Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  “No, Earl. I don’t.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I’ll walk you out to your truck,” Jackson said, and he was relieved when Earl said okay.

  When Jackson returned to his office in the morning after lecturing on the “Great Leap Forward,” he found a note tacked to his office door telling him to call the hospital. Earl had gone on a tear after leaving Jackson’s, had gotten into a fight with some college students and then smashed his truck up on a culvert on Highway 34. He’d given the doctor Jackson’s name.

  He looked pretty banged up when Jackson arrived.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m all tore up,” Earl said, “just like when they took Fern away. I’ve been tore up real bad ever since it happened. Handed the church over to Brother DX for almost a year. A bad year. But the Lord picked me up and I came back and started preaching and handling again, and I got the power. God moved on me. There’s nothing like it. To feel the Lord’s hands upon you, anointing you. I thought I was okay …”

  “Everything would be a lot simpler,” Jackson said, “if you could find it in your heart to cooperate with Sunny. Or Fern. She’s not going to ask for her half of the property. She’ll stipulate to that. That means she’ll agree in writing that you don’t have to give her anything.”

  “Don’t talk down to me. I’m not ignorant. I know what ‘stipulate’ means.”

  “But look. You haven’t seen her for six years.”

  “She’s still my wife. As long as she’s alive.”

  “She’s afraid of you, Earl. You forced her to stick her arm in a box of rattlesnakes.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Yes I believe that. Why would she lie about it?”

  “That’s what she will tell you. But what I will tell you is that she got a snake out of the shed and was trying to get it to bite me while I was taking a nap. And she started hollerin’ that she got bit, and I woke up and went out to the kitchen to get me a glass of milk, and she shot me. And then she called her cousin Sally, and Sally come over, and DX, and Sally called the ambulance from Rosiclare.

  “Oh, she got bit all right, but I don’t know if it was that diamondback like she said. More likely it was Tricky, that was our pet coon. She told people it was a dry bite, but it was just the coon.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Not any harder’n what she told you.”

  “Look at it this way, Earl. If she’s lying about this, telling this story about you, why do you want to hang on to her? Why not let her go? It’s over between you.”

  Earl didn’t say anything.

  “Are you looking for a sign?”

  Earl nodded.

  “I think you got one. Loud and clear.”

  Earl seemed to look inward for a moment. “You mean the accident?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.”

  Earl looked up at Jackson. “I knowed it all along,” he said. “But I didn’t want to think on it.”

  “If I bring the papers, Earl, will you sign them?”

  “What about my truck?”

  “I’ll take care of your truck.”

  “You’ll do that for me?”

  “I’ll do it. I’ve got a friend on the police force. He’ll help me take care of it. I’ll have it towed to Bill’s Auto Body. They’ll put it back together.”

  “And you was really there? In the Garden?”

  “I was there.”

  “What was is like?”

  “It was beautiful, Earl. The river. The mountains. The people; you know, they don’t have money, they don’t have lawyers, they don’t have law courts and banks and government. They don’t even know how to make a fire. They carry their fire with them wherever they go. There’s no war. They don’t kill each other. They don’t even kill other people. There’s no rich or poor. They don’t have to work hard. They trust the Forest to take care of them. They’re like the lilies of the field.”

  “Why don’t you go back?”

  “I’d like to, but it’s complicated.”

  “I’ve never been anywhere,” Earl said. “Oh, I’ve been to Chicago and Paducah and St. Louis. Chicago’s the farthest I’ve been from home. It don’t seem like much. Does it? For a man my age?”

  “Some people travel all the way around the world,” Jackson said, “and don’t see anything new. Other people never leave their hometown and learn new things every day.”

  “Bring that piece of paper,” Earl said. “I’ll take it home and study on it.”

  9

  Fieldwork

  He riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself. After that he poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded. Then cometh he to Simon Peter: and Peter saith unto him, Lord, dost thou wash my feet? Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter. Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me. Simon Peter saith unto him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head. Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all. For he knew who should betray him; therefore said he, Ye are not all clean. So after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set down again, he said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. — John 13:4–15

  Fieldwork,” Claude used to say, “is to anthropology what the blood of the martyrs is to the church.” At any gathering of anthropologists, this is the main question: Where did you do your fieldwork? The more remote and dangerous the better, of course. But it was getting harder to find “untrodden fields.” Naqada, Illinois, was not the Ituri Forest, but it might be worth a monograph, or even an NHI grant. Jackson hadn’t published anything in three years, and he couldn’t milk any more articles out of the Mbuti, and he wasn’t prepared to slog through Claude’s notebooks and risk ridicule for claiming to have located the Garden of Eden, so he might as well try his hand at a piece of salvage anthropology at home, a record of a disappearing culture—a straightforward ethnography of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following. How many people in the congregation? How often do they handle snakes? Where do they get the snakes? What kind of jobs? Income? Environment? Kinship? Technology? Economic life? Social life? Political life? Intellectual and artistic life? Religious life? Religious organization? Relationships with other churches?

  Sunny was opposed to the trip. Jackson wasn’t surprised, but he hadn’t expected her to get so worked up. She’d listened from the top of the stairs to the conversation Earl and Jackson had had about the Garden of Eden, but hadn’t said anything until Jackson suggested they drive down to Naqada together.

  “I didn’t know which one of you was crazier,” she said. “The ‘Garden of Eden’? The ‘Mountains of the Moon’? You get Earl all stirred up with your nonsense and now you want to go down there to see people handle serpents and drink strychnine and handle fire, and you want me to go with you? I don’t think so. Besides, I’ve got too much work to do. I’m a college student now. I’m glad you got Earl to sign the divorce papers, but I’m staying away from him. You know he can’t marry again as long as I’m alive. Church rules. It’s like the Catholics, only they stick to it.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Think about it.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he said.

  “Damn right.”

  “Look,” he said, “I can see an NHI grant in this. If I don’t like the looks of things I won’t pursue it, but I’ve got to do something. I haven’t published anything in three years.”

  “You’re on your own,” she said
.

  “Fieldwork,” he said. “It’s what anthropologists do.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Sunny, don’t be like this.”

  “Like what?”

  It was a six-hour drive from Colesville to Naqada, just long enough to make it seem like a journey, a trip, a voyage of discovery—Malinowski on his way to the Trobriand Islands, Margaret Mead off to the island of Ta’u—but Jackson didn’t start to feel he was in a different country until he reached Eldorado, where he stopped for a Big Mac and to check his map. There was a picture of George Harrison on the wall by the condiments. Harrison had performed here in 1963, while visiting his sister, five months before the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.

  He was in coal country now, but most of the spurs that branched out from the center of town, spurs that had serviced the big coal companies, had been turned into bike paths. Open pits had been reclaimed; waste piles, tailings, sedimentation basins were all out of sight. On the way out of town on IL 142 he passed a sign for the Peabody Coal Company.

  From Equality, at the edge of the Shawnee National Forest—the southern margin of the Illinois Glacier, which had passed this way more than 200,000 years ago—he drove into rough, unglaciated territory. The trees still held on to their leaves, though it was the end of October, and offered patches of bright color—yellow beeches, red maples and gum trees and dogwoods—against a background of oak and pine. The trees on the secondary roads were so thick he seemed to be driving through a tunnel. He turned on his lights. The towns—Herod, Eichorn, Humm Wye—were little oases of light in the sea of leaves that surrounded him. Until he came to Naqada, on the bank of the Ohio, where—unlike Malinowski or Mead—he had booked a room at the Naqada Inn, an old Italianate Victorian mansion right on a bluff overlooking the river and the marina. He thought of stopping at Earl’s Bait & Tackle, in the marina, which he could see from the veranda of the hotel, but decided he needed to rest first.

  Jackson didn’t speak the new language that anthropologists had borrowed from cultural studies, didn’t think in terms of the “anthropological gaze” or “ruling metanarratives.” Like Claude, he thought in terms of stories. You talked to people and you listened to them and you let them tell their stories in their own way. Which is what he did with Earl later that afternoon, in a pilot interview on the veranda of the Inn, his little Panasonic tape recorder on the round Adirondack table between them.

  Earl’s family had come from East Tennessee, on the Clinch River, and had moved to Kentucky after the completion of the Norris Dam, in 1936, which flooded the entire Norris Basin. Earl and his grandfather had visited once when Earl was a boy. They’d rented a boat to do some bass fishing on Norris Lake. When the water was still and the light just right, you could see the houses under the water, and Earl got it confused with Noah’s flood.

  Earl’s stepdaddy had been in the Special Forces and knew a lot of ways to kill just with his bare hands, and he taught Earl a lot of tricks, and boxing too. Earl went up to Chicago and fought mainly in old warehouses.

  “I’d fight anybody, it didn’t matter, and I usually won. And then I got older and put on some weight, and I could whup any man alive just about. I met Joe Louis after a fight over on the south side, and he gave me some tips. I was doing all right, but I come back to Middlesboro one time, over in Kentucky, just to come home for a while, and a man named Gene Morton was beatin’ on somebody I knew, Jimmly. Little bitty guy. Gene had broke his arm. So I told Jimmly I’d whup this Gene Morton for him, and he said Gene was comin’ over that night, ’cause Gene was messin’ with his wife and he heard her talkin’ to him on the telephone. Somebody must of told Gene that I was going to whup him ’cause when he got out of his car he had a big old tire chain wrapped around his arm. Me and Jimmly was sittin’ on the porch, and I said, ‘Mr. Morton, I’m agonna whup you.’ He just laught and started unwrapping that tire chain off his arm, but I got up real close to him so when he swung that chain it come around me and hit himself in the back of his head, and I whupped him real good. He kept getting back up, but I wasn’t gonna play with him and I just kept knockin’ him back down till Jimmly’s wife come out screamin’ she’d called the police, and I see now that the Lord was watchin’ over me ’cause he kept Gene from dyin’. The ambulance come and took him to Rosiclare, and the police come and took me to jail. That was my first felony. And about a year later Gene Morton comes to see me in the prison, over at Roederer, over by La Grange. I’d been thinking about living right. I knew it was gonna be hard to give up some of the things I was doing—alcohol, and women, and fightin’—and when Gene come to forgive me and to talk to me about livin’ right, God moved on me right in the visitors’ room and I got down on my knees and started prayin’ too. At first I was trying to make a deal with God. Trying to negotiate. But God wasn’t negotiating. It’s the same for all of us. We want to negotiate. We want to keep a little bit back from the Lord. Some little corner to call our own where we can keep our secrets. But that’s not the way the Lord works. The Lord wants all of you. He wants you to give it all up. That’s the only way he can make you whole.

  “I was in for three years. When I got out I started going to church with Gene and we’ve been brothers ever since. He’s closer to me than my own brother.

  “This was a little church out by Neville Pond, and they handled snakes. Gene showed me in the Bible where it says to handle snakes and I been handling ever since. When Number Five up by Naqada blew up, across the river, Gene, he had a cousin who worked in the mine up there and went to a little church and we went up to help the people there, and that’s where I met Fern. Her daddy and about twenty others was down in the mine, and God moved on me to start singin’ and preachin’, so that’s what I did.”

  “Sunny told me about that.”

  “You know it breaks my heart ever time I hear you call her that name.”

  “That’s what she calls herself now.”

  “I know, but it ain’t her name.” He shrugged. “You think you could whup me? ’Cause there been a lot of guys thought they could whup me and found out different. You and me, we’re about the same size. What’re you, about one eighty? Five eleven? You ever do any boxing? Sparring someone?”

  Jackson had done some boxing in college but he didn’t think he had a chance against Earl, and he experienced a spurt of shame. He fantasized downing Earl with a karate chop, but he didn’t know karate.

  But Earl’s head was down. His lips were moving. “God is great,” he suddenly shouted. “God don’t never change. Gloreee. Praise His name.” He paused. “You don’t think God changes, do you?”

  “I think that men’s ideas about God change.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking too. But God. God himself don’t never change?”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  “Me and Fern was real happy for a good while. I was preaching at the church and we was going to church almost every night for somethin’ or other. Then the main services on Friday night and Sunday. And I had the bait shop down in the marina.” He nodded toward the marina, a long rectangular Butler building with a low pitched roof. “Still do. You’ll see.

  “It was good people in the church. Well, you’ll see that for yourself. DX and Sally and Mawmaw Tucker and Betty and Jim Thompson and Rob and Doris Hawthorne. We had near a hundred people every Saturday night and the same on Sunday. You could feel the presence of the Lord in the church, you could smell it, like a cloud, like you can smell the river. And then she got tired of livin’ right. Maybe it was because she didn’t have no kids to occupy her mind. She didn’t want to go to church no more. She wanted to party. Then she come home one night with a bottle of vodka and we started drinkin’ vodka and orange juice. I hadn’t drunk no alcohol since I got out of prison, except two or three times. And then Fern started going with other men. She told me how she was going with all my friends: DX and Sheldon and Tommy Fisher and Daryl Anderson and Cord McAllen. Even old Mr. Thompson.

  “I sai
d, ‘You do what you want and the Lord’ll forgive you, and I’ll forgive you too.’ And I do forgive her. And I forgive you too.”

  The service that night began at seven o’clock but didn’t really get going until eight. The men greeted each other with holy kisses, on the lips, and the women did the same. Jackson managed to avoid the kisses, the way he avoided the air kisses that had become fashionable at TF. Air kisses in France were one thing, but he didn’t care for them at home. Earl introduced him as a friend—as an anthropologist who’d been to the Garden of Eden—and he was greeted warmly. There was plenty to talk about. But where were the snakes?

  By eight o’clock about a hundred people had filled the small church, which was in an old DX gas station that DX, Earl’s friend, had given to the church after the old church burned down. The pulpit was in the old office space, and the pews in what had been the service bays. Outside, an old Quaker State Oil sign—the kind that was hooked on a frame so it could swing back and forth—had been painted over: THE CHURCH OF THE BURNING BUSH WITH SIGNS FOLLOWING.

  Jackson didn’t have a camera or he would have taken a picture.

  The church was backwoods, but the music setup was professional: Fender amps, high-definition speakers on speaker stands, an eight-channel mixing board, wireless mikes, two twelve-inch monitors. The lead guitarist, tuning a Stratocaster with a triangular metal plate under the pick guard, and the drummer, partly hidden by the pulpit, couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. The bass player, fingering a vintage Gibson with its own small amp and speaker, could have been their father. The woman with straight black hair comping chords at the Yamaha keyboard in the back could have been their mother.

  The music started loud and stayed loud. The bass player laid down the rhythm, and the others joined in. The musicians didn’t make eye contact with each other, and at first they didn’t seem to be playing the same song, or even in the same key. But a communal key eventually emerged and Jackson recognized a mix of commercial bluegrass and country-western using simple twelve- and sixteen-bar blues progressions. He was tempted to get a couple of harps out of his truck, but he decided it was too soon. The church was already full. People were there to be healed, he understood, and to experience God’s presence. He was there to observe.