The Devil in Pew Number Seven (5 page)

That’s when the unexpected happened.

Momma became ill. Not just sick as if she had a head cold. Day after day, she struggled to get out of bed as if shackled to the mattress. Morning would give way to noon, and she’d still be trying to pull herself out from under the covers. When she did manage to emerge, she stumbled through the motions of getting ready to face the day.

She wasn’t depressed. Far from it.

Her husband had a new fire in his eyes as he reported the details of his various meetings. As far as they could tell, they were in the center of God’s will doing exactly what they should be doing. Depression had nothing to do with the queasy, nauseated feeling rocking her emotional boat. The evidence seemed to point in one direction.

With a mixture of faith and apprehension, Momma asked Daddy to take her to see a physician as soon as he could clear his schedule. When the doctor returned with her results, he was all smiles. God had given her another chance to be a mother.

She would finally fill that empty place in her soul.

With me.

During the early weeks of her pregnancy, after the nausea had passed, Momma felt impressed upon her spirit to visit friends in North Carolina while she could still travel. An extended road trip might seem crazy—if not borderline irresponsible—since she had just lost a baby. But she was neither insane nor reckless. I can only imagine that Momma must have had a powerful indication from the Holy Spirit to undertake such a journey while pregnant.

Although Daddy didn’t feel the same tug in his heart, he listened to his bride, trusting that she would have prayed about such an important decision. They traveled to the charming town of Lumberton, North Carolina. A popular rest area for tourists, Lumberton is situated halfway between Florida and New York. The Lumber River, a scenic blackwater river, cuts a whimsical path through the town, adding to its laid-back appeal.

However, Daddy and Momma were not tourists seeking a haven of rest. To be sure, they would have appreciated the local beauty. And, given Daddy’s love of fishing, it’s easy to imagine they made some time to cast their lines in the Lumber River. But they had had their season of rest and now were anxious to be fishers of men.

While in Lumberton, Daddy was invited to bring the morning sermon at a local church. His topic was “Seek Those Things Above.” Upon hearing the passion with which Daddy preached his message, the ministers suggested he sow some seeds of faith in the outlying communities of North Carolina. To my daddy’s way of seeing things, I’m sure the idea of planting the seeds of truth among the area’s farmers had a certain ring about it. Eager to serve, he agreed to their proposal, and three revivals were scheduled.

Their first assignment was to conduct a series of revival services at the Free Welcome Holiness Church, a small independent church eight miles south of Whiteville, North Carolina. Armed only with their Bibles and the conviction that God had opened this door, Daddy and Momma pointed their car south toward Whiteville, a thirty-minute ride.

With fewer than four thousand residents, Whiteville wasn’t exactly a large town. It really wasn’t much larger than a whistle-stop. But at least it was a town, complete with a city hall, bank, grocery store, doctor’s office, gas station, hardware store, motel, and restaurant. As Daddy and Momma continued south, the signs of city life quickly fell away as the two-lane stretch of blacktop took them deeper into the sparsely populated outlying area, closer toward whatever awaited them in Sellerstown.

As Daddy and Momma were quick to discover, while there
was
a street called Sellerstown Road, technically speaking there wasn’t a
city
of Sellerstown—at least not in any official sense of the word. Unlike Whiteville, Sellerstown was little more than a tract of farmland and residential dwellings. No banks, no businesses, no city hall. Just acres of farmland. In spite of the fact that Sellerstown is unincorporated and not noted as a town on any map, the locals had been calling their community by that name for four generations.

They still do.

More than a hundred years ago, four Sellers brothers moved to this beautiful stretch of wide-open country. With an eye on farming, three of the brothers purchased all the land on either side of the two-mile road that would ultimately be named after them. A thousand acres or so became home to their extended family tree, where the Sellers clan promptly put down deep roots in the rich, virgin soil.

There, they built their homes and raised corn, tobacco, and soybeans. For better or worse, they lived, worked, played, and fought together. With a few rare exceptions, everyone in Sellerstown was related to one another in some way. Which is why at times, shotguns in hand, they watched out for one another. The Sellers kin are true salt-of-the-earth people . . . although some were saltier than others.

Willie Sellers
1
comes to mind.
2

* * *

For ten years, Willie Sellers ran a service station. His was an explosive personality, dynamite looking for a reason to detonate. He possessed both a volatile temper and a short fuse. Willie was the kind of hothead you didn’t want to cross. His legendary anger would flare up at the slightest provocation.

What’s more, Willie was obsessed with the thought that someone might swipe a pack of cigarettes or a stick of gum without paying. He patrolled his turf with an eagle’s eye. No one would take advantage of him, not if he could help it. If a stranger walked in seeking directions, Willie got straight to the point, having no use for small talk. Chitchatting was for women. Assisting the customer took a backseat to running a tight ship.

If there was one thing that made Willie madder than a hornet’s nest when poked by a stick, it was hired help that didn’t show up to work. Such was the case one Saturday morning in the mid-1960s. Left alone to pump gas, fill kerosene cans, and run the register, Willie ran back and forth, in and out of the store, like a headless chicken. Midmorning, with more business than he could juggle, Willie called his cousin E. J. Sellers and asked if he could lend a hand. E. J. would pump the gas while Willie watched the store.

Glad to help, E. J. arrived and got busy, although Willie remained in a sour mood, his forehead perpetually snarled in a knot. As E. J. tells it, three youth in their midtwenties rolled to a stop at the pumps. Who they were or where they were going was no business of his. Minding his own affairs, E. J. gassed the car and washed the windshield, applying enough elbow grease to adequately scrub away all visible bug remains. With that done, the driver stepped out of the car, entered the building, and paid his bill.

On the way out, however, he took a quart of oil from the display case between the pumps without paying for it. At the time, a quart of oil cost all of twenty-five cents. Still, money was money, and E. J. wasn’t about to let the guy off the hook. When he asked for payment for the oil, the driver denied taking it. Words were exchanged, but neither the oil nor the payment was handed over.

E. J. went inside and told Willie what had transpired. The news was more than Willie could handle, the final straw in an otherwise horrendous day, at least from Willie’s heated point of view. He raced to the back room of the store, grabbed a pistol from the shelf as if arming for battle, then sprinted outside to confront the driver as he opened his car door.

Willie barked so loud, anyone within a block would have heard him: “Hey, you! Did you take that quart of oil? You owe me!”

The driver turned and stood his ground. “I didn’t take no oil, and I ain’t paying for oil I didn’t take.”

“I’m warning you,” Willie yelled. “Pay me for that or else—”

The driver told Willie to back off—only in making his point he used a string of profanity as colorful as the shades of red on Willie’s face, which was about as smart as pouring gasoline on a bonfire. The young man hopped in his car and started the engine to leave. E. J. watched in stunned silence as Willie raised his gun and shot the driver—and, in the heat of the moment, one of the other passengers as well, for reasons E. J. still doesn’t understand.

Never in a thousand years did E. J. think his cousin would actually pull the trigger. He knew Willie could lose his cool, especially if he had been drinking. But Willie hadn’t touched a drink all day. He was just at the boiling point when the heat was turned up. If E. J. had had any inkling that his cousin was capable of taking a man’s life, he would have kept the incident to himself and gladly paid for the oil out of his own earnings.

The passenger who had been shot lived.

The driver, however, died.

The law was called, and Willie Sellers was arrested. His family was quick to raise the $100,000 bail money, and Willie was released. When the tragic incident went to trial, E. J. was called to testify. If E. J. was shocked by the senseless murder, he was dumbfounded when the jury returned a “not guilty” verdict.

* * *

Less than thirty minutes after leaving Whiteville, Daddy and Momma spotted Sellerstown Road, a side street branching off to the right. Tucked in the shadow of the Route 701 Service Center—a one-story, two-pump gas, snack, and repair station—it would have been easy for them to miss the turnoff. Considering the events soon to take place on Sellerstown Road, it might have been better if they had.

They slowed, then turned right.

Watts Farm Supply, immediately on the left-hand side of the street, greeted them. As the only game in town, the store provided the necessary nuts and bolts to keep the farming community running smoothly. Parked behind this white, cinder block building, a modest collection of trucks, tractors, and trailers in various stages of disrepair sprouted from the field like turnips. The neglected and forgotten assortment of clutter stood in stark contrast to the otherwise serene country setting they had enjoyed since leaving Whiteville.

Aside from this disheveled patch of land, to the naked eye there was nothing ominous about the Sellerstown community. No dark, sinister clouds lying low like a shroud in the sky. No sudden heaviness in the air. No uneasy feeling, premonition of impending doom, or even a lone black vulture circling overhead, keeping watch in anticipation of death.

My parents didn’t have the slightest reason to turn back. They didn’t know about Willie Sellers, who settled disputes with a gun. Besides, they had a host of reasons for pressing on. They had been called, they had their marching orders, and now they were headed to Sellerstown to do the Lord’s work. It would be up to God to reap a harvest of souls.

As they had done before the start of every revival, once they arrived in Sellerstown, my parents planned to meet their local contact, survey the hall where the revival services would be held, and then find a place to stay for the duration of the meetings. They knew a member of the congregation might provide accommodations in his home. Plan B usually meant setting up housekeeping in a nearby, inexpensive motel—though they soon discovered Sellerstown had none.

Although I can’t say for sure, they probably drove toward their destination with the windows rolled down. It was, after all, a typical sunbaked day in Sellerstown. The mid-eighty-degree temperatures were the by-product of an August sun standing high and proud in the sky as if it were about to receive an award. Without air conditioning in their 1964 Plymouth, a brown sedan which had seen better days, it’s safe to say they would have invited the token breeze to bring some relief.

Within a minute of turning onto Sellerstown Road, they passed Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, a humble white, cinder block structure, no larger than a four-car garage, planted like a cemetery headstone in a small plot. A clutch of tall trees surrounded the property like sentries, with just enough of a clearing to permit parking on the grassy side yard.

This, they would learn, was where the black folk attended, with room for no more than forty or fifty worshipers. Most of the members worked as hired help on the local farms in this agricultural community.

As the church took its place in their rearview mirror, they smelled, then saw, a tobacco barn fifty paces from the road. A gentle wind filled the air with the sweet, almost fruity scent of drying tobacco and a hint of freshly turned earth. As picturesque as a page torn out of
Southern Living
, rows of perfectly planted cornstalks, too numerous to count, awaited their turn for harvest in the unhurried patchwork of farmland beyond the barn.

Behind a trailer at the far end of the field, laundry pinned to clotheslines swayed as the grayish white lengths of rope drooped under their loads. Directly across the street on the right-hand side of Sellerstown Road, a second church appeared: the Free Welcome Holiness Church. The modest one-story, redbrick building, accented with six windows, backed up to cornfields and felt instantly inviting, even though the white front doors remained closed.

Adjacent to the church stood a newly constructed, almost-completed parsonage. Daddy had been informed that the church had been without a pastor for some months and the sheep were scattering without a shepherd. Perhaps the congregation, twelve women and one man, thought building a residence for the minister would attract a new candidate to fill the pulpit. Whatever their motivation, building the homestead certainly was a giant step of faith for such a small church family to undertake.

My hunch is that Daddy, having served in the Navy and out of habit, might have cruised the length of Sellerstown Road, conducting an informal reconnaissance of the area before stopping inside the church. A preliminary survey would give him a better feel for his audience during Sunday’s revival. It was just as likely to prompt a few local metaphors with which to illustrate his message.

If so, Daddy and Momma would have counted an assortment of prefabricated single-wide and double-wide mobile homes resting on stacks of cinder blocks; ranch-style homes, some made of brick, others sporting clapboard siding; three barns with sagging rooflines; and a number of weathered feed shelters peppering the landscape.

When they ultimately arrived back at the church, they were greeted by Rev. Lonzie Sellers and his wife, Alma. Although formally retired, Rev. Sellers had offered his preaching services until a proper replacement could be found. True to form, Rev. and Mrs. Sellers gladly opened their home to my parents with all the Southern hospitality you might expect from a couple who freely gave their lives in the service of others.