Jake's Preacher gig
Baby Boomer Author
Jake's Preacher gig is a two-episode story focusing on characters from three separate families, tracking the daily life of the principle character, Reverend Jake Millsaps. The point of view of this tale is unique: we see all action though the eyes of a group of stumbling demons.
The demons do not dispense curses, nor do they commit any physical mayhem. They exist only in the spiritual dimension and use their powers of suggestion to try to influence events in Jake's day-to-day life. Their purpose is to encourage chaos to undermine Jake's effectiveness as campus pastor. For his part, Jake is quite pliable, pretty much a go-with-the-flow individual.
The story takes place at picturesque but fictitious Hyacinth Junior College in Plant City, in East Tennessee. The time period is the 1989-1990 school year.
Jake Millsaps is an ex-convict, having served thirteen years in Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary for involuntary manslaughter. He killed a young Marine, Sam Johnson, while driving drunk. He is Hyacinth's provisional pastor, and, with his wife Linda, a performer of praise & worship music.
His mother, Cora Mae Millsaps, built a grand church on the Hyacinth campus with the stipulation that her son be accepted as provisional pastor. The college is in trouble... the drug culture has invaded campus. Cora Mae thinks her son is just the man to turn things around.
The Boss, leader of the demons, is betting the opposite--the demons are tasked to make sure campus life remains unstable by hounding the cursing, volitile new Provisional Pastor.
Linda Millsaps has been Jake's wife for nineteen years. She moved to Nashville during his incarceration, working as a singer and keyboard player. During the later years of Jake's prison sentence, she cohabited with a lounge performer named Bobby Brightwell.
Andy Millsaps is the couple's Hyacinth-student son who did most of his growing up without his father.
Dani Millsaps is their precocious four-year-old daughter, born after Jake was released from prison and before he talked Linda into returning from Nashville to join him in his 'preacher gig'.
Jackson Byrd is the patriarch of three generations of gifted female singers. Byrd owns a farm adjacent to the college and is building a strange pavilion beside a country road near the college's Faculty Row. Althea Byrd, Jackson's wife and Susannah, their daughter, were both haunted by a terrible illness and both committed suicide.
The college-age granddaughter, Ronnie Lea Byrd, a gifted keyboard player, has the same genetic defect as her mother and grandmother—one of the first symptoms is a swelling of the brain, causing the eyes to protrude: 'bugeye'.
Johnny Holdcamp, a gifted vocalist, is an incoming Hyacinth student. Theresa Johnson Holdcamp, Johnny's mother, is the only sibling of Sam Johnson, the young marine who was killed in Jake's drunk-driving accident. Billy Holdcamp, a hard-nosed deputy sheriff in neighboring McMinn County, is Johnny's father.
One final important note about our demons: in the presence of true spirituality (when Ronnie Lea sings, for instance,), the demons are Ziip'ed to another dimension and have no first-hand knowledge of what happens during their absence. Because the story is told from the demons' point of view, the reader must also play 'catch-up' with the story line at any time the demons are Ziip'ed.
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