Content Warning: This story might test the boundaries of some readers.
These events takes place in the summer of 2013
“Jesus Christ is your friend!”
The congregation began to stir and look at one another in confusion as the small, wizened man dressed entirely in black didn’t say anything but stared at them for what seemed like a very long 60 seconds. He gripped the pulpit and looked angry as his black eyes drifted across them.
“Jesus Christ is your friend!”
This time there was a timid ‘yes’ from the back of the church and the pastor leaned over over his pulpit like a bird of prey as he tried to see who spoke.
“Whoever said that stand up.”
He narrowed his eyes and grimaced as he watched a teenage girl stand up and flush with embarrassment. The man’s face was a changing map of wrinkles with each change of expression. His grey hair was shaved in a poorly executed brush cut and there were bald patches and ugly scabs on his scalp. His skin was burned an angry red from sunburn that was peeling away and leaving behind oozing raw patches. He was lean as rawhide but fat with rage and self righteousness.
“Anyone else? Would anyone else like to stand with this young woman and declare that Jesus Christ is your friend?” The desiccated man behind the pulpit was Elijah Powell and he was a pastor that had recently returned from mission duty in Nigeria. He was standing in for a sick pastor Johnson and the members of this church in Pleasant Grove, Alabama had never seen him before.
Members of the church started to stand and Pastor Elijah watched them with a sour expression until the entire congregation was on their feet. The different parts of his features didn’t match. The skin of his face was twisted in a rictus of pain but his mouth smiled while his black eyes were fierce and angry. Witnesses would later call them crazy eyes.
“Hallelujah! Praise the lord and take your seats again.”
The congregation sat down and some of them looked pleased as if they had passed a test of faith. Their attention was fixed on the scarecrow figure of the missionary man as he walked around the pulpit, crackling with energy like a transformer hit by lightning.
“The hand of God has brought me to your church for a holy purpose. I am here to save your damned souls. I am here to tell you that Jesus Christ is not your friend!”
The first young woman to stand up gasped with shock. The rest of the congregation became unnaturally still and silent. No one raised their voice in objection because of a lifetime of conditioning that told them to be quiet during a sermon.
“Jesus Christ preaches love! Christ preaches acceptance. Christ preaches the forgiveness of sins. I’m here to tell you that you’ve been told a pack of lies all of your sorry, ignorant lives!”
The missionary man paced in front of the horrified people with his arms spasming in a sequence of violent gestures as if he was chopping down an unholy foe that was trying to silence him. “Christ is not the son of God! Christ is the son of Satan sent to Earth to preach a message of weakness that has damned the soul of every so called ‘Christian.’ You are damned! You are damned! You are damned!”
With each pronouncement of damnation he pointed toward a different section of the church as long strings of saliva spun out out of his screaming mouth.
“My God is a vengeful God! My God is a God of righteousness. Jesus Christ is a son of Satan that has damned legions of humanity to an eternity of torment and hellfire!”
A black clad arm reached back and the missionary man plucked a bible off the pulpit and held it high over his head. “Our bible, our book of God, has been tainted by the corrupt, Satanic rantings of the new testament.”
He threw the bible on the ground and split it in half to separate the testaments of the old and new. A butcher knife was pulled out from inside his jacket and he attacked the bible as if it was alive. Soon he held up the old testament and kicked away the new testament as if it was radioactive.
“This is my bible! This is where you will find the God that preaches death to the perverts, death to the sinner, death to the foreigner! There is no love in God! There is no love in the world!”
The teenaged girl who had first pronounced Jesus was her friend screamed at the sight of the holy bible being desecrated and at the blasphemy howling out of the mouth of the missionary man.
He focused on her and tilted his head as he stared through her with a rictus of gleeful pain on his sunburned face. “Woman! You so-called friend of Jesus! You are a whore of Satan and I will send you to join him!”
She screamed again as he ran toward her with a butcher knife in one hand and a mutilated bible in the other. The second scream woke up the other members of the congregation who had been frozen like mice hypnotized by a weaving cobra.
The missionary man was tackled by two strong farm boys who were shocked by the maniacal strength possessed by an old man half their size. More men from the congregation piled on him before he managed to stab anyone.
“You are all damned!” He screamed in a voice cracking from strain. “Damned for all eternity!” He only became quiet when he sank his jagged brown teeth into the forearm of one of his captors.
Braxton Lee was sheriff of Pleasant Grove, Alabama. Pleasant Grove had graduated from a large town into a small city sometime back in the 90’s but Sheriff Lee still called it his town and most of the residents agreed with him. Whether or not that was a good thing depended on your level of income and the colour of your skin.
Sheriff Lee had beautiful blue eyes that looked out of place on his meaty face. He stood six foot four and was 240 lean pounds of easily provoked sadism. He had been in church yesterday and put handcuffs on the missionary man after he bit the arm of one of the members of the church. If there hadn’t been so many witnesses Braxton would have done a lot more than handcuff him but there would be other opportunities.
He leaned against the cell bars and stared at the small old man that had caused so much mayhem in his town. The missionary man turned the dried apple he called a head and stared back at him with black eyes that burned right into his blue irises. The sheriff found he couldn’t match that unhallowed gaze and pretended to cough so he could break eye contact without losing face.
He was a big ex- marine, current god of law and order in Pleasant Grove and widely acknowledged as one tough, mean son of a bitch. Why did this tiny missionary locked safely inside a cell still scare the shit of him?
Sheriff Lee knew the full story on Elijah Powell. Recently returned from missionary work in Nigeria where he was involved in a scandal involving young girls and boys that nobody at the church wanted to talk about. They believed pastor Elijah had lost his mind after his body had been ravaged by malaria in Africa. He became erratic, violent and an embarrassment to the church. He had been living in an isolated retreat near Pleasant Grove until he escaped and attacked pastor Johnson so he could take his place in church last Sunday.
“You’re lucky you didn’t kill pastor Johnson or get to Jacqueline with that knife or you’d be up for murder.”
The missionary waved his hand languidly as if this was no concern. “God decided to spare them.”
“You’re pretty casual for someone who just missed getting the death penalty.”
“I’m not afraid to meet my God. Are you?”
Sheriff Lee snorted and patted the .357 magnum holstered on his hip. “My God is right here and I met him a long time ago.”
The man in the cell gave him a look of scorn. “Someday you will eat your God.”
Braxton found he had to look away again. Ever since his wife had left him after one too many casual slaps across her face he had spent drunken nights sitting on the couch with a gun barrel in his mouth. How could this bastard have known that? It hadn’t been a guess. This psycho burned with certainty.
“Turn around and put your hands behind your back. It’s time to transfer you to prison while you wait for trial.”
The missionary man stared at Braxton with that rictus smile of his for a good long while before he stood up from his cot and complied with the sheriff’s orders.
Sheriff Lee didn’t take any chances with pastor Elijah as he transferred him to the back of his cruiser. He held Elijah’s cuffed hands with his own left hand and steered his prisoner with a firm right hand on the shoulder. He remembered the insane strength this small man exhibited when four big old boys could barely hold on to him. He did not want to be the next one bitten by this rabid dog.
The passenger in the back of the cruiser turned his head as they passed the turnoff to the highway that would take them to the waiting prison. He made no comment when the cruiser turned down a poorly maintained road that led to a small industrial development. The missionary man was in the hands of God and felt no emotion except for a mild curiosity.
The sheriff eased the car to a stop behind a long vacant factory that had most of its windows broken. Shards of glass crunched under the tires of the car and then the soles of his boots as he left the cruiser and opened the back door.
The prisoner exited the rear seat and looked at his surroundings. They had parked far from the road and the the road was a long way from anyone’s home. Birds flew in and out of the broken windows of the factory. Some of them perched on windowsills and watched the two intruders as if they were expecting a show.
The sheriff made a twirling motion with his finger and pastor Elijah obediently turned around so his cuffs could be removed. He absently rubbed at the marks on his wrists the cuffs had left behind and looked at the sheriff with a questioning expression.
“This factory used to make auto parts back in the day, body trim, interior trim, stuff like that. ‘Course now they make it cheaper down in Mexico and the bean eaters have all our jobs.”
He turned and pointed out another small factory that had made electronics parts, also shuttered. Sheriff Braxton Lee knew his town. He was also a high school football coach, deacon in his church and a grand titan for the local Dominion of the Klan.
“I was listening to your message in church pastor.” The sheriff removed his sunglasses and rubbed his knuckles against the stubble on his cheek. “The libtards just elected a monkey for president the second time in a row and we got filthy immigrants flooding across our border like it wasn’t even there. I think it’s time for a little old time religion.”
He nodded toward an office building that was in better shape than most of the vandalized factories. “That’ll be your new church over there. I think your message is what we need to make this country great again.”
The missionary man joined his hands together at his back as if he was standing at attention in front of his lord. “It is good to meet a fellow man of God. Bring me my flock and I will spread the word.”
The song ‘Missionary Man’ was one side of a 7” album. On the other side was ‘Take Your Pain Away.’ Here is a link to Nathan Hatch’s story ‘Take Your Pain Away.’
So true, and it was a good writ! Have a wonderful Easter day ahead!
Very deep, very sleek, thought provoking.