The Devil and the Church Lady

My mother is a devout Christian and, as such, attends religious services regularly. She also suffers from insomnia from time to time. About a year ago, her bouts of insomnia peculiarly began to manifest themselves only on Saturday nights. The result being, she was often too sleep deprived to get herself up and going for Sunday morning services. One day she announced that it was clear to her the Devil was behind her difficulties. I found myself pondering her predicament and its possible devilish causation. Soon, I produced a story for her, in good humor. As I wrote, I considered my own church attendance, which over the years had become abysmal. I began to wonder if perhaps the Dark Lord had something to do with that as well. Hence, part II of the story came to fruition. I submit it here for your consideration and hopefully a little amusement.

PART I: THE DEVIL AND THE CHURCH LADY

This story happened in 1975 when Gerald Ford was President. The Church Lady didn’t really like Gerald Ford all that much, but she thought for a guy who was never elected President he was doing an okay job.
The Church Lady lived in a little town in West Virginia, just outside the capital city which is called Charleston. In her little community were three churches. One was the Baptist Church which she didn’t like because they thought baptism was only a symbol of salvation rather than an essential part. The other was an independent sort of Holy Roller church founded by a reformed drunkard named Sebastian Kingrey. That church was called The Temple of the Lord Jesus Christ, Most High and Holy God, Church of Seers, Signs, and Prognosticators. In the fine print it said Snake Handlers Welcome. But the church lady chose to attend the last of the three churches, the Church of Christ. It was the smallest church and the other churches made fun of it behind its back because they believed you had to be baptized to have any hope of salvation and took communion every Sunday. Plus, the Church of Christ got on everyone’s nerves the most because they thought they were the only church that was doing it right and called all the other churches “houses of vain worship” and said they were “in error”. They said they only told these things out of Christian love, but it really rubbed all the other churches the wrong way and at the end of the day this was the real beef these other two churches had with the Church of Christ.
But, the Church Lady liked the Church of Christ because she, like them, thought the modern church should try and be like the ancient church in as many ways as it could to be pleasing to God. So, even though it was the smallest, most run down, looking church and most of the people who went there were hicks or know-it-alls, she still went faithfully every Sunday morning. The Church Lady thought the other two services; the ones on Sunday evening and Wednesday nights were unscriptural so she wouldn’t go to them. She also believed it was a sin to have a kitchen in your church, and so did this particular Church of Christ. Turns out a lot of them have gotten off from the truth and put in kitchens, but not this one.
Everything was fine in the Church Lady’s life until March 1975, on a particularly normal Saturday night. She watched the evening news and then read her Bible a little and said her prayers, down on her knees beside her bed, and then crawled under the covers and turned out the lamp and drifted off to sleep looking forward to going to church the next morning. It was around three a.m. when the Church Lady was awakened by a tremendous lot of racket coming from the kitchen. She was very scared and got out of bed and put on her housecoat and slippers, so as not to be immodest, and then got her grandfather’s shotgun out of the closet and loaded a slug into it, before creeping down the stairs to see what the commotion was.
In the living room the television was on to that channel with the vertical colored stripes that’s there after the regular channel goes off for the night and the sound was blaring out that high pitched tone. She could see light from the kitchen, and that’s where all the commotion was so she headed in that direction very quietly. When she sprung into the kitchen with the shotgun trained on her mystery guest she was shocked to find that it was the Devil and that he was wearing her apron and running the mixer. It appeared he was baking a cake. A shocked sound escaped the Church Lady’s mouth. She hadn’t expected to find the Devil in her kitchen, after all.
The Devil must have heard her, because he turned and shut down the mixer and asked, “Do you like Chocolate?” The Church Lady was incensed to find the Devil in her kitchen and told him to beat it straight away, but he just turned the mixer back on and went back to work and in a louder voice went on, “Ah, come on, everybody likes Chocolate, don’t they?” He grinned back at her mischievously and she thought well, chocolate is my favorite actually. So the Church Lady just leaned her shotgun up against the wall and got out another apron and went to helping the Devil make his cake. Actually it was a Devil’s Food Cake, which should be no surprise I guess.
So the Devil and the Church Lady got everything mixed together which took about a half an hour or so and the Devil put on a pot of coffee, so they could sit and talk and drink coffee while the cake was baking, which they did. The Church Lady was shocked to find the Devil was very polite and charming and had so many interesting stories to tell. Soon she was captivated and they went on through the rest of the night talking and eating cake and drinking coffee.
It wasn’t till around seven in the morning when the Devil and the Church Lady had cleaned up the kitchen. She had said she would take care of the cleaning, because she was old fashioned and thought that was mostly a woman’s work, but the Devil was such a gentleman he insisted on helping. The Devil went on his way and the Church Lady went back to bed, but she was all keyed up, plus the coffee, and couldn’t fall asleep until eight o’clock.
When the Church Lady awoke it was just before noon and she was immediately furious. She knew the Devil had just done all that cake making and talking and such to keep her up all night so she would be too tired to wake up for church. How she could have fallen for that, she wondered. And how evil of the Devil to make a person miss church like that for no good reason. She guessed he really must be bad even though he seemed very polite and charming the night before. So, the Church Lady got on her knees and prayed to God and repented and vowed she would never let that happen again.
By the following Saturday night, the Church Lady had forgiven herself for her indiscretion and made preparations to ensure she didn’t miss church again the following morning. She got tucked into bed and on the nightstand beside her bed sat a nice new electric clock with big illuminated numbers. She had set its alarm since she could no longer trust herself to wake up on time like she usually did. Of course, the Devil had something to do with that, but she wasn’t taking any chances.
When the Church Lady woke up, she could tell something was wrong because the sun seemed too high in her window. When she looked at her clock she could see that it was stopped at three a.m. She checked and sure enough it was unplugged. Now, the Church Lady was sure she had plugged in her new alarm clock and set it the night before. She was certain of that, and since she also smelled the faint hint of sulfur in the air she knew that the Devil had snuck into her room and unplugged her new alarm clock. She couldn’t believe it and was furious. That Devil wasn’t just evil he was incorrigible. But, the Church Lady calmed herself and thought that really it was her responsibility to get up in time for church so even though the Devil had pulled a nasty trick she took responsibility for it and got on her knees and prayed to God again and repented for missing Church. She assured God that she would be at church right on time the next Sunday and spent an hour reading her Bible to try and make up for missing. But the Devil wasn’t done with the Church Lady yet.
The next Sunday morning the Church Lady awoke to find that a fuse had blown in her fuse box and again her alarm clock had failed to go off. The Sunday after that she had come down with horrible diarrhea at around three a.m. and was too sick to go to church. But by around noon she was right as rain and she knew it had been the Devil’s doing. The next Sunday came and the Church Lady woke up early and at first thought she’d finally beaten the Devil, but then she realized she was paralyzed and couldn’t move anything but her eyeballs. She stayed that way until just before noon. The Sunday after that, a late snow storm blew in over the night and the roads were totally frozen up so she had to miss church again. But, the Church Lady wasn’t fooled. The Church Lady actually caught herself laughing the next Sunday morning when she couldn’t find her car keys, even the spare one she kept in the lazy Susan on top of the refrigerator. She knew what was up, of course. Later she found the keys in the tank on the back of the toilet, but she never did find the spare.
Finally, the next Sunday came and it all seemed to be over. Maybe the Devil had found someone else to trouble, because the alarm went off right on schedule and the Church Lady got up and had her coffee and got showered and dressed and was even running a few minutes early when she stepped out the front door happy to at last be able to go to church. She locked the door and turned around and froze in place at what she saw. There in the driveway was the Church Lady’s 1973 Chevy Impala with all four tires missing. The car was up on blocks, like in some redneck’s back yard. The tires were stacked neatly in a tall cylinder behind the car.
The Church Lady was so angry she said several words that aren’t very nice and when she got down on her knees to repent for missing church again she was also forced to confess to these indiscretions, but she hoped God would understand and forgive her. After all, the Devil was driving her crazy.
The one thing the Church Lady knew for certain was that she had had enough. She wasn’t going to be the Devil’s chump for good. So, she set to work looking for a solution to her problem. She went to the library and consulted old dusty books. She went to a palm reader (which she promptly repented for), but didn’t find any help there. She sat long hours at her kitchen table drinking coffee and smoking filter less Lucky’s racking her brain for some answer, some way to escape the Devil’s clutches and get back to her own life where she went to church every Sunday morning and was both happy and in good standing with the Lord. She had all but lost hope, when on Friday afternoon at three p.m. an idea popped into her head. The Church lady stubbed out her cigarette and just laughed a while. She was pretty sure she had beaten the Devil.
The next night when the Devil showed up at the Church Lady’s house he could hardly keep himself from bursting out laughing. He had cooked up a good one this week. But, the Devil wasn’t laughing anymore when he got to the Church Lady’s room and found her bed was still made and no one in it. The Church Lady was nowhere to be found, and the Devil got a sinking feeling in his stomach. It seemed his game with the Church Lady was finally over. He grinned to himself because he couldn’t help but be impressed with the old gal. No one else had figured it out so quickly.
Of course, the Church Lady hadn’t really figured it all out. She’d just had a hunch that maybe if she stayed somewhere else on Saturday nights the Devil wouldn’t be able to find her and she’d be able to go through her night unmolested.
The Devil, however, understood full well why the Church Lady’s scheme had worked. See, she was staying over at the Holiday Inn just off the exit on Interstate 64. This he knew without even trying. The problem for the Devil was this. Hotel rooms are the one place on earth the Devil is forbidden to go. The reason is the rooms are protected by something inside them. If you haven’t already figured it out, it those Bibles they put in a drawer in every hotel room. Of course, the Church Lady had her own Bible at home, several in fact, but the key to the whole thing was that these hotel Bible’s were specially blessed by God to keep the Devil away. It was an agreement made with the Gideon Society long ago. The only one who knew about it besides for God and the Gideons was the Devil himself.

PART II: THE DEVIL AND THE SON OF THE CHURCH LADY

The Church Lady spent her Saturday nights at the Holiday Inn just off the exit of Interstate 64 for several weeks before she got up the courage to test the Devil and try sleeping a Saturday night in her own bed, but when she finally tried it out she found that the Devil had in fact moved on to troubling someone else. For the next three years the Church Lady’s life went on its normal course and she only missed church once in all those years on account of a migraine headache which was just a normal illness and had nothing to do with the Devil.
By the time this other story happened, which is curiously related to that of the Church Lady, it was 1978 and Jimmy Carter was President. Even though he was a Godless Democrat the Church Lady thought well of Jimmy Carter. It wasn’t that she thought he was a good president, but since he was a peanut farmer before he became president she liked him because she just thought farmers were good people. So, if Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer, he must be a good somebody. That’s how the Church Lady saw it.
One Tuesday in October of 1978 the Son of the Church Lady showed up at her door with a couple of suitcases. He was a terrible alcoholic and finally his wife had had enough of him and taken the children and left him. He was so broken up about it he became an even worse alcoholic and lost his job at the newspaper and soon was evicted from his house. So, the Son of the Church Lady came home to his mother’s house to try and get straightened out and pull his life back together. She hugged him and welcomed him into her home.
At first things weren’t going all that well, because no matter how hard he tried, the Son of the Church Lady couldn’t stay away from the booze. He’d make it a few days and then wind up sneaking a bottle into his room late at night and getting drunk. At first he had the Church Lady fooled, but then one night he got up to pee and passed out in the bathroom and fell on the sink and broke it off the wall. The Church Lady heard the ruckus and came down from her bed to find both her son and the bathroom sink in the floor, and water spraying everywhere.
After he got sobered up the Son of the Church Lady was very ashamed of himself for getting drunk in her house behind her back and promised to cut it out and get himself together. The next day he got up early and went down to the basement and dug out an old typewriter and brought it up to the kitchen table. He said he had always dreamed of being a writer, not the kind that works for a newspaper, but the kind who writes stories, so he was going to pour all his energy into his writing and forget the booze and his wife and all and really make a fresh start of things. He even promised that starting next Sunday, he’d be at church with his mother the Church Lady.
Well, the Son of the Church Lady was as good as his word, for once, and he started attending church with the Church Lady regularly. Plus, he was writing up a storm. He’d finish about one story every week and so on Saturdays the Church Lady would read the new one and tell him what she thought about it. This caused the Church Lady a lot of distress because it forced her to tell big whopper of a lie every Saturday like clockwork. You see the Son of the Church Lady was a terrible writer. At the newspaper he had only written the obituaries which he had done well, but I guess that just doesn’t translate into writing good stories because his were absolutely awful. Once in a while one of them would start out in a way that seemed promising, but they never ended right. It was always as if the Son of the Church Lady had stuck the wrong ending on each story. They just didn’t make any sense. But, he had quit drinking and started going to church regularly so the Church Lady decided it was worth the risk to lie and tell her son his stories were wonderful just to encourage him and keep him working at it so he wouldn’t go back to drinking and all. Besides, she thought maybe he’d get better.
Things went on like this for around six months before they changed. One Saturday, the Church Lady came home from her weekly trip to the grocery store to find her son sitting in the big chair in the living room drinking right out of a bottle of whiskey. There was torn up paper all over the place. “What happened?” the Church Lady asked. Then the Son of the Church Lady told her how he had taken some of his stories to the guys down at the newspaper to get their opinion on them and that they had told him not to quit his day job and he replied to them that this was his day job and so they said he should look for another one. The Church Lady was afraid something like this would happen, but he was her son and she loved him and she hated to see him so disappointed and all. So, the Church Lady just took her bags on into the kitchen and pretended not to notice her son was drinking again.
After that, the Son of the Church Lady just sat around watching television all day, but he kept his drinking under control and only had a few in the evenings before bed. He was still going to church with the Church Lady so she hoped God would be willing to overlook his drinking because of what a string of disappointments he had suffered. So, even though it worried her, she allowed him to drink in her house as long as it didn’t get out of control and that he kept on going to church with her. Down deep she figured eventually the Lord would work in her son’s heart and take away his need to drink if he just hung in there and kept going to church. But the Church Lady also worried about her son because he seemed so depressed. He rarely said anything, but just sat there in the living room chair watching television, but with a look on his face like he was obsessing over something. Then one day he said something. “You know Ma, I’d give anything to be a great writer.” She just looked at him feeling so sad that her son’s dream just couldn’t be and watched as he walked off to go to bed. “Night, Ma.” This all happened on a Saturday night.
At first she thought she was dreaming some pointlessly annoying dream about machinery, but then she realized she was awake so she couldn’t be dreaming. When the Church Lady checked her electric alarm clock with the big illuminated numbers on it, she saw that it was around three thirty in the morning, and a little worry gripped her inside. So, she got out of bed and put on her robe and slippers and went downstairs. Light and smoke were coming out of the kitchen and gay voices and the clickety clack of a typewriter being put through its uses. The Church Lady headed towards the kitchen, but she pretty much knew what she would find.
There sat the Devil smoking a big cigar and telling one of his interesting stories, while the Son of the Church Lady typed it all down on the other side of the table. “Sorry if we woke you, Ma’am.” The Devil said, with an inappropriate grin. “I’ve already beaten you at this game, so you just move on again and bother someone else.” The Church Lady fumed. “Oh, this has nothing to do with you, dear lady. This is between me and junior. See I’ve always been sort of a patron of the arts so I’ve decided to take the boy under my wing. I think he’s got real talent.” The Devil had a menacing look in his otherwise gentlemanly visage which the Church Lady hadn’t noticed in their previous encounter. “Ma, this is a really great story. I can’t wait for you to read it. I think this one is going to be my breakthrough work.” The Son of the Church Lady had never looked happier. The Devil poured them both another drink and got back to telling his story.
The poor Church Lady just stood there a minute watching and listening as the Devil talked and her son typed away. Clickety clack, clickety clack. The Church Lady knew a hopeless case when she saw it. Her son was so happy though, that it brought a brief smile to her face. The Devil winked at her once and it gave her a cold chill. So, the Church Lady just went up stairs and packed her overnight bag and headed out of the house to go stay at the Holiday Inn just off the exit of Interstate 64.
Soon the Church Lady got used to spending her Saturday nights at the Holiday Inn just off the exit of Interstate 64, and of course, the Devil didn’t bother her and she never missed a Sunday service. Her son though never went back to church again. From that night onward his inspiration only showed up during the late evening on Saturday nights. After writing all night, he was just too tired to go to church with his mother the Church Lady.
It became a routine; every Saturday night she’d pack her overnight bag and leave around eight o’clock for the Holiday Inn just off the exit of Interstate 64. As she pulled the front door to on her way out she always paused a moment to listen to the sounds of gay chatter, and the clicking of glasses and bottles, and the clickety clack of her son’s typewriter. At least he was finally happy.
The Church Lady didn’t get to sleep in her bed on a Saturday night again until the end of January, 1995. By then Bill Clinton was President. The Church Lady liked him least of all the president’s she’d seen come and go through the years. Often when she saw him on the evening news she would think words which she later had to repent of. That January was when her son died of cirrhosis of the liver from all his year of drinking just two days after he turned forty seven. He had never gone back to church again, so the Church Lady cried some nights as she went to sleep as she knew her son was in Hell. But, she always thought before she drifted off to sleep that there could be some comfort taken in the fact that at least he was happy in life, for he had been a very successful writer.