by Gina nahai
FORA YEAR after she died, I did not leave the house.
I couldn’t tell day from night and didn ’tfeel cold or hunger and I saw no one—not the well-wishers who called those first few weeks, nor the doctor who came to give me pills, nor even the Professor, who sat by me as if afraid I would never emerge from the darkness.
I remember being aware of his presence but not of his grief wondering later at the strength that allowed him to put aside his own needs and tend to mine. Toward the end of that year Anne Pelton came to see me. She brought a plate of home-baked cookies and a Bible, knelt beside the chair in my bedroom and asked if she might pray for me.
I wanted to tell her NO, but I did not have the strength, or the courage perhaps, to turn her away. When I didn’t answer she bowed her head and started to pray in that slow, melodic rhythm that moves the mountaineers ’ words, and after a while the very softness of her voice, the conviction with which she spoke filled the emptiness in my room, pulled me out of the silence, and made me want to hear more.
“Pray with me,” she said, and I found myself kneeling next to her, looking down at the designs on the rug and repeating the words she uttered.
Maybe this is what faith is: a woman with a plate of cookies and an old book, a pair of hands that fold before you in the dark, a voice that asks you to believe.
I prayed that a man would ride into my town on a dark wind, bringing with him the dust of a thousand moons, spreading it by the handful through the narrow alleys of the labyrinth of longing I could no longer escape, setting to light a darkened passage that may lead to Hope.
BEFORE DAWN SHE MOVED AGAINST THE SHEETS, PULLED herself away from him, and rose from the bed. She had been lying on the right side of his body, her head resting between his chest and collarbone, and when she left, he felt a sting of cold air on his skin.
He kept his eyes closed and listened as she reached for her dress in the dark. He imagined the white fabric gliding across the front of her thighs and up around her stomach and her chest. He wanted to reach for her across the bed, run his hand over the places he saw in his mind, pull her back to him. She left without a word.
In the hallway below, Isiah Frank lit a lamp and talked to her in a whisper. Then he unlocked the door and let her slip quietly back into her life.
Adam lay faceup on the bed and smoked until the air became murky and his throat shut down with the bitterness of the tobacco. He imagined Blue walking alone through the streets of Knoxville: her feet were cold and bare against the asphalt and her body moved effortlessly in the dark, and the color of her eyes changed from a deep indigo to an almost transparent sapphire with the rising light.
Without her, Adam’s room seemed hollow and dark and hungry—an echo chamber where her words, the memory of her touch, hung like fireflies in mid-flight.
He got up and put on the first shirt he found, left his bed unmade, grabbed his car keys and money. He felt at once elated and lost, appeased and angry.
The Dutch boys were nowhere to be found. Isiah Frank was downstairs in the living room, wiping the dust off his glass animals and speaking to his cat as he worked.
On Gay Street Adam went into Nate’s—the city’s only deli—and bought a cup of coffee that he would drink in the car. He pulled into Henley, under the freeway overpass, and out toward Highway 75 going north. Behind him, mist hung low over the river, and the mountains were a thousand shades of green, and the earth was a bright, golden rust the color of Blue’s hair.
He drove through the mountains all day and came back when it was dark. For a while he parked his car across the Gay Street Bridge and watched its lights reflected on the river, the shadows of people traversing it. Then he went back to the house and waited for Blue.
She came up to him from behind, stood so close, he could feel her chest rise with every breath. Naked, she pressed herself against his back, reached around him and unbuttoned his shirt. When he turned to face her, she kissed his mouth, the length of his neck, the edge of his shoulder.
“I always knew you would come,” she said, and now he believed her.
In September the heat suddenly let up. The air, which had hung low and heavy through August, became crisp almost overnight, and the sky took on the transparent clarity of glass. The leaves began to turn, and the river rose from its lethargic state, and the light became vivid and sharp and animate.
The Dutch boys left their luggage in the boardinghouse and went on a monthlong drive through the American South. Isiah Frank unpacked two trunks full of costumes from Shakespearean plays he had produced at the university, and hung them out in the yard to air. Then he dressed up in a different costume each day, and acted the part.
“Life should be as grand as theater,” he said as if to an audience in his thrall.
In the archives room of the Knoxville News Sentinel, Adam sat looking through stacks of microfilm on a badly lit monitor. He searched for references to Sam Jenkins and Blue, for a possible mention of his mother or Rose. He asked the attendant—a lanky old man with a faded green T-shirt—what he remembered having heard or read, whom he recommended Adam talk to. Mostly, he looked at the July 26 issue of the newspaper, where Little Sam’s death and funeral were first announced.
On the very top of the page was a picture of Sam in his younger days. He wore a white shirt buttoned to the collar, stared at the camera with tiny eyes that almost looked frightened. His face was red and swollen from too much exposure to the elements and too many snakebites, and his ears were too large for his head, but there was nothing in the way he looked, nothing Adam could read in his face, to indicate the kind of man he was.
Below Sam’s picture was a smaller one of the shed where he had been conducting services when he was bitten. It was a crumbling structure with a tin roof and board siding badly in need of repair, set in the midst of an empty field, with nothing else in sight.
A third picture, taken after Sam’s funeral, showed the members of his family who had come to Florida to pay their last respects. They had driven all night, the newspaper said—four truckloads of relatives from Tennessee and beyond— just to attend the funeral and then drive home again to be at work the next day. No one had handled snakes at the burial, but a country music band had played and afterward, food had been served.
Adam had seen these pictures and the article several times, but he kept going back to them. With all of his power to conquer the souls of men and to resist the devil, Little Sam Jenkins had died in poverty and without much pretension. With all the sins he had committed against his family, he had been buried by two dozen loyal offspring.
The family portrait showed fourteen adults and three small children. They all wore neat clothes and church shoes. Some of the women bore the wide frame and the fleshy face of Esther Parker. One of them had dark wavy hair and looks reminiscent of the German wife with the Gypsy curse. A man in the back row, dressed in a light-colored suit and tie, had Sam’s cauliflower ears.
One of Sam’s daughters, herself a matriarch in a church in Kentucky, had recalled to the reporter present at the scene that her father had been so pure “he never even drank coffee.”
Time and again Adam tried to guess which one of the women would have made such a remark. It was impossible to tell, of course, just as it was impossible to divine what any of those people thought at the moment directly following Sam’s burial. What Adam knew for certain, what he kept wanting to remind himself every time he probed the papers, was that he had never belonged in that picture—regardless of his ancestry or the place or his birth—that he may have carried Sam’s blood in his veins but had never shared his spirit or the dreams and desires of his other children, that he may have been conceived of Sam’s flesh but would never perpetuate the legacy of lies and treason Sam had cast into the lives of his believers. Adam was, as Rose Watkins had often told him with contempt, a true bastard seed.
He WENT TO see Anne Pelton again.
It was Monday, and he’d spent the morning driving through Lynch and its
surrounding towns. Along the 63, the mountains jutted into and away from the road like jagged carvings of dense forest on a black diamond soil. Up the 25 and towards Cumberland Gap, the interstate grew wider, then narrow again. He had gone past Pineville, through Harlan, and into Lynch. He was watching the abandoned coal tipples, the empty barns with crumbling roofs, the slowly decaying crosses planted sporadically in the ground.
Lynch was a ghost town covered under an avalanche of dust and coal residue. Driving up its only street, Adam peered into the fronts of wooden cabins and homes, wondering what life had been like here in his own childhood, where Little Sam Jenkins had pitched his tent for the ten-day revival that had culminated in Adam’s conception.
He was so engrossed in his search, so moved by the emptiness of this town where his own destiny had been shaped, he did not notice at first the silver pickup that had pulled up behind him and was now on his tail.
It was a wide and ancient vehicle, dented all over, its wheels smooth as skin. The driver wore a checkered gray-and-red shirt and leaned on his right elbow as he drove with his left hand. He stayed a hair’s breadth away from Adam’s rear bumper, and he had fixed his eyes on Adam’s image in the rearview mirror. He must be a local, Adam thought. He had not recognized Adam’s car as one of their own, figured it had to be a rental because it was new and had out-of-state plates. He was giving a warning, nudging Adam off the street and back toward the highway, where he felt strangers belonged. He stayed on Adam’s tail until he had pulled back on the 25 and was heading south toward Harlan.
Anne Pelton lived in a one-bedroom house off an unpaved street across from the True Church of the Lord Jesus in Pine-ville, Kentucky. She was a tiny woman with a wide flat face marked with spider veins that loomed just under her skin. She had wrinkles around her eyes and her lips, but she looked younger than her seventy years, moved with a light step and an easy flexibility. Her hair, straight and shiny, was always tied in a ponytail that reached down above her hips, and she wore tennis shoes even to church. Her only downfall was her eyes: they were small and watery, forever squinting as if to bring the world into focus. Long ago, a preacher had told her that wearing eyeglasses might be interference with the work of the Lord.
Through her kitchen window she heard Adam’s car approach, but she waited until he had walked up to the door before she responded. Even with her failing eyes she could see that he was paler, thinner, more intense than when she had seen him last.
“The Lord has blessed me with another visit from you,” she said, and invited him in.
A tiny living room with faded green carpeting led to a small alcove that Anne used as her kitchen. There was a wood-burning stove, a refrigerator, a sink with a chipped surface revealing rusted metal underneath. Pale yellow curtains—hand-sewn with large stitches—hung at the window overlooking the road.
Adam sat at the folding aluminum table with a cracked vinyl top, and watched as Anne filled a kettle with water, set out two mugs, and prepared tea. She had her back to Adam as she worked, but her manner was easy and calm and welcoming in a way that disarmed him. Without asking, she put four spoonfuls of sugar in his mug, then put the tea in front of him and smiled.
“My husband only drank coffee,” she said, easing into her chair, “but even when he was alive I never gave up my tea.”
The table was so small, their hands almost touched when they reached for the tea. There was a phone on the counter next to the stove, but no radio or television—the devil’s agents—in the house. On the window ledge, next to the yellow curtains, small glass bottles filled with liquid were lined up in the sun.
Anne Pelton was the child of a migrant coal worker, and of a Czech immigrant he had met at a coal camp in Virginia. Her parents had traveled everywhere by foot, living in the wild and bathing in ravines and lakes between jobs. Together they had borne thirteen children and put most of them to work in the camps. But in the later years of their lives, her father had become sick with black lung disease and her mother had lost the strength to keep working, and so they had given their four youngest children to strangers: they had placed each child in a different home, with elderly couples who needed a young body able to work.
Anne had been given away at age eight, but her new family had beaten her mercilessly and given her little to eat, and so she had run away after three years. From age eleven to thirteen, she had managed to work in the camps disguised as a boy, but when she was too old to pass undetected, she took to the road as her mother and father had done. One winter in Floyd County, she had spent three days walking alone, and she had nearly frozen to death when a man in his mid-forties stopped his truck and picked her up. She had traveled with the man to this same house, and married him a week later.
“I’ve been hoping you would call again,” she told Adam. “I’ve been praying for you since you arrived, and I’ve prayed more since I realized who you are.”
It bothered him that she was so direct, so presumptuous, almost, in extending her prayers. He took a sip of his tea and forced himself to push ahead.
“Blue tells me you knew my mother,” he said.
Her name melted on his tongue like sugar. He loved the taste of it, the way it floated into the air and filled the space between him and Anne, the freedom to speak about her as if she—as if they—were real.
Anne must have been anticipating the question.
“Your mother was a few years younger than me,” she said, purposely ignoring the reference to Blue, “but for many years I wanted to be just like her.
“She never came to church except to cause trouble, and that was all right by me, because I liked the way she dressed and talked and the way she wasn’t afraid of the preachers or the church members or even Rose.”
Anne Pelton had not been born to Holiness, Adam knew. She had been introduced to the church by her husband, and for a long time she had resisted the faith and refused to handle snakes. She was her husband’s second wife, raising his children after their mother had run away and left them, and she had had time to have only one child of her own before Buford Pelton was bitten by a snake and died in Alabama. After that she had undergone a transformation, and in time embraced the church in earnest.
“The other women in these parts were jealous of her, of course: she was pretty, and she knew what to do with a man, and our husbands couldn’t keep their hands off her. But I liked watching her. She was so different from Rose—almost like they weren’t of the same blood, like she had landed in Rose’s womb by mistake.”
As she talked, the smile on her face widened and became more distant—as if she were transformed by her own words and the image she described for Adam.
Adam thought of the flowers Clare had in her hand that last time she came to see him in the orphanage: she had picked them off the side of the road, and they had wilted by the time she arrived, but their colors had been cast in his memory forever. Even after she had abandoned her child, Clare had continued to cling to an ideal of beauty and refinement so at odds with the reality of her life.
“People said Clare had taken after her dad,” Anne mused, “but I think she was just different all around—not like anyone who should have been born in these parts.”
Adam looked at Anne then and thought how gentle she was when describing Clare, how unlike the believers he had known in his childhood, who had judged Clare and her offspring so harshly. Anne, too, had been given away as a child, raised by strangers, brought into the church as an outsider who would have to prove her loyalty or leave. Still, her spirit had remained fluid and pure and devoid of judgment. She made it easy for Adam to turn around, to look back and see Clare and Rose and all the people he had once loved.
Anne was looking directly at him, not squinting at all, about to say something of consequence.
“I don’t know why your mother gave you up,” she said, “but I know why she killed herself.”
On the windowsill, light was hitting the bottles with the clear liquid, exposing the tiny white flakes—feat
hers—that gave away their content: strychnine, mixed with water and ready to drink.
Anne caught Adam’s eye on the bottles.
“My husband drank carbolic acid pure,” she explained. “That’s what Sam liked, too, but I prefer strychnine because it burns less going down.”
She watched Adam’s face for a reaction. He was thinking how strange it was that a woman as gentle and easy as Anne could inflict such violence on her own body, how someone as practical as she could buy into the preachers’ lies. That’s what he never could understand about the snake handlers, what drove him to condemn the faith and its practitioners.
She read his mind.
“It’s not about the messenger,” she said softly. “It’s about the message.”
He almost lit a cigarette right there in her kitchen, but he could hear the wheezing of her lungs—the result of breathing coal dust her whole life—and he stopped himself. He drank the tea she had poured for him, savored its sweetness, the simplicity with which it had been offered. She got up and poured more tea for them both. It was past noon, and she must have felt hungry or at least obligated to offer her guest some food, because she went to the narrow cabinet in the wall and opened the door. There were cans of vegetables on the shelves, a box of oatmeal, a bag of rice. On the very bottom shelf were two snake boxes with wire mesh on top.
Anne took out a box of crackers and put it on the table in front of Adam. She caught him staring at the snake boxes—one painted a vivid blue, the other dark wood—noticed he was listening for the sound of the serpents inside. She went back to the cabinet, and instead of closing the door took out the blue box.
She placed it, still closed, on the table before Adam.
He held his breath and tried to stay calm, but he felt an almost primal fear—something larger and more devastating than he had ever experienced—and he threw back his chair and jumped to his feet. Through the wire mesh, he could see a yellow copperhead with a flat head, and a gray-and-black rattler next to it. He felt his heart race in terror, felt his body grow cold—a small boy asleep in a bed somewhere in the darkness of a derailed train car, with snake boxes under his bed and the fear of his mother’s departure in his heart.