Going Through Hell Into God's Grace

By Dennis McQuaig

The book was written about my life that covers all the bad things I went through and bad things I did. It covers things about the military and the prison he worked in and the life that inmates go through including, his time working on death roll and how execution are carried out in the state of Florida. It also covers his time when he also became a inmate himself. Wanted to write about what happens when a person comes out the system and how going through hell doesn't mean that you can't receive God's Grace. This book is about a journey that many others have gone through but don't want to change because they live in the past and blame the past for their own actions. Anyone can obtain God's Grace, it is free. God sent His son to die for everyone so that we may have His Grace though Him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889827337

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

About the Author

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Going Through Hell Into God's Grace

Dennis McQuaig

Copyright © 2023 Dennis McQuaig

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2023

ISBN 979-8-88982-732-0 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88982-733-7 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Introduction

I am writing this book because I want to inspire others to realize that you can go through hell your entire life and still receive the grace of God, no matter how bad it was or how bad the things that you have done to others.

While doing the prison ministry and homeless ministry, I heard so many stories of the reasons they were in prison or on the streets. I gave them my short testimony about my life and how I have been where they are. They usually will ask me how I changed my life. I always respond by saying you asked the right question. Anyone who wants to change their life will either ask how or what it takes. I tell them it always begins with being tired of the life that they are living. The ones who don't want to change will always make up excuses about why they are in prison or on the streets, and their growing-up experiences are usually someone else's fault. It's never their fault, or they can't catch a break.

I want to be able to reach more people from my life experience and let them see that no matter what happened in the past or what others have done to them, God's grace will save them and change them–if they are willing to let God work through them. It starts with each person accepting blame and responsibility for their own mistakes. They must want to change. No one can change them if they don't want to change. Not the courts, not their family, and not through counseling. They must want to change themselves by asking that one question: How do I change my behavior?

There will be things in this book that will expose a lot in my past that many do not know about me. There will be things that will be embarrassing to me and my existing family. There will be things written that many will not believe even happened. But everything in this book is truthful and real. There will be one thing in here that I will not be explicit about so that I can protect the victim that I hurt, and I take full responsibility for my actions. Many names will be withheld or changed in order to not bring harm to the ones that are still alive.

The book will address physical abuse, homosexuality, molestation, alcoholism, drug use, abandonment issues, death, and things that go on inside prisons from the perspective of a correctional officer and an inmate who lived it.

After reading about my life, I pray that many will see that there is no excuse not to want to change, and they can change if they want to. As it says in the A.A., choose whatever–or whoever–higher power that will help them change. I choose Jesus Christ and my Father in Heaven as my higher power. It began with me wanting to change and God helping me towards his grace, no matter how bad it was or the bad things that I did.

Chapter One

Memories can be real or distorted in a person's life at the beginning of their life. Many families started with all the good things happening in their lives. For some of us, like myself, it seemed to begin like most happy families.

We were living on a horse farm called Ocala Stud farm. My father was over at the stud barn handling the stud horses that came off the racetracks, and they won enough money to be used for breeding to birth more foals to put on the racetracks. The farm was the biggest farm in the state of Florida at the time. My father was also a ringmaster at the Ocala breeder sales, where horses were brought up to be sold so that they could be used to race or to breed.

I will start at the age that I can remember, around four or five. My mother at the time wasn't working then. She was 14 years old when she met my father, who was 21. It seemed to be allowed at that time; I don't remember how they met, as they would never talk about their past. It seemed that they decided to have a baby every year and a half, except when my last brother was born. Supposedly they had a girl that died between my 3rd and 4th brothers. I was the second born, and Mom was 16 years old then.

The only thing I know about my father's past is that he was abandoned by his mother when he was young and was raised by a couple in Anthony, Florida, until he joined the army. During the good times, we would visit them, and they were good people to us. I don't know the actual story about how my father was abandoned by our grandmother. We were told that he was taken to the Florida Theater to see a movie, and she never did come back to get him, and that the police officers took him to the couple out in Anthony so that they could raise him. My grandfather–my dad's dad–died from cirrhosis of the liver at the Marion Hotel due to his drinking, but that's about all that we know about him. As far as my mom goes, we believe that she was born in Alabama somewhere, and we do not know anything about her mother and father because they never spoke about them. I believe we did meet them around when I was three or four. My younger brother did a lot of research on our family and found out that a family member, somewhere around the 1800s, brought the family from Scotland here through New York and signed them in, and they settled here in Fayetteville, NC. When that family member died, the oldest son moved everybody to Georgia, and he died after coming back from the Santa Wars from a motorcycle accident, and the family then moved down to Florida.

We were staying in a house that belonged to the farm. We had a swing and toys to play with, a little red wagon like most kids did. My mother told me that when I was three or four, my older brother got mad one day because I beat him to the slide, and he pushed me headfirst down the slide where our red wagon had a broken handle, and I hit it with my head. Mom said I came running inside, covered in blood. By the time we got to the hospital, I had lost a lot of blood and was almost dead. They had to put over 100 stitches to close it up. My mother said I had a lot of seizures afterward, but they stopped before I went to school.

When I was in the first grade, they didn't have kindergarten back then. I came down with an eye infection that would mat my eyes over every morning where I couldn't see. They used to have to put warm water on them to get them open. We didn't know we were poor back then. They tried to treat it themselves as my parents always did. I missed too many days of school and had to take first grade over. Something happened to my eyes that I will write about later.

We started noticing changes with our parents, and this is where the hell started in our lives. I believe I was around six or seven years old, and we moved across the street to Judge Bandell's farm. My dad was trying to make extra money by taking care of the farm for the judge. He was making only around $75 a week. The only problem with the move was that there was only a two-bedroom trailer on the farm. They had one room, and all four of us boys slept in one bed.

At the time things started changing, my dad was going to Miami, FL, to be a ringmaster at the horse sales. He would go to the Greyhound races while he was down there instead of coming back home. My mother got tired of it, I suppose, and she started to go to him to beg him to come back home. She would leave us with a babysitter who had to boil water on the stove to give us baths. The water heater was broken all the time. For some reason, the babysitter poured the hot water on me and scalded my whole right arm. She waited until my mom came home to take me to the hospital. I still have the scar from that injury because they didn't take me soon enough to the hospital to have it looked at.

Their relationship just kept getting worse. They were fighting all the time, and my father was staying away from home more often. It was only making things worse; I never saw them drinking until one night when I found my mother on the floor, passed out. It seemed like every night that she was drinking at home and going out to drink. While Dad was going to Miami, she would leave us alone at night so she could go out drinking. I was having a hard time taking care of my two younger brothers. My older brother was not much help, being only eight years old himself, and there was a time she wouldn't feed us before she left the house. When our dad was home, she would still get drunk and come home and try to get in bed with him, but he would just kick her out onto the floor, where I would find her the next morning.

If it wasn't for the school meals, there would be times we wouldn't have anything to eat. I would sit at the table next to where the other kids would put their trays into the trash bins, and I would ask them for things they were throwing away. I put the food in my jacket and book bag so I could take it home and hide under my pillow and under the bed. This was the only way sometimes I could make sure we had food to eat. There were times when Dad was gone for weeks at a time, and Mom would disappear for days at a time. We would try and cook banquet meals, which I dropped several times. When there wasn't any food, we would drink sugar water and eat spoons of mayonnaise.

There was a trailer park across the street that belonged to the farm. A lady from Russia who was old that lived there used to see us boys come walking across the field to her trailer, and she would feed us when she could.

Chapter Two

I guess things reached the boiling point between Mom and Dad. They separated, and we had to stay with Dad at the trailer, even though neither one of them wanted us. Dad started separating us and putting us in what I called racetrack homes, people that my dad knew and would take us in. I and my older brother usually stayed together. My two younger brothers were put in different homes, but the only trouble with this was that their families had their own kids. Every time they did things wrong, we would get blamed and get beaten by their fathers. One time we read an article in the newspaper that my younger brother under me had come missing. They eventually found him walking on the railroad tracks trying to run away. He was only six years old then. The police just took him back to the family he was trying to run away from.

For some reason, Dad couldn't find any place to put us, and we ended up with our mom at the South Wind Motel; we were all together then. We had one bed again and a mother who hadn't changed any. She was drinking more and leaving us alone again for days at a time. I was in the second grade by then. I had to figure out a way to feed my brothers. I would steal money from the cash register at the hotel office to buy food. I would go into people's homes and take only food. I could never get Mom up to get us off to school or feed us. One time I got caught stealing food; one of her boyfriends at the time felt that I had embarrassed him, so he took it upon himself to use a bullwhip on me, leaving me bleeding badly. There was a cookout behind the hotel one day, and the drunker everyone got, the more money I could beg from them. I didn't realize that my youngest brother, who was only five years old at the time, had gone missing. A trooper showed up with him in the car, and he wanted to know where our mother was. I told him she had to work and was sleeping; she was passed out drunk, so the hotel manager said he would keep a better eye on us. I asked my brother where he was going, and he told me that he was trying to help me get food from the money he had gathered up. Every time I think about what he said, I usually start crying.

One time my mother was gone for a couple of days, and we all decided to go out at night to walk around. There was a gas station next to the hotel, and when we came around the corner of the station, there was a man coming outside the door. We figured he had broken into the place. We ran back to our room and started setting up traps to stop him from getting to us in the room. He did try to come through the window and then tried the door, but he couldn't get in. The next morning, we saw the police there, but we didn't say anything.

Another time my mother was having a party in her room, and the alcohol was flowing pretty good, so we all just went to sleep. On Saturday mornings, we always went into Mom's room to watch cartoons. But this particular morning, what we saw looked like a movie out of a horror show. There was blood everywhere, on the wall, beds, and floors. Looked like someone had killed our mother. We ran from the room and hid until about midday. The hotel manager came looking for us, dragging us out of our hiding places. There had been a big fight after everyone had gotten drunk. My mother had beaten a couple guys up with a guitar, and everyone was at the hospital. Another time my mother was gone for three days. She finally showed up with cuts all over her face and body. She got drunk and wrecked the car, throwing her through the windshield.

Later in life, I was going through counseling, and the psychologist put me under hypnosis and told me that around two or three years old, my father had been molesting us. I confronted Dad about it, but he denied it ever happened. At this time, I also learned that my father was bisexual. I believe that because I spent a lot of time playing with myself was because of what he had done to us.

One day I was leaving school while in the second grade, thinking about how I was going to feed my brothers that night, and I ran into an older lady in her 40s while walking on the railroad tracks. She asked me if I knew where a certain place was on the tracks. I told her where it was, but she offered me money to show her. I needed money to feed my brothers, so I agreed to take her. When we got there, she told me we had to go into the woods so she could pay me. When we got there, she started kissing me and trying to take off my clothes. I didn't know what she was getting out of all of this, and I was so confused at that time that I didn't know what to do. I won't go into a lot of details about what she did, but while she was doing it, I was trying to get money out of her purse in case she didn't give me any money. After she was done, I was confused as to what had happened. I only wanted money to feed my brothers. She did give me money and invited me to meet her on the railroad tracks on Saturday to get more money. When my mother showed up, I told her what had happened, and all she could say was that I should stay away from the tracks, which I did.

At this point in my life, there was never any kind of religion that I would have been involved with that would have comforted me and given me an understanding of why I was going through the things I was going through. At this time, I never even heard of the name of Jesus Christ, our God.

I don't remember how long we were at the hotel. Mom kept disappearing for days on end. After the last time she was gone for five days, the manager found my father and told him he had to get us out of the hotel. I couldn't get any food at times and had a hard time dressing my younger brothers while we waited for Dad to come get us. My dad came and got us and separated us to racetrack families again. One time we went back to Judge Bandell's Farm, and Dad was there sometimes but also gone for days. Not sure when it happened, but my parents got divorced, I guess around the mid-1960s.

Chapter Three

Mom showed up again, and she took me and my older brother, but not my two younger brothers. They were in homes with people I didn't know. Mom was drinking even heavier at the time. She was working and was always with a different guy every time I turned around. They were drunk all the time and would beat us for no reason.

The big change in our lives was about to happen around 1967 or 68. We never saw my dad much when we were with Mom or the other families. One day Mom showed up at the school, Oakcrest Elementary School. She had all her clothes in the car, and she put us in the car and told us we were going to go spend the weekend with our father. I didn't think anything about it at that moment because it happened all the time. There was this dirt road that led up to the trailer from Shady Lane Rd. She drove up to the trailer and told us to sit on the steps until Dad came home. She left all our clothes with us and took off down the road.

A man who worked on the farm, Ocala State Farm, who we all called old Milwaukee Bill because that was what he drank all the time, saw us from the road. He went to the stud barn where Dad worked all the time and told him he saw us there sitting in the trailer. Next thing we knew, Dad came storming down the dirt road madder than we had ever seen him. He asked us what we were doing there. We told him that Mom had told us we were spending the weekend with him. He started cursing and yelling and told us to get in the car. We knew there was something wrong.

He took us across the road to the trailer park to stay with a good friend of his named Larry. Apparently, Mom had found out that Dad was about to get married to a young lady. I guess it was her way of getting back at him. Dad showed back up around two or three that morning to get us, and there were two ladies in the front seat, both looking young. I think I was around 12 years old when I found out she was only 18 years old, and dad was around 32 years old or so. She had long black hair and was much taller than our mother. She was a lot bigger also; not that she was heavy, she was just a big girl. I don't know how they met, and I was told she had just come out of a juvenile detention home.

During this time before they got married, I remember we never had much. All our clothes were either handed down or given to us by others. I tried all I could to get my brothers dressed for school. We were always made fun of for having holes in our clothes and being mismatched. We were bullied a lot and picked on. I know that today kids bring knives and guns to school. We would settle things out on the playground or the streets. To get to school, we would walk around one to two miles to get to College Park Elementary School. We would cross fields that are now buildings and doctors' offices. We mainly walked on Shady Grove Church Rd. We didn't ride a bus until we went to junior middle school. We still had to walk over a mile just to get to the bus stop.

We used to do work on the farm. It was hard to do because of our size; we would try to feed the horses and give them hay. We cleaned stalls and took them out to the fields. Being only 6 to 12 years old, the horses seemed big and scary to us. I guess why I don't like Christmas, birthdays and other holidays was because we didn't have many. For Christmas and birthdays, we might get one toy and some clothes. As I wrote before, we would go days without food. We lived on hot dogs and rice and eggs mostly. That is until our stepmother came into the picture. When Dad married my stepmother, my older brother and I felt that our lives were going to get better and our other two brothers would come back home, and we would be a happy family. Boy, was I wrong–hell had descended upon us with both feet. If I had known God at this time, I probably would have cursed him out for allowing her into our lives and for the life that I had been handed. Up to this point, around age 11 or 12 years old, we still had not heard God's or his son Jesus Christ's name spoken around the home. There never was a Bible in the house or any of the homes we stayed in. We used to pledge alliance to the flag at school but didn't understand who He was.

Chapter Four

I don't know what happened to our mother during the time our stepmother showed up. My brother and I moved back into the beat-up, run-down two-bedroom trailer with her and Dad. I was still bringing food home and hiding it for fear that we would go hungry again. I was thinking about my two brothers coming back home, and I wanted to make sure they had something to eat. At this time, I felt, at such a young age, I was either a caregiver or a parent.

One day while my dad was at work, we went to our stepmother around Christmas, believing this was a good time for us to be a family, and asked her when our younger brothers were coming home. She looked at us like we were crazy kids playing a joke. She asked us what two brothers? We didn't know Dad hadn't told her about having other kids. We told her, and for the rest of the day, we knew it was best to stay away from her.

When Dad came home, she had a frying pan waiting for him, and she confronted him at the door, asking why he didn't tell her about them. He told her he didn't think she would marry him. She made him go and get our brothers and bring them home.

At this time, we thought she was the greatest person we ever met. At times she was doing right by us, but other times we feared her. We realized later in life that I guess she was doing the best she knew how. We had a mother who we were missing a lot, and it hurt not knowing where she was. Our stepmother wanted us to see her as our mother.

Everything seemed good at first, except they were fighting all the time. She made him stop going to the horse sales and stay home. She seemed to have more control over him than our mom did. Then again, she was a big woman. I believe today he was afraid she would leave him with his boys to take care of again.

They never showed any affection towards each other–unless they did when they were alone. Over the years, I learned that older people back then were never open to showing affection in front of others. One time my dad came out of the back room with no clothes on covering himself and went into the bathroom, and I asked my older brother what was going on, and he didn't say anything. When my stepmother came out of the back room, my brother told her what I asked him. She got mad and took a belt to me until I couldn't stand up. Never understood why at that time of my life she did that. That also reminded me of the time my mother caught me playing with myself in the bathroom at around the age of six years old and brought my dad into the bathroom, where they were laughing about it. From that point on, I always made sure I