by Gina nahai
It was the first time I had seen someone die in church. All I could think of was that it could have been me lying in that coffin, dead at Little Sam s hands.
Then we went to Florida.
IVe drove twelve hours from Knoxville, through Albany and south, to Calhoun County, twenty-five miles from the Georgia-Florida state line. In Lester's shed, near Altha, we saw three doen trucks parked outside in anticipation of Little Sam’s arrival. I had not been to church since Tess died, but Anne had dropped by to see me every Monday afternoon, and she said that Sam had not handled snakes at any services. Fie said only that he had not felt the Spirit move upon him, but it was beginning to look like he had lost his nerve, Anne said, and now he was feeling the pressure to handle again: the worshipers expected him to set an example, and the local papers had been sending reporters to every meeting hoping that another accident would occur and that they could write about it first.
This was Sam’s weakness, I thought: his fear, and the fact that he wanted to hide it.
In church that day Sam did not look at me at all. Tess s widow was there with all her children, and Sam gave her center stage to testify and sing and faint in ecstasy. But when his turn came up to preach, he chose a passage from I Corinthians: Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy. ”
He spoke of the ways a woman might defile the temple of God and also the ways she could be punished. He was attacking
me again, but now I could see the snake boxes lined up against the wall of the shed, and I knew how I was going to fight back.
Sam was winding down the service, ignoring the believers ’ desire to handle.
I saw the lard can in which he kept the rattler that had killed Tess.
I knew rattlesnakes are more likely to bite than the other serpents we normally handle. I knew Sam was afraid. I knew that snakes sense fear and attack the weak.
I opened the can, took out the snake, and walked it over to Sam.
I remember his wrist and arm swelled to three times their normal sfe, and his flesh turned black, and he started to vomit blood. George Guilford, who is the Calhoun County sheriff, asked if he could drive Sam to a hospital, but of course Sam refused. He lay on the floor, surrounded by worshipers in prayer, his eyes fixed only on me.
Some church members lifted him in their arms and drove him to a nearby house where they planned to continue to pray until he recovered. The mood then was still light. People were talking and eating outside the house, praying inside. Some newspaper reporters smoked on the steps, and even Sheriff Guilford, whose job it was to enforce the statutes against snake handling, was chatting amiably and drinking lemonade instead of arresting anyone. Nobody actually believed that Sam would die, and so they did not think about the fact that I was the one who had encouraged him to handle.
But Sam s body kept swelling and turning blacker before our eyes, and he was getting more delirious every hour, and then all
at once we all knew this was different that he wasn’t going
to pull through as he had done hundreds of times before, that he was mortal and vulnerable and at last at the end of his fight.
The distance from innocence to guilt, I realised then, is the tick of a clock—quick, easy, impossible to undo.
When he knew he was going to die, Sam asked Sheriff Guilford to send for his children in Kentucky and Tennessee and wherever else they could be located. The sheriff obliged, and then everyone started to pray in a panic. Guilford came back from the station and said that a convoy of Sam s children was headed toward Florida. That’s the way of mountain people, you see: most of the time, they put family above all, uphold the bonds of loyalty and kinship.
Hoping to avoid blame myself, I knelt with the others next to Sam, bowed my head, and sang:
“Faith, faith, it can cure anything. ”
He heard me singing and looked up. He raised a swollen arm, waved it in my direction and tried to speak, but his voice was barely a whimper and he coughed blood every time he wanted to force a sound out of his chest. So he looked again and found Sheriff Guilford in the crowd, motioned for him to put his ear to Sam s mouth. I knew then that Sam would manage to take from me in death what he had not managed to exact in life: my place in the church, the trust of the believers, the possibility of at last belonging.
“That woman brought fear into my church and handed me the snake to kill me,” I later learned he had said.
“She’s as guilty as if she had put a shotgun to my head.”
ISIAH Frank BROUGHT Adam a cup of Turkish coffee and a plate of pastel-colored sugar cubes arranged in the shape of a pyramid. He put the coffee on the table next to Adam, turned around, and surveyed the disorganized state of the room. He had taken to cleaning Adam’s room in his absence. He made the bed, took out Adam’s laundry, washed and folded his clothes and put them back in drawers instead of the backpack. He wasn’t playing domestic, Adam knew. He was keeping an eye on his guest, a hand in Adam’s affairs.
Adam had been dreaming of Sam all night. Sam was lying on a flat board inside a stranger’s home, his face and body swollen black from poison, his feet bare and disfigured from too much abuse. Around him people knelt in prayer. They were waiting for Sam to get up, to raise himself from the dead as he had promised to raise so many others. He never did.
Adam heard Isiah moving around his room, and woke up. Sitting in bed, he forced the sleep from his eyes and slowly remembered the events of the last two days: the train ride to Chattanooga, Blue’s getting bitten, the hours he had spent in the car waiting to see if she would live.
By the time they had found the clinic Jimmy Ray Weston had recommended, Blue had overcome the most critical effects of the poison. She had been admitted, observed, sent home a few hours later. Driving back to Pineville in Anne Pelton’s car, she had said nothing and hardly looked at Adam.
After almost fifteen years of believing herself immune to snakes and poison, Sister Blue Kerdi had learned otherwise.
“I buy the coffee from an Armenian store clerk who runs his own business out of his boss’s store,” Isiah said as he opened and closed the dresser drawers across from Adam’s bed. “He makes me a cup when I go in—cooks it with milk and sugar till it foams like cream—and then he reads my fortune in the lines at the bottom of the cup.”
He stopped and threw a glance at Adam.
“You might try it,” he said with exaggerated disdain. “It helps clear the mind.”
Adam got up and went to the sink. He threw cold water on his face, lit a cigarette, fell back in the chair near the dresser. He felt exhausted and confused and overwhelmed by conflicting emotions—not at all prepared to tolerate Isiah’s intrusions.
“Of course some of us like seeing things in a fog,” Isiah went on.
Adam bounded out of his chair. He grabbed Isiah by the side of the collar, and turned him around.
“What is it you want?” he said. “What are you looking for all the time?”
Isiah was petrified. He stood with his eyes locked into Adam’s, aware that the slightest move, a single word, might provoke further attack. A minute later he eased his collar out of Adam’s fist and took a cautious step back.
It wasn’t he that aroused Adam’s rage, he knew. It was all the others—Blue and the Professor, Clare’s memory and the snakes and yes, a dead man Adam had come back to understand and who was haunting him instead.
They remained facing each other for a while. Then at last Isiah gathered his courage and spoke:
“I’m looking for your eyes,” he said. “Open your eyes.”
The Professor KNEW about them, of course. This much Adam was certain of. Blue had never acted in secret, never tried to hide Adam from her husband or from all those watching her. Her boldness had given Adam a sense of security—the impression that she belonged to him entirely, that her husband did not matter, did not exist. Night after night Adam had held Blue in his arm
s knowing the Professor must be waiting for her at home, that he must be going through their house looking for signs of the intruder in his world. He must search for fingerprints on every hard surface, Adam thought, must stand above his bed looking for the shape of Adam’s body, asking himself if, in his absence, Blue had taken her lover into the places that were most holy to her husband.
He knew about them, of course, and yet, the Professor had done nothing to stop the affair.
It made no sense, Adam realized in the days after Isiah’s warning—that a man who had worked so hard to build a home with his wife, a man who planned his every move so carefully, who guarded every word, every sound—a man as arrogant, as distant and frightened as the Professor, would so willingly allow himself to be robbed.
Doubt, like desire, had become second nature.
He went to find Isiah in his workroom behind the kitchen. He wasn’t sure about allowing Isiah a glimpse of his thoughts— letting him play a part in an already tangled relationship. But Isiah seemed to know more than anyone else did about Blue, and he had wanted to tell Adam this—had offered a bait Adam could not refuse.
Tired of searching for perfect new pieces to add to his collection, Isiah had bought a book on making glass figurines, and was teaching himself the craft. He was bent over a large table in the workroom, holding a blowtorch to a piece of colored glass that melted and gave in the heat.
He saw Adam standing in the doorway.
“What about the old man?” Adam asked without coming into the room.
Isiah kept his eyes on the flame that was shaping his glass. He didn’t answer for so long, Adam thought he hadn’t heard him.
“Which one?” Isiah finally replied, still looking down. “The one she killed, or the one she has yet to kill?”
He looked up and winked playfully. His sarcasm made Adam’s stomach turn.
“I mean her husband,” Adam said sternly.
Isiah pulled on the melted glass until it was thin as a string, then swirled it around in the shape of a cone. When he was done, he turned off the blowtorch, put it down, and pulled off his goggles.
“Come on in.” He motioned with his hand to the chair on the other side of the table.
In his late fifties, he was still fit and muscular—the lines in his face deep but still sharp, his manners affected but proud.
“What about the husband?” he asked once Adam had sat down.
“Why won’t he stop her?”
Adam was uncomfortable asking the question—alluding to his own affair with Blue and, thereby, he felt, accepting the terms of Isiah’s friendship.
Isiah looked pleased. He nodded at Adam in approval—a teacher, about to give up, suddenly discovering the light in his pupil’s eyes.
“What makes you think he can?”
It was a tempting proposition: that the Professor was powerless before Blue, that he had not been able to stop her from going back to church or handling snakes, and he knew he could not separate her from her lover. Adam didn’t buy it.
“Why doesn’t he try?”
Isiah’s smile widened. He started to say something, sighed instead and remained quiet. He was looking for the right words, Adam thought, for a way to reveal enough but not too much.
“People fight their battles differently,” he offered at last with a shrug.
He waited to see if Adam understood.
“The young rush to confrontation,” he said. “The old and the weak win by waiting. Sometimes by retreating.”
They sat across from each other—two men worlds apart, similar only in their need to connect.
Isiah leaned toward Adam.
“Go to the house,” he said. “Look around.”
The LOW wooden gate above the steps on Clinch Avenue was locked. Adam stepped over it without effort, crossed the front yard, stood at the door without knocking. It was ten in the morning, a time when the Professor was always at home.
Adam rang the doorbell once, waited, rang again. He heard no sound, felt no movement on the other side.
He imagined Blue and her husband sitting together in a room at the far end of the house. They had heard the doorbell and were looking at each other silently. They knew who had come to call. They were each wondering what the other might do, betting Adam would go away if they didn’t answer.
He rang a third time.
A man’s footsteps approached. A lock opened. The door creaked and gave.
The Professor was smaller and more anxious than Adam had ever seen him. He looked at Adam with a mixture of hatred and sadness, a plea for mercy, a promise to defend himself to the death. Facing him, Adam suddenly realized he did not know what to say, or how to explain the purpose of his visit. He felt ashamed of his own arrogance, the presumption that he had a right to steal another man’s life.
The Professor’s words sounded like a declaration of war.
“She’s upstairs.”
Adam sidestepped the husband and walked in without daring to look back. The hallway was dark, the doors to the rooms along it all closed. The wooden steps in the stairway were bare and clean and shiny. The landing was stripped of any cover, bathed in shadows from lace curtains that had been drawn against the light. The double doors to the master bedroom lay open.
He walked in with as much confidence as he could muster— aware that the Professor was watching him, hoping Blue was in the room.
She stood with her back against the bedpost, the sheer white mosquito netting draped behind her. When she saw Adam, her eyes moved. She raised her hands toward him, but pulled them quickly back.
He had not seen her since the ride back from Chattanooga. Her skin was still yellow from the poison, and her lips were drained of blood, and she looked as if she would fade into the white mosquito netting at any moment. He felt like going up to her, pulling her against him and holding her until he knew she was all right again.
Instead, they remained facing each other across the vast, empty room—their shadows reflected on the bare hardwood floor, their bodies drawn to each other but aware of the impossibility of union. Behind Adam in the hallway, the Professor stood guard.
“Open your eyes,” Isiah had urged, but Blue was all Adam wanted to see. The moment he was with her, he felt relieved and reassured, suddenly tired of his own doubts, unwilling to pursue the questions.
“Look around,” Isiah had said, but the room was empty except for the bed. There was no dresser table, no chairs. The mantel above the fireplace was bare, the freestanding closet open and hollow. Everywhere, the curtains were drawn.
“ Openyour eyes,” Isiah had said, but the longer Adam stayed in this house, the more he felt as if there was nothing for him to see here at all. He felt he had come here by mistake—wandered out of the boardinghouse and into his childhood dreams where he was always lost. He was locked alone in the boiler room; sleeping in Rose’s train car. He was staying up nights in the barn, listening to the sound of worms plopping off the tobacco leaves and wondering where Clare had gone. He was vigilant, suspicious, always expecting to be let down.
“ Openyour eyes,” Isiah had said, and slowly Adam realized it was this—the very bareness of the room, the emptiness of the house, that he was supposed to see.
In her stories of life with the Professor, Blue had described a house filled with objects large and small—a place of quiet luxury and old pretensions, a cocoon packed with silks and linens and all the trinkets that would serve, the Professor had hoped, as proof of his own and Blue’s existence.
This was not the house Blue had described, not the house Adam should have found.
“ Open your eyes.”
Inside the house on Clinch Avenue, all the clocks had stopped and all signs of habitation had been erased and it was only them—the lover, the husband, and Blue—only them and the words that would save or damn them all.
“My husband has quit his job at the university,” Blue said, but by then Adam had begun to understand. He could see the telltale signs of departure,
could feel the separation he had so often experienced in the past.
He heard her without needing to listen, saw her without registering her image.
“He’s been selling off everything we own.” She paused.
Her voice was slipping farther away.
“He’s going to leave town, and I have to go with him.”
He DIDN’T REMEMBER leaving the house, didn’t remember turning away from Blue or bumping into the Professor on his way out. After that he drove for hours without knowing where he was headed or if he intended to leave or stay, pulled onto and off the highway looking for a place to have a drink and finding none. In Big Stone Gap off the 23, he parked at a truck stop and went in to buy cigarettes. Three men sat in work clothes and baseball hats, drinking beer and listening to blue-grass music on a scratchy tape recorder. He bought two warm beers and a pack of Marlboros, went back to his car, and sat drinking and listening to the radio. He hadn’t eaten for two days, and now he felt his stomach churn from the effects of alcohol and the many hours of driving, so he rolled down the window and sat in the freezing night air until he started to shiver. The trucks that sped across the highway made the earth tremble under his car. He felt his head become warm and heavy from the beer, so he closed eyes to stop them from burning.
“The old," Isiah had said, “win by waiting.”
She had used him, of course—used him to detract attention from herself and Little Sam’s death. She must have been planning to leave all along. That’s why she had sought Adam out, given herself to him so readily, been so brazen in their affair. It was also why her husband had not tried to stop them: they had wanted the town to see the affair, wanted the believers to talk about her adultery instead of Sam’s death. They had wanted Adam to stop searching, wanted to distract him and all the others.
She had been buying time in Adam’s bed while her husband prepared for their escape.
Furious again, he turned the engine on and headed back toward Knoxville. He heard the sound of his own blood gushing through his head, heard his heart pounding in his ears. He was going back to confront her again, back to demand an explanation. But the truth was more readily evident than anything Blue could say.