Pastor Richard's Journal

Alabama, August 9, 1979

This is the summary of my investigation, as I have exhausted my resources, my contacts, and myself. I only write this entry in the hopes that it helps someone one day.

Now, they said that Farmer Smalls was as Country as a bowl of grits, but he was also as crooked as a barrel of snakes. He paid thirty thousand dollars for a one-month-year-old and cared no more for the boy than his momma. It was said that while holding him, he smiled with yellow smudged teeth as the boy cried.

All records of the boy's original name was buried by his momma. Only one name would be known. Only one name would matter: Leonard Smalls.

He grew up learnin' the Bible, Paradise Lost, and such. But he was also taught to farm and hunt in the woods...by himself.

But it was the year when it was hotter'n than a goat's butt in a pepper patch when things changed. It was then when Farmer Smalls told young Leonard about the adaptation and the exact amount his mother was willin' to sacrifice him for. Then he was given fifty dollars and the freedom to go find his momma. And then he needed to make a choice to stay with her or to go back to the farm.

Leonard only asked one question. "Why?"

Farmer Smalls answered, "Because I can't wait to see what you'll become."

It was said that Leonard rode off the farm so fast on his 1960's pan head that it blew the rusted metal off the saddle.

The fateful day came; to this day she doesn't know how he found her.

He went to his momma's new home and his momma answered the door; he recognized his momma immediately, even as the years passed, he remembered her eyes and that's what he'd peered into the longest.

He said with hope expected of a child, "Howdy-doo, mah name is Leonard Smalls and…ah yah son."

"Wal eff'n isn't th' gran'Pappy of all liars! You ain't my boy!"

With a breaking heart he answers, "Ah come fum Alabama and ah got…"

The poor child got slapped into silence. Privately his momma pulls him away from the front door and to the ground in front of the white picket fence.

With the venom of snake, she said, "You ain't welcome here, you ain't ever gonna be family. Yah a mistake I made for falling for a handsome drifter, promising money but only left me a bastard. I was lucky as hell to find a real man after I sold you like the trash yah was. Trash yah always gonna be."

Then Leonard said something strange then, but only now does it make sense. He quoted Isaiah 39: 5-7, grimly after he tears for the last known time:

"Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, hear the word of the Lord of hosts. Behold, the days are coming when all that is in your house, and all that your fathers have laid up in store to this day shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be left, says the Lord. And some of your sons who shall issue from you, whom you shall beget, shall be taken away; and they shall become officials in the palace of the king of Babylon."

It was said his explosive scream that followed was so loud and so horrible, that it reached the gates of Heaven; only to say to God, "Remember this day. Remember."

And his momma only survived his rage by running inside and slamming the door closed, just as a dagger nearly slices through it; the police wrote on their police report that the blade was an inch away from the middle of her forehead. No charges were brought; she didn't want to risk invoking his rage again.

On lookers said that he continued to scream as he rode away with a new deep tone that no child should have, killing small creatures with daggers with deadly accuracy on his path of death.

It was said he sped so fast that he traveled a minute in thirty seconds. And in that moment neighbors saw flames come up from the ground and reach thirty feet high in the air. He rode throw it and disappeared in it.

It was the last thing people saw through their windows, it was as close as they wanted to get without damning their souls.

Now, to call the remaining accounts of this story farfetched is like blamin' Country music for makin' you choose between your truck and your girl; some things are obvious, some things ain't.

But it's said that Farmer Smalls was waitin' for him on his porch, smokin' his pipe in the dark when young Leonard returned back to the Smalls farm instantly, his body and clothes still steamin' from takin' what I call the devil's shortcut.

Now, there have been many that said Farmer Smalls forced the evil in him. Some believe that the evil was there at birth; because only the devil's child would make the perfect nightmare that he became. But others, like me, believe that rogues aren't born or forced into evil. Simply human cruelty is enough.

If you're readin' this and askin' where is God in this situation, I found two passages that best speak to this question, Wisdom Chapter 1: 13-14 and Chapter 2: 23-24:

"For God did not make Death, he takes no pleasure in destroying the living. To exist - for this he created all things; the creatures of the world have health in them, in them is no fatal poison, and Hades has no power over the world. For God created human beings to be immortal, he made them as an image of his own nature; death came into the world only through the Devil's envy, as those who belong to him find to their cost."