Texas-Arkansas 1924. A man on the run from the law finds three abandoned children are his meal ticket to grifter heaven. Now he must work fast to keep the fallen angels’ slick scam from unraveling as law enforcement closes in.

SYNOPSIS:

We begin in Texarkana, Arkansas during the Great Depression. Jeb Nubey is caught having sex on a cotton bale with the girlfriend of the sharecropper’s son, Hank Hampton. Hank catches them. Jeb and Hank fight, leaving Hank in the hospital, expected to die. Jeb is on the run, wanted for attempted murder in Texarkana. Transforming from longhaired and bearded itinerant worker to clean-shaven and handsome, Jeb escapes arrest and goes on the road with supplies and weapons to last.

He pulls off the road to sleep, but wakes up to find three abandoned kids have looted his store in the back of the truck — thirteen-year-old Angel, and her siblings, Willie and Ida May Welby. He lines them up along the roadside to tell them he's going to have them arrested for stealing, when a sheriff comes speeding toward him. Using the kids as a decoy family, he sends the cop on his way. But the oldest girl, Angel, recognizes him from the cop's wanted poster and blackmails him to force him to drive her and her siblings to their sister Claudia's house, miles away in Nazareth, Arkansas.

When Claudia is nowhere to be found, a tornado-force storm drives Jeb and the trio into a church at midnight. They wake up to find Jeb's truck has been looted overnight. Church members who mistake Jeb and the kids for the long awaited Reverend Gracie and his children greet them.

Showered with food and clothing by the sympathetic townspeople, Angel sees the opportunity before them. She manipulates reluctant Jeb into letting her give him preaching lessons. Jeb tells her the news — he's illiterate.

Sweetening the pot is a beautiful schoolteacher, Fern Coulter, who is willing to aid Jeb and the children with settling into their new digs. Jeb, who considers himself a charming ladies man, plies Fern with attention and loads of bullshit. Fern buys into his charm and sets out to help Jeb and the children settle in as a legitimate clergy family in Nazareth.

As wanted posters circulate throughout Arkansas, Jeb is forced to accept preaching lessons from Angel and fumble his way through his first Sunday sermon, while Angel and Ida May awkwardly, but humorously, coach him from the rear pew.

Angel, who continues to blackmail Jeb, takes him to a local movie theater where she shows him how a pro manipulates the church folks — Barbara Stanwyck as The Miracle Woman.

The kids settle into their comfortable beds that night as Angel hides her tears. Her memories of her mother, Thorne, who was taken away to an asylum, were made worse when her daddy moved in a local hussy to take Mama’s place.

Jeb stands under the light of the moon shining down on the steeple of the Church in the Dell. He ponders his situation with the law, the prospect of a torrid affair with a sexy schoolteacher, and accepts the only assignment before him — scam the people of Nazareth for as long as he can, and line his pockets with the enduring loyalty of the faithful until he can make his get away.

All the while, the real widower Reverend Gracie, kids in tow, is making his way toward Nazareth, dealing with his own perils along the roadways of America’s Dustbowl.

Series Bible available.

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