by Gina nahai
When he started the city school in the fall, he kept to himself and refused any attempts at friendship. He went to class four hours a day, reported back at the home for lunch, then left for the fields. He said nothing to his teachers or the other children about the home or Mr. Harris, nothing about his wayward mother or preacher father. If he heard people speak about Jenkins, he never acted as if he recognized the name or knew its owner. He wasn’t lying, he told himself. He had never belonged with Jenkins, and now, he didn’t belong with Clare either.
He made a conscious effort to remove himself from the people and memories that had clouded his past. He saw himself become taller, saw his hands grow larger and his body become more confident in its strength and he liked this, but not as much as he liked feeling disconnected from everything that had hurt and frightened him for so long. Mr. Harris never beat him again after the day he left the scar on Adam’s face, and Mrs. Kelsey with the enormous breasts and the dead husband in the war waved at him from across her desk every time Adam walked past her classroom, but he felt neither grateful for the former’s neglect nor moved by the latter’s affection because to do so, would be to put himself at their mercy once again. He learned to survive on his own-—without his father’s recognition or his grandmother’s blessing, without faith and without prayer and, in the long run, even without his mother’s love.
That’s why, when Clare finally did come back for him, Adam would have no part of her.
It was MIDDAY in June, a week before the end of the school year. He was sixteen years old. He saw a woman on the side of Highway 63. She had on a faded taffeta dress and torn black stockings, a cigarette in one hand and a bunch of wilted rhododendrons in the other. She was smiling at Adam politely as if at a stranger. She asked him if he might direct her to her son whom she believed might still be at the orphanage.
Seeing Clare then, smelling the odor of rancid dreams and sunken hopes and all the lost battles that had taken her from him, Adam thought she was a remnant of the Biblical tribe of wandering souls his grandmother Rose had warned would walk the Earth till eternity, and quickly looked away. Then he remembered the caramel candy eyes, the pink, upturned lips, the blonde wisps of hair that fell onto Clare’s forehead and cheeks and gave her the look of a young child even in middle age, and he looked again. She had lost most of her front teeth, and she was standing as if her feet ached. She was accompanied by an old man in city clothes, who limped behind her on a wooden leg and who might have owned the car that was parked on the side of the highway across from the home.
She asked Adam if he lived in the home. When he didn’t answer she became irritated and started to ask again. Then she looked at him harder, and her hand began to shake. The rhododendrons fell out of her fist, and tears gathered in her eyes, and he could tell from the way she said his name, the way she sighed and remained in place without daring to come any closer—he could tell she knew she was too late.
He would never believe her again and would never trust her and she had come here in vain, seeking forgiveness, perhaps, or even love, but he could tell she knew they were both out of her reach and long wasted.
Some months after that meeting the man with the wooden leg returned to tell Adam that Clare had died—-drowned in the foamy white waters of the Cumberland River where it poured into the Ohio, he said, and washed ashore, as if to prove she could not escape the mountains even in death.
He SPENT HIS senior year in high school trying to prepare for departure. He knew Harris would turn him loose as soon as he had turned eighteen, and he welcomed this, it was true, but he had no idea where he would go or what he must do once on his own. Mrs. Kelsey with the enormous breasts kept asking him if he had a job outside of the orphanage and if he knew where he was going to live once he had “come of age,” but her questions only increased the anxiety Adam felt about his future. A boy he knew from the farm had found a job driving a coal truck for a buck and a half a load, and offered to help Adam do the same. The principal at the public high school asked if Adam might like to stay on and teach first grade. One of his teachers that year told him about her nephew, who worked for a big Chicago newspaper and who might, if approached, help Adam get a job as a copy boy.
The day Adam turned eighteen, Mr. Harris called him into the office.
He had gotten old over the years, and thinner, too, and he did not speak as much or lecture the boys as often. He seemed tired, jaded, not as eager to confront or prevail. He still carried his whip everywhere he went, held it whenever he called Adam into his office.
With the whip he pointed to a piece of paper on his desk.
“Your birth certificate,” he said quietly.
Adam took the paper but did not examine it. He felt Harris’ gaze on himself but did not return it. They stood face-to-face, both of them quiet. Between them was the chair where Clare had sat the first time she had come to drop Adam off.
“You can keep the clothes you’re wearing,” Harris finally said. “Everything else belongs to the State.”
It was still morning when Adam left the home. He took away only his high school diploma and his birth certificate, walked out without saying goodbye even to Mrs. Kelsey. The older children were in class, and he did not stop to see them. Two young boys stared at him from their work stations in the yard, and he did not wave at them as he left.
On the gravel pathway outside the home, he turned around and looked at the building one last time. He wanted to remember that moment exactly, to remember the orphanage precisely. He had no idea where he would go next. He knew only that he would never come back.
He HITCHED a ride to Kentucky, pumped gas for a dollar a day and a place to sleep, ate leftovers at the local diner where he cleaned the floor and picked up heavy loads after work. After a few weeks, he called his teacher at the school and asked for the nephew’s name and number in Chicago, said he might look the man up and see if he could get started in the paper. Before that, however, he said he was going to see his father one last time.
Sam’s marriage to Helen Kiessling had lasted long enough to produce four children and a mountain of debt Sam could not repay. Having failed to cure Helen of the Gypsy’s curse, or convince her of the sincerity of his faith in God, he had sent her and the children back to her family farm, where the grandparents could feed and clothe them and where Helen could find work in a nearby stocking factory. She lasted at the factory only a few months, then returned to the farm and abandoned herself to the increasingly frequent seizures which soon took her life.
Little Sam Jenkins received notice of Helen’s death while en route to a revival meeting in Georgia. He sent word that her children should be sent to an orphanage if possible, or released to the care of their grandparents until they were old enough to leave home. Then he went on to marry again.
Throughout the 1950s he was interviewed and written about regularly in the press, and he even went on the radio to preach his version of Christian worship to those unfamiliar with his movement. He offered conflicting stories about his own background, avoided mention of former wives or the number of children he had fathered, but he never did waver in his view of the Bible and the manner in which the Lord operated.
Adam found him in Jamesboro, Kentucky, at a meeting attended by five hundred people. The day of the revival, traffic leading to the site was so heavy that sheriff’s deputies had been dispatched to the area to direct cars onto and off the highway. All around the tent where Sam was going to preach, believers had gathered since the early morning, playing their cymbals and guitars and singing hymns. Gangs of hecklers loitered around. Women with hair long to their knees rushed about setting tables full of food.
Inside the tent the sheriff had roped off the front section and reserved it for those worshipers who planned to handle. He stopped a twelve-year-old boy who had tried to pass into the front.
“Children can’t handle,” he told the boy. “It’s the law, and it better be obeyed.”
Reluctantly the boy sat next to Adam, in
the row directly behind the rope. He kept muttering to himself as he looked at the makeshift pulpit and the snake boxes around it. Then he turned to Adam and said he was going to handle one of those snakes regardless of the sheriff’s orders.
“God’s law is above man’s law,” he said.
Increasingly excited, he rubbed the palms of his hands together and moved his torso back and forth as he spoke. “Man’s got to beat the devil if he’s gonna live in the Spirit.”
He wore a yellowed dress shirt closed in the front with a single button—the others having fallen off and never been replaced—and he kept his pants around his waist with the aid of a rope. His shoes were clearly too big for him, and he had a scar across the top of his right hand and over his wrist and arm. He said he had been burned a year ago at a service in Jolo when he had tried to handle fire.
“I was anointed all right,” he explained, “but just when I put my hand in the furnace I got scared, and fear lets the devil into your soul, and that’s why I burned.”
Two itinerant farmhands, brothers, each with a family to support, had died of snakebite at the same service in Jolo. At their burial the next day, their father had handled snakes over his sons’ coffins.
The boy stopped rubbing his hands together and sat up straight.
“Here he comes,” he said, motioning with his head toward the pulpit.
Adam felt his heart drop but did not look up. He waited till he had overcome the initial excitement he felt at the prospect of seeing Sam again, till he had reined in his emotions and could see the preacher with a cool eye.
Little Sam Jenkins wore the same patched white shirt he had worn when Adam was a boy. Unusually short, he had rolled up his pant bottoms, and he walked with a clear limp. His face was red and swollen from a recent snakebite, and his fingers were twisted and scarred from poison, but he was every bit as wired and charged and full of danger as he had been the last time Adam saw him. Now he was famous, too, Adam remarked—famous and obviously enjoying it.
He paced the length of the tent, holding his arms out to the believers who had gone into a frenzy at the very sight of him, shaking hands and kissing friends and beckoning the hecklers to kneel down and pray to the Lord. The twelve-year-old with the urge to handle sprang to his feet.
“Brother Sam!”
Jenkins came up and patted the boy on the head, then took his hands in his own. He looked directly into the boy’s eyes and said a prayer, then walked away.
The music inside the tent was so loud, Adam wanted to cover his ears and run.
Two doctors had come all the way from Charleston to examine Sam’s body in search of clues to his apparent immunity to poison. He showed the men the glass of lye he was going to drink that day, invited them to check it for authenticity, to join along in drinking if they felt the Spirit move upon them.
“I am an Apostle Paul,” he said, “I plant seeds that others will water.”
The sheriff warned he would arrest anyone who broke the law or became rowdy, and Sam invited him to do so in the name of the Lord. Then he preached.
He spoke for seven hours that day. He recited from the Bible, spoke of his past experiences with the Lord. He walked through the congregation and interrupted his sermon to ask individual members about the health and well-being of their children and spouses, sat down a few times and caught his breath before springing up into a frenzy and continuing to preach. Twice he stopped in front of Adam.
The first time, he patted the twelve-year-old on the head and spoke directly to Adam:
“Jimmy Ray here was born in the Word and has walked in the Spirit as long as I’ve known him,” he said. “He’s walked in the Spirit and he’ll die in it, I know, all to serve the Lord.”
The second time, he defied the sheriff’s orders and handed Jimmy Ray a snake.
But at no time during the service did Little Sam Jenkins treat Adam to more than a friendly glance, or act as if he had recognized his own son.
BLue was waiting for Adam outside her house, Expecting him with as much certainty as if his visit had been planned by them both. Her hair was pulled back from her face, and she wore a stark white dress that covered her arms and legs and rose to the edge of her neck. She looked as if she had not felt the heat at all, as if she had just emerged from a block of ice that had been left melting in the heat to expose the radiant perfection of the prize it held.
He parked the car directly in front of the house, got out and circled it until he had his back to the passenger-side window. He had the uneasy feeling that he was playing into her hands by pursuing her the way he was, that what lie had believed was a conscious decision on his part to set the facts straight about Sam’s death was nothing more than a response to Blue’s silent calls. For a long time he watched her—his eyes following their own desire to travel along the curve of her neck, the arch in her back, the soft dip in the crook of her arm. He imagined her turning in the dark, smiling the way she had to the hotel owner from Michigan when he brought her sweets. She spoke first.
“What if I told you about the snakes?” she asked.
Her question shocked him. He took a moment to understand it, weighed the words in his mind, and tried to read the message behind them. She was pulling him in, he thought, pulling him close.
“What about the snakes?” He shrugged.
With her hair pulled back from her face, he could see the edge of her lower jaw, the soft, transparent skin directly below her ear. “White porcelain,” an Arab cab driver in Beirut had said to him once, paying the highest compliment he knew to Western women. “As fair and delicate as white porcelain.”
“What if I told you why I handle?”
His hands were stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, his body leaning carelessly against the car, but his heart was already racing with anger and the effort to contain it.
“Doesn’t matter why" he said, knowing full well that it did-—matter—to him, that he despised all handlers and distrusted every one of them and that, whether he liked to admit this to himself or not, the very fact of her religious practices made her a suspect in Adam’s eyes.
She knew it, too.
“It’s not about what you do to yourself with the snakes,” he insisted. “It’s about what you do to others.”
“What I did to Sam,” she corrected. “It’s about what I did to Sam.”
He shrugged again. “To anyone.”
Blue smiled indulgently. Her eyes were amused, her body devoid of the tension he had seen the previous night when she had followed him in the rain. She descended the steps leading from the front yard to the sidewalk, came close enough to observe the tiny lines around his eyes, the shape of the scar on his face. Without touching her he could feel the coolness of her skin, the lulling comfort of her breath as it poured, balmlike, into the air around him.
“My friend Anne Pelton thinks she knows you,” she whispered.
Suddenly he felt the color drain from his face.
“She’s been handling for almost forty years,” she said. “She knew Little Sam in the very beginning.”
She spoke without malice, didn’t intend to frighten or embarrass him. She was putting together the clues to a mystery, he thought, looking through him to understand a bigger puzzle.
“She says you went out to her twice to ask questions. She thought you looked familiar the first time. The second time she realized why.”
Anne Pelton was a seventy-year-old widow who lived in Pineville and boasted of knowing everything there was to know about God. Her husband had died of snakebite in Alabama. Her daughter had moved to Nashville and sworn to become a country-western star or to die trying. She was the subject of most of Anne Pelton’s prayers.
“She says your mother was so pretty, it would be hard to forget her face. She says you have the same face, the same color eyes.”
Adam offered Blue his most sarcastic glare.
“I didn’t realize that woman could still see,” he said.
It wasn’t his natur
e to be cruel. He was trying to buy time, to decide how to react to the news that he had been recognized, remembered, talked about by the very men and women he had assumed knew nothing about him.
“At any rate, I wouldn’t put much stock in what she has to say if I were you.”
He could almost feel the sharpness of his own words, taste the blood they drew as they rose through his throat and onto his lips.
Blue didn’t flinch.
“Anne thinks you may be Little Sam’s child,” she said.
Mrs. Roscoe across the street was watching them from her doorstep. Blue was aware of the woman’s presence, Adam could tell, but she refused to grant the woman so much as a glance, refused to let her movements be inhibited by her neighbor’s presence.
“Come to church with me,” she told him quietly.
When he didn’t answer she went around the car and sat in the driver’s seat.
They DROVE WEST on Interstate 40, then south on 75 toward Chattanooga. In the passenger seat Adam smoked two cigarettes back-to-back, threw the butts out the open window, and kept his eyes on the road.
The highway cut across miles of open field. Around it the earth was flat and wide and emerald green, the road running through it like a smooth, shiny ribbon—quiet and still and slow as a dream. Watching it, Adam thought about the irony of what had happened—what he had done—only moments ago: confronted with Anne Pelton’s knowledge of his background, Adam had tried to deny his past, to hide his link to Clare and Rose Watkins and certainly to Little Sam. He had been blinded by shame, rendered mute by the anger that had coursed in his veins and settled on the tip of his tongue, and he had done what he had always blamed Sam for doing.
In Sweetwater Blue stopped at the first house they came to and knocked on the door. A young boy in cutoff pants emerged from the field behind the house and stared at the car, then at Blue. She asked if he knew where the Holy Rollers were meeting that day.