Thank you for that information Lynne, tht sounds like a lifestyle I could have easily fit into. I think the Irsih today all have a bit of that in them.
This is my thoughts I put together from last night as I tried to sleep:
"Pentecost, noun, a Christian festival celebrated on the seventh Sunday after Easter, commemorating the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the apostles....."
--From Webester's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, 1996
I knew a bit about the Pentecost. I remembered the story I had heard once that involved flames appearing above the heads of the apostles, 50 days after the crucifixion.
I knew Cowboy Wayne knew the Bible. In our first meeting I had lernt that. Our first morning in West Virginia we even got it out and read from it. Double checking the chapter and verse used in Latter Days on the pocket watch. So I asked him "what is the pentecost?" and he explainned it thusly: The followers were promised that in the old testament that they would be sent a comforter. When this spirit arrived they spoke in flaming tongues, a sign that the gospel would be spred out to other nations.
Jack had said his mother never explained it to him. That can happen, you just assume people know what your talking about, which is why I am still hesitant to classify people by the color of their collar. I don't really know what that means.
In the story we are told that it was several months before Ennis know about the accident. Certainly some amount of time passed before he went to the Twist ranch, but when he got there, Mrs. Twist demonstrated that spirit of comfort to him in her acts of kindness. He received the shirts, left there like an abandoned burial shroud in an empty tomb, and then.....
"Around that time, Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had first seen him, curly headed and smiling and buck-toothed, talking about getting up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic obsenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron. And he would wake sometimes in greif, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets."
Jack, in this way, came to Ennis in spirit and comforted him. Ennis experenced Pentecost in the form of Jack in his dreams. That question he had asked so long ago was answered.
May we all find answers, or at least never stop asking.