The skeptic
Wade Tolley
An 18-year-old West Texas mucker and rockabilly singer who becomes a penny-stock salesman. Narrates the story at 92.
Bright rockabilly over furious lyrics.
The story
Teach us to number our days
It is April 2026. In a shuttered tin-roofed church on the Colorado River, a 92-year-old man named Wade Tolley sits down at a dusty upright piano. A young real estate agent named Lainie has a buyer who wants the church's water right for a resort. Wade won't sign, and he starts to explain why.
The story goes back to August 1952, when Wade rode into Moab on an ore truck with a guitar, the week the uranium boom began. Trailers parked under every cottonwood, penny stocks sold out of café booths, and the mines filled men's lungs with radon while the government kept quiet.
Wade fell in with Rev. Eli Corder, a poor Pentecostal preacher dying of the radium mines he worked as a boy, and then he sold him out.
The show follows Book IV of the Psalms, Psalms 90 through 106, from start to finish. Book IV begins with Moses, declares that the Lord reigns, and ends by remembering: God's faithfulness, the people's forgetting, and a plea to be gathered home.
"So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab." Deuteronomy 34:5
Like Moses, Eli dies in Moab before the rain comes. Seventy years later, Wade finally sings his song.
Prologue · 2026
The shuttered tabernacle
An old man, a sale contract and a song he hasn't played in seventy years.
Act I · 1952–1954
The Lord Reigns
The boom, the betrayal and the fire. Wade walks away with Pruitt's envelope.
Act II · 1955–1957
Remember
The cost: a widow's orchard, a preacher's well, a shaft collapse, and rain at a grave.