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In God she trusts — for now

The Lord healed her pain before, so Dawn turns to him again. Can the devil of addiction be cast out?

By Mary Meehan

MMEEHAN1@HERALD-LEADER.COM

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.