Ronda Rich

Syndicated Columnist

Make no doubt about it: I was raised in a household of two of the most righteous people who ever lived.

Both were mountain people who never gave a moment’s thought to looking back at the mountain poverty they had escaped. Both came down, out of the hills, and built a better life for themselves. One that including bathrooms and heating that wasn’t from a wood stove.

But when the mountain people needed them, they were gone in a moment. One of Daddy’s quirks was that his gas tank could never be less than three-quarters full. This was in the days when stations closed at 6 but it became a lifelong habit.

“You never know when sumpin’ will happen in the middle of the night and you gotta get to the mountains.”

Daddy had no intention of becoming a bi-vocational preacher. In fact, like many rural men, he ran from the calling for years. Then, one night at Aunt Ozelle’s church revival, Daddy fell in the altar and surrendered.

“When he come up out of that altar, I had no doubt that God had made a new man out of Ralph Satterfield.”

Shortly, a tiny church in a county, fairly equally divided between righteous and renegades, called him to pastor tiny Mill Creek Baptist. He was ordained in a grueling service where other pastors grilled him on the Bible and his theological doctrine.

This was years before I was born but I grew up hearing both loving and sad tales of that church. They loved so many there and, because my Daddy had been born into a band of renegades on his Daddy’s side, he had a powerful understanding of those who ignored the laws of the land. Moonshine. Murder. Gambling.

He never judged. He just tried to steer them in the right direction and to church.

Of all the tales, the most notorious was about four teenagers, drunk, staggering into church, just as the old upright piano began to play, “Just As I Am.” Daddy stepped down from the pulpit and began his plea for the unwashed soul of any who had gathered.

The boys laughed, mocking the preacher. His soft, green eyes watered as he humbly said, “If you don’t know Jesus or where you will spend eternity, don’t leave without making it right. The Bible says tomorrow is not promised.”

They’d had enough. From the back pew, still laughing and cursing, they stumbled out, into the warm August night.

Later, some claimed to have heard the horrendous sound of metal and glass exploding as it wrapped around a tree next to a missed curve. Less than four minutes after stumbling out of church, all four boys were dead.

This I don’t know, but I suspect that Daddy sank down on the cement steps of the church, still in suit and tie, and dropped his head in his hands to pray and silently weep.

Two days later, one of the boys’ aunts made a scene when she marched into the church as Daddy stood over the casket to begin the service. A devout Christian woman, she burst through the door of the church and charged to the altar where she stopped and hauled back — and slapped the corpse across the face as hard as she could.

She turned to those gathered and told them how he had laughed in the preacher’s face two nights earlier. She said more. And it took ahold with at least one of her family.

In the dusty, grassless, red clay dirt, they lowered the handmade casket. Daddy, broken-hearted, prayed, offered condolences to the family, then walked across the graveyard.

“Hey, Preacher, kin ya’ wait up?” called the deceased’s brother.

Daddy stopped. The boy dropped his head. “Kin you pray for me? ‘Cause I wanna go where I know my brother ain’t.”

These words will stick to my heart always.

This is the second in a two-part series. Ronda Rich is a best-selling Southern author.