H.D. Dennis is Margaret Rogers’s second husband. Referring to her first husband (of thirty-nine years), she says, “He went to the South Pacific also, to fight, and come back without a scratch, and then one day robbers come in the grocery store and killed him. Then she met the Reverend. “He asked me would I marry him,” she explains. “I wasn’t exactly sure. But he said, ‘If you’ll marry me, I’ll turn your little old brown plank store into a palace.’”
They married in 1984, and the Reverend’s “palace” became a promise kept. It started with one tower. If and when this tower is completed, it is intended to house his re-creations of the two tablets of the Ten Commandments, which he has been holding for that purpose Meanwhile, the tablets are accommodated by the elaborate sacred Ark of the Covenant, made by Dennis from a steamer trunk, lots of costume jewelry and gold paint, several locks, protective satin cushioning, and, among other things, a glass doorknob “that got the All-Seeing Eye. I’m talking from Masons now, four thousand years. I learned it when I was young. It’ll take you a long way.”
