Salvation on Sand Mountain
Page 19
For believers, faith itself may be “the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11.1). But for a journalist, belief is not enough. It’s one thing to describe what it feels like to pick up a rattlesnake, for example. It’s quite another to attribute these sensations to the will of a higher power.
I was taken in by the handlers, but not bamboozled. I was taken in in its truest sense, as if I were homeless and they had given me sanctuary from the World. They fed me with the Word and clothed me in the Spirit, and I began to think of them as genuine Christian mystics out of a heritage so revolutionary, deep, and otherworldly that the established church had no alternative but to deny it.
I even started praying that I would be anointed to handle serpents myself. And about that time, I forgot I was supposed to be writing a book.
“Step back,” Don Fehr advised me. “You’re too close to your subject.”
The book seemed inconsequential, just another proof of human vanity. And when the first words finally came, they spewed out of me in the angry cry you hear toward the end of the prologue. It was, I thought, the voice of my people — those Anglo-Irish immigrants who, thinking they were bound for the promised land, had come down from the mountains to discover they were still pilgrims in yet another hostile and unrepentant world.
That prologue was all I had to say for the longest time, until Don came to visit us in Birmingham. He wanted to see the first hundred pages of the book. I told him he’d had a long journey and needed a good night’s sleep. In the morning, over breakfast, I confessed that not only did I not have the first hundred pages; I hadn’t written another word.
I won’t attempt to describe Don’s reaction to that news. I can only say that I had to take him to a snake-handling service in Georgia just to get his mind off killing me.
With Don safely back in New York, I told Vicki that I didn’t know how to begin the opening chapter.
“Why don’t you start with your first visit to a snake-handling service?” she said.
“I couldn’t do that. Nobody even took a snake out.”
She smiled.
So that became the opening line of chapter one: “The first time I went to a snake-handling service, nobody even took a snake out.”
It was easier after that. We’d just moved from our house in the woods to one on a quiet suburban cul-de-sac in Birmingham, and Charles and Aline McGlocklin came down from New Hope to bless every room. The writing of the first draft took place over about four months. I worked at night while the rest of the family slept. Our bedrooms were on the second floor. I’d pretend to fall asleep and wait until I was sure Vicki was under. Then I’d tiptoe down the stairs, all the way to the basement, where I’d work in a kind of fever, sometimes until dawn.
The chapters that gave me the hardest time were the ones in the middle. I lost my way a hundred pages in, during a long chapter about a trip I’d taken with the handlers to Chicago for their appearance on a syndicated television talk show. The host had treated them unfairly, I thought, and my rendering of the episode was self-righteous and indignant in tone. Don had been reading the manuscript with little comment, but when he finished the Chicago section, he pulled me back and saved the book. I tore that chapter up.
On numerous other occasions, he steered me out of trouble, caused mainly by my pride and laziness, and pushed me harder to find the exact phrase, the solid sensory detail, or the true ending to a chapter, not just the easiest one. Most importantly, he urged me not to lose my sense of humor, because it served as a tonic to what could have become a pedantic and deadly treatise on an otherwise fascinating subject. Don may have been correct when he said this was the book I was born to write, but it never would have been written without his imprint on nearly every page.
I didn’t intend, for instance, to write about the moment I took up that yellow-phase timber rattler at the Old Rock House Holiness Church on Sand Mountain. Don knew I had done it, and couldn’t understand why I hadn’t included it in the text. I told him the book was about the handlers, not me, but this explanation did not satisfy him.
“Your readers will want to know what it was like,” he said. “You did it. You have to tell them.”
He had a point, so I tried the scene, but in the second person, present tense: “You step forward and take the snake with both hands. Carl releases it to you ...,” and so forth.
“Come on, Dennis,” Don said. “You’re using a literary trick to distance yourself from the experience. You were the one who took up the rattlesnake, so tell it in the first person. What was it like?”
I rewrote the page, trying to get it exactly right, and when I’d finished the scene, I knew that the story would flow inevitably from that moment, like the tune from Cecil Esslinder’s dulcimer, all the way to the end.
And about endings, let me just say this: I disagree with Edgar Allan Poe. I don’t think it’s necessary for a writer to know the end of a story before he even begins. In my opinion, such knowledge is rare, and the writer who owns it must be singular and blessed. For most of us, the ending comes much later, in the natural course of discovery, and I well remember the night we drove back to Birmingham after the wedding at Brother Carl’s church in Georgia.
Carl had just preached about the role of women in the church. I had delivered a brief message contradicting his, and the young preachers who followed had nearly skewered me to the wall for heresy. So we were in a contemplative mood as we crossed the state line back into Alabama. I was worried about whether I had enough material now to finish the book.
“I just don’t know how the story ends,” I said.
Vicki glanced out the window. “Don’t you think that tonight was the end?”
In this, as in many things, she was right.
All that was missing was the rest of the drive home, into the city and past the old neighborhood where my father still stood at the edge of the lake — in that bright, far country beyond words.
Dennis Covington,
April 2009
About the Author
DENNIS COVINGTON is the author of five books, including the novel Lizard and the memoir Salvation on Sand Mountain, which was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Vogue, Esquire, Redbook, Georgia Review, Oxford American, and many other periodicals. His most recent book is Redneck Riviera: Armadillos, Outlaws, and the Demise of an American Dream. A native of Birmingham, Alabama, he currently makes his home on the high plains of west Texas.
Copyright © 1995 by Dennis Covington
Afterword copyright © 2009 by Dennis Covington
Photographs copyright © 1995 by Jim Neel and Melissa Springer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information, address Da Capo Press, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142.
Portions of this work have appeared in different form in The New York Times, The Cbattanooga Review, and on Notional Geographic Explorer.
The epigraph is excerpted from “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction” from Mystery and Manners by Flannery O‘Connor and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright © 1969 by the Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor.
Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book
is available from the Library of Congress.
First published by Addison Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 1994
First Da Capo Press edition 2009
eISBN : 978-0-786-74582-1
Published by Da Capo Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com
Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestn
ut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.