Salvation on Sand Mountain (7 page)

We were in that ditch for half an hour. I was certain we were going to die. For the first time, I realized how much I wanted to live. I was shameless in this prayer of mine. I promised everything. We made it out alive, but altered. During the next six years, I went back to Central America again and again, a dozen times in all. I was always scared. Ashley and our second daughter, Laura, were born during those years. Vicki’s writing career took off. I survived turning forty, the death of my father, and a battle for tenure at the university. Nine years after I wrote it, that novel under my bed found a publisher. And shortly afterward, my father came back to me in a dream. My mother and sister had gone to the cemetery to lay flowers at his grave. When they returned, he was with them. He had a message for our family. “Jesus found our lives here too beautiful,” he said, “and
so invented trials from which only he could save us by his act of continual self-sacrifice. Be that as it may,” he concluded, “the love of God surpasses all others.”

There was mystery and passion in the message, words my father might not have used in real life, though he often prayed aloud with uncommon eloquence. I did not take the dream lightly. I took it as a blessing. One thing was certain: My father had come back to me for a reason.

On Sundays, I would sit with Vicki on the back pew of an urban Southern Baptist church in Birmingham, the one she’d grown up in. It had Doric columns and an enormous Wedgwood blue sanctuary lighted by Italian chandeliers. The windows had been handcrafted in England. The organ made use of over three thousand pipes. I was grateful to be back in church, but I was also vaguely uncomfortable. The previous nine years had been a journey out of cynicism and denial into a kind of light. I had my life, my family, my sobriety. But something was missing. I had reached that point in the middle of looking for something when you have forgotten what it is you have lost. At the time, I couldn’t have put it into words, but I think what I was looking for was what I had experienced growing up in that odd Methodist church in East Lake. I wanted some hoarse and perspiring preacher from the sticks to reach into his pocket and take out a comb.

And that was my spiritual condition on that day in 1992
when I left Glenn Summerford sitting in his white prison jumpsuit and made my way down the crowded corridor toward the light at the other end. Glenn’s mother, Aunt Annie Mance, was standing in the crowd, and she recognized me from services at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following. She knew I was a journalist, but she smiled anyway. “We’ve missed you in church,” she said as I passed, and then she added to some of her friends behind her: “We’re going to make a snake handler out of him yet.”

 

 

In a surprise development, Glenn Summerford won the custody battle. Since the day of the first murder attempt on Darlene, Marty had been staying with one of Glenn’s daughters by a previous marriage. He had been doing well in school. Apparently, the judge decided it would be in Marty’s best interests to stay where he was until his father got out of prison, a long wait, considering Glenn had been sentenced to ninety-nine years. The ruling was a blow to Darlene and her family, but only a bittersweet victory for Glenn’s supporters within The Church of Jesus with Signs Following. They had their own problems to worry about by now, problems that would eventually result in a dramatic split over finances and church authority.

In the weeks before the attack on Darlene, Glenn had quit the church. In a tearful confession, he said he’d backed up
on the Lord and wasn’t fit to pastor the church anymore. J.L. Dyal, the man with the Jesus belt buckle, tried to keep the church going by making sure the utilities got paid and the doors were open for scheduled services. Visiting preachers, including Carl Porter, took up the slack in Glenn’s absence. But after Darlene was bitten by the snakes, Glenn called Carl Porter in Georgia and asked him to come to Scottsboro to rebaptize him. Brother Carl, who had first heard about the attack on a television newscast, agreed to perform the baptism. “He said he’d come back to the Lord,” Brother Carl recalled.

Glenn also asked Brother Carl to call Darlene at the university hospital in Birmingham and try to persuade her to patch things up. Glenn’s own trip to the hospital on the day after the attack had ended disastrously when he was met in Birmingham by university police, who arrested him on a DUI charge and confiscated a handgun.

Brother Carl made the call to Darlene’s hospital room, but she refused Glenn’s peace offer, choosing to press charges of attempted murder instead. Glenn was despondent. Having been rebaptized, he preached again at the church until the trial, but after his conviction, the responsibility of keeping the church going fell again to J.L. Dyal. “Glenn asked me to keep the doors open on the church and I was doing everything I could to do it,” J.L. says. “It was kind of rough, but I
did the best I could. I’d go down there and we’d pray and I’d read a verse or two out of the Bible. I didn’t call myself a preacher.”

Brother Carl came to Scottsboro as often as he could, but he was too busy with his own church in Georgia to pastor the Scottsboro church, too. He did take up a collection, though, to help with Glenn’s legal expenses, and then turned the money over to J.L. The final crisis began brewing when J.L. went to visit Glenn in jail, and Glenn told him to turn that money over to Tammy Flippo, the surprise defense witness whom in-laws described as a woman who had left her husband and children in order to be with Glenn.

“I said no,” says J.L. “That money’s for your lawyer.”

“Tammy’s gonna get me another lawyer,” Glenn said.

“No she ain’t, Brother Glenn,” J.L. said. “She’s gonna rip you off.” But against his better judgment, J.L. says he gave in.

“From now on,” Glenn told him later, “whenever you pick up a donation or anything at the church, I want you to give it to Tammy.”

This time, J.L. was adamant. “I can’t do that,” he said.

“Well, if you’re not going to help me when I need help,” Glenn said, “you might as well close the doors on the church.”

J.L. said, “Maybe I had better do that.”

The two men talked it over. Glenn finally said he wanted J.L. to keep the church going, and J.L. said he would. “Me
and my wife were handling the collection,” J.L. says. “We were paying the bills. We kept records of everything we did. I mean, we accounted for every penny of it.”

But that was not the end of the pressure to divert the offering at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following. That spring a letter addressed to the congregation arrived, supposedly written from jail by Glenn. “He wanted his mother and Bobbie Sue Thompson to take over the treasury,” Brother Carl Porter said.

That’s how J.L. remembers it, too. “I said I ain’t gonna do it. And they said, well, here’s the letter right here, you know, and I said I’m sorry. At the time there wasn’t nobody paying tithes down there but me and Brother Willie and Mama and my wife, Dorothea, and Brother Porter. They said, well, we’ll have the law to get it from you. I said you send the law out here and if they can get it, I’ll give it to ‘em.”

J.L. is leaning forward in the living room of his house on Sand Mountain. His fingers are knit, and he’s looking at a framed print on the wall of Jesus appearing in the sky above a waterfall. “The night I walked out down there, I told them, I said, ‘Well, I’m no longer a member here.’ And come to find out, Brother Glenn didn’t write the letter to start with.” J.L. now believed that the letter had been written by Bobbie Sue.

When J.L. left the church, Brother Carl decided that he’d stop trying to keep it open, too.

For all practical purposes, it was the end of The Church of Jesus with Signs Following. The miniature steeple with the wooden cross would come down and lie in the grass behind the house on Barbee Lane, near the shed where Glenn Summerford had kept the rattlesnakes that he had tried to murder Darlene with. Some of the pews would be stacked up and left to rot in a nearby hollow under the trees. On a Sunday after this final split, Vicki and I drove up from Birmingham. I had wanted her to experience firsthand what went on there during worship services, but we found the walls of the church bare, no portraits of Jesus, no Last Supper. There were no amplifiers, no set of drums, no microphone, cymbals, or tambourines. There were no bottles of oil, no jars of strychnine, no propane torches, no snakes. Glenn’s mother, Aunt Annie, was there with Cecil and Carolyn Esslinder, loyal to the end. Also present was a Brother Tony with his family. New to the area, they’d just been driving around looking for a place where they could worship when they spotted the converted service station with its hand-painted sign.

“Brother Carl’s not coming back no more,” Aunt Annie said. “He wanted us to give our tithes to J.L., but I didn’t want to give mine to anybody but a preacher, and J.L.’s no preacher.” Her eyes were still giving her trouble from recent cataract surgery, and when she took off her tinted glasses to
clean them, she had to squint against the light. “Glenn needs some spending money at the jail, and I’d like to see some tithes go to him, but Brother Carl said no, if we didn’t give the tithes to J.L., he wouldn’t be back, and he hasn’t been.”

Brother Tony had brought along his brother, a stooped, walleyed man who struck up a chorus of “Jesus on My Mind” on his battered acoustic guitar. His strumming hand appeared palsied, but the music came out strong and sure.

“I told Glenn about all this,” Aunt Annie said in a louder voice. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, Mama, they’ll be a preacher there this evening.’ And sure enough, when I got here, here was Brother Tony.”

The meeting started to sound like an actual service. Having come to the front of the church, Brother Tony sang with gusto. He’d seen now that he’d been led by the Lord to this place and this time. “I believe in snake handling!” he shouted when the song had ended. “I’ve been bit myself! I don’t shake the box down or look for the heads! I just reach in and take one out!” He made a dramatic, downward sweeping gesture with his hand, as though there were a real box in front of him, with a real live rattlesnake buzzing angrily inside.

“If you have to shake the box or look to see where its head is at,” he continued, “you ought’n be trying to get that snake out of that box in the first place!”

Cecil and Aunt Annie gave him a few amens, but it was clear their hearts weren’t totally into it. They knew they had come to the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. Without real serpents present, what was the point of talking about them?

In time, regular worship services would recommence in the converted service station on Woods Cove Road. It’d be known by a different name though: Woods Cove Holiness Church. And no snakes would be handled there. Aunt Annie’s health would deteriorate to the point where she would rarely get to church, anyway. And her boy, Glenn, would continue to spend his days and nights spreading the gospel to fellow prisoners at a state penitentiary west of Birmingham.

Offerings at the church had routinely been twelve to fifteen dollars a service, and it was over amounts like these that the remnant of church members who believed in Glenn’s innocence split. The issue was one of church authority, which in the free Holiness tradition resides entirely with the pastor. A further principle had been at stake, though. Would the church be run from prison or not? J.L. and his family had spoken with their feet.

The eventual outcome was that snake handling ceased at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following in Scottsboro, but started up, as soon as the weather permitted, in an open field
on top of Sand Mountain, where Brother Carl Porter, J.L. Dyal, and the End-Time Evangelist, Brother Charles McGlocklin, would lead services under muscadine vines, honeysuckle, and starlight, like believers used to do in the old days, before the world with all its deceitfulness and vanities lured them down from the mountains and into the city, where a woman might be tempted to back up on the Lord and stop drinking strychnine, and her husband would have to take matters into his own hands by putting a gun to her head and forcing her to reach into the serpent box.

T
he card he pressed into my hand read: “Charles McGlocklin, the End-Time Evangelist. ” “You can have as much of God as you want,” he said. His voice was low and urgent. “These seminary preachers don’t understand that. They don’t understand the spirit of the Lord. They’re taught by man. They know the
forms
of godliness, but they deny the
power.”

Brother Charles was a big man in his early fifties with a full head of dark hair and hands the size of waffle irons. He didn’t have a church himself, and he didn’t particularly want one. He’d preached on the radio, he said, and at county fairs and trade days. In years past, he’d driven all over the South, conducting revivals under a tent he’d hauled in the back of his ‘72 Chevy van. He said he had even stood on the road in front
of his house trailer in New Hope, Alabama, and preached at passing cars.