Salvation on Sand Mountain

by Dennis Covington

  “Never played one before in my life,” he said.

  His wife, Carolyn, was leaning into the fender of a battered Dodge Dart behind him. “Come on, Cecil,” she said. “I want to go. My head is killing me.”

  Cecil smiled up at me, but he was talking to Carolyn. “You ought to go up and get anointed with oil. Let ‘em lay hands on you. Ask for a healing. God’ll heal you.”

  “I know that,” Carolyn said. “But you’ve got to have faith.”

  “You’ve got faith,” Cecil said, still smiling at me.

  “My faith’s been a little poorly.” She took a pill bottle from the pocket of her dress. “I’m putting my faith in here,” she said.

  Cecil just laughed, and so did the other men. He handed the dulcimer back to its owner and stood up from the grass. “There’s something I forgot to tell you,” he said to me, although I couldn’t even remember the last time we’d talked.

  “You have to be careful when you’re casting out demons,” he said. “An evil spirit can come right from that person into you.”

  That’s when it washed over me, the memory of the story I’d written when I was nineteen. “Salvation on Sand Mountain.” About a church like the Old Rock House Holiness Church, and two brothers, family men, who pretend to get saved, so they can fake their own rapture, caught up like Elijah in the air, when what they’re really doing is running off to live with their girlfriends in Fort Payne. I’d never been on Sand Mountain when I wrote the story, but twenty-five years later, I knew that this was the place. This was the church, in a grove of oak trees, surrounded on all sides by fields of hay. I don’t mean it resembled the church in my story. What I mean is that this was the church itself.

  At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound that even as I begin to speak of it, the hairs on the back of my hand are starting to stand on end. I believe that the writer has another eye, not a literal eye, but an eye on the inside of his head. It is the eye with which he sees the imaginary, three-dimensional world where the story he is writing takes place. But it is also the eye with which the writer beholds the connectedness of things, of past, present, and future. The writer’s literal eyes are like vestigial organs, useless except to record physical details. The only eye worth talking about is the eye in the middle of the writer’s head, the one that casts its pale, sorrowful light backward over the past and forward into the future, taking everything in at once, the whole story, from beginning to end.

  I found Brother Carl by his pickup truck. He was talking to J.L. Dyal. They’d just loaded the big yellow-phase rattler into the bed of the truck, and they were giving him one last look.

  Carl hugged me when I walked up. “I sure am proud of you,” he said.

  I asked if he was leaving for Georgia already.

  “I’ve got to get back to God’s country,” he said.

  While Carl went to say goodbye to some of the others, J.L. and I stared at the snake in the back of the truck. I told J.L. I just couldn’t believe that we’d taken it up.

  “It’s something, all right,” he said.

  I asked what it had been like for him.

  “It’s love, that’s all it is,” he said. “You love the Lord, you love the Word, you love your brother and sister. You’re in one mind, one accord, you’re all combined together. The Bible says we’re each a part of the body, and when it all comes together ... Hey!” He whistled through his teeth. “What was it like for you?” he asked.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  It’s hard for me to talk about myself. As a journalist, I’ve always tried to keep out of the story. But look what had happened to me. I loved Brother Carl, but sometimes I suspected he was crazy. Sometimes I thought he was intent on getting himself, and maybe the rest of us, killed. Half the time I walked around saying to myself, “This thing is real! This thing is real!” The other half of the time, I walked around thinking that nothing was real, and that if there really was a God, we must have been part of a dream he was having, and when he woke up ... poof! Either way, I worried I’d gone off the edge, and nobody would be able to pull me back. One of my uncles by marriage was a Baptist minister, one of the kindest men I’ve ever known. I was fifteen, though, when he killed himself, and I didn’t know the whole story. I just knew that he sent his family and friends a long, poignant, and some have said beautiful letter about how he was ready to go meet Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I believe he ran a high-voltage line from his basement to a groundfloor bedroom. He put “How Great Thou Art”on the record player. Then he lay down on the bed, reached up, and grabbed the live wire. He left a widow and two sons. My uncle’s death confirmed a suspicion of mine that madness and religion were a hair’s breadth away. My beliefs about the nature of God and man have changed over the years, but that one never has. Feeling after God is dangerous business. And Christianity without passion, danger, and mystery may not really be Christianity at all.

  9

  WAR STORIES

  “Every time you go through one spiritual door,” Charles McGlocklin said, “there will be another to go through. Every time you go through one, you’ll get stronger, you’re led by the Spirit more, the Spirit can reveal things to you and let you know more and more, and the more it can trust you with, the more it will let you have.”

  During that spring and summer, word had gotten around among the handlers that I was one of them. “He’s not only taken up serpents, he’s washed my feet, and I’ve washed his!” Brother Carl would say from the pulpit at churches all along the snake-handling circuit. “This book he’s writing is going to spread the gospel to every nation! It’s going to reach more people than have been reached by all us snake-handling preachers put together! Why don’t you stand up and give your testimony, Brother Dennis!”

  And I would. It wasn’t so hard once I got the hang of it. I’d just list the things I was thankful for: my family, my health, and the kindness of Carl and Carolyn Porter, and Charles and Aline McGlocklin. I didn’t have any stories as spectacular as Anna Pelfrey’s, who had been raised from the dead twice by prayer. But I would say that I could feel God moving in my life, and I meant it. Sometimes, I’d even sing. One of the great things about snake-handling services is that even the tone deaf are encouraged to perform.

  Some of the younger handlers, who had grown up around snake handling and never known anything else, were probably suspicious of me even then, but the older ones seemed to accept me. They’d lived in the world. They didn’t think it so odd that someone from outside the snake-handling family would want to come in and partake.

  In May, I drove up to Happy, Kentucky, to persuade Gracie McAllister, an older member of the church in Jolo, West Virginia, to sign a release form so that some video I’d shot at her church could air on National Geographic Explorer. Gracie had refused to give her permission by telephone, and I figured she objected on principle to the videotaping of services. But after tracking her down to show her the tape, I discovered she didn’t mind being videoed at all. In fact, she had her own snake-handling tapes. It wasn’t the presence of a camera that disturbed her. She had just been worried that the footage might wind up in the wrong hands. She said that still photographs of services at Jolo had appeared once in Hustler magazine.

  While we were talking, one of Gracie’s sons, D.J., stopped by with his baby daughter. “See her little glass eye?” D.J. said. He set the baby in Gracie’s lap and turned her to the light. “See them little blood vessels they put in there? They make them look just like real. Cost over nine hundred dollars.”

  “Pretty,” Gracie said. “I can’t tell the difference.”

  D.J. smiled and crouched on his heels. “It ain’t a round eyeball,” he said. “More like a contact. We have to take it out every night.”

  The baby was blond haired and blue eyed and four months shy of her first birthday. She seemed perfectly happy in her grandmother’s lap until she glanced at the television screen in the corner of the living room, and then she let out a wail and re
ached for her daddy. On the screen was a videotape of one of her uncles with a seven-foot cobra draped around his neck.

  “She’s been seeing so many doctors, she’s afraid of people,” D.J. explained as he took her back.

  But a shadow passed over Gracie’s face. “I just haven’t been around her enough,” she said. “She’s forgotten who I am.” And then she turned to me: “We handled that cobra for over a year before it died. I wish I’d had it stuffed.”

  Gracie had been in this thing for more than thirty years. Her first husband had been a snake-handling preacher, and she had tried to keep his church going after he died, but she said she couldn’t keep a preacher who believed in the signs. The church at Jolo was just one of the churches that Gracie attended now. Like many of the handlers, she’d drive hours to go to church, often several times a week, accompanied by Muffin, her Shih Tzu pup. Some of the other members of the Jolo church thought Gracie was too worldly, but not because of her red car, exotic dog, or VCR. Many of them also had nice cars and VCR’s. In fact, Dewey Chafin, the assistant minister, had a special room in his house where he kept his snakes and video library. Sometimes members of the church would handle in that room and watch themselves on video afterward. No, Gracie was thought too worldly because she believed in going to doctors. She went for treatment of a heart ailment. Sometimes, she even went when she got bit by rattlesnakes. That was the worst part. “They hit me pretty hard over at Jolo for that,” she said. “You know, a whole lot of them doctors are against serpent handling.”

  I told her I bet they were.

  Gracie said the last time she was bit by a rattlesnake, the only thing that happened to her was that her heart beat fast. When she went to bed that night, she told her husband, Ray, that she’d been bit. He asked where and turned on the light. She said, “Now, if I die, give me that test to see what killed me, my heart or the snakebite.” Then she went on to sleep. The next morning, she got up, cooked, got dressed, and went to church again.

  She also handled fire. I’d never seen anybody do that. Seems like I’d just missed it everywhere I’d gone. It must have been more prevalent in Kentucky than on Sand Mountain, although the Summerfords always kept a propane torch handy just in case. Gracie had her own fire bottle, but she was out of kerosene at the moment. She had a video, though, of herself and others holding their arms and legs in the flame of the kerosene-soaked wick. That’s what she was doing one July night after she’d sworn she’d never handle rattlesnakes in July again. She’d been bit the previous two Julys. “I decided I’d just handle fire and drink strychnine that night,” she said.

  Good idea, I thought. It always pays to be on the safe side.

  The problem arose as Gracie tried to handle the fire with her feet. She lost her balance and fell on top of three serpent boxes. “I crawled on my knees and got every one of them serpents out,” she said. “My friends said, ‘Gracie, you said you wasn’t gonna handle serpents tonight,’ and I said, ‘I wouldn’t if I hadn’t gotten in the fire.’ ”

  You listen to enough of these stories and you start to feel like you’ve heard them all before. They seem to have the same architecture and tone. They’re war stories. Literally. You can take a look outside Gracie’s house and see that right away. Happy, Kentucky, is a dozen miles south of Hazard, a coal mining town in an area that anyone might mistake for a battlefield. The hills have been shaved off, the trees splintered, the ground blasted and pulverized. It’s a kind of ugliness that can be achieved anywhere, I suppose, but it’s most easily found on the borders where cultures clash, in this instance where the Appalachian hill people have run smack up against contemporary America. The emblem in Hazard is a mountaintop scraped flat for a Holiday Inn with an indoor pool and Jacuzzi. Somebody’s always dying or about to die in the stories that grow and flourish in places like these. Firefights, mining accidents, snakebites. It’s all the same.

  There was the time, for instance, down the road in East Tennessee, when Charles Prince got bit by a rattlesnake. Gracie stayed all night at the house where they took him after the bite. Lying on his deathbed, he continued to handle copperheads and drink poison, she said. It took him awhile to die. Gracie was concerned about him, of course; she’d been praying for him all evening, but she was also concerned that their homecoming services the next day might be “messed up” on account of him getting bit. She said, “Brother Prince, do you care for us going to church tomorrow?”

  “Go on, Gracie, go on,” he said. “Do everything you can for the Lord. I’ll be all right.”

  Gracie said she told some of the others that they’d have to really pray that they’d be able to get into the Spirit the next day. They’d brought eight or ten boxes of serpents. “And you know,” she said, “the Lord got Brother Prince off my mind. We got in the Spirit so good. You ought to see the film.” They never could figure out what killed Charles Prince, the venom or the strychnine, Gracie added. She smiled and shook her head.

  You see, this can be read as callousness. But so can every good war story. It’s part of the form, the way we talk about events that contain too much meaning to be comprehended or too much suffering to be faced head-on. A smile, a shrug. Or a line delivered deadpan. When a handler tells you about somebody’s leg that “swole up and burst,” or how bad the gangrene smelled, you can’t take the grin at the end too seriously. It doesn’t mean the storyteller hasn’t experienced or felt deeply about what happened. On the contrary, the understatement and the gallows humor is a dead giveaway that something mysterious and wrenching has occurred, is occurring all around us in this case. For this is warfare, spiritual warfare. The tragedy is not the death of a particular snake handler, but the failure of the world to accept the gospel that the handler risked his life to confirm. Or, at least, this is how the handlers seem to see it. Inevitably, they will say of a fallen brother, “At least he died in the Lord.” The implication is that a world that rejects Christ is wasting its tears when it mourns a believer who has died of snakebite. Better weep for yourselves, the snake handlers say. Or as Gracie said about a former snake-handling preacher who died in the mines, “He was a good snake handler. Worst thing is he went back on the Lord before he got killed.”

  The issue is complicated, of course, when the snakebite victim is kin. One of Gracie’s sons, Kirby Hollins, is married to a woman whose mother died of snakebite at Jolo. Gracie’s youngest son, Sam, started handling when he was fourteen years old. Now twenty-three, he has been bitten four times. “The last time I was bit, I ate four jars of homemade sauerkraut, and it made me feel a lot better,” he told me that day in Happy, Kentucky. But even Gracie knows that the sauerkraut might not work the next time. What then?

  In snake-handling lore, what’s remembered about fatal bites is what the victim said before he passed on to the other side. The last requests seem tailored to produce in the listener an impression of magnanimity and spiritual purpose, tinged with a suggestion of good sportsmanship. When Reece Ramsey was bit and died in 1954, he collapsed into the arms of the evangelist conducting the brush-arbor service and requested that the man’s daughter sing “Only One Rose Will Do” at the funeral. The story is that the choir began singing “I’m Getting Ready to Leave This World” as Ramsey died in the evangelist’s arms.

  Rev. Lee Valentine’s last words were, “When you hold my funeral, be sure to use my snakes and handle every one of them over my grave.” Valentine, a father of seven, had been bitten at the Old Straight Creek Holiness Church on Sand Mountain in 1955.

  No one seems to know what Lloyd Hill’s last words were. He had survived the bite he received in Birmingham in 1956, but he died of another bite in Georgia four years later. The preacher at that Georgia church, Charlie Hall, was tried for murder under a tough Georgia anti-snake-handling law, but he was acquitted. Charlie Hall would later die of snakebite himself, at Old Straight Creek in Alabama. He refused to have a fan turned on him or a bag of ice placed on his bite. His last words are reported to be, “If you’re gonna do that, you
might as well take me to the doctor. That’s not faith, boys. If I die, I’m just a dead man.”

  These are the war stories, redundant, understated, clean. Just war stories. Not meant to frighten, just meant to keep the soldier alert and focused on one thing: them snakes. And in every handler’s memory are the stories common to every war: the new guy who got scared and died before anybody could learn his name, and the old master sergeant, veteran of many campaigns, who got careless just once in his life, the time it really counted.

  The bites themselves are often not the worst part of spiritual warfare. “I’ve seen people so demon possessed, they’d crawl on their bellies like snakes,” Charles McGlocklin told me once. He also told me about a satanist who had shot a preacher in Huntsville and about the cow mutilations on Sand Mountain that police in Albertville were attributing to satanists with helicopters. A woman Charles knew was fighting a spirit that had been telling her to cut her children’s heads off. He said he had heard of another woman who could cause the radio to change stations without even touching it.

  And Punkin Brown told me the story of how he and Allen Williams had been asked to cast demons out of a girl in the Tennessee mountains. “We went back up there in this real black holler,” he said. “Her mother said she’d walk around with a knife in her hand and talk in two or three voices.”

  The girl was in a back room when Punkin and Allen got there. Several other people were at the house praying for the girl, too. “They were almost in as bad a shape as she was,” Punkin said. “Anyway, the girl come through there, buddy, and all her hair had fell out. She wasn’t sick. All her hair had just fell out, and where it had come back in, it was just as white as snow. I’d say she was in her twenties. She had piercing blue eyes. Buddy, she’d send a shiver up your spine.”