Salvation on Sand Mountain

by Dennis Covington

  In the weeks prior to that night, they had both backslid and taken to drink, he said. “She was bad to run around,” he added. “On September eighteenth I caught her with a man, a preacher from the church. When I told her on October fifth I wanted to get a divorce, she tried to kill herself.”

  He said she took a box of Sominex and a bottle of extrastrength Tylenol. He made her drink warm water so she’d throw the pills up. She threatened to kill him. It was a similar story to the one the jury had heard in snatches during the trial, but not from Glenn’s own mouth. On the advice of counsel, he hadn’t testified in his own defense. “If there’s a new trial, I’ll testify,” he said.

  About that time, he craned his neck to peer down the hallway, where those supporting him and those supporting Darlene had coalesced into the two opposing camps. He couldn’t have seen Darlene from there, but he shook his head sadly as though he had. “She’d completely backslid,” he said. Then he leaned closer to me. “I looked at her at the trial. She looked spiritually dead. When Darlene was living right, she looked clean, nice. Afterwards, she just looked dead.”

  We talked for a while longer, and then I asked him if he’d ever drunk strychnine in church. “I’ve drank it different times,” he said.

  “What about Darlene?”

  “When she was really living right, she drank it,” he said.

  When she was really living right, she drank poison. What a peculiar idea, the journalist in me thought. But who was I to judge?

  I never intended to become a journalist. I wanted to be a forest ranger. In college, though, I took fiction writing courses instead of forestry, and after a stint in the army, I went to graduate school at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I had it in my head that I would write short stories and teach at a good liberal arts college somewhere in the Midwest.

  After some detours, that’s exactly what happened. I wound up at The College of Wooster in Ohio. I was on my second marriage by then, to the sister of a childhood friend. Vicki, too, was from Birmingham and a writer, although she didn’t fully know it yet. She was employed in Ohio as a social worker and had just written her first short story. She hated the Ohio winters. I hated academic life. I decided I wanted to turn thirty unemployed in an apartment back in Birmingham. Writing would be my living from now on. The idea had a romantic ring. It was a wonderful moment when we quit our jobs, thumbed our noses at common sense, and headed south again. We felt like we’d committed the ultimate rebellion: We’d taken our lives into our own hands.

  Things worked out all right at first. I did turn thirty unemployed in an apartment in a Birmingham neighborhood called Southside. Vicki found work as a therapist in a substance abuse program at the university there. I sure wasn’t making a living as a writer, though, so I began teaching part-time at the university. We decided to have children. Vicki conceived quickly, but lost the baby and nearly died herself. We thought we’d never be able to have children after that. And like many childless couples our age, we sank into cynicism and carelessness. Or should I say, we drank ourselves there, something we’d been doing for a number of years. But both of us continued to write. Our stories occasionally appeared in the literary magazines, and I wrote a novel that was rejected at a couple of houses before it wound up in a box under my bed.

  A kind of desperation set in. I felt like my writing wasn’t going anywhere, and my job as a college English teacher seemed minor and absurd. I wanted to have an adventure before I turned thirty-five, one in which the risks were real. I’d been in the army during Vietnam, but I hadn’t been sent overseas. Maybe I felt like I hadn’t proven myself as a man. My education as a writer wasn’t complete. In 1983, I decided I wanted to go to a war, and the nearest one was in El Salvador. Journalism seemed the logical means. I borrowed a thousand dollars from my credit union, found a photographer, David Donaldson, who also wanted to go, and talked the editor of a Birmingham newspaper into giving us press credentials. I’d never written a word for a newspaper. I’d never been out of the United States. The only Spanish I knew was “I am a journalist. Please don’t shoot me.”

  I became a journalist in El Salvador. And something else happened to me down there. It was more than learning a new trade and a new language. In El Salvador, I found the antidote for a conventional life: I got the shit scared out of me. I haven’t been the same since. On the plane down, I read an article about John Sullivan, a free-lance journalist who, on his first night in El Salvador, had been taken from his hotel by armed men, tortured, beheaded, and buried in a wall. At the airport, armed customs police confiscated my binoculars and Boy Scout canteen. Our taxi driver barely got us into the city before the curfew began. Outside our hotel, security forces with automatic weapons were stopping and searching cars at random. The phones at the hotel were tapped.

  On my first trip into the countryside, I went with other journalists to a town that had been overrun by guerrillas. Walking down the cobbled streets, I could hear the clatter of machine-gun fire and the steady whump of mortar rounds. The guerrillas we encountered demanded “war taxes,” which we paid. That night, in the hotel lounge, a man came up to our table, accused us of being American military officers, and asked us to accompany him outside. He said he had a gun in his back pocket, and if we didn’t come with him, he would kill us on the spot. Hotel security got to him and hustled him away. There was no gun in his back pocket, but he’d achieved the desired effect.

  After that first trip, I quit drinking. So did Vicki. The second time I went to El Salvador, she went with me. While she stayed at the hotel, I rode into the countryside and interviewed the fighters on both sides in the civil war. Both suspected I was a spy. At night Vicki and I would lie awake listening to the sound of gunfire and exploding grenades. During dinner one night at the home of friends, we had to crawl under the table when shooting erupted on the street outside.

  When I returned to El Salvador for the fourth time, Vicki was pregnant with our first daughter, Ashley. On that visit, in September of 1984, photographer Jim Neel and I were interviewing guerrillas along the road to a town called La Palma, in the northern province of Chalatenango. While we were talking to a guerrilla commander, a Salvadoran army patrol opened fire. The guerrillas scattered like quail. Jim and I dove for a drainage ditch. The gunfire was unrelenting and close. The air above our heads was filled with bullets. And time very nearly stopped. Jim watched an insect move slowly along my shoulder, and I found myself staring at the water pouring out of a culvert and into the ditch. The water was frothy with raw sewage, but the light falling upon it mesmerized me. Like the other physical sensations — the sucking sound my boots made in the mud, the hum of insects, the sting of sweat — the light on the water was precious to me, as though it were something I knew I was about to lose.

  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.