<TITLE>07. Par 49-56</TITLE>L-49   Well, after I had got up maybe ten days old, or something, they taken me up to a little Baptist church called "Opossum Kingdom," Opossum Kingdom Baptist church. That's quite a name. There was an old circuit preacher, the old-fashioned Baptist preacher came through there about once every two months. On... The people would have a little service together, they'd go sing some songs, but they had preaching every so often on the circuit rider. They paid him each year with a sack of pumpkins and a few things like that, you know, that the people would raise to give it. And the old preacher came by, and there he offered prayer for me as a little boy. That was my first trip to church.

L-50   At the year of about... something a little over two years old, the first vision taken place.

L-51 Well, they had told around in the mountains there that "This Light came in." So they tried to figure it up. Some of them said it must have been the sunlight reflecting on a mirror in the house. But there was no mirror in there. And the sun wasn't up, so it was too early, at five o'clock. And then, oh, they just passed It by. And when I was about... suppose be near three years old...

L-52   Now, I have to be honest. There's things here that I do not like to say, and I wish I could bypass it and not have to say it. But yet, to tell the truth, you must tell the truth if it's on yourself or your people. Be honest about it, and then it's always the same.

L-53 My father was a long way from being a religious person. He was a typical mountain boy that drank constantly, all the time. And he had gotten in some trouble in a fight, and there had been two or three men almost killed as they fighting, shooting, and cutting one another with knives, at some kind of a party up in the mountains. And Dad had been one of the ringleaders of this fight, because that there had been a friend of his had got hurt, and had hit someone with a chair. And had... The man had a knife out and was going to cut Dad's friend on the floor with this knife, through his heart, and Dad took his part. And it really must have been a terrible fight, because they, from all the way down to Burkesville, many miles away, they sent a sheriff up after Dad, horseback.

L-54   So the man was laying at the point of death. Might be some of his people listening in. I'm going to call his name, Will Yarbrough was his name. They probably... I think some of them is in California, of his boys. But he was a bully, great powerful man, killed his own boy with a fence rail. So he--he was a very powerful and wicked man. And so there was a great knife fight between he and Dad. And my father almost killed the man, so he had to run and leave Kentucky and come across the river to Indiana.

L-55   And he had a brother that lived, at the time, in Louisville Kentucky, was the assistant superintendent of the Wood Mosaic Saw Mills in Kentucky, in Louisville. And so Dad come to find his older brother. Dad was the youngest of the boys, of seventeen children. And so he came to find his older brother, and while he was gone for almost a year. He could not come back, because the law was looking for him. And then when we had heard from him by letter, signed by another name, but that he had told mother how it would be that she'd hear from him.

L-56   And then I remember one day the spring (this little cabin) was just behind the house. And--and during that time after... There's nine... eleven months difference between me and my next brother, and he was still crawling. And I had a big rock in my hand, and I was trying to show him how hard I could throw this rock in the old mud, where the spring had run out of the ground and made the muddy ground. And I heard a bird, and it was singing up in a tree. And I looked up to that tree and the bird flew away, and, when it did, a Voice spoke to me.


<A HREF="P8">Next Page</A>