Blessed Jesus Hold My Hand
Tim has a long meditation, then goes to visit Donnie Ross
[Hello, dear humans! I’m sorry I’ve been scarce here. During the same week my dad stopped driving, my mom had a surgery with a five-day hospitalization, my day job went hog wild, and I had to call adult protective services on my dad because — well, never mind that. Let’s just say that Tim getting his own mother reported to social services was prescient.
I did republish this story, my favorite ever in some ways, especially when I’m so beside myself with love I can barely breathe. I need Statius to tell me, as he does Dorrie, “Take your husband for granted a bit … ” Of course, I don’t have a husband — but long-time readers will remember Dorrie didn’t, either, at that point. He was just saying it.
Anyhow, back to the Mad Art Project. This story picks up after Fairies and Onions. It’s the evening of the day when Tim and Donovan find evidence that Jethra’s mad art project is bearing fruit — and the fruit’s off crawling around somewhere.
You remember Donnie Ross, the preacher and two-bit Boss Hawg who first tried to hire Tim to find Jethra? Tim’s been avoiding him but now has decided to pay him a visit. The reader knows — but Tim doesn’t — that Donnie Ross actually has Jethra locked in his basement.
Need to catch up? Check out the Table of Contents.]
While they preach sermons in the country, time stretches out like those spiderwebs you walk through but never really leave behind. The webs connect you to the doorway that leads down to the basement Sunday school rooms. Downstairs there’s a fellowship hall, cement-cold, with windows up near the ceiling. At the end of the fellowship hall, two doors indicate the older children’s and preschool Sunday schools. Both are cramped, with construction-paper artwork — think Crayola shepherds with cotton balls glued beside them for sheep — mouldering on the walls.
Grownups sit in a circle of folding chairs in the big room, shivering winter or summer, reading the lesson in the paper booklets that come out, I suppose, from the conference or district or whatever ecclesiastical body governs the rural mission. Doors on either side of the stairs lead to a tiny men’s room and tiny women’s room. You have to be thin to fit into the single stall. The door touches your knees. I remember the plumbing was bad and those rooms smelled of a combination of urine, earth and elbow-grease — the last was represented by the strong aroma of Pine-sol, evidence of the Women’s Cleaning Committee’s efforts to keep those damp-floored restrooms fresh.
I’m describing one church here, the Methodist church where my great-grandmother used to take me before she died. But it could be any little church in Marion County, and I want you to think it’s the church where Donnie Ross grew up and first preached.
There’s no inside route from the basement to the sanctuary. Instead, you climb narrow stairs between whitewashed concrete walls and emerge into the sunshine trailing cobwebs, as I’ve said, from your hair.
Outside at 11 of a June morning it’s already hot. The contrast with the damp, chill underground rooms makes the warmth first welcome, then oppressive. You’re never comfortable here. Not inside, not out.
But it’s beautiful outside. Gnats swarm up, and the air vibrates with cicada song. Seen through waves of heat, oak and pecan leaves waver. You blink and look away. Your great-grandmother (Donnie Ross’s great-grandmother) hands you a peppermint.
(Donnie Ross’s great-grandmother hands the small boy a peppermint. He’s very butch, as I imagine him. Four-year-old Donnie Ross is a real little ruffian, short-legged and barrel-chested, with a mop of black curls and bright black eyes and dangerous knuckles. During sermons he falls into long daydreams. Whatever the preacher says he sees acted out in technicolor right in front of his eyes.)
You climb the tall, poured concrete stairs between the boxwood hedges. Under those boxwoods, children sometimes hide out from their parents. I’m sure, now, girls stole kisses from boys under there now and then. Climbing, you look down and see an amber-rimmed eye gleam at you out of the shadows. A brown thrasher has built her nest among the tiny, glossy leaves.
Then you come to the church doors. Your great-grandmother pulls you forward. You step back into the dark.
The narthex gives on a sanctuary with two aisles of, I believe, seven or eight pews each. Squeeze in eight people on a pew and the sanctuary might hold 50 or 60 folks crowded full. The pulpit and holy table gleam. They’re pecan-colored, as I remember, and always highly waxed. The Women’s Cleaning Committee has no other social life, back in the 1970s; that church always shines.
People mill around and talk, near as I can make out, about each other’s digestion and rheumatism. Lester Phillips changes the numbers on the message board: new date, new attendance figures. Last week’s figures he transfers to the row below, moving one black tile at a time. Never more than a couple of dozen people, usually fewer. The paraments show the liturgical season by their color. June would be green for Pentecost … I think. I never believed, not even then, but these things stick with you somehow. Anyhow, I never went to that church anymore after Granny died. I’m not sure why I remember it in such detail.
(Donnie Ross, who grew up Pentecostalist of some kind, might not have experienced liturgical seasons as a boy. I don’t really know. I do know the sermons he listened to would have been much more expansive and his church crowded to the doors. The preacher would start with the creation of the far-flung stars, focus in on the earth, take the listener through the Fall, the coming of Christ, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the vision of Heaven, the threat of Hell. An hour in, you’d feel the flames licking your feet. You’d be very ready to wail and gnash your teeth as you thought of your eternal fate.
And it’s a big deal if a Methodist boy wants to marry a Pentecostal girl, or was until maybe a generation ago. Two generations, that would be now, of course. Good god, I’m rambling. Let’s get back on track. Green hangings. Honey-colored wood. Peppermints. Yes.)
Old Roy Burgess is coaxing hymn after hymn out of the electric organ. He shifts into the doxology and all dozen congregants stand and sing.
Average age 70. They sound like it.
The preachers stands. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.”
They answer: “And also with you.”
I was going to tell you more about Donnie Ross as a boy, his black curls shorn close, when I imagine him this time. He’s wearing, maybe, one of those too-short sunsuits they used to deck little boys out in. I saw a picture — but never mind that.
Let’s say he’s a youth minister — not a minister to youth, but a young man designated to preach. He’s already broad-backed and swarthy, with ruddy cheeks and good hands. He hasn’t grown that full, firm belly yet. His natural hair’s black-auburn, not that out-of-the-bottle blue-black he wore when I met him decades (how many decades?) later. In another picture, Billy Graham’s shaking his hand.
That’s a puzzle, isn’t it? In that childhood picture I saw, he was wearing a tiny sunsuit circa 1945. In the 1970s he was preaching, running his first beer distribution place — looking mighty damn young for a man born during World War II. He was feuding up and down the county by the 1980s and didn’t leave that off until the next millennium. And when I met him in 2024 — yes, yes, I’ll get to that — he didn’t look much past 60. Younger, maybe.
And he had the strangest effect on people. They came from miles around to hear his sermons. They practically begged him to come to their camp meeting and baptize their children in the cold-water spring. They fell in love with him, though maybe they didn’t recognize the feeling as such.
It’s easy to fall in love when you’re lonely.
My contemporaries spent, let’s see, more than 200 hours a year in those country churches where maybe they were the only child, or one of a handful of children, or the only teenager, or one of a passel of cousins.
There was no one there you could date, anyhow. There’s school but that’s a 45-minute bus ride away and only the town kids stay late for science club or band. You marry Bill because you’re related to Dusty and Bill and Dusty are the only boys who go to your church. Everyone else there is older’n dirt.
This was the adolescence I was creeping toward before those Adventists adopted me and brought me first to South Pittsburg, then to Hamilton County, a few miles north of Chattanooga. I’m only just past 50, and my childhood comes back to me vivid as yesterday, but as I describe it to you, I realize I lived in an alien country.
What world is this?
No internet, remember, and just one newspaper, if your family got it at all, and a single phone in the house, if you had a phone — Momma didn’t — and you were on the party line anyway. If you were a girl your dad might whup you for kissing a boy, but he thought nothing of letting you roam over the mountain to the next valley to see your Mamaw and Papaw. After all, he taught you how to be careful of rattle snakes. How to find north by the stars.
If you had a VHS player and a ride into the city to visit Blockbuster, you might fill your imagination with Labyrinth and Dirty Dancing. But even so, the sermons you heard every Sunday morning, Wednesday night, and camp meeting populated your thoughts with angels and hellfire, submissive virgins and those inexplicable chasms between David and Jonathan, Christ and Thomas. Reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side.
You dreamed the strangest dreams.
Once a girl was in love with Donnie Ross and she dreamed he swallowed her.
Once a girl was in love with Donnie Ross and she dreamed she shrank small as a Barbie doll and he buttoned her inside his shirt and he had breasts, woman’s breasts, but before she could wonder too much about that she struggled deeper, right through his sternum, and was absorbed by him. At first she felt darkness and pressure, as if she was caught in a vein of coal, but then she could see and she could navigate by swimming. Alongside her swam mermaids with hideous heads.
I woke up from that dream in a cold sweat, I can tell you that. And now I can’t get away from it: I have to tell you what happened that night after Momma drew the fairies, after the sheriff’s deputy came by my boarding house, and after Donovan and I saw where Jethra’s mad art project had borne fruit.
Instead of going home, I asked Donovan to drive me to Donnie Ross’s house.
Donnie Ross lived in a white bungalow built in the 1930s, much like other white bungalows built in country towns in the 1930s. I know it wasn’t his family’s house. His people didn’t have anything a hundred years ago, Grin Watson had told me. They lived in some kind of shack.
Anyhow, I couldn’t tell much about the house that time of night, even with the clouds scudding away and the sleet hardening on the frozen grass. I came up on the porch to find it swept clean, set up with a few empty flower pots and some porch furniture — a rocking chair, a few weathered rail-back chairs, and a metal glider. There was a rough-carved wooden cross nailed over the front door.
I couldn’t see any lights on inside. When I peered in the glass panes of the front door, I saw nothing but pale shadow, which puzzled me until I realized there was some kind of gauzy white curtain tacked over the front-door windows.
But I heard someone walking inside.
Of course you don’t tap on the front door at night and expect to be answered, not really, not in Bethlehem, unless of course the inhabitant is the sort to open the door and poke the muzzle of his shotgun in your face. But I went on around down the side porch to the kitchen door. There, light shone through red curtains of some kind. Music was playing:
I need thy light
To guide me day and night
Blessed Jesus hold my hand
I couldn’t make out the words through the door, of course, but I recognized the tune. At the same time I realized there was no cross over this door, the side porch door, the one the master of the house and his accustomed visitors actually used.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t have paid details like that much mind, but Grin Watson had set me thinking with his sold his soul to the Devil talk and then Momma perturbed me a little bit more with her fairy drawings. And those onions or whatever Jethra’s mad art project had caused to sprout in back of her house, those creatures that grew up through the icy muck like it was springtime, then pulled themselves up by the tops and crawled off — where had they gone?
I unsnapped my holster.
I cleared my throat.
I tapped on Donnie Ross’s side-porch door.