by Gina nahai
He knew there are no cool spots in a flame, no right ways to hold a burning log.
Long after he had first set out to discover the lie behind the snake handlers’ beliefs, Adam had come to the same conclusion that had forever baffled the reporters and scientists who studied holiness people: too often, for no logical, scientific reason, the snakes did not bite, the fire did not burn, and the strychnine did not kill those who believed.
About ten o’clock the music resumed, and the believers began dancing around the church. Suddenly the woman with the razor face stood up, cried “Judgment day is near,” and fainted to the floor. Two men dragged her by the arms into the center aisle and knelt beside her in prayer. Pastor Jimmy Ray Weston was called to begin the process of revival. Praying loudly, he leaned over the woman and touched her forehead, first with his Bible, then with his hand. The music became louder, as if in celebration, and Jimmy Ray Weston rocked back and forth on his knees over the woman. She was writhing in ecstasy, her eyes still closed, her head moving side to side. He put his hand on her shoulder and her knees. He touched her lips, her stomach, put his fingers on her hipbones, then on her crotch.
She opened her eyes.
“Praise the Lord.”
Her revival marked a turning point in the service. The air in the room suddenly felt thin, and everyone looked exhausted and ready to rest as they slowly returned to their seats. Jimmy Ray Weston started to pace in front of the pulpit with his hand crossed over his chest and his head bowed in reflection.
“My name is Jimmy Ray Weston,” he began, “and I am here to receive the Spirit.”
He spoke in a slow and halting pace, stopping every few words to run his hand through his hair and catch his breath. He had a burn scar over his wrist and the back of his hand, and a habit of rocking his torso back and forth as he spoke, moving faster as he became more excited. He was clearly not the kind of preacher who had spent much time in school, but he spoke with a fervor that was sincere and contagious in its fury, and he showed a passionate desire to communicate his faith that moved his congregation, and even Adam.
“All things work together for good to them that love God,” he recited from Romans 8:28.
He spoke for over an hour, stopping every once in a while to allow time for a song, and he managed to capture everyone’s attention so fully that they all seemed to have forgotten Blue and her presence. Then, all at once, Adam saw her standing in the far end of the church, and she had a snake in her hands.
It was a six-foot-long copperhead with a triangular head and a broken rust-and-coral—patterned coat. She was holding it from the middle, her elbows bent and slightly raised above her waistline, her palms turned toward her face. She looked calm but intent, focused only on the serpent in her hands, unaware of what was going on around her.
Adam bolted from his seat, horrified, and leapt halfway to the middle of the room. He was going to throw himself on Blue and the snake, wrench the beast from her hands if he could. Someone grabbed him from behind, and pulled him back.
“Easy,” E. Preston Pope hissed in his ear, “or the snake will charge.”
Adam wrestled free from the man’s grip, pushed the others who had closed in around him. His instincts urged him to act, but he knew Pope was right—that any sudden move on Adam’s part would only upset the balance between Blue and her snake and incite the animal to strike.
She was whispering to the copperhead. She wasn’t fighting so much as seducing it, he thought, and now it had wrapped its tail around her wrist and was rising toward her face. She let it glide against her chest, up toward the center of her neck. When it had come to within an inch of her throat, she stopped talking and closed her eyes.
The snake rubbed its head against her chin, put its mouth on her lip.
She bristled, but that was all. She let the snake crawl over her face and onto her head, allowed it to wrap its tail around her neck. It went down the length of her back, through the opening in her sleeve, under her dress, and against her bare flesh.
Anne Pelton was singing about salvation in a voice that shook with her tears. Hearing her, Blue opened her eyes and smiled. She looked as if she were far away—deep under a body of water that distorted all images and dulled every sound.
The snake circled around her waist—its colors and thickness visible under the fabric—then climbed up the middle of her stomach and chest. Its head rested in the spot directly between her breasts. It rose off her skin, pulled away, landed again.
She shook once, and her lips stopped moving. She looked stunned, as if faced with a question she did not expect. Pain washed over face and brought tears to her eyes. Her hands froze in midair. Then a single red spot appeared on the front of her dress.
She had been bitten. Bitten by a copperhead. Here in the middle of these woods, with nothing but dirt roads surrounding them and help hours away.
She brought her hands to her chest as if to take hold of the snake, but Adam saw that they were trembling and uncertain, and he realized that she was frightened. The woman with the razor-thin face had also noticed that something was wrong, and was examining the drop of blood that had now spread on Blue’s dress.
There was no telling how much of its poison the copperhead had already dispensed, or whether it would bite again, Adam thought. With its head so close to her heart, a second bite might well induce cardiac arrest.
He went to her now, and pushed the razor-faced woman away. Blue’s lips were chalk-white and her face was covered with moisture and now she was trembling all over. He knew it was only moments before she’d pass out.
He reached with both hands and ripped open the front of her dress, revealing her bare body and the serpent around it. The razor-faced woman screamed in alarm, but Blue remained still. The copperhead contracted around Blue’s waist, turned around with lightning speed, rose higher off her body, and charged Adam. Instinctively, he grabbed it around the neck with the flat of his hand—his fingers pressing its neck. He held on, but the snake fought harder than he had expected, and now it was thrashing its tail at Blue’s hip. Adam held fast, trembling and drenched in sweat, his arm aching from pressure. He saw that Blue was gasping for air, realized he had to free her quickly. He turned his wrist back and down—bending the snake’s neck—and yanked.
The copperhead tensed up, then suddenly went limp. Adam pulled again, harder this time, and the snake came off Blue like a piece of rope.
She folded onto the ground as if made of fabric and string alone.
Coming down on his right knee, Adam brought his wrist with the snake still around it to the ground. He opened his hand, laid his palm flat against the earth. The copperhead loosened, unwound itself, and slid off.
Jimmy Ray Weston put the forked tip of a tree branch on the back of the snake’s head and guided it smoothly into a cage.
“Praise the Lord,” he said when he was done, but inside the church, everyone was numb and silent and deaf to his words.
Adam grabbed Anne Pelton’s keys and ran outside to bring the car around. Driving back, he caught Blue in the car’s headlights: she had been carried outside by Paul Kane and laid on a blanket on top of a picnic table. All around her on the ground, the church members had knelt in prayer.
Jimmy Ray Weston gave Adam directions to a clinic he thought might be open at that hour.
“She wouldn’t need it if her soul had been clean,” he remarked as Adam carried Blue to the car.
They drove up a winding road that rose through the woods and higher up the mountain, then slowly descended toward the opposite end of the highway that had brought them here. Above them the mountain cast long black shadows on the road and blocked out most of the sky. Blue was sitting in the front passenger seat with her head on a folded-up blanket placed against the window. She had become feverish and hot by then, and she was coughing as if to clear her lungs of something hard. Adam held her left hand as he drove, and told her to stay awake, not to be afraid, he would take her to a hospital soon and from there, the
y would go home.
She wasn’t responding, and she looked more and more disoriented. When she coughed again, a narrow stream of blood poured out of her mouth and down the side of her chin.
Hang on, he thought, or maybe he told her. Hang on, and we’ll be out of here soon, down on the flat ground with streetlights around us and signs showing the way. Down in a place where men put their faith in their own and each other’s hands instead of God’s.
Hang on, he thought, but he realized that they were completely alone—cut off from the church members and their music, surrounded by walls of rock and trees, alone on a narrow pathway he hoped would lead them out.
In the train car the day she died Rose Watkins had looked every bit as normal as Adam had ever seen her. She had died in mid prayer, the neighbors had deduced—which explained the engrossed but far-away expression on her face—but it wasn’t until later that Adam realized what bothered him so much about Rose’s appearance that day: she had looked no different in death than she did in life, and it seemed to him that this was wrong; that the line between the living and the dead should be clearly marked; that for all the physical and emotional turmoil it inflicted upon the body, life should assert itself differently from death.
“Hang on,” he told Blue, but the mountain leaned so far onto the road, he could hardly see ten feet ahead of the car. He thought about he directions Jimmy Ray Weston had given in the church parking lot, reviewed in his mind every turn he had taken since he left. They were simple enough—the directions—but out here in the woods every road looked the same as the other and all at once he realized they had come to a dead end and were facing the mountain again.
He looked in the rearview mirror, out the side of the car. He must have taken a wrong turn, and now he was confused and had lost precious time.
Blue coughed again, and this time her eyes closed and her head fell limp to the side. He backed out of the dead end and turned the car around, found the road he thought had taken them here and this time took a different turn. He was driving fast but couldn’t tell which direction he was headed in, couldn’t find a sign or a marker to indicate the way out. Minutes later the road ended again.
He felt a panic he did not know he could feel—a blinding, suffocating fear that made his jaws lock and his fingers freeze around the steering wheel.
He put the car in park and killed the engine, jumped out the door and looked around for a cabin or house where he might ask directions. There was nothing—no people, no lights, not even the usual sounds of the woods at night.
Blue coughed blood again, and he saw that her skin had turned cold and cloudy as wax paper.
“Hang on,” he told her, and opened the passenger-side door, knelt on the ground, and took both her hands in his own. Her pulse was beating erratically and her breath smelled like blood, and he realized there was nothing he could do now— nothing he could do but wait and hope she would beat the venom on her own.
“But to one is given by the Spirit the word of wisdom,” he remembered a verse from I Corinthians, “to another the word of knowledge by the same spirit; to another faith by the same Spirit...”
Hang on, he prayed, and put his lips on Blue’s forehead and her nose, kissed her eyes and her hair. He was speaking to her without knowing what he said, praying to her without knowing if she heard.
“To another faith by the same Spirit.”
He wiped her forehead with his hand, caressed the sides of her face with the back of his fingers. He had failed her, he thought—failed to protect her from her own madness, to stop her when he knew better. He had failed her when it mattered most, and now he had no choice but to surrender to the darkness of the mountains and to his own human limitations.
Hang on, he prayed as his tears mixed with hers. His mouth burned with the fever on her skin. He opened the front of her dress and saw the two holes in her chest dug by the snake’s teeth. They were red and turning black, the flesh around them a sickly white.
Hang on, he prayed, and put his lips to the wound.
All NIGHT LONG she lay feverish and trembling in the car. He wrapped her in the blanket and felt her pulse every few minutes, checked her wound for swelling and discoloration, tried to calculate the time left until sunrise, when he could attempt to find his way out of the mountains again.
Before dawn she stopped trembling, and he felt the fever slowly let go. He asked her if she could remember the events of the previous night, but she wouldn’t look at him or respond at all. So he sat her upright in the front again, started the car, and began to drive. Down the side of the mountain, he could see bits of the highway through the thickness of the woods, and he heard Blue’s breathing return to a normal pace. She was sleeping now, and he thought that the worst may be over, so he opened the window to let in the morning air and he let go of her hand and breathed a sigh of relief. He felt a dull ache in his arm, and realized it was a result of his struggle with the snake. Then he remembered Jimmy Ray’s parting words, his buttonholes held in place with bits of rope, the way he had rocked back and forth as he grew excited.
On the highway toward Chattanooga, he turned on the radio and listened to a swarthy voiced announcer recite bits of the day’s news, looked at Blue sleeping next to him, and he felt as if it had always been this way—as if the two of them had traveled in this car all their lives, sat next to each other as the sun rose over the mountain and illuminated the road that would take them away from their pain and home to each other.
I DID KILL HIM, it’s true.
She spoke with her face turned away from Adam, her voice small and distant, devoid of conviction.
I killed Little Sam Jenkins with that snake, hours after we had entered the empty blacksmith shop in Altha and he started to preach his version of God’s love, after he had lived almost nine decades and survived 446 snakebites, countless gallons of poison, a do^en knife wounds, electrocution, and jail.
It was either him or me, and I saved myself
After my daughter died, I went back to church with Anne Pel-ton against my husband’s wishes. I did not go to fight Sam. I went to seek the company of other humans, the peace that came with prayer, the possibility of finding hope.
The Professor was so alarmed by my return, he stood in the doorway and forbade me to leave when Anne came to fetch me. He had taken a leave from the university that year, and he spent most of his time at home, reading the Old Testament and writing down his thoughts and reactions in scholarly essays. He had stopped taking care with his clothes and his appearance, let the yard fall into disarray, abandoned the house to disorder. He talked to me with reason and explained why I did not belong in Holiness, why the mountaineers who had remained isolated for two hundred years would never accept an outsider, much less a foreigner like me, as their own. He said the snakes would kill me sooner or later or that I would kill myself, but that at any rate the harm I would do by handling would far exceed any relief the church might bring.
He may have been right, of course, but back then the church was the only place I knew to go.
Sam attacked me almost as soon as I went back, but for a while I didn’t care enough to react. I had been wounded more deeply by my daughter’s death than by anything he or anyone else could do to me, and it was easy, in those years when I hung between despair and the utter lack of feeling, to overlook him.
But the longer I stayed in the church, the more important it became to me, and after a while I found myself going back if only to prove I could, if only to beat Sam at his game. / began to fight him without knowing exactly why 1 wanted to win, and that became more essential than anything else the church had to offer and so 1 stayed, year after year, and the longer I resisted Sam s attacks and the longer I prevailed over the snakes, the more alive and in control I felt until he decided it was time to launch a different battle.
He started to look for evidence he could use to have me expelled. He asked a few questions, and found out about my husband’s trips to Memphis. Suddenly he saw himself st
aring at the answer to the enigma of the Professor’s life: the man was a Jew, of course—a Jew who had passed as a Christian. This made me a Jew as well, or at least half-a-Jew, but at any rate it made me a liar and a devil because I had kept the truth from the church. That’s what Sam was going to reveal to the believers before 1 killed him.
Three weeks before Altha, we had been to Sister Mary’s church in Mount Vernon, Kentucky, and Sam had spent the entire sermon talking about whores and adulteresses posing as Holiness women. He had not mentioned my name, but the members knew him enough to understand how he laid an accusation at someone's feet without naming them. Even as he spoke, I could hear the whispers behind me, could see the slanted eyes and the side-way glances, and the only thing that kept me from being expelled that day was the snake that bit Tess Bettis, and that killed him on the spot.
Tess screamed when the animal bit him. He tried to drop the snake, but it held on with its fangs and Tess had to pry it away. Then we all saw the two holes left by the serpent’s teeth and the stream of blood that fell from them.
He turned blue almost immediately. Someone asked him if they should call a doctor, and he said yes, get help as soon as possible, because I am dying here and the Lord will not hear me but by then he was already convulsing, and then he lay stiff-— twenty-six years old and the dead father offive.
Little Sam picked up the culprit snake and shoved it back into a box, then tried to explain Tess’s death: "Not enough faith in the Holy Ghost," he said. “You must never handle if you 're afraid, or if you don't feel anointed. ”
On the ride home after Tess s funeral, Anne talked incessantly about the Lord’s glory and how Tess had died happy, knowing he was closer to the Lord than at any other time in his life. She spoke about her own family—her husband and his brother, who had died within a month of each other—the brother from strychnine poisoning, the husband of snakebite—and how that had only strengthened her resolve to fight the devil through prayer and do God’s work.