Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  “If you mean godless people, yes, we do keep ourselves apart. But we got people in the church have gone to college. We got two mechanical engineers and a supermarket manager and a funeral director. We got Jimmy Kay that works over to the bank, and DX’s cousin Martha teaches English in high school, and she handles almost every week.”

  “Tell him about all the people who got bit. Tell him about Bennett Brown.”

  “Bennett Brown didn’t die because he was serpent bit. That’s what the sheriff was sayin’, but if you look at the video you can see that he had a heart attack. It happened too fast for a serpent bite. They was sayin’ he died because he was serpent bit but that was because they wanted to make trouble. When you look at the video you can see that he just keeled right over two seconds after he was bit. That was too quick for a bite. He had a heart attack, that’s what it was.”

  “What about Bennett’s wife, Melody? She got bit at a brush arbor across the river, and she died. And what about Ed Banks …”

  “We don’t know what God had in mind. Maybe Melody shouldn’t have handled that day. Maybe she wasn’t anointed good. Maybe God wanted to show unbelievers that the serpents haven’t been doctored up somehow, had their venom sacks taken out. People will believe all kinds of stuff. We just don’t know. God don’t tell us everything.”

  “How do you catch the snakes?” Jackson wanted to change the conversation.

  “Some guys use a hook or a grabber—like a kind of clamp—but mostly you can step on their neck, right behind the head, and then pick up their tail and just hold it a while and the blood will all go to their head and they’ll get real easy to handle. Or you can use a forked stick and pin it behind the head. He pronounced “forked” with two syllables: “fork-èd.”

  Sunny said, “What about all the people for hundreds and hundreds of years who didn’t handle?”

  “I reckon the Lord will know what to do with them.”

  “You think they’re going to hell.”

  “I think I know what God tells me to do,” he said, turning to Jackson, “and I’m going to do it, and God tells me to handle serpents. I been handling serpents since I started going to church with Gene Morton over in Middlesboro. I had to do it, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t like I had a choice.”

  “Of course you had a choice,” Sunny said. “Everybody’s got a choice.”

  “Everybody’s got a choice of doing God’s will or going against it. I done that too, I admit. I been backed up on the Lord more than once. I don’t have to tell you. But the Lord has always took me back, like savin’ someone from drownding.” He stretched out an arm to demonstrate God’s reach. “And he’s reaching out to you too. Both of you.”

  Jackson put out clean plates for their salad, which they ate after their hamburgers.

  Earl asked if there was any coffee. Jackson got up to make espresso.

  “I see she’s got you well trained.”

  Jackson made the coffee in one of Claude’s espresso pots. He took out little cups and saucers while he waited for it to brew.

  “You got a lot of deer around here?” Earl looked at the little cups.

  “Too many. Deer ticks.”

  “Professor Jones has Lyme disease.”

  “You know, that’s what Doc Weiler said about your cousin Raymond last year, and he went and got himself bit by a big old copperhead. There was a nest of them right outside the door to the church. He got bit and everybody thought it was ’cause he wasn’t anointed, and his mama was a-carryin’ on like it was the Second Coming. She wanted to call the hospital at Rosiclare, but Raymond said no, and he was feelin’ pretty poorly for a day or so, and then after that he was fine. The Lord took away his Lyme disease too, just like that.” Earl snapped his fingers.

  Jackson poured the coffee.

  “I can’t take any sugar in mine,” Earl said. “Doctor says I’m pre-diabetic, whatever that means.”

  “It means you’ve got to cut down on sugar.”

  “What do you think I just said?”

  “Maybe I should try that,” Jackson said. “Might be good for Lyme disease.”

  “Serious. Maybe you should. You know how them honey bee stings can cure arthritis. Old Mammie Carter from the Holler, she swore by it. People couldn’t hardly keep her away from their hives.”

  “What about John Granger, and Charlie Halpern, and Cindy Lofter? Dead, dead, dead. Serpent-bit.”

  “That was over in Kentucky,” Earl said to Sunny.

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It’s hard to explain some things to this woman,” Earl said to Jackson. “My wife. She’s stubborn as a mule.”

  “Earl, it’s over. You could have just signed the papers I sent you instead of coming all the way up here. I got another set here. Maybe we could settle this while you’re up here.”

  “Did you know that the Israelites and the Canaanites spoke the same language?”

  “I never gave it a thought,” Sunny said.

  “They could talk to each other.”

  “What’s your point, Earl?”

  “Sometimes I don’t think we’re talking the same language. You and me.”

  Sunny got up to leave, holding the Walther in her left hand.

  “You comin’ home with me?”

  “I’m going upstairs to study.” She walked into the living room. Jackson could hear her footsteps on the stairs.

  Earl put his head in his hands. Jackson hoped he’d leave, but he stayed put while Jackson cleared the table, rinsed the dishes, put them in the dishwasher. Earl’s lips were moving. He was praying.

  “I used to argue with God,” he said, lifting his head.

  “Like Abraham? About Sodom and Gomorrah? Thirty good men? Twenty?”

  “More like we would dialogue with each other. Confirm something. I have the gift of prophecy, and sometimes I’m not real eager to deliver the message.”

  “Would this be one of those times?”

  “I’ve got nothing against you, nor against any human being, but you’re living in a situation with my wife, and God can’t let me be still about the truth of this situation. I’m the kind of person will share with you whatever you need. If you need food, I will bring it to you. If you need money, I’ll give you what I have. But my wife is another thing. God don’t look too kindly on adultery, which is what this situation is. Unless you tell me you’re living like brother and sister.”

  Jackson didn’t say anything. Earl was standing in the middle of the kitchen. He changed the subject: “You reckon there’s anything to this Y2K stuff?”

  “I can’t get too worked up about it.”

  “Nineteen ninety-nine. You might want to think about it. Get yourself right with God while you can.”

  He hadn’t changed the subject after all. “You think the end is near?” Jackson said.

  “Two thousand. End of the millennium.”

  “The millennium doesn’t end until the end of year two thousand.”

  “I heard that too. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. No man knows the hour.”

  Earl was good-looking, well-mannered, polite. You wouldn’t expect him to jump up and punch you in the face (or shove your face down into a box of rattlesnakes and copperheads). But at the same time you were aware of considering the possibility. An interesting “anthropological sample,” Jackson thought. Not representative, but all he had to go on. He wasn’t sure. Maybe there were others like him. A whole church full.

  What Jackson had learned from Claude was “disciplined subjectivity.” It was seeing yourself through somebody else’s eyes. Earl’s. Earl was a man with a unified vision of the world. He had a way of filtering out the disconnected information that threatens to overwhelm us.

  “Them anthropologists I was telling you about, they come to the church, more than once.”

  “Salvage anthropology.”

  “ ‘Savages’?”

  “ ‘Salvage,’ not ‘savage.’ A lot of cultures are disappearing. M
argaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in New Guinea, for example. They had to do everything: learn the language, make a dictionary, write a grammar, make a census, figure out the genealogies and write down the myths, along with trying to understand the political structure.”

  “Like them pygmies?”

  “Exactly. But the pygmies go way back. Theirs is the oldest civilization.”

  “What about Adam and Eve? You saying Adam and Eve were pygmies?”

  Jackson wasn’t sure he wanted to have this conversation, but he couldn’t think of any other conversation he did want to have.

  “Yes. In the sense that they were the first people. Older than the Egyptians. The Egyptians held the pygmies in the highest esteem. There’s a pygmy right there on one of their oldest monuments. You’ve got pygmies dancing. It’s the oldest civilization in the world. And continuous. It goes back at least forty thousand years, maybe much longer. And now the Negroes who live at the edge of the Forest are chopping down the trees to make plantations.”

  “But the pygmies,” Earl wanted to know, “they live in Africa, right? But the Garden of Eden was in Mesopotamia. ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden.’ ”

  Jackson finished putting the dishes in the dishwasher. He wiped off the table with paper towels and went into the living room to fetch Claude’s Atlas historique d’Afrique. He put some newspaper down on the table, which was still damp, and opened the atlas to the two-page Mercator projection of the earth at the front and proceeded to explain the great African diaspora, a word Claude had always pronounced with the accent on the next-to-last syllable—diaspóra. With his finger he traced the northern route followed by the earliest humans from central Africa, up the Nile Valley. And then the eastern route, either crossing the Red Sea from northeast Africa, or going up the North African coast to Egypt. Then north across the Bering Sea and into the Americas. He didn’t take time to explain that this all took place over a period of eighty thousand years or so. He didn’t want to get into a chronological argument with Earl, and he didn’t bother to explain that sea level had been three hundred feet below what it is today.

  “But what about Eden?” Earl asked. “You got your four rivers. ‘A river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads.’ ”

  “Right where I started,” Jackson said, putting his finger down on what is now the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Biological anthropologists (or paleoanthropologists) locate the origins of humankind in the highlands reaching north from the Cape to the Lakes of the Nile.”

  “That ain’t what the Bible says.”

  “Of course. There’s a discrepancy between the Biblical account and the fossil evidence and the accounts of the Arab geographers. But Claude—my teacher—believed that he’d found the explanation for this discrepancy. And it was hard to argue with Claude. Take your four rivers? What are they?”

  “You got your Pison,” Earl said, “that compasseth all of Havilah; you got the Gihon in Ethiopia, you got the Hiddekel in Assyria. And then you got the Euphrates.”

  “It’s an old problem, Earl. It doesn’t make sense geographically. It doesn’t match what the Arab geographers knew.”

  “What don’t make sense?”

  “Mesopotamia. You don’t have enough rivers in Mesopotamia. You’ve got your Tigris and your Euphrates, all right, both coming down from the mountains up in eastern Turkey. That’s two. You need two more. Where are they?”

  Jackson paused to let Earl study the map. “But there’s a simple solution that involves one assumption. The assumption is that people are inclined to name their own cities and rivers and mountains after older ones. Look at Little Egypt. You have Cairo, Illinois. That’s named after Cairo in Egypt. You’ve got Karnak, that’s named after Karnak in Egypt; you’ve got Thebes, Illinois. That’s named after Thebes in Egypt. You have Naqada; that’s named after an old Egyptian cemetery. You can see what’s happened here. People use the old names for new places.”

  He opened the atlas to a large map of Africa that folded out.

  “The Arab geographers were right when they located the Garden at the source of the Nile, in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa—right here, see these big lakes. When the book of Genesis was written the legendary rivers of Paradise were confused with the Nile and its tributaries.”

  “You’re saying that God made a mistake, didn’t know where he put his own rivers?”

  “No, Earl. I’m saying that modern people haven’t understood the Bible right. What happened was that when people migrated to Mesopotamia they remembered the names of the rivers from the real Eden and used them to name the rivers there, just like Cairo or Karnak or Thebes or Naqada here. They took the names with them from Africa and used them in Mesopotamia.”

  “You mean Moses wrote down the old names?”

  “All right. Moses. But what’s important is this. The Gihon. That’s what the Jews called the Nile. Up here, see, where these two rivers come together at Khartoum, the Blue Nile from Ethiopia, and the White Nile from Lake Victoria. That’s the Victoria Nile. Then north from Lake Albert. That’s your Albertine Nile. All rising out of East Africa, right where the Arab geographers located the Garden. The Egyptians too.

  “That’s only three rivers.”

  “The fourth river drained out of Tanganyika—see this big lake here. It drained northward along the African Rift Valley and joined the Albertine Nile. But it was blocked by the Virunga volcanoes. Volcanoes, Earl. You’ve got volcanoes in Genesis, right?”

  “ ‘And ye came near and stood under the mountain; and the mountain burned with fire unto the midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick darkness. And it came to pass, when ye heard the voice out of the midst of the darkness (for the mountain did burn with fire), that ye came near unto me, even all the heads of your tribes, and your elders.’ ”

  “There aren’t any volcanoes in Mesopotamia. Not a one. But look here.” Jackson pointed to the Lake District. “Lots of volcanoes. The Virungas. Eight of them. You had eruptions in 1948 and 1958, when Claude was there the first time. There was a major eruption about ten thousand years ago. Gilgamesh refers to it. That’s what blocked the river.”

  How much of what he’d told Earl did Jackson actually believe? He wasn’t sure himself. Standing with Claude on the Pavement of Api or sitting with him in an Efé camp on the bank of the Albertine Nile, looking up at the Mountains of the Moon, it was easy to be persuaded that they were in the original Garden. Claude was very persuasive. But back in the States it was easy to be a skeptic. After all, lots of people had claimed to discover the original Garden of Eden. There were lots of rival claims, mostly in Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Bahrain, Iran, even Scotland, and on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. And one staked out in Jackson County, Missouri, by the Latter-Day Saints.

  This was why Jackson hadn’t published the notebooks. He closed the big atlas and put it away. Earl wanted Sunny home with him. Sunny wanted Earl to sign the divorce petition. Jackson had no idea what was going to happen.

  “I can’t tell you how many times I drove up here,” Earl said when Jackson came back into the kitchen, “but she wouldn’t put my name on the list of people who could visit her. And she sent all my letters back. And finally I stopped comin’. Then I run into one of her home girls that just got out, over in Prairie du Rocher, that’s how I knew Sunny was out. They was supposed to notify me, the prison was, but they didn’t. Now she’s livin’ here with you.”

  “Her uncle had a little apartment over the garage. She lived there for a while after she got out, and then she moved in with me.”

  “Pretty convenient, huh? And what am I supposed to do? As her husband? Just step aside? Do you know what the Bible says about adultery?”

  “The Bible’s not pro-adultery.”

  “ ‘If a man be found lying with a woman married to a husband, then they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman and the woman;
so shalt thou put away evil from Israel.’ ”

  Jackson took a deep breath. “Nobody’s pro-adultery, Earl. That’s not the underlying issue.”

  Earl closed his eyes and seemed to be praying again, moving his lips in and out. When his lips stopped moving, he looked up at Jackson. “I’m going to ask you to do somethin’ for me.”

  “I can do that, Earl. But there’s got to be some give and take.”

  “I’m going to ask you to get down on your knees and pray with me and pray for the Lord to show us what’s that right thing to do. That’s all I’m going to ask. If the Lord wants me to turn around and go back home, then that’s what I’ll do.”

  “If I get down on my knees,” Jackson said, “will you sign the divorce petition?”

  “It don’t work that way. There’s more than just me involved here. We got to wait on the Lord. Fern ought to be here too. I worry about her. A man tries to walk in the way of the Lord. He does his best. But Satan’s always on the lookout. A moment of inattention and he’s got his coils wrapped right around you. It don’t never do to underestimate the power of Satan. He’s the prosecutor, you know. And to accomplish his work he’s got the power to place evil on men, the power of darkness.

  “Satan darkened her eyes, do you see? Have you ever stood outside a house when the woman you love is goin’ with another man? You imagine all kinds of things. You think about that man putting his hands all over her body. I never loved a woman like I loved little Fern. And I forgave her for running around on me because I understood it was Satan leading her to do that way. But it tore me up inside, and it tears me up inside when I think about all those times I drove four hundred miles to come up here and they wouldn’t let me see her because of a little piece of paper, and all the times I wrote to her and the letters come back unopened. Let me tell you, I prayed hard for Fern, I prayed hard for the Lord to soften her heart.”

  “I think she’s made up her mind, Earl. Maybe you ought to pray for the Lord to help you understand that.”

  “This isn’t the first time she’s made up her mind. She went with my best friend, DX. I knew she was going with him because I saw ’em get out of DX’s truck and go into the house. I busted DX up pretty good, and then I forgive him and he forgive me. And I forgive Fern too.” He paused. “Do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior?”