Free Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington Page B

forty-two days and nights. I was one hundred twenty pounds when I got shot and eighty-seven when I got out of that hospital. But just look at me now!”
    Praise His name!
    Brother Charles was standing with his hands clenched at his side and a wild look in his eyes. He was a big man, an enormous man. It was not the first time I’d noticed that, but it was the first time I had considered the damage he might do if he ever had a reason.
    “God’s been good to me!” he said as he started pacing again.
    Amen.
    “I said He’s been good to me!”
    Amen!
    He suddenly stopped in his tracks. “But I wasn’t always good to Him.”
    “Now you’re telling it,” Brother Carl said.
    “When I was sixteen, I went to live with my real daddy in Tennessee,” Charles said. “He was one of the biggest moonshiners in the state, and I wanted to learn the trade. I dabbled
in it a good long time. I was bad. I went up to Chicago and did some other things I shouldn’t have.”
    Tell it. They’d all done things they shouldn’t have.
    “When I came back South, I drove a long-haul rig twice a week to New York City. Then I bought me a thirty-three acre farm in Minor Hill, Tennessee. Two-story house. Fine car. I had a still upstairs that could run forty to fifty gallons of whiskey, and in another room I stored my bales of marijuana. Pretty good for a boy who’d grown up picking cotton.”
    Amen. They knew about cotton.
    He raised his Bible and shook it at us. “I don’t have to tell you that’s the deceitfulness of riches talking, boys.”
    Preach on.
    “One day, things had really got bad on me. I had just got under so much that I couldn’t go no further, and I was getting ready to kill myself. The devil spoke to me and said, ‘Just go ahead and take that gun and kill yourself and get it over with’ ”
    No, Lord.
    He walked to the edge of the arbor and pantomimed picking something up from the grass. “I went over there and got the gun and was fixing to put a shell in it, and when I did, this other voice came to me and said, ‘Put that gun back down and walk back over in front of that wood heater.’ ”
    Amen.

    “I walked back over there in front of the wood heater, and suddenly that power from on high hit me in the head and knocked me down on my knees, and I said six words. I won’t never forget what they was. I said, ‘Lord, have mercy on my soul.”’
    Amen. Thank God.
    “He took me out in the Spirit and I came back speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gave utterance. The devil said, ‘Look, look now. Now what are you going to do?’ He said, ‘Look at all that moonshine, all that marijuana you got. What are you going to do now? Ain’t you in a mess now? Here you are, you’ve got the Holy Ghost, and you’ve got all this in your house.’ And the Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Just set your house in order.’ ”
    Bless him, Lord!
    “He said, ‘Just set your house in order!’ ”
    Amen!
    “So that’s what I did. I set my house in order. I got rid of that moonshine and marijuana. I told the devil to depart that place in the name of Jesus, and within a year I’d taken up my first serpent.”
    Amen.
    “We’ve got to set our house in order!” Charles said, and now he was leaning toward us, red-faced, with flecks of white spittle in the corners of his mouth. “We’re in the last day with
the Lord, children! He won’t strive with man forever! He’s a merciful God, he’s a loving God, but you better believe he’s also a just God, and there will come a time when we’ll have to account for these lives we’ve led! We better put our house in order! ”
    Amen. Thank God. Bless the sweet name of Jesus.
    There were only thirteen people under that brush arbor, but it seemed like there were suddenly three hundred. They were jumping and shouting, and pretty soon Brother Carl was anointing Burma and Erma with oil, and Brother Charles had launched into “Jesus on My Mind” on his guitar, and J.L. and I had our