Institute History
Description
Years ago in the storefront church of an abandoned strip mall, a small congregation tried to perform the miraculous healing of an eight-year-old autistic boy and smothered him. The boy’s own mother was holding down his feet while he was crushed to death. One man from that group served five years in prison for manslaughter.
Free in Deed is set in the present and the memory of a recent past as this intensely religious man secretly returns to the town where his attempted miracle became a criminal act. After five years in prison, Joey Jenkins suddenly appears in Oil City to care for his own sick son. Hiding out, making furtive trips to the surrounding motels, stores, and pharmacies, Joey waits and watches shamefully for his son to recover from an unexplained illness.
Now passive and helpless to interfere with the suffering of his own child, Joey quietly avoids the few remaining residents of the town who know him and the former congregants of his poor storefront church. Although he wants to survive anonymously and avoid any encounter with the remains of his past, the relationships and ruin he left behind gradually hunt him down.
Faced with an immense responsibility in a new reality devoid of miracles, and overwhelmed by concern for his child, this lonely man finally does something unthinkable.