In God she trusts — for now

Don Lloyd — Brother Lloyd — stalks across the church basement, pacing in front of a small kitchen used by ladies on Sunday to heat casseroles and pies. But Brother Lloyd's message is food for the soul.

Dawn Nicole Smith, convinced that only divine intervention can save her from drugs, listens intently.

The devil is constantly after people who love the Lord, says Brother Lloyd, who is small and compact, his head covered with wisps of thinning white hair. "He that believes and is righteous, he shall be saved," he says. "He what is not shall be damned."

Brother Lloyd's hourlong class counts as a drug-education meeting for drug court participants who gather in the basement of a church on North Limestone. It starts with his assistant, Brother Marvin Burton, reading from a photocopied sheet about addiction. "Heroin comes from a poppy seed. It is an opiate drug. ..."

But then Brother Lloyd starts walking and talking, most always about the miracle of a clean and sober life. He knows the tale well; he tells them he once loved alcohol above all other things. Eventually, his daughter was murdered, and Brother Lloyd, so down and low and broke from drink, found himself, gun in hand, aching to press it to his temple. But, in that instant, the Lord told him to reach out to the broken, the drunk and the addicted — and he, and they, could be saved.

Tonight, he's talking about all the things people give up for drugs or alcohol. Not all at once, but over time, things keep falling away. They give up their homes. They give up their kids. And sometimes, when the money is low and the need to get high is unbearable, they give up themselves.

He stares right at Dawn, who manages to stare back without crying or lowering her eyes in shame or hiding behind the "sweet little innocent" mask she regularly adopts to deflect bad things.

Dawn prefers Brother Lloyd's meetings to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, which she says are too loosey-goosey about the Lord, always talking like they do about choosing your own "higher power." She believes only in her Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.

Just out of jail for using drugs, she's spent the day giggling with her three little boys in a shallow, plastic swimming pool and kissing their smooth cheeks. She is at her happiest when she is with her sons, who shuffle to be within arms' reach of her whenever she is home.

But tonight her focus is on what she has decided is the answer.

She'll go back to church, where for a while she felt whole and alive, and like God was on her side. "When I was in church, I didn't do nothing, I didn't even smoke a cigarette," she says, smoking a cigarette. She didn't even swear. Religion has long been her anchor — with varying degrees of success.

A REVIVAL HEALING

Dawn's mother, Brenda Raines, can quote chapter and verse and has used religion as a balm during her own often difficult 44 years. She divorced her first husband, Donald Harris, when Dawn and her brother were little. Brenda says that after a second brief marriage to another man who stole from her and drank too much, she just lost her mind. Even now, Brenda, when in a funk, will show the thin red scars on her wrists from what she says are too many suicide attempts to count.

It was around 1989 that Brenda met her third husband, Larry Raines, and, Brenda admits, they did cocaine and lived what she remembers as a wild, free life.

But cocaine and depression were a bad combination, and Brenda asked a relative to take Dawn, who was 7 years old, and her older brother just so she could get herself straight. With a little time, she thought, she could get back to where she was before the divorce and the depression, back to a place where she had an office job and enough energy to coach her daughter in T-ball.

Her kids were gone for a year.

Dawn doesn't talk about what happened then.

But Brenda says a distant relative, who was watching the kids just for one day, took Dawn into a bathroom and touched her in a way that's not OK.

Brenda says the police were called, but no one was punished. Brenda says she was sexually abused by a relative when she was a girl, so she knows how it sticks with you.

That separation set off something in Dawn, who even now can go into chest-clutching anxiety attacks when away too long from her mother.

Even after the family came back together, things were never what could be called settled. Larry, whom Dawn soon called Dad, worked mostly as a painter. Brenda worked in fast food, at convenience stores — low-paying jobs that didn't seem to last long. They moved from rented house to rented house, from Lexington to Crab Orchard to Nicholasville and back to Lexington again.

Dawn always believed the Lord would guide her, save her, and she tried desperately to be worthy of his grace.

In the fourth grade, she was hit by a car when she was walking to a playground. Her pelvis was shattered. Even after the doctors said it was supposed to be better, the pain was so bad she sometimes couldn't walk.

Dawn had prayed and prayed to Jesus to heal the pain, and at a tent revival, she believes, he did. She still had to go through fourth grade twice, but after that revival, her hip didn't hurt anymore.

After that, it seemed to her that prayer could fix just about anything if you were right with the spirit.

It seemed that way, at least for a time.

A SPIRIT BROKEN

In 1996, when Dawn was 14, Larry and Brenda filed for divorce and bankruptcy. Soon after, Dawn says, it happened.

One night, Dawn says, Larry came to get her, and they went to some guy's house, some friend of Larry.

Dawn says Larry, who claims to this day that Dawn made up the whole thing, kept giving her Jim Beam.

Things get a little fuzzy after that.

Dawn says her stepfather kept trying to kiss her. She told him no.

He just pushed her down and got on top, she says.

She was too drunk to get away.

It's hard to say whether what happened afterward was shock or some indefinable thing — the moment when a spirit gets broken. In the minutes and hours after it was all over, Dawn says, she didn't react at all.

It was done. There was no changing it.

She didn't tell anybody. She didn't even really cry. She just went home and smoked some pot to help her forget.

Jesus didn't help that time.

Not that she blames him. She wasn't worthy, she says.

Dawn figures the whole thing with Larry wouldn't have happened if she'd been right with the Lord. If she'd been in church, she wouldn't have gotten drunk. If she hadn't been drunk, she could have gotten away.

All these years later, she still doesn't drink.

She did, however, stop calling Larry "Dad."

And she tries not to think too often about what happened. When telling the story, there's only the gentlest shift in tone from how she talks about going to the grocery or how she'll get money for gas. There's only the slightest tug of sadness in her voice. She doesn't allow it to linger, moving quickly to the next topic with a big smile on her face.

In a sing-song voice, as if she is narrating an after-school special in which all trauma is resolved before the final commercial break, she explains what happened next. "I got in church, met Tony and had my kids." She nods her head for emphasis.

THE DEVIL CAST OUT

It's true the Lortabs helped, for a time. But because she is in drug court, those are not an option now. She'll go back to what she knows — the Lord, whom she first took into her heart at the Church of the First Born in Middlesboro.

That's what her mom is doing, too. She, too, attends Brother Lloyd's meetings, because she got caught writing bad checks to cover a crack habit.

Short and round, Brenda is prone to nervous energy and fierce, passionate rants, both on her daughter's behalf and in her daughter's direction. She's already had several run-ins with drug court workers, whom she considers meddlesome and out to make Dawn's road unnecessarily hard. Mixing outside of the family, as Brenda says often, brings nothing but trouble.

But the evening of Brother Lloyd's meeting, Brenda is giving off a smooth, glassy glow.

She's already dipped in the cool waters of Brother Lloyd's baptismal font, as the ladies with ankle-length denim skirts and never-been-cut hair quietly moaned.

Oh, Brenda says, the devil still tempts her. Just the other night, she woke up from a dream and there on the kitchen counter was a Coke can cut for use as a crack pipe. With a prayer, she grabbed it and threw it in the garbage. In the morning, it was gone. Proof, she says, of the devil cast out.

WALK WITH THE LORD

Tonight, released from her latest stay in jail, Dawn hopes for the same relief, the same sort of spiritual muscle to help keep the demons of addiction at bay.

When Brother Lloyd's class is finally over, Dawn and her mom walk upstairs to the church sanctuary.

Brother Lloyd and Brother Marvin struggle into their baptismal jumpsuits, which look like hip waders. The men take a few minutes to explain to Dawn the importance of the step she is about to take. The empty church is silent, and they talk in hushed, even tones, as if the devil might be listening and invoke a last-minute intervention.

Taking this plunge into the water truly means a new life, they say. It means you are turning your life over to Jesus and dedicating yourself to his service. There can be no drugs.

Dawn nods gravely and goes into the dressing room, emerging in a maroon gown that looks like a choir robe but is thick and rubberized to keep from creating immodest cling. Water the color of lime Jell-O gives off an almost fluorescent glow. Dawn enters down a rickety metal ladder, like one you'd hang over a back-yard pool. After some arranging, Brother Lloyd grabs Dawn at the back of the neck and swiftly pushes her into the coolness.

"I praise you, sweet Jesus. I praise you, Jesus," she says, shaking her head, hands clasped in front of her, hair dripping as she comes up from her dip.

"You're clean now," Brother Marvin says, breathlessly. "Your sins are washed away."

"Remember, it's what you do now that matters," Brother Lloyd says.

Dawn grins, trailing water across the floor of the darkened sanctuary, repeating to herself, "Everything is going to be OK now. Everything is going to be OK."

But life has not stopped spinning. She not only keeps using while in drug court but also breaking other rules. Neither is unexpected at this early stage in recovery. But she seems to be struggling more than most. To caseworker Elton Terry, who writes in his notes that he wonders whether Dawn might be a little slow, Dawn acts as if she doesn't understand what's expected of her. But she understands well enough to get around the rules — she padded her schedule at McDonald's to visit her mom and kids while on work release.

The rent is due. Dawn's missed a period. That could mean baby number four. Tony has announced he has a girlfriend, and he is leaving.

But Dawn will not worry. She'll walk with the Lord, and the Lord will show her the way.

But not today.

Reach Mary Meehan at (859) 231-3261 or 1-800-950-6397, Ext. 3261.

Editor's Note: On June 9, 2007, Don Lloyd, 68, who ministered to Fayette County's addicts and alcoholics for two decades, died at Carroll County Memorial Hospital after a long illness.