Janie Satterfield does not recalculate. She tries to block out the howling dogs and cats. There’s enough money for a week of food—two weeks if a Christian Youth Group comes in and adopts half the strays. Sometimes she dreams of this: If every Boy and Girl Scout troop in the country adopted one dog or cat, then the number of strays would decrease somewhat. Not much, but a little. If every elementary school in America adopted a mascot. If every hospital. If every retirement home. Janie keeps a notebook of people and organizations that she thinks might help control the pet population in America. If every contestant on a game show, if every person who worried about getting into heaven, if every church and synagogue and mosque, if every prison.

The telephone rings. Janie does not answer. It’ll be one of her volunteers from the Junior League calling to cancel, she knows. Every day, it seems, one of her volunteers calls, faking a cough, saying that she doesn’t want to bring the flu into the kennel area.

The machine beeps. An older woman says, “I hope I got the right number. I’m calling to donate. I can do the five-dollar-a-week program. Just tell me where to send it.” The woman leaves her telephone number and address. Janie stares at the answering machine.

The phone rings again and, thinking that it’s probably the older woman calling to say she misdialed earlier, Janie answers with “Graywood County Humane Society.”

“Yes. I’m calling to offer my donation,” a man says. “I’d like to send a hundred dollars to you.”

Line two rings, then line three. Janie brightens her voice. She says, “That’s so kind of you, sir,” and gives him the post office box address.

And it happens and it happens and it happens. For six straight hours Janie Satterfield picks up the phone, takes donations, and at the end of the day she’s been promised more than a hundred thousand dollars. And she is amazed to learn that a television evangelist, one Reverend Leroy Jenkins, has directed all of his listeners to donate to the Graywood Humane Society.

“I need to write Reverend Jenkins a thank-you card,” she says to herself, still alone without a volunteer. She steps into the kennel area and says to her barking strays, “Maybe we’ll take a photograph of us all and send it to Reverend Jenkins.”

Janie had never heard of this particular television evangelist.

And she’d never heard of Manna Man, working his powers, redirecting.