Salvation on Sand Mountain Read Free Page B

God sends his dark messenger to roll over the rooftops and loose the prisoner from his sleep!”
    I was sitting in the middle of the congregation and watching Aunt Daisy with increasing alarm. I hoped she wouldn’t get the urge to march in my direction. In any other context, I would have pegged her as an obvious lunatic. But then I realized that the rest of the congregation seemed not only to indulge her but to understand her. She was prophesying Glenn Summerford’s miraculous escape from prison, and at about that time, the revelation seemed to sweep over the congregation all at once. Glenn’s mother burst into tears.
    “And there’s nothing the world can do to prevent it!” Daisy said. “The world will have no power against it!” She was standing at the front of the church now, and she pointed her finger into the center of the congregation at some unnamed and unseen adversary. “They’ll have no power against it!”

    With that, she swooned and collapsed onto the front pew. Amen! That’s when Brother Carl stood up to preach. He had one hand in his pocket, and he smiled down at Aunt Daisy as she roused herself to a sitting position on the pew. I would later find out that Brother Carl was like a son to her, and that he took her prophecies dead seriously. At the time, though, I thought he was trying to distance himself from her outburst.
    “It’s hot in here, ain’t it?” he said. Everybody laughed. They knew he wasn’t talking about the temperature, but I thought that he was. I also thought that Carl Porter was a man for whom preaching could not have been a natural or comfortable talent. He had made his way to the pulpit tentatively, like a badger who has just ventured out of his burrow and isn’t entirely easy with what he sees. He wore a rumpled white dress shirt, open at the collar, and polyester slacks. His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose. In the future I’d see a more flamboyant side, but on this night, he was dressed unobtrusively and started out his sermon as though the Lord didn’t have anything particular for him to say. Then he opened up his Bible.
    “Let’s look over here in the second chapter of Acts,” he said. “ And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and
it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of therm. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
    He closed his Bible, looked at it a second, picked it up, looked at it some more, and said, “The Holy Ghost wouldn’t come until they was all of one accord.” Then he turned to us. “That’s what the Word says, and honey, the Word says what it means and it means what it says.”
    There was a chorus of amens from the congregation, and Cecil, the guitar player, ran his finger up the frets with a scree.
    “They was gathered together of one accord,” Brother Carl continued, “and you know, this book wasn’t just written for the apostles. This wasn’t just something that happened to the apostles. When the Holy Ghost came down with tongues of fire and they started speaking in the unknown tongue, God didn’t intend for just the apostles to do that.”
    And here he grimaced, as though he had stepped on something sharp. He ducked to one side of the pulpit and came up bobbing. “Jesus sent the Holy Ghost for us,” he said and slapped the pulpit with the flat of his hand. “You know, some people are still sitting around waiting for the Holy Ghost to come. It already came, at Pentecost! And it’s been
coming ever since! I can feel it all over me right now,” he said. “Whoo!” And he did a little hopping dance on one foot while Cecil plucked the guitar strings in accompaniment. “Whoo! It just goes from my feet all the way to my head. I