November Mourns

by Tom Piccirilli

  Rebi gripped his arm and pulled Shad up the veranda stairs. “We’re late getting back. It sounds like they’re about to start.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Jerilyn said. “They’ll be glad to see we’ve brought a new friend.”

  They marched to the front door and Shad stopped in his tracks and stared into the foyer ahead. Prison was closing in on him again. Both Gabriel girls tugged at him harder, but he didn’t budge.

  Megan’s hand beckoned him from the hall and he finally stepped forward.

  It wasn’t dark inside the home at all. He even had to shield his eyes, moving from the gloom of the storm to an abruptly illuminated room. He was suddenly surrounded by clamor: voices, a clatter of silverware, and the rattling of windows as the rain throbbed against the glass.

  Rebi brought him a towel, and said, “Come sit.”

  “The whole settlement sits down and takes meals together?”

  “On certain days. The babies and real young’uns are put down for naps after a roundup.”

  “You sure no one will be upset?”

  “You got no sense about you at all.”

  “There’s plenty who’d say you were right.”

  “You’re thinking it’s a big fuss, Shad Jenkins,” Jerilyn said. “It’s not. You got no call to be distressed. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  “Sorry, it’s been a long time since I’ve sat down and had dinner with any family.”

  “Even your own?”

  “I don’t have much of one anymore.”

  With a casual grace, she led him down the corridor into the depths of the house. They moved side by side as if they were a long-enduring couple who’d been together so many years that they balanced each other out. It somehow felt more natural now that it ever had with Elfie. It was such a disturbing thought that it put a hitch in his stride.

  Jerilyn reacted with subtle adjustments, slowing to match his pace. He dried himself but couldn’t shake the chill. Falling behind him, Rebi slid herself against his back and urged him along.

  Okay, he thought, so where does the game go from here?

  When do I get to wrangle the rattlers and prove myself a servant of the lord?

  Folks were already seated for dinner and the first plates were being served when Shad stepped into the room. He sat between the sisters and his introduction into the fold hardly made a ripple. He counted twenty-five people and none of the children were in sight. A few of them reached over and shook his hand, clapped him on the back. A couple knew his name already and said they’d met his father years ago.

  A woman flitted over, hugged him, and made a comment he didn’t catch. He heard various names spoken at him, but few he could remember. Taskers. Johansens. Burnburries. It was the first time he’d had a meal with another person since the prison cafeteria.

  Up on the wall they’d nailed Hellfire Christ, and he didn’t want your sympathy. He didn’t even want your love. He just scowled at you from his agony and wrath and let you know he was up there for the sole purpose of making you come face-to-face with your own crimes and weaknesses. Hellfire Christ was damn near smiling. He wanted to see you go down.

  Shad was a tad surprised. He’d thought only the Catholics went in for crucifixes. If these folks were going to have one, then he expected snakes to be wreathed around the gaunt figure. Snapping at the Messiah’s feet, twined at the bottom of the cross.

  But there weren’t any other idols or paintings of serpents anywhere in view. Did snake handlers believe that Saint Patrick was a good man for casting the vipers out of Ireland or did they consider his actions disgraceful?

  The shit you had to think about.

  Shad ate beside the snake handlers, giving short precise answers whenever he was asked a question. The old-timer with the sunburned crown looked over and said it again. “Hey there, how you today?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Good taters!”

  “Yes.”

  It felt exactly like it did in the can. Your first view of the new world’s hierarchy happened in the cafeteria. You learned how the place was organized, who ran the show. Where you were allowed to sit, how the power structure worked. You started with the guy at the head of the table. All the others would fall into line eventually.

  There he was. Leader of the nameless church, master of vipers, King of the Goblins, Jerilyn and Rebi’s father, Lucas Gabriel.

  A bull of a man dressed all in white except for the carefully knotted narrow black bow tie that had been fashionable before Atlanta burned. The tie told Shad something about Gabriel but he didn’t know what. He was bald, his skull knobby and creased, with a fringe of kinky brown hair above each ear. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to reveal powerful forearms covered with purplish snakebite scars. He showed them off the way cons advertised their jailhouse tats. It proved you didn’t care about the surface of your flesh. Only what was in your blood really mattered.

  There was an element about Lucas Gabriel that reminded Shad of Pa. Maybe the tightly compressed potential of force waiting for the chance to escape.

  The patriarch. Shad knew the man had a hell of a story, and he wished he’d asked Dave Fox or somebody else what it was.

  Gabriel watched Shad with washed-out eyes the color of gravel. There was no suspicion in them. Only an impish sparkle of authority that let you know he was in charge and never to cross him. It was the same gleam the warden’s gaze had held until Jeffie O’Rourke rammed a paintbrush through his eye.

  “He came here on his own, Daddy,” Jerilyn said. “This is Mr. Shad Jenkins.”

  “There’s always room at our table for one more,” Gabriel told her. “If someone wants to share our bread with us.” His voice had a laugh to it, but the laugh didn’t come out.

  No direct acknowledgment or real welcome from the man, which put another spin on the situation.

  “He ain’t never handled snakes before,” Rebi put in. Almost mocking but having fun with it, pushing a little. Shad figured these people did a lot of that, honing their social skills against one another like sharpening knives.

  “Folks from the hollow, or most towns anywhere, don’t truck much with snakes except to kill ’em.” Gabriel’s smile showed off his small, even, white teeth. “Must’ve been quite a sight for him to come upon, seeing as how we were rounding up so many for services.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  Shad figured the hard sell was about to start, and they were going to talk about the burgeoning ranks of God’s saved people now. He began to draw his thoughts together and gather his words, but then Gabriel asked somebody to pass him the potatoes. The whole group fell to talking among themselves again even louder than before. Most of them were garrulous, chuckling noisily, leaning toward him to welcome him into their long-winded jokes and conversations. No one addressed him specifically.

  He checked around to see who might be keeping to themselves.

  Those were the ones you had to watch for. The hitters. The muscle.

  They weren’t hard to spot. Two toughs, brothers by the look of it, with feral eyes and fixed dull faces covered with patchy beards. Shirts buttoned up to the collars, thick hair parted at the side and combed over into ridiculous juvenile waves and curls. Perhaps they were Gabriel blood, but Shad didn’t see any of the same poise in them. They sat obediently like dogs.

  It took a while but eventually he heard their names. Hart and Howell Wegg.

  They ate silently and with good manners, wiping their mouths a lot. They kept their elbows off the table, cut the ribs off the bone, and sliced their meat into small pieces. Whenever someone spoke to them they smiled dutifully but hardly said a word. They appeared so docile that Shad could feel himself gearing up for impending grief. He hoped he was being paranoid but really didn’t think it would be that easy.

  The meal seemed to be a carefully rehearsed performance put on for his benefit, and he paid no serious attention to it. He tuned out most of it and found that even Jerilyn wasn’t saying anything of impor
tance though she kept whispering to him. He could feel how keyed up they all were, holding back but edgy and raring. Was it due to his entrance or because this was one of their holy days? He sat and waited and knew it wouldn’t be too much longer.

  It took another twenty minutes. As the ladies began to clear the table, he started to stand and Rebi shoved him back down. She told him, “It’s not anything sexist, it’s just our turn to clean up. You sit and relax, talk to Daddy for a bit.”

  Gabriel held his chin up in Shad’s direction. That proved to be the only gesture he needed to make for everyone to quiet down. Some folks had already left, others didn’t seem certain of where they should go or what they should be doing.

  “Not many men from town would share a plate of food from our table.”

  “Why’s that?” Shad asked.

  “There was talk a hundred years ago that my forefathers were cannibals.”

  So now things were going to be silly.

  Shad got the feeling that Gabriel was testing him, but he’d expected as much. Cannibals though? He guessed everybody had to play out their dark secret, no matter how goofy it sounded.

  Rebi brought him a slice of cranberry pie for dessert. He couldn’t put it past these folks to have tossed in a fingernail or a couple strands of hair to get a reaction.

  “Anybody remember that talk besides you?” Shad asked.

  “Some, I suspect.”

  “I never heard it.” He spooned in a mouthful of pie and swallowed without tasting. Sometimes you pushed back, and sometimes you just played along and considered the angles. Shad stared at the man.

  Hart and Howell Wegg ate their dessert too, without any hint that they understood what was going on. Rebi and Jerilyn returned and took up their seats beside him again, but didn’t eat.

  “You want to know about us, don’t you?” Lucas Gabriel said. His voice had a sigh to it, but the sigh didn’t come out either.

  “Yes.”

  “Why’s that? Not because you’re lookin’ for the Lord.”

  The man was right, but you couldn’t give anything away this early in the game. “It’s presumptuous for you to say that, Mr. Gabriel.”

  “I reckon that’s true. I got no defense for such boldness.”

  “We all have our reasons.”

  “So then, name some of yours, Mr. Jenkins. Why have you come to us?”

  “I’m not certain,” Shad said. If you straddled the line, no one could trouble you for being on one side or the other.

  “Good, I can appreciate a man in agitation who’s not afraid to admit it.”

  Shad didn’t think he’d admitted to any such thing, but the man’s assuming nature was something to keep notice of. “My sister recently died.”

  Murmurs went around the table, the usual kind words and sympathies. The Wegg brothers kept staring, vacuous but amenable. Rebi licked her lips, a gesture of sex and girlish fidgeting.

  Gabriel began to paw at his chin, the scars on his arms twisting in the light like snakes themselves. “So then, perhaps you do seek to ease your burden.”

  “Everyone seeks that, don’t they?”

  “I do believe you’re right.”

  “She was part of the Youth Ministry in Preacher Dudlow’s church down in the hollow.”

  “A fine man. I’ve met the reverend in town on occasion, and at some of the Christian tent gatherings when traveling ministers come to visit.”

  “I was wondering if you’d ever seen her up this way. She was seventeen, long blond hair?” He couldn’t believe that this was the only way he could describe his sister, and he wasn’t even sure if she’d still had long hair. “Her name was Megan.”

  “No,” Gabriel said. “We have few visitors, and I recall each of them well.” He glanced around the table and others shook their heads and agreed they’d never met her. “Was there something we could have done for her?”

  “I don’t know. I was away for a time. I’m sad to say I didn’t know her well anymore.”

  Lucas Gabriel grunted loudly. “Loss of a family member is one of our most painful trials. It’s made so much worse if there are regrets or unresolved circumstances.”

  Time to divert the course of the conversation, allow the man to have his say. Shad could see that Gabriel was beginning to get a touch antsy, waiting to cut loose. “Does your sect have a name?”

  The man caught on to the word—sect, sounding so much like cult—and the glimmer in his eyes seemed to flare. “No, we believe that the denomination of churches and religions has more to do with man’s hubris than his following the Lord. Shall I tell you about us? Our history?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you familiar with Mark 16:18?”

  “No,” Shad said, though he realized it had to be the verse about snakes. Something about laying hands on. If you couldn’t quote the passage word for word, then you couldn’t say you actually knew it. That’s how it had been back in Becka Dudlow’s Bible class.

  “It’s the central passage that forms the core of our faith. ‘They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’ From that verse came the original belief of the snake handlers.”

  “Everybody’s got to have their own blessing,” Shad said. “Makes them feel like God’s giving them extra attention.”

  “Well, I’d say you’re probably right about that, much of the time. We want to earn our consideration. My great-grandpa Saul was one of the founders of the Holiness Church in eastern Tennessee. Used to bring the serpents with him to the camps and down into the mines.”

  “How’d that go over with the other men?”

  “Not well, at first.”

  “I’d guess not.”

  The others at the table had heard the tale before, but expectation and curiosity still grew in the air, the mood fluctuating, as if they had never heard the end of the story.

  “At the close of the nineteenth century, the industrialization and factories of Moloch were spreading down through the South. The rich owners began to turn their backs on God and praise only silver. They replaced our farming and our way of life. They paid poor wages for unskilled labor, offered only high-priced rental properties and unsanitary conditions. The bitterness of men took hold and they became violent.”

  “Tell what happened, Daddy,” Rebi said. Jerilyn let out a soft snort that only Shad could hear.

  “The snakes saved us,” Gabriel said. “God gave us the signs of his power. We followed his will. We bore witness and struggled with the serpents, and sometimes managed to heal the dying with the venom.”

  Shad had talked to a couple of drug dealers in the slam who’d come out of the river bottoms and whose fathers had mined those same mountains. On the outside they drove Mercedes and Porsches, had houses in Miami, and yet they still fucked around with snake handling. It wasn’t poverty that pushed them. It was the primitive urge to try yourself against the hand of fate.

  The glass of the windows vibrated with a gentle staccato.

  “Thing was, all of them were actually afraid of snakes,” Lucas Gabriel said. He shifted in his seat until he was aimed entirely at Shad. “Saul most of all. Rattlers terrified him. His baby brother had died in the crib after being bitten. They knew firsthand the kind of agony one would go through. All of them had seen congregation members die. They went to church and were visited by the spirit of the Lord, and yet they never knew if they were going to get back out the door alive. If not, at least they died in service.”

  That was about as old-school as you could get. “Where’s the cannibalism come in?”

  “One summer the green timbers of a mine gave way and there was a cave-in. They got most of the men out safely, but it took rescuers seven days to dig Saul free. He was trapped alone there in a far chamber, except for the snakes. When he was rescued, the lower half of Saul’s left leg was gone. People figured that he got so hungry he actually ate it.”

  There was an even
more subtle analysis going on now. Shad allowed himself to be set up, and said, “He was driven to that extreme in only a week?”

  “No, a’course not, but that’s the way legends get started. Saul’s leg had been crushed and gangrene had set in. He surely would’ve died from his wounds, but he claimed the snakes fed off his rotting leg and saved him.”

  “Maybe it’s true.”

  “Maybe it is, at that.” Shad knew he was expected to grin but not laugh at the miraculous twist, so he did. Gabriel joined in for a moment. “After that, Saul came out here with his wife and sons, my grandfather among them, and together they built this house. This hamlet grew up around the faith.”

  Looking down to take another bite of pie, Shad saw that it had been cleared along with all the other plates. Only a few folks remained around the table, and some were talking and appeared to have been deep in conversation much of the time. He’d been focused too sharply on Gabriel.

  It was dark outside and a weariness began to settle on him. He’d been up since dawn with almost no sleep and had covered at least fifteen miles of rugged terrain on foot. Jerilyn’s shoulder pressed him from one side and Rebi sort of nuzzled him on the other. They both smelled faintly of jasmine, which he hadn’t noticed before.

  Gabriel pursed his lips and appeared to be considering his words. “Will you stay the night? You appear to be exhausted, and I doubt you’ll find your way back to Jonah Ridge in the dark. Pardon my saying so but you don’t seem to be an expert mountain traveler.”

  “I’m not.”

  “One misstep on the Pharisee and you’ll meet the Lord earlier than I presume you’re expecting.”

  “Aren’t you holding your services tonight?”

  “No, that’ll be tomorrow afternoon. The roundup and the storm have agitated the snakes. I want to give them a chance to calm down some.”

  All right, now it wasn’t a fairy tale anymore, but the beginning of a dirty joke. Traveling salesman staying overnight with the farmer’s two luscious young daughters. There were so many punch lines he couldn’t decide on any one of them.