To Dance with God

By Andrew Hersom

Honest-to-goodness miracle workers were not welcomed by the Pastor of Rome County Kentucky's snake-handling church. Josiah David Fitzpatrick Sr. was averse to being shown up by anyone, especially his blood-crying son, JoJo. Growing up in the Ku Klux Klan, in the 1970s, with a sociopathic father and a child-molesting stepmother was a daily struggle all by itself. But the day six-year-old JoJo gave sight to his eyeless best friend, Larissa, in the presence of his father's church, the need to escape Rome County became a matter of life and death. JoJo had to leave to save himself and his older brother, Judas, and stepsister, Ruth. The journey would open JoJo's spiritual eyes to his own darkness and teach him that the meaning of life is, and always has been, to dance with God.

A story of the supernatural, To Dance with God introduces us to the blood criers in the world, that see beyond the darkness of man with an impossible love not their own. The story transcends organized religion with the underlying truth of us all—that we are the most alive when we love each other.

The author can be reached at [e-mail].

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781683484394

Book preview

The Church of the Rattlesnakes

I was seven years old the night I learned the meaning of life is to dance with God. Mine were not the only eyes to have wept tears of blood, but I have shed more than most who have come before me, perhaps. I took the life of my own mother, have seen into eternity, and given health to the sick, all with crimson tears staining my cheeks. Besides all that, I was a normal boy, I suppose.

I am a grown man now, the result of two lives that intertwined the day the sun went out to bring me into a dark world. On April 27, 1970, life and death collided, giving birth to the child who would accidentally destroy generations of his own family’s hatred by his eighth year of life. I am that child.

It was a warm cloudless spring day under a stark azure sky before the light went out on an otherwise perfectly normal childbirth—well, normal for members of the cult my parents belonged to. An eclipse of the sun occurred outside the small illegal church where I was born, and when it did, all hell broke loose. That’s when my mom took her last breath, surrounded by the sisters of our snake-handling Pentecostal church that probably never should have existed.

Us kids called our place of worship The Church of the Rattlesnakes. It was neatly hidden in the dogwood-draped hills of Rome County, Kentucky, and my father, Josiah David Fitzpatrick Sr., was its pastor. It was his idea that all the congregation’s children be born there.

Daddy was the biggest, meanest man in Northern Kentucky. Not even the nastiest drunk on his worst night would dare tangle with him. He stood a full 6’9" tall and weighed four hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce. He wore his thinning copper-colored hair slicked back by his musky, ever-present sweat and had fat mutton-chop sideburns like Elvis used to have before he died. Daddy’s bottle-cap eyeglasses that futilely tried to uncross his narrow blue eyes made him look like Mr. Magoo and Foghorn Leghorn had a lovechild that neither of them wanted.

During the war in Vietnam, my father started calling himself a patriot. He really prided himself on being patriotic and religious, but that only meant he hated anyone who wasn’t a white-bred racist like him. He turned prejudice into an art form that somehow made people take him seriously as a man of God, charged with leading the Church of the Rattlesnakes into hell.

Daddy’s fear tactics made him a convincing preacher, if not a supremely hypocritical one. He rebuilt the Church of the Rattlesnakes, as I knew it, near the start of America’s involvement in Vietnam, at his ailing father’s request. It wasn’t very much of a building really, barely more than a shack. It looked more like a small barn, except that it had a wood floor and no loft. On the outside,

it was painted in camouflage to help keep it hidden in the woods. No one bothered locking its doors, since there was nothing there worth going through the trouble of stealing (unless you consider a few aquariums full of venomous serpents worth stealing, those and the bales of hay from my grandfather’s horse farm that served as pews). The only things of value—an old canvas army cot for births and snakebite victims, along with two ten-gallon cans of gas, and an electricity generator—were stored in a padlocked outhouse about twenty yards up the hill behind the church.

Only the congregation’s women were allowed to witness my birth. That was a rule long before my father became the pastor. One of those in attendance would thereafter become my stepsister, and I think my mama knew it somehow. Her name was Ruth; she acted as my momma’s midwife, which was more than a little unusual, since Ruth was only eight years old that day. It was as if Momma knew she wouldn’t survive and how much Ruth would love me in her stead.

Momma died before the umbilical cord could be cut, with her and my eyes full of blood. In a superstitious cult like ours, the eclipse’s darkness and our bloody eyeballs would be counted as a very bad omen. As it was, I was blamed for my mother’s death for the first seven years of my life. Thankfully Ruth, young as she was, was quick on her feet. She cleaned off our bloody faces with her underwear before the sun could return to expose our family secret. That was all Ruth had that could easily be hidden. She just put her underwear back on under the ankle-length dress all the women of the church wore.

Ruth was young, but my mother picked her to be my godmother in her will. She was also the only person on earth that my mother told what crying bloody tears meant. It was hardly a good thing, too—at least not at first. But sometimes the meaning of a thing can change from one generation to the next. There is such a thing as divine intervention . . .

People in Rome County still say the eclipse that day let in my guardian angel unannounced. Inexplicable things have haunted my entire life, but that doesn’t mean that whatever the cause is is an angel. In my family April 27 tends to open the door to a lot of unnatural forces, and not all of them could be considered welcome or angelic. After all, my mother died the same day. Thank the Lord above she gave me Ruth to take her place.

Five short days after my birth, and two even shorter days after my mother’s funeral, my obese father married Ruth’s recently widowed mother, and Ruth became my big sister. But she was more than that. Ruth shared a bed with me. She changed every cloth diaper, fed me every meal, sang every lullaby, and read every bedtime story. Ruth taught me how to read and tie my shoes. She was every bit my mother as if I’d come out of her own womb. To be honest, Ruth Anne Harper-Fitzpatrick was my whole world . . . and that’s where I went wrong.

I often lamented that Ruth had to be raised by the same father who made my life hell with his religion. We were forced to endure five services a week and at home studies that used Daddy’s hand-written propaganda as a study guide. It was classic brainwashing 101, and it was very effective.

The only reason I gave a damn about church at all had nothing to do with saving my eternal soul and everything to do with being near my soul mate, a sweet little girl by the name of Larissa Hansen, who held my heart in her tiny hand. She was my first and only love. She was four years old when I entered the first grade, and she was one of two reasons I became a writer and learned to read so early. Larissa was born totally blind, and I used to read to her and lead her by the hand anywhere she wanted to go. I still remember her light brown hair and big soft blue eyes that always seemed to be smiling. Everyone knew her as the skinny, knobby-kneed girl who spoke with a stutter and always wore candy necklaces until I gave her her sight one fateful Christmas. After that, she was my best friend, and she made the Church of the Rattlesnakes worth attending—and worth burning to the ground.

Ruth and Larissa were the two biggest relationships in my life in those days. But they weren’t the only ones. There was another sibling under my roof, and my relationship with him was much more complicated.

Chapter Two

Judas

To say I was an exceptional child wouldn’t have been a stretch of anyone’s imagination. That I wept blood merely scratched the surface of who I was. I was also a prodigy when it came to writing and a literal miracle worker when it came to those I loved. I saw into eternity to behold the very face of God. Maybe I would have become arrogant for all my gifts, had the good Lord not seen fit to give me an older brother to keep me humble. And if keeping me humble was his job, he did it very good—maybe too good. In some ways my brother was even more important to the church than Daddy.

Sometimes at church none of the men, including Daddy, would attend. When that happened, usually about once a month, the women and children were forced to endure a pre-recorded rant about how good wives and children ought to submit their wills to good husbands and fathers. Not surprisingly, no one ever explained what the definition of a good husband and father was. But whether or not the men were at church service, the snakes always were. The Good Book says in the gospel of Saint Mark: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.

So Daddy, completely ignoring the fact that Jesus also said: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, brought the rattlesnakes and watered-down poison. Over the years people died as a result, and it was my big brother’s responsibility to dispose of their bodies. It was shameful in the extreme. When a brother or sister died of poison or snake venom, Daddy said they had no faith and didn’t deserve a proper funeral. I just thought it was murder. I was led to believe God had a really sick sense of humor, but I never did get the joke.

The second reason I learned to read so young, after learning for Larissa, was to see for myself if all the self-serving lies Daddy spouted about what the Bible says were true. He figured if he yelled loud enough, people would believe him—and people actually did, to the point of burying the corpses of the so-called faithless. The man was an expert at exploring man’s sheep-like nature, but so is the devil. He forced his own teenage son to handle the bodies of his victims and intimidated the boy into keeping his mouth shut about it. To say there was a hostile family dynamic under the roof of the aluminum-sided trailer I grew up in would be very understated.

I’d have lost my sanity if God didn’t also give me Ruth. She took such good care of me it was rumored she made herself lactate so she could be my wet nurse. When I asked her about it, she laughed and said that was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. She insisted eight-year-olds don’t have anything to lactate with. Then she hugged me real tight and said, But if I could have, I would have. That was Ruth. But she was only one side of my sibling coin.

There was also my brother. He was ten years old on the day I was born, and he begged Daddy to trade me for a new bicycle. Interestingly enough, my brother’s name was Judas, Jude for short, after the man who betrayed Jesus of Nazareth. I never did learn why my parents gave him such a notorious name, but you’ll see how it fit him.

Judas was the first person to tell me that I killed our mother. It was on a Sunday night in August when Larissa’s momma told me about the eclipse at my birth. It was an otherwise pleasant evening. Every Sunday after church, Larissa’s family ate supper with mine and spent the night telling us kids stories about the past. I used to love those sessions until that muggy night I was stupid enough to ask Judas about the details surrounding my birth. Keep in mind that up until that very moment, I believed Barbara Fitzpatrick (Ruth’s addle-minded mother), who sat beside me senselessly giggling to herself, was my real momma. I was in Ruth’s lap, and with Barbara and Larissa’s mother there, I didn’t expect Judas to get so nasty. Metaphorically speaking, asp venom dripped from my brother’s tongue.

You were so ugly God blocked out the sun so Momma didn’t have to look at you, he growled angrily. But she saw you anyway, and the sight of you was so horrible it killed her, and Daddy had to marry Ruthy’s momma. It was all your fault, damn it.

That was just the way my ornery brother was. He was an uncivilized, godless, corpse-hiding redneck who’d hump anyone who’d stand still long enough. But that day what he said broke my heart. In three simple sentences he took my real mother away, exposed Barbara as a lie, and told me Ruth wasn’t actually my sister. How does such a deluded little boy respond to something like that?

My real momma’s dead? I whispered tragically. Ruth, you’re not my sister?

Of course, I’m your sister, she insisted, kissing my forehead before turning her attention to Judas. She lifted me from her lap with eyes that burned into my brother’s soul with all the wrath of God. You were just a bowel movement, she snapped through gritted teeth as she got to her feet. That’s why you’re so jealous of JoJo, because his life matters and you were just a horny accident your daddy never wanted!

When Judas stood up, Ruth punctuated her statement by launching her foot into his groin so hard even I felt it. In bed that night Ruth more gently explained about my real momma and how she (Ruth) was chosen to be my godmother. I wasn’t sure what that word meant, but I thanked her for beating up Judas for me that night. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t stay mad at him long enough . . .

I told you about that fight between my brother and sister to give you a sense of the confusion I experienced the night I discovered just how close they really were; even then I didn’t know the half of it. It happened not one month later.

I shared a bed with my sister so Judas, being the eldest son, could enjoy the privacy of his own room. Or maybe I slept in Ruth’s bed to keep my older brother out. In any other family, a little boy sharing a bed with a stepsister, eight years older than him, might seem inappropriate and strange for the boy. But our sleeping arrangement was established when I was less than one week old. It was my normal. It only got weird when Judas wormed his way in. I don’t know how long it was going on before that fateful moonless night, but that night Jude crept into my room hoping I’d fallen asleep with an agenda between him and Ruth I don’t think any boy my age could have figured on.

He’s asleep, I heard Ruth tell my brother about me. I had no earthly idea why she lied to him. Ruth and I had been whispering a conversation between us just mere seconds before Jude slithered into the dark room. I took it to mean two things, and both of them profoundly disturbed me: First, I took it to mean I was supposed to pretend to be asleep, which I did; and second, Ruth’s not-so-innocent lie told me that she wanted me to witness her acting like a mother in every sense of the word. Hell, she was just a kid, too; we all were just doing our best to survive the toxic world God or fate dropped us into. Still, no boy ever wants to see his brother and sister doing that.

When Jude climbed into our bed, Ruth stealthily patted the back of my naked leg beneath the covers to let me know that she knew I was conscious. It was a comforting stroke, as if to tell me, Don’t worry. There’s a good reason I want you to see what’s about to happen.

Are you sure, Ruth? He’s not snoring, Judas whispered, sounding uncharacteristically afraid. I’d never seen my brother scared of anything, much less whether or not I was asleep. Whatever reason he was there must have been very serious, and my curiosity was piqued.

My head was facing away from them when Judas awkwardly mounted my sister, but I could just make them out through the mirror on the dresser next to my side of the bed.

He’s not snoring ’cause he’s sleeping on his stomach, Jude. He never snores when he sleeps on his stomach, Ruth’s voice quivered in a hurry-up-and-do-what-you-came-for tone that told me my brother’s visit wasn’t as welcome as I first thought. It was more of a necessary evil than a pleasure visit.

And then Judas very amateurishly bounced up and down for all of twenty seconds. But what really confused me was that he choked her as he did. As a grownup I get that people have sexual and psychological fetishes, but I was just a kid then. Seeing my brother’s bony fingers clamped around Ruth’s ivory throat had me stumped on human behavior for years, considering the contorted twist of ecstasy on Jude’s face. My brother couldn’t have been angry at her, and even if he was really trying to hurt her, she would have slapped him stupid, like she’d done so many times before. Instead it looked like they were playing a game like Twister—a game Ruth seemed to win but Judas enjoyed a whole lot more.

I think you bruised my neck, Jude, Ruth said, worried, sitting up when he was done with her. He produced the small keychain flashlight he used to stalk around the trailer in the dark to check.

All I see are freckles, sis, but you better double-check in the morning to be sure, Jude whispered and pulled away before Ruth could lean forward to kiss him. Even watching through the mirror in the dark I could see how much that hurt her fragile teenage heart. Jude didn’t care at all. He just slinked away into the night as quietly as he came, leaving me almost hating him for the nocturnal visit. When I secretly wished my brother harm, I didn’t think my wish would come true so soon . . . But I’ll get to that.

Hey, Ruth said, leaning over to switch on the lamp on her side of the bed. We need to talk, JoJo.

But I didn’t want to talk to her. Part of me knew what they did was what only mommas and daddies were allowed to do, but I pretended I was ignorant. I grew up an avid skinny-dipper with the other kids of Rome County and knew the physical differences between boys and girls, and even how those differences fit together. But that wasn’t something I ever thought about until that night—and now Ruth wanted to talk about it with me. Well, I wasn’t in a talking mood. As far as I was concerned, Ruth was still my perfect big sister, who did nothing more than play Twister and breathe really hard with our brother. No big deal.

Turn off the light, sissy, I demanded, shielding my eyes from the intrusive artificial light. Some things were better left in the dark!

Listen to me, JoJo. You can’t tell anyone, especially Momma and Daddy, that Judas ever came in our room tonight, Ruth warned, turning out the light. I stared at her, silently allowing my eyes to adjust to the reclaimed darkness. Like almost everybody else to meet me, it terrified Ruth when I stared into her eyes with the preternatural gaze I inherited from my real mother. But all I was thinking at the time was, Really, sis, we’re going to talk about all this carnal mess now? I didn’t mean to frighten her.

I think that big ole bruise on your chubby little neck will tell Daddy for me, I snapped, sounding serious.

What! she yelped, much too loud, before turning the light back on to check herself in the mirror.

Just kidding, I snapped, knowing her outburst would wake up our parents.

Keep it down in there! Daddy’s angry voice sailed through the paper-thin walls, sending Judas the message I wanted to send: Don’t ever bounce on Ruth when I’m in the same bed again— ever.

Now Judas knows I was awake, I whispered, still staring into Ruth’s frightened eyes.

Sorry, Daddy, Ruth called. I just had a bad dream is all.

At the time, I had no way of knowing how afraid of our father my brother and sister were. If I lived to be one thousand years old, I never would have guessed what Ruth and Judas did that night was the beginning of a carefully thought out plan to escape his cruelty forever, cruelty I was about to learn of firsthand.

Chapter Three

A Father’s Cruelty

When Daddy shouted at Ruth and me through the bedroom wall, I faced my clearly shaken sister with a pseudo-innocent oh-did-I-wake-Daddy look on my dumbly smiling face.

You did that on purpose, Ruth quietly accused, more shocked at my behavior than angry with me. You’re a real April fool. You know that, JoJo? She grabbed me by the ears to kiss me on my mouth as my punishment, knowing how much I hated anyone’s lips touching mine. I was so upset by what I’d just seen in that bedroom I didn’t have the energy to fight her off or wipe my lips clean with my forearm.

Why did Judas choke you? I ventured, unsure if I wanted to know the answer. Ruth, inexperienced as she was, probably didn’t have any idea why, but I couldn’t have known that at the time. I could tell by how she quizzically furrowed her brow that the question got her thinking more than she wanted to, which was something I was good at getting the people I loved to do. At least she didn’t seem embarrassed. I wasn’t trying to make her uncomfortable. I just needed to know.

It’s just another part of S.E.X. Ruth mouthed the letters after a long pregnant pause. The most important thing is not telling, little brother. If Daddy ever finds out about this, he’ll beat me and Judas somethin’ fierce, ’cuz sex is a bad way to feel good.

Daddy said just about everything that made people feel even just a little bit of pleasure was sinful, but I couldn’t imagine he’d beat up his own children