Now, I guess I was more than half a heathen when it happened, and I wasn’t really inclined toward reformation. I’d been working in Kentucky for a couple months, and coming home on weekends. I believe I was working with an outfit out of Minnesota on a smoke stack liner at a TVA coal fired power plant.

Anyway, my wife and kids were living on Skyline Mountain in an old house built during the FDR administration by the government. They would put up a house and barn on forty acres, bring in a family give them a mule, wagon and mule drawn farm implements. The idea was to settle the mountains and raise these people up out of poverty all at the same time.

There weren’t many of these houses left, but we were renting this one. Well, I came home one weekend and Janet (my wife) said a gold car had pulled up and a man had come to the door and asked if so and so lived there. She said that what bothered her was that it wasn’t the first, but the second time this same car had hit the yard, and they had asked after someone different the first time.

The word was out that this family was fairly lawless and way more heathen than I was. I didn’t at the time consider myself heathen at all as I worked and paid most of my bills on time. As an aside the unwritten rule for trespassers in our county in North Alabama was if you had to shoot somebody drag “em inside and the sheriffs boys would come haul “em off as shooting someone who had broken in wasn’t against the law and the sheriff understood that you might not want to wait till they got all the way inside. The sheriff only had eight deputies at the time, and they rode two to a car and covered a county 50 miles wide and 30 miles north to south.

I didn’t feel I was going to put up with strangers coming to the house while I was two states away, so I was hoping they’d come by while I was home so I could explain it to them. Janet went to the valley to do some grocery shopping and see her Momma that next Saturday morning and I stayed on the mountain.

I’d say it was about ten thirty when I heard a knock on the door. I eased up to the window beside the door and saw a gold car sitting there in the yard through the edge of the window not covered by the curtain. I didn’t have to think about it long before I snatched up the rifle we kept by the door held it pistol style in one hand and jerking the door open I stuck it up against the stomach I saw there. I said “Can I help you?” as I looked up to this man’s face and then seeing his red hair it hit me. This was the preacher from the local church Janet had said might come by.

I pulled the gun back and set it in the corner while I apologized and said I had been expecting someone else. I invited him in and offered him a seat. He did sit down, but within five minutes he was gone. I believe he was a little flustered. I never did see the other fellow but my policy back then was if they thought you were crazy they left you alone; which was why the gun was handy. Strangers got a look at the gun. We had a long u shaped driveway and since it had been awhile since the house had been lived in people had developed a habit of parking in the drive.

I discouraged this habit by going out the front door with a double barrel twelve gauge on my hip and just looking at them till they started up and left. Word gets around and people find other places to park. Anyway me and the preacher ended up becoming friends later. He sent a different fellow who was friends with my Daddy in law and who called ahead a couple weeks later to invite me to church. I explained about why I’d done what I did and he said he understood but that I had shook the preacher up some and he couldn’t real clear about why he’d stopped by.

The preacher was a good man, and I went to his church more than I’d gone in years.