The Neon Bible by John Kennedy Toole Page A

grinding under our feet, Aunt Mae turned around and looked down at the town and held Mother by the arm.
    "You know, I never thought I'd be happy here." Then she looked out onto the hills and the night sky.
     
     
    We didn't see much of Aunt Mae after that. One of the old men who played in the band at the plant that night asked her if she wanted to sing with them all the time. They had a lot of jobs in the hills playing and went into the county seat and the capital sometimes, too. When Aunt Mae came home from the plant in the evening, she put on the dress she wore to sing with the band and went off. The old man met her at the foot of the hill in his truck with the bass fiddle in the back. I used to sit on the porch in the twilight when the night birds were beginning to sing and watch Aunt Mae go down the path in her good dress and disappear where the hill got steep and I couldn't see her anymore. A while later I could see the old man's truck going off down Main Street with Aunt Mae's arm resting on the door and the big fiddle in the back.
    The newspaper had a story in it about the band once, with a picture of Aunt Mae singing along. It was like all the other pictures in our paper. Aunt Mae's hair looked like a cloud with a bunch of colored men playing behind her. In all the pictures people's skin was always dark and their hair white, no matter what color it really was. The story told all about how Aunt Mae was once a famous singer and that people like her were needed in the valley to make people feel good. Mr. Watkins wrote a letter to the editor about the story. It said that the people of the valley needed a lot more things before they needed Aunt Mae. Then Aunt Mae wrote a letter that said the valley needed a lot less people like Mr. Watkins, if it needed anything. They didn't have any more letters in the paper on either side, and I thought it was over when the preacher got into it.
    He put an ad in the paper that had a list of reasons from the Bible why the band and Aunt Mae weren't doing anyone any good. After Bobbie Lee Taylor left, the town was split over the preacher. The people who didn't go to the preacher's conference when Bobbie Lee was in town were dropped from the church rolls. The people who got dropped were mad at the preacher because everyone liked to go to church if he could pay the pledge. Of course, there were people like us who didn't belong to the church when all this happened, and the preacher said they were the kind that "didn't care which way the wind blew."
    The people who were dropped bought an ad in the paper the next day and gave a list of reasons why Aunt Mae and the band were good for the valley. It started that on Saturday night the moviehouse began to have Aunt Mae and the band besides the movie for ten cents more. The second Saturday that they were there some people who belonged to the church walked up and down in front of the moviehouse with big signs about the evil inside. When the editor of the paper heard about this, he got a picture of them on the front page. Our paper went all the way into the county seat, and even plenty people in the capital bought it. They saw the picture of the people with the signs and, like people always do, came to see Aunt Mae the next Saturday night. That night the town looked almost like Bobbie Lee was there. Trucks were parked all over, and only a few out of all those people could get into the movie house. You couldn't even find the preacher's people with the signs in the crowd on Main Street. The people came back the next Saturday night who couldn't get in, and by then the sheriff told the preacher his people were creating a nuisance and would be removed. They had done his brother's business all the good they could.
    After this the preacher sort of set himself off from the town. Mr. and Mrs. Watkins and the others who were still on the rolls tried to fight anything the town did, and even sent a few of themselves to the state legislature to see about the