“Billy Goat Talk”
“Good morning. Do you believe in Jesus?” It was not long after our fourteen-foot flood. I was sitting in Hardees at a booth tucked away in a far corner, hoping to eat breakfast and read the morning paper in relative quietness. At this sudden, unexpected question I took another sip of coffee and put my sausage biscuit back on its plate. I looked up at the speaker. Next to my booth stood a little old man whose entire face was stretched in a wonderfully friendly smile. He wore a funny, little, round hat that said “peanuts” on the front of it.
“I don’t know,” I answered smiling back.
“You will come to the Lord when he is ready for you to come,” he told me, continuing to smile. “I’m Kie Sasser and I'm eighty years in the service of Jesus. I carry out his business. Whatever he tells me to do I do.” That is how I first met Kie Sasser. I noticed that almost every morning he was at Hardees, speaking to everyone and spreading his brand of kindness and good cheer all around. One morning, after I had known him for some time, he slid in across from me at my corner booth.
“The Lord talked to me yesterday,” Mr. Sasser said, excitedly. “He told me there was somebody out there who needed help, and I was to go out and find them. I went right out in my old, ragged clothes and my old shoes with holes in them — you don’t want to hear this, do you?” I told him I certainly did want to hear and to go on and tell me what happened.
“Well, I couldn’t get the old truck started,” he continued. “I had to walk. It was the battery or something like that. Anyway, I went out looking poor and destitute in those old clothes searching for that person Jesus said needed help.
“I walked over yonder by Court House Square and saw a woman sitting on that bench that’s out in front of the drug store. I don’t ever meet a stranger, so I started talking to her. She told me she was living in a pup tent under the river bridge — you know, the one they had to work on so long after the flood. She said she hardly had enough to eat. I knew that the Lord had led me to that woman. We prayed right there, and I gave her some money so she could get a meal. Then I went over to that convenience store by the bridge and made arrangements for her to have two meals a day. The Lord talks to me and leads me to do his work.”
After that, Mr Sasser talked to me regularly and told me about himself. He was born in 1912 out in the country in Crenshaw County, Alabama. He said that his parents were dirt poor and he did not have a chance to get an education except for some elementary grades. According to Mr. Sasser, most of what he learned was self-taught. He said he heard the call of the Lord at an early age and began to preach. He mentioned maybe half a dozen Church of God churches in south Alabama and west Florida that he had pastored. He told me that for a number of years after his work as a pastor he was “in the field.” I did not know what that meant, and, when I asked him to explain, he said he had been a travelling preacher who moved from church to church holding revivals.
I was sitting in my booth in Hardees on a Sunday afternoon and had almost completed the Sunday Newspaper before Mr. Sasser arrived. “Do you ever do any preaching now?” I asked him as he settled into the seat across from me.
“Almost every Sunday,” he answered. “On Sunday mornings I go see an old lady who lives out on the Luverne Highway. She’s an invalid, shut in, and can’t ever get to church. I try to get by and preach to her every Sunday. There are others, too." He hesitated a moment. “My friend,” he continued, “if a person is really a preacher, what he does is preach no matter whether he has a church or not and no matter how old he gets.”
“I meant do you ever preach at a regular church,” I said.
“Not much of that,” he answered. My home church is right here in town, but I rarely attend. I can’t just sit there on a pew. That’s not where my ministry is. Then, too, nowadays they want a fancy young preacher in these churches.” He looked away for a moment. “No,” he continued, “churches and church people are not for an old man. They’re at you, messing with you, all the time — looking for that jugular vein, trying to put you out of your misery.”
He pulled a mud-stained photograph from his pocket. “This picture survived our flood,” he said. “I was able to save it, but just barely.” He held the picture out to me. It was of a lovely, young woman holding an infant to her. “That’s my wife holding our first-born,” he said. “The Lord took her from me over a decade ago.” His voice cracked. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes and ran slowly down his cheeks. “Oh, how I miss her,” he said.
I drove up in front of Mr. Sasser’s house. For a few moments I continued to sit in my truck and just look. The most astonishing thing about the house was the front porch. It was packed with a dozen or more large, hand-painted signs extolling the virtues of Jesus and of being saved. Every sign was different — in size as well as content. A huge sign right in the middle of the porch read, “The Three Keys to Salvation: Believe in Jesus, Confess Jesus, Love Jesus — You Have the Sign.” Another, somewhat smaller sign had a heart drawn freehand on it, and inside the words, “The Heart, Soul Saved.” One other small sign said, “Jesus Wants Good Boys.” All of the signs had been cleaned and stacked in an upright position against the wall, but there was still evidence of river mud on them from the flood. The house and yard looked pretty much as they had the day after the flood waters went down over two years earlier — devastated, but dryer. Mud coated the sides of the house as high up as the water had risen. An eclectic collection of objects lay scattered about the yard, deposited there by the flood and apparently hardly touched since. I climbed out of the truck and met Mr. Sasser in the yard as he was walking out to me.
“Do you live here all by yourself?” I asked.
“Yes, I’ve got two daughters, but they don’t live here in town, and I don’t see them that much.” He looked at the cat crossing the street down at the end of the block, then he looked back at me and smiled. “The youngest one went to college and studied music. She can play and teach almost any instrument, but she can’t sing — can’t do anything but screech. Now, the oldest one didn’t go to college and didn’t study music, but she can play the accordion and sing like a bird. I told her she could get rich playing and singing like that; it’s beautiful, but she never did anything with it.” We walked toward the house.
“The flood was bad to me,” he said, pointing to his house. “That one’s mine, too,” he pointed to the house next door. It was also coated with mud on the outside and the flood junk was strewn randomly across what used to be a lawn. “I lost two more houses in that water. They’re over on the next street,” he continued. “That’s where I stay.” He pointed to a motor home parked in the driveway. It was a medium-sized motor home, maybe eighteen feet long — not one of the megaliths that seem to be clogging the interstates. Its outside was covered with mildew and pecan tree stain. “I bought it used after the flood when I didn’t have anywhere to sleep,” he said opening a panel in the side of the vehicle. “See,” he pointed.
“What happened?” I asked, looking at the badly scorched area.
“I guess lightening struck it last week during a thunderstorm. It burned up all my wiring.” He pulled a D-cell flashlight from his pocket and held it for me to see. “This is my electricity now,” he smiled. We walked down a little path to the back porch; then he led me through the back door. We were in a room from which all the furniture had been removed. The walls were made of tongue and groove knotty pine. They seemed to have been thoroughly cleaned recently. “I put in these walls, did all the work myself. That was back when my wife was living,” he said. Looking up I could see the rafters. There was no ceiling. “The water took out the ceiling,” he said. Casting my eyes down, I saw nearly an inch of dried river mud still covering the floor. “You know, since the flood I just haven’t been able to get myself together to get this place back in shape. I can’t make myself work on it.”
“In here is the bathroom.” He pointed through a door toward an adjoining room. “It works good.” Mud was still covering everything in the bathroom. Under the mud it appeared to be all right except for one wall which had buckled badly, and, of course, there was no ceiling in there either. “I’m going to have to do some cleaning,” he said. “But I'm doing just this room and the bathroom. I'm letting the rest of the house go — too expensive to heat it anyway.” I glanced up at the open ceiling. “I know the ceiling is out and before I can heat it I'll have to somehow put something up there. I've got to fix it though. I need to stay in here now that the motor home is broken.”
As I left, I asked Mr. Sasser if I might interview him. The smile left his face, and I could see his muscles tighten. He looked hard at me.
“No, I don’t have time for anything like that,” he said. “Anyway, I never had no education. All I can talk is that old billy goat talk.”
I waved goodbye as I drove away. Mr. Sasser was standing beside his motor home smiling and waving back to me.