“Repent!” Preacher Bob shouted, and heads ducked.
What if the deacon was talking about me? I glanced around and noticed that the door was locked and guarded by two more deacons.
Things finally ran out of gas, and two hours after I sat down I bolted from the building. I needed a drink.
I wrote a pleasant little report about my visit to Calvary Full Gospel and ran it on the Religion page. I commented on the warm atmosphere of the church, the lovely solo by Miss Helen Hatcher, the powerful sermon by Preacher Bob, and so on.
Needless to say, this proved to be very popular.
At least twice a month, I went to church. I sat with Miss Callie and Esau and listened to the Reverend Thurston Small preach for two hours and twelve minutes (I timed every sermon). The briefest was delivered by Pastor Phil Bish at the United Methodist Church of Karaway — seventeen minutes. That church also got the award for being the coldest. The furnace was broken, it was January, and that may have helped shorten the sermon. I sat with Margaret at the First Baptist Church in Clanton and listened to Reverend Millard Stark give his annual sermon on the sins of alcohol. With bad timing, I had a hangover that morning and Stark kept looking at me.
I found the Harvest Tabernacle in the back room of an abandoned service station in Beech Hill, and I sat with six others as a wild-eyed doomsayer named Peter the Prophet yelled at us for almost an hour. My column that week was quite brief.
The Clanton Church of Christ had no musical instruments. The ban was based on Scripture, it was later explained to me. There was a beautiful solo, which I wrote about at length. There was also no emotion whatsoever in the service. For a contrast, I went to the Mount Pisgah Chapel in Lowtown, where the pulpit was surrounded by drums, guitars, horns, and amplifiers. As a warmup for the sermon, a full-blown concert was given with the congregation singing and dancing. Miss Callie referred to Mount Pisgah as a “lower church.”
On my list, number sixty-four was the Calico Ridge Independent Church, located deep in the hills in the northeastern part of the county. According to the Times archives, at this church in 1965 a Mr. Randy Bovee was bitten twice by a rattlesnake during a late Sunday night worship service. Mr. Bovee survived, and for a while the snakes were put away. The legend, however, flourished, and as my Church Notes column gained popularity, I was asked several times if I intended to visit Calico Ridge.
“I plan to visit every church,” was my standard reply.
“They don’t like visitors,” Baggy warned me.
I had been greeted so warmly in each church — black or white, large or small, town or country — that I could not imagine Christian folks being rude to a guest.
And they weren’t rude at Calico Ridge, but they weren’t too happy to see me either. I wanted to see the snakes, but from the safety of the back row. I went on a Sunday night, primarily because legend held that they did not “take up the serpents” during daylight hours. I searched the Bible in vain for this restriction.
There was no sign of any serpents. There were a few fits and convulsions below the pulpit as the preacher exhorted us to “come forth and moan and groan in sin!” The choir chanted and hummed to the beat of an electric guitar and a drum, and the meeting took on the spookiness of an ancient tribal dance. I wanted to leave, especially since there were no snakes.
Late in the service, I caught a glimpse of a face I’d seen before. It was a very different face — thin, pale, gaunt, topped with grayish hair. I couldn’t place it, but I knew it was familiar. The man was seated in the second row from the front, on the other side of the small sanctuary, and he seemed out of touch with the chaos of the worship service. At times he appeared to be praying, then he would sit while everyone else was standing. Those around him seemed to accept him and ignore him at the same time.
He turned once and looked directly at me. It was Hank Hooten, the ex-lawyer who’d shot up the town in 1971! He’d been taken in a straitjacket to the state mental hospital, and a few years later there’d been a rumor that he had been released. No one had seen him, though.
For two days after that, I tried to track down Hank Hooten. My calls to the state mental hospital went nowhere. Hank had a brother in Shady Grove, but he refused to talk. I snooped around Calico Ridge, but, typically, no one there would utter a word to a stranger like me.
Chapter 33
Many of those who worshiped diligently on Sunday mornings became less faithful on Sunday nights. During my tour of churches, I heard many preachers chide their followers to return in a few hours to properly complete the observance of the Sabbath. I never counted heads, but as a general rule about half of them did so. I tried a few Sunday night services, usually in an effort to catch some colorful ritual such as snake handling or disease healing or, on one occasion, a “church conclave” in which a wayward brother was to be put on trial and certainly convicted for fancying another brother’s wife. My presence rattled them that night and the wayward brother got a reprieve.
For the most part, I limited my study of comparative religions to the daylight hours.
Others had different Sunday-night rituals. Harry Rex helped a Mexican named Pepe lease a building and open a restaurant one block off the square. Pepe’s became moderately successful during the 1970s with decent food that was always on the spicy side. Pepe couldn’t resist the peppers, regardless of how they scalded the throats of his gringo customers.
On Sundays all alcohol was banned in Ford County. It could not be sold at retail or in restaurants. Pepe had a back room with a long table and a door that would lock. He allowed Harry Rex and his guests to use the room and eat and drink all we wanted. His margaritas were especially tasty. We enjoyed many colorful meals with spicy dishes, all washed down with strong margaritas. There were usually a dozen of us, all male, all young, about half currently married. Harry Rex threatened our lives if we told anyone about Pepe’s back room.
The Clanton city police raided us once, but Pepe suddenly couldn’t speak a word of English. The door to the back room was locked, and partially hidden too. Pepe turned off the lights, and for twenty minutes we waited in the dark, still drinking, and listened to the cops try to communicate with Pepe. I don’t know why we were worried. The city Judge was a lawyer named Harold Finkley, who was at the end of the table slogging down his fourth or fifth margarita.