he says, because he
felt the organization was beginning to take on an expansionist, charismatic
tincture -- both developments that Ferree believes Hall would not have
approved of.On a Saturday afternoon in Cleveland,
Mike and his wife, Sally, a frank, bespectacled woman with long, graying
hair, stop to visit their daughter Beth, who just bought her first home and
is having a housewarming party. Inside, the living room teems with Mike and
Sally's offspring: a son, half a dozen daughters and as many grandchildren.
Mike Ferree takes a seat at the kitchen table and browses a slender volume
titled Why God Didn't Kill the Devil. His daughter Melissa lingers at the
table. She is 15, a sullenly elegant teenager with long blonde hair, braces
and a superabundance of dark eye makeup. "You need to take some of that
stuff off your face," Ferree says to her, and she looks at him as if he
asked her to grow a tail. One of his granddaughters raves past, and Ferree
scoops her up; she leaves a chocolate face print on his shirt, and he sets
her down again.
Ferree, who is accustomed to the solitude of his highway voyaging,
seems put upon by the chaos in the house, and after 15 minutes or so he gets up
to leave. He pulls out of Beth's driveway, and on the way home, he drives past
the Full Gospel House of Prayer, which is the church he pastors. The church is a
converted auto repair shop in the center of a parking lot of cracked concrete,
enclosed by a low Cyclone fence. A sign out front reads, "Jesus saves, Jesus
heals, Jesus delivers." Ferree's house sits on a thickly canopied rural lane. He
parks in his driveway, not far from the big white trailer that holds his revival
tent.
The Ferrees' residence used to be a single-wide trailer, but Ferree
converted it to a proper house and doubled its size a few years ago. Now it is a
comfortable, if unsumptuous, place with freshly laid carpet and linoleum, and
enough frugally proportioned bedrooms to accommodate the four children still
living at home.
In a good year, Ferree might gross $50,000 -- though he and his wife
lack the benefits and security they'd have enjoyed had he chosen a more
conventional line of work. Ferree has no 401(k) plan, no health insurance, no
retirement fund. When he and Sally were married, they didn't have the money for
wedding rings, and neither of them wears one.
Ferree sits on the couch, enjoying the quiet in the house, but
before long, the family arrives in a storm of friendly noise. He picks up a
granddaughter who is pretending to be a spaniel, and, catching sight of Melissa,
he says, "Have you been plucking your eyebrows?"
"Not lately," she says, and she and her sisters get into a
conversation about cosmetics.
One of them remarks on the vibrant, dark rose color of daughter
Louise's hair.
"I was going for the Lindsay Lohan look," Louise says. "It didn't
really work out."
Melissa flips her hair. "I was going for Jessica Simpson," she says.
"Jessica Simpson? What in the world?" Ferree shakes his head and
sighs into the scalp of his granddaughter squirming on his lap.
"Ain't none of y'all been whipped enough," he tells his daughters,
and grins. "Amy, you still ain't too big to whip."
"Oh, please," says Amy, 27. "I was never whipped at all."
Only two of his children, Beth and Amy, have received the baptism of
the Holy Spirit, though most of them attend church. Aaron, the Ferrees'
16-year-old son who says rather proudly that he's been expelled from half a
dozen schools, says he's not too big on church. Ferree says that he wishes his
children would "get right. It hurts your heart, but you can't force it." He
mentions an estranged older son, who is "backslid, drinking liquor, on drugs,"
Ferree says. "It's painful, but we love him, and he knows it . . . [But] if he
comes to a meeting, and God moves, we'd cast the devil out of him."
The following morning, Ferree sets out under a gunmetal sky, a
mizzling rain stippling the Cadillac's windshield, as a detachment of children
and grandchildren come out to the porch to wave him down the road toward a
three-day stand in Drexel, N.C.
Ferree, who has worked as a carpenter, says that he occasionally
battles the temptation to pursue a conventional career. "You get old, and people
don't want to hear you no more," he says. "But Brother Hall sort of prepared me
for it, how hard and lonely being an evangelist can be. You'll go down these
roads, and the devil talks to you: 'Nobody loves you, nobody cares. If you'd
just quit preaching, you'd have a lot more money. If you got off the field and
got a job, you could drive new cars and have new houses and have everything
everybody else has got.' I've heard those voices every day of my life."
Ferree pulls off the highway, in search of a Starbucks. He's in
luck, and back on the highway, running late for tonight's meeting, he lays
heavily on the gas, barreling down on the North Carolina state line at 87 mph. A
state trooper, blue lights flashing, swings out into the lane. Ferree's face
goes ashen, but the cruiser swerves in behind a speeding pickup truck. "Thank
you, Jesus," he says.
When Ferree was an infant, he says, his mother prayed that he would
some day become a holiness preacher, a prayer that followed Ferree through a
course of harrowing meanders before it wound up coming true.
Ferree's father owned a hog farm in southern Indiana. His mother
worked in the home, and also at a gunpowder plant. His mother was a devout
Methodist. His father did not care much for religion, and neither did young
Mike. His chief enthusiasm, he says, was liquor and amphetamines, which he began
consuming in volume at age 17. After years in the drug trade and hearing the
voice of God in San Antonio, Ferree felt his life was tilting out of skew, and
he began seeking spiritual aid.
In the winter of 1975, at the age of 25, Ferree says, he heard the
voice of God, compelling him west to seek salvation through a friend in San
Diego, a born-again Christian named Paul Pate. On a snowy morning in January
1975, Ferree went down to Interstate 65 outside of Louisville and held up his
thumb, bound for California. Five days later, he arrived at Pate's home. "He
pulled me in the door and pushed me down on the floor, and in 15 minutes the
Lord turned my life around," Ferree says. "I never smoked another cigarette,
drank another drop of liquor, or had another needle in my arm except one time to
get a blood test when I got married."
When he returned to Kentucky, he heard the news that an acquaintance
of his, Sally Lockman, had been saved as well. "This was the girl I ended up
getting married to," Mike says. But before he found God in California, he says,
"I wasn't thinking about marrying her. I was planning on killing her."
"Him and some guys had committed a robbery," Sally says, "and he was
afraid I was gonna rat him out."
"I was going to put concrete blocks around her feet and throw her in
the Ohio River," Mike says.
Sally, who plays the organ in Ferree's tent meetings and Sunday
services, had been a heroin addict herself, but at his insistence, the two of
them began attending church avidly. "We'd go every chance we could get --
Baptist meetings, Methodist, Independent, we didn't care. We just loved church."
Ultimately, Mike Ferree found his spiritual mentor in a "long-haired
wild man" -- Hall, whose Louisville revival Ferree wandered into in 1977. Soon
after his conversion, Ferree began pastoring a small church in Corydon, Ind., in
a building he rented for $60 a month. (In the Pentecostal tradition, one doesn't
need an academic degree to enter the clergy; one needs only to feel "anointed"
to do so.) Ten years later, Ferree began his traveling ministry.
It was Hall who instilled in Ferree a dedication to spartan, simple
living and a belief that the sick might be healed through a laying on of hands.
"He'd sleep in his car, or he'd lay down on a church pew and sleep in his suit,"
Ferree says. "I don't think he ever ate a $12 meal in his life, but there wasn't
too many blind eyes he prayed over that wouldn't open, or too many deaf ears
that wouldn't hear."
Ferree says that the blind have been healed at his meetings, though
he is somewhat diffident about his purported healing gifts. When Ferree lays
hands on people, he prays for them, pleading that God might come to their aid.
"But we're not stupid," he says. "We know not everyone we pray for gets healed,
and not everyone who comes to our meetings gets delivered."
Ferree is not a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. His sermons
generally traffic in messages of living a Christian life and strengthening one's
relationship with God. Though Ferree frequently inveighs against the familiar
targets of the religious right -- homosexuality, abortion, the moral
depredations of Hollywood -- his most battered rhetorical punching bags are the
"spirit of greed" Ferree sees driving high-capital ministries, American
materialism and the "deceitfulness of riches."
"I don't believe Jesus ever intended that a preacher live above his
flock," Ferree goes on. "Why would He want me to take money from widows and folk
who don't have much to begin with? So I can live a lavish lifestyle? I don't
know what you call that, but I call it sin."
The largest church in America is Lakewood Church in Houston. A
capacity crowd at Lakewood is 16,000 people; it boasts 28,000 members in weekly
attendance, and according to its institutional literature says that 200 million
families tune in to receive weekly messages from Lakewood's pastor, charismatic
preacher and motivational author Joel Osteen.
In 1999, Osteen inherited the pastorship from his father, John
Osteen, a Pentecostal preacher who, ejected from the Baptist Church for speaking
in tongues, founded Lakewood Church in a deserted feed store in 1959. Under the
junior Osteen's stewardship, Lakewood underwent a mighty increase from an
already formidable 11,000 members to its present multitudes. In 2003, the church
began a 60-year lease for its current quarters in what used to be the Compaq
Center, the former home court of the Houston Rockets basketball team.
According to Lakewood's Web site, the renovation cost $95 million.
In addition to the worship hall, the building holds an Internet cafe, enough
meeting spaces to accommodate Lakewood's 30 or so specialized subministries, and
a bookstore whose inventory ranges from Christian fiction and nonfiction to
radio-controlled monster trucks to iPod minis to jewelry. The vestibules where
beer and nachos were formerly hawked are now stacked high with assorted Osteen
merchandise.
One recent Saturday, Osteen's flock files in for evening services.
It's a comparatively meager crowd by Lakewood's standards, perhaps 6,000 people
or so, whose startling ethnic diversity -- nearly equal numbers of black, white
and Hispanic congregants -- reflects the church's pandemographic appeal.
Lakewood's designers have eschewed crucifixes and biblical statuary
for an atmosphere of state-of-the-art, nonsectarian opulence. The air throughout
the mammoth temple is thick with a moist, swirling vapor, which is possibly
rising from the dual waterfalls flanking the pulpit. To the left of the stage,
and farther back in the floor seats lurk a pair of very large, faintly saurian
camera booms, part of a sizable arsenal of cameras working actively during
services. The cameras' live feed plays on the three giant screens beside and
above the pulpit, and in subsequent broadcasts on TBN, the Discovery Channel,
BET and USA, among others. High above what used to be center court hangs a
firmament of rumpled fabric suffused with an ethereal azure glow. Behind the
orchestra, a golden planet Earth the size of a weather balloon revolves slowly
eastward, bathed in a gentle wash of stage lights shifting from aquamarine to
vermilion.
The onset of praise and worship at Lakewood is heralded by a
flickering in the giant screens, and the thousands in attendance turn to watch
what amounts to a deluxe advertisement for Lakewood Church, which in its content
and production values -- color-saturated, slow-mo vignettes of a grinning family
on a verdant lawn, hard-hatted oilfield roustabouts torquing a pipe, a father
and son lugging their fishing tackle to a golden, dawn-lit lake -- mimics an
aesthetic vocabulary one sees in commercials for life insurance or allergy
medication. The video's soundtrack is a thrumming jingle whose refrain drives
home Lakewood's slogan: "Discover the champion in you."
Shortly, Osteen and his wife, Victoria, take the stage and welcome
all assembled. "God bless you tonight!" he says. Osteen, whose PR office did not
return repeated requests for an interview, is 43 and has a pleasant, angular
face topped by a tidy shrub of wavy hair. The camera shifts to Victoria, a
beautiful woman with flaxen hair and a pair of incandescent greenish eyes. A
digital pennant bearing Victoria's name flashes on the giant screens, just
beneath her alabaster chin, and a crashing wave of applause rolls through the
sanctuary.
The secret of Joel Osteen's success, as a pastor and an author (his
biblically driven self-help manual Your Best Life Now has sold nearly 3 million
copies) lies in his rose-hued philosophy, which skirts contemplations of sin,
Hell or persistent misfortune, and instead telegraphs a gospel of positive
thinking and material prosperity. Osteen's feel-good message has garnered him a
fair amount of criticism from believers in a more traditional gospel, none of
which has dimmed the enthusiasm of his crowds. Last year Osteen sold out two
consecutive nights at Madison Square Garden. Tickets for Osteen's appearances
away from home sell online for as much as $130. When Lakewood moved into its
current quarters, 42,000 people attended the opening ceremony.
"It's awesome," says Brenda Pearson, a two-year member of Lakewood,
who recalls she wasn't that keen on church until she found Osteen. "There's no
condemnation. You never walk out of here feeling guilty at all."
In Osteen's theology, God comes across as a kindly executive, ever
on the lookout for right-minded employees to shower with promotions and
benefits.
Your Best Life Now includes chapters such as "Developing a
Prosperous Mindset," in which Osteen tells a gently chiding anecdote about the
time a church member presented his father with a gift for $1,000, but the senior
Osteen, suffering from a "poverty mentality," put the check in the church
offering rather than keeping it himself. He "had a false sense of humility. He
thought he was doing God a favor by staying poor." His father, Osteen writes,
was shortsightedly resisting God's attempt to enrich him.
After Victoria Osteen delivers a brief prayer for the flock's
children, volunteers fan out through the rows, bearing silver plastic offertory
buckets. Joel Osteen says a few words about the debts outstanding on the new
church. "We need about an extra $10 million between now and the first of January
2007." Then he goes on to discuss the importance of tithing. "When you tithe the
first 10th of your income, that allows God to open up the windows of Heaven."
The congregation stirs as purses are unclasped and wallets are
opened. In the seat beside mine, a young woman unfolds five $20 bills and places
them in an offering envelope.
Victoria Osteen closes her eyes and utters a prayer for a healthy
offering. "We're asking you in the name of Jesus to give us an unprecedented
amount of money, Father," she says. "I just ask that every single person would
get it in their heart to tithe their income so that you can move in their behalf
in Jesus's name. Amen."
Once the buckets are collected, the artificial waterfalls, which had
inexplicably slowed to a trickle during the collection, suddenly pour forth a
robust flow.
Throughout the service, a few people here and there appear to be in
religious raptures -- eyes closed, lips moving in silent prayer -- though
ecstasy at Lakewood is generally expressed with careful politesse. The most
outre expression of emotion comes from Joel Osteen himself, who, when thanking
his flock for having elevated him to so lofty an office, suddenly breaks off
midsentence, pinches the bridge of his nose and draws a tissue from the hollow
of the lectern to stanch the tears of gratitude. "I don't know why I'm such a
crybaby." Osteen's tears rouse the crowd to a standing ovation.
The effect strikes an equally potent chord the following morning,
when, while delivering a sermon identical to the previous evening's, Osteen once
again breaks into tears, during the same sentence as the night before. Again,
the flock leaps to its feet and applauds. But Osteen earns his most thunderous
response the third time around, in the second Sunday service, with the church
crowded to the upper galleries. When the difficult sentence arrives -- "You
believed in me" -- and Osteen again presses a hanky to his face and once more
declares himself a crybaby, the house goes apoplectic with approval. "We love
you, Joel!" someone shouts from the nosebleed seats, and it is a long moment
before anyone sits down.
The most overt instance of traditional evangelical Christian worship
comes at the tail end of the sermon, when Osteen asks those who have fallen away
from God to stand and rededicate their lives to Jesus Christ, though at this
point, lots of worshipers are already quietly trooping toward the exits to beat
the exodus from the parking garage.
Mount Airy, N.C., is a small, mountain community on the Virginia
border, a town of abundant churches and of retail establishments sprung from the
marketing premise that this is the home town of TV actor Andy Griffith: Aunt
Bea's barbecue, Floyd's barbershop, Goober's restaurant, etc., and the Andy
Griffith Parkway, which runs past an open field north of town, where a sign
stands reading "Old Fashion Tent Revival, evangelist Mike Ferree."
Though Ferree is, so to speak, the main attraction here, the 10-day
revival is being jointly sponsored by fellow Cleveland, Tenn., preacher Cecil
Hamby, Becky Ferree Trammel of Kentucky, who is Ferree's sister and who has been
evangelizing ever since Ferree led her to the Lord 30 years ago, and her
husband, Ronny Trammel. Minus the event's expenses, Ferree and his colleagues
will net about $300 apiece.
On the revival's opening night, a small crowd rolls in around 7:30.
It's a stifling, overcast summer evening. Plastic folding chairs sit facing a
low, freshly painted platform supporting a drum set, an organ, a guitar and
amplifiers, and an electric piano garlanded with red, white and blue bunting.
The band tonight includes Sally Ferree on organ and Beth Ferree on
drums. Becky Trammel welcomes the group in song. Her speech oscillates between
gentle solicitousness and a kind of enraptured overdrive. "Who wants a
visitation?" she says.
"I'm looking for a visitation from God." Here, she goes into a long
oration of rapid speech. Then, "If you love him, give him good praise."
The evening proceeds in a protracted ensemble of singing and
testimony, plus sermons of varying length from the dozen or so preachers in
attendance, punctuated here and there by orations from Hamby, Becky Trammel and
Mike Ferree.
Trammel introduces a preacher, a man with a creased face and an
immaculately shaven head. The man is a sheriff, she says. "If I'd met him a few
years ago, I wouldn't have liked him, and he wouldn't have liked me. I was a
heroin addict and a drunk, and I was trying to keep myself out of a woman's
prison for being a drug dealer."
Trammel began seeking God shortly after her fourth drug overdose, on
heroin. She lost consciousness, and her friends left her for dead in a bathtub.
Ultimately, she came to, which she now credits to divine intervention. In the
months after his spiritual journey to San Diego, Ferree had made a steady effort
to win his sister to the Lord. "He would hitchhike to my house just to sit there
and read to me from the Bible," she says. "I hated it, but he was my brother, so
I'd listen. I'd be on drugs when he showed up, but when he'd leave, a strange
thing would happen. I wouldn't be high anymore, and that scared me. It scared me
that he could read out of that book, and all that money I'd invested in them
good narcotics, Demerol or heroin or whatever, it wouldn't be good anymore."
After her overdose, Trammel went to visit Ferree. "I said, 'I don't
know what you did when you were in California, but whatever it was, I wanna do
that.'"
Ferree took her to church that evening, and she found salvation.
Back in the tent, Ferree walks down the center aisle, his hands
aloft, his eyes closed in effort, as though he's holding up an invisible girder.
A low hubbub of moans travels through the audience, which has swelled to perhaps
50 souls, drawn from points as distant as Florida, Maryland, Georgia and
Arkansas.
Ferree stands before a swaying field of upraised hands. "How many's
seeking His face with a whole heart?" he asks the crowd. He gazes at the ceiling
with a look of pent-up woe. "Lay your hand on your heart and say, 'Greater is He
-- greater is He -- that is in me than he that is in the world.'"
Ferree usually arrives at the tent lot midafternoon before the
evening's services, and spends the three or four intervening hours sitting in
his car, where he prays, reads his Bible and collects his thoughts before the
meeting. Sally Ferree spends much of her days at the hotel, usually aswarm with
children.
They married in 1976, and moved into an old farmhouse outside
Louisville. Sally tended to their home, while Mike pastored a church and worked
odd jobs as a roofer and housepainter, which Sally says was a hopeless endeavor
because he had a habit of giving away his paychecks to people he felt needed the
money more than he did. The Ferrees spent their mornings studying their Bibles;
it was an unspoken rule that no one was allowed to work, or even to utter a
word, before noon.
It wasn't easy, she says, adjusting to the subaltern, wifely role
she and Mike believed then to be the cornerstone of a Christian marriage. "It
was so bad the first year, me and him both used to pray, 'God if there's a way
to get a divorce and stay Christian, show me.'"
Money was a bitter struggle, too. For the first few years, the
church wasn't bringing in more than a couple of thousand dollars a year, leaving
barely enough to feed and clothe the Ferrees' expanding family. One winter was
so lean, Sally says, that the family survived on nothing but oatmeal. One
summer, the family had to subsist almost entirely on vegetables from their
garden. "Our kids never wore anything that didn't come from the Goodwill," Mike
says. "We had nothing, I mean nothing, but we was so happy seeking God we didn't
care."
"We didn't know how bad we had it," Sally says. "People had to tell
us."
These days, Sally sees Mike two or three days every week. After 30
years as an evangelist's wife, she has grown used to the arrangement. "I love it
when he's home," she says, "and I love it when he's gone."
The day after the revival's opening night, Becky and Ronny Trammel
sit down to lunch with Danielle and Terry Donaldson, a couple from Hot Springs,
Ark. The Donaldsons were saved only months ago, and they emanate a sort of giddy
enthusiasm about their faith, like people in the throes of their first romance.
They plan to stay for all 10 days of the revival, and Danielle tells me they
drove through the night -- 850 miles -- to make it here last night.
I say that 850 miles is a pretty long drive.
"He died on the cross for us," replies Danielle, 31, in a forceful,
almost offended tone. "We can go 850 miles for Him. We've never done anything
like this before, but we felt like we had to. We came from such an awful mess."
"I owned a liquor store, but it was a demon zone," says Terry, 42, a
tanned, muscular man with a short mustache. "I was making $100,000 a year, but I
had a $50,000-a-year drug habit."
He and Danielle, he says, were addicted to methamphetamine. Danielle
says that she had a 13-year drug habit and that Terry had been on drugs for 25
years. They found salvation, they say, after listening to a tape recording of
Becky Trammel's personal narrative of her drug addiction, overdose and
salvation. Terry soon sold his interest in the liquor store.
The meals arrive. Trammel says a brief prayer. The conversation
turns to miracles and healing.
"Since I got saved, I'm not scared to die," Danielle says, apropos
of what, it's not clear. "I'm ready to go at any time. It's gonna be so awesome.
Going to Heaven? I can only imagine what I'm gonna do when I get there. I can't
wait."
Trammel fixes Danielle with a forbearing look. "I'm not afraid to
die," she says. "But I'm glad to be alive. I'm happy not to be on drugs. It's
been 30 years, but I still feel like if I'm not cooking my breakfast in a
tablespoon, it's a good day."
After a week of subcapacity crowds, the Friday evening meeting in
Mount Airy draws a surprising throng.
The lot is crammed with cars nearly to the shoulder of the parkway.
Ferree is still out in his Cadillac, enjoying a moment of repose
before the meeting. He steps from the car and appraises the lot. He snugs his
necktie up under his stiff white collar, but he doesn't head inside yet. "I
loaned one of my friends my hairspray, and the dickens, he locked it in his
car."
Another pastor arrives with the car key. Ferree's hairspray is
restored to him, and he stands in the lot, combing his hair. His sister's
amplified voice booms from the P.A. system.
Ferree raises his hands to the heavens and strides into the
butter-colored light spilling from the tent. The band begins with a thundering
anthem, and from the first moment of the evening, almost no one is sitting. The
band has grown to 10 musicians: four guitars, drums, two keyboards, a harmonica
and several vocalists, whose singing is pretty much superfluous in the
harmonious din.
A chaos of prayer and of layings on of hands ensues. Ferree lays
hands on Trammel, and his sister lurches off, dazed, toward the stage. About a
dozen people begin promenading before the platform, two by two, hands lifted,
eyes closed, lips moving in prayer.
A female preacher lays hands on a large red-haired woman, whose
torso whips violently under the prayers, as if she's riding an electric bull.
Half a dozen little scrums of prayer crowd the floor. The tent resounds with
weeping and tongues.
Ferree summons all the preachers in the house to the front of the
tent and instructs them to turn toward the stage, which congregants will
traverse under a gantlet of prayerful hands. The entire crowd, all 225 people,
lines up and begins making slow progress through the line. Melissa Ferree walks
through and continually fixes her hair where the preachers have mussed it. Where
the line empties out, three or four people are laid out on the tent floor,
quaking in the spirit.
Ferree gazes out over the crowd. "There's no telling how many people
got healed in this tent tonight," he says. "No telling how many lives have
really been changed. We've been sowing in this tent for 10 days, and tonight we
started reaping."
Becky Trammel and Cecil Hamby fan out through the crowd to take up
an offering, but the reaping brings forth a leaner harvest than anticipated.
Hamby makes a second pass through the crowd and brings Ferree a palmful of
quarters, which he regards wanly and then slips into the pocket of his suit.
The preachers and musicians step down from the stage, as the crowd
staggers out. Ferree sits in the front row, exhausted, holding his face in his
hands. Presently, a middle-aged woman in a maroon dress walks over to him, and
Ferree squints up at her.
She tells him that she's traveled here from a town in West Virginia
that was once a regular stop along H. Richard Hall's revival route. "He used to
come through every three months or so and get us going, give us a jerk or two,
but now we got nobody, nothing," she says, shaking her head sadly. "You think
you might be able to come up sometime?"
"Well, I don't usually get up that far," says Ferree absently.
Her face clouds, and she says, "Now that I think of it, I don't know
where you could even come to," she says, explaining that no one holds meetings
anymore in the old hall where traveling evangelists used to preach. "They've got
one of these big churches up the street now, but that place is awful. We don't
know what we're gonna do."
The revival visitors make their way out to the parking lot, and the
darkness outside the tent glows red with the taillights of people driving home.
Ferree stands and smooths the hair back from his forehead. His fatigue of a
moment earlier seems to dissipate, and an expansive grin brightens his face.
"Call me," he says. "If there's a place for us, we'll come."
