The Red Dirt Hymnbook

A story that will make you homesick for the Heartland - even if you’ve never been there

Ruby Fae McKeever is realizing that she made a terrible decision when she dropped out of college two years ago to marry that sweet-faced JW Jasper and join his family’s traveling revival ministry–or, as her Daddy had put it, when she run off with the dang-fool Jesus Circus. She’d thought at the time that she was called by God. But now that she thinks about it, maybe she just really, really likes singing on stage. Or she could have confused God’s voice with the feeling of JW’s hand up her shirt. Hey, It’s an understandable mistake.

Now she’s trapped on a never-ending bus tour with a controlling father-in-law, a cipher of a mother-in-law, and a man-boy for a husband who is so desperate to prove himself to his father, he’s capable of almost anything. Homesick, worried for her baby daughter, and cut off from communicating with her family, Ruby Fae is desperate to get back to Oklahoma.

Don’t call her helpless, though. Ruby Fae comes from a long line of tough women, fine men, and dang good gunhandlers. As the bus rolls from church to church across the Great Plains, Ruby Fae stares out the window and plans her escape. She is thwarted again and again, but she draws strength from her wealth of family stories of war mothers, drought survivors and land runners. She may be in a bad fix, but she knows who and where she comes from. Which is more than she can say for these Jasper Characters she’s married up with–they’ve got no sense of place or history at all.