Blood Kin (13 page)

“That’s right! They dont care!” someone shouted. “Nary a one!”

“Bout the only comfort for folks like us is in our Lord Jesus Christ. Cause Jesus, he
loves
the poor people. He loves the forsaken, the mistaken, and the denied! Read your Bible! ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.’ Matthew 19:24. I reckon that gives folks like us a leg up as far as Heaven is concerned.” Some of the people laughed, but the preacher’s hard expression didn’t encourage much laughter.

“Remember the Israelites? Even the lowliest of the low have power on God’s green earth! And I tell you sweet brothers and sisters, each and every one of you need to recognize the powers that Almighty God has bestowed upon you. You know what I’m talking about! Some of you more than others!” Sadie knew he was talking about her, and when she made herself look up into his face, there was his scar, big and bold and red as could be. “You learn to
seize
that power, you learn to love that power, and I swear nobody will be spitting your way again.”

The preacher started pacing back and forth then, swinging his arms, rocking his shoulders, shaking his head like he couldn’t stop himself, like he could hardly hold himself back from something, something awful, but Sadie couldn’t imagine what.

“Mountain folk like us, we’re on the shy side. We’d rather do than talk, and we dont always speak up, even when we’re in a world of pain. But people, you got to open your mouths and let the words come out! Not the words that men have taught you, not those words you learnt in school, but the ones Jesus put into your mouth. Let Jesus be the one to train your tongue!

“Member that place in Acts 2 where our Bible tells us ‘and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.’

“And right there in Mark 16:17 it says ‘they will speak in new tongues!’ So let’s hear some of these new tongues! Let’s hear what the Lord gives us to say!”

The preacher kept walking around, swinging his arms, twitching like he had hundreds of insects stinging him. The rest of the church was the quietest they’d been since the services began. A couple of people stood up, looked like they were about to say something, but it was like they suddenly lost the words, or were too shy to say them. They sat back down looking embarrassed.

Then this sound started, this low sound like from deep inside a cave, and at first she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Then it got louder, and she watched the preacher, who was back up near the cross now, and he was all tense, then swaying, his bones loose like all that connected them together was a little bit of string. And the sound was coming from him — she just wasn’t exactly sure how.

Then the preacher opened his mouth more, and he started saying things, and the people sat up, most of them, like they’d been slapped.

“Glory be to God hallelujah!” the preacher said. “Ah sa lelogo shelagalah!” he shouted, or something liked that. What was he saying? Had he gone crazy? He sounded just like that auctioneer down the county fair last year.

The preacher was strutting like a rooster. His head moved back and forth. “Shi rilly yaya shang be to goddah holly lujah! Glor holly to goddah lujah!”

The preacher walked around the inside of the church, marching with his elbow brushing the walls, circling every member of his flock like he was herding the bunch of them in. It made Sadie awfully nervous to see that, to see him up front, then behind, then right beside her. He kept running faster and faster, saying all that nonsense, then raising his arms out to his sides like a little kid playing airplane, then screaming “Where are my saints! Where are my saints?” Certain people stood up and delivered their own version of whatever it was he’d been shouting, each in their way praising the Lord with their “Muss alowa goddah! Shah ally lawja!” The spirit took them one at a time, and then the spirit took them in waves, standing and shouting, turning in circles, laid back in the pews with their heads roiling around, lying on their backs on the floor with their hips jumping. The people in front were shaking and twitching, the people in back still standing in their rows but waving and shouting, some with eyes big as eggs, or rolling into the backs of their heads, the whites glowing in the light from the lanterns hanging along the walls.

At last the preacher came to the center of the church, his body stiff and his legs locked like a statue in the middle of the aisle, only his knees twitching, and his hands making grabbing motions with his fingers dancing as if they expected money to be dropping out of the rafters at any second and they were anxious to grab some. The people started pushing around him, climbing out of their seats and making a tight but writhing circle, like the muscles spasming around the mouth of someone trying to swallow their own tongue, but the preacher was the tongue, the preacher was the muscle making the words that were going to draw the Lord’s grace down upon them all. And he threw his head back, his neck swelling like a serpent in the act of devouring the sacrificial lamb, and then there was this gorgeous flood of
ahs
and
esses
and
m’s
from so deep inside him it was as if he was dredging it from the floor beneath, from the ground beneath, from somewhere deep within the mountain that fed and sheltered and buried them all. The sound started low enough to stir the belly but kept climbing higher and higher until it broke apart into this high speed chatter that was like a thousand tiny mouths eating the thoughts right out of Sadie’s brain.

S
HE MUST HAVE
fainted because after another slow blink she saw the preacher floating over her, the sweat pouring off his face and gathering in her eyes. “Will my saints come help me with this poor lamb?” She almost expected angels to descend. Instead it was several men who came around and lifted her, so that she rose up out of the midst of that congregation and was brought forward to a seat in the front row with the older women who stroked her arms and fanned her face murmuring “praise you child, sweet Jesus praise this innocent lamb.”

The preacher stood before them with his arms outstretched like he was Jesus himself crucified and his sleeves rolled part way up to show off his terrible scars. A long scar on his left arm curved through the crook of the elbow and wandered down almost to the wrist. She’d heard tell that once in his early times he’d got snake bit in his arm so bad they had to cut it down its entire length because it swelled up dark and evil. And then there was that terrible place on his palm. The preacher was close enough that hand hung down right by her face. The veins looked gathered and tied in that dark place and there was a gob of skin and muscle missing. Some said it was actually because he’d paid a man to take some ten penny nails and nail him to that big tree on the side of his house, but most agreed to that bad snake bite story, how the poison had made a portion of his hand rot away.

The preacher didn’t always handle snakes in his sermons. She’d heard that in one service he drank poison. In another he held the flame of a torch to his bare hand. But there was something about the way he stood there that made her think there’d be snake handling tonight. Somebody opened the doors. She could see some of the people twisting around but she couldn’t take her eyes off the preacher. Then she heard the heavy feet coming up the aisle, and four men carrying a wooden box wide as a big man’s chest and long as a coffin coming around the preacher and setting it down behind him. It had black iron hinges and straps and a scattering of holes about as wide as your finger along its sides and every now and then something glistened and moved behind those holes. Afterwards the men passed in front of the preacher and he gave each of them a holy kiss mouth to mouth and they went back to their seats and everybody was still, watching him.

Then an old woman came up beside him and handed him a bundle wrapped in a ragged bit of bed sheet stained with dark rusty blotches and yellow streaks and green marks and Sadie couldn’t imagine what might have made all those different stains. He unwrapped the bundle and there was a big old worn Bible inside — its cover scarred and broken and bits of paper and ribbon and string hanging out in all directions from within its pages and the whole of it out of true. The old woman took the torn bit of sheet and held it to her cheek and returned to her seat.

The preacher stood there thumbing through the giant Bible at his leisure as if he was the only one in the room, his lips moving, and sometimes his gaze floating toward the ceiling. He kept pulling out ragged pieces of paper that had things written on them, scrawled pictures and doodles and the handwriting so thick on some of them she couldn’t see how a body could make out enough to read. He kept mumbling things nobody must have been meant to hear except maybe God and His angels, and the congregation must have been used to it because nobody said a word. They didn’t even seem restless. He’d read a passage to himself and then he’d pull out a slip of paper and read whatever he’d written on that. Finally he opened to a page and laid his hand there, gazing out over his flock. “Folks ask me why I do this. I tell them it’s because it’s writ down here in my Bible, plain as day. They ask me do I do everything that’s writ down in this here book and I tell them no, no I dont. I aint Jesus. I dont exactly perform miracles, but I’ve seen my share of miracles happen. I dont feed the multitudes with a couple of fish and a little scrap of bread. And I aint been crucified and Lord knows that I aint come back from the dead. I’m just a mortal man and try as I might that’s all I’m ever likely to be.

“But I believe even a poor man, an ordinary man can do wonders. I believe the people we come from could do wonders. I believe some of them we come from could trace our line all the way back to the olden times, the biblical times of the old disciples, the times of Jesus hisself. I aint saying they was as great as Jesus, but I believe they was great enough for poor folk like us.

“I say we got some today with this wonder in them. I say maybe some here right in this room got this wonder in them. I say maybe we got a saint or two here today greater than all the old saints what ever lived.”

He held up his Bible and started shaking it like he was angry. The ribbons and the strings and different pieces of paper fell out all over the place but he didn’t seem to care. He kept shaking it and shaking it and he seemed to get angrier and angrier. Some of the congregation looked nervous and afraid. Even his small group of saints up close kept their mouths shut.

“In Genesis the Lord tells us that the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field. And in Matthew he advises us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Then in Mark he reckons that maybe we ought to pick up them serpents because they give us power; so that even if we drink poison, it wont kill us, and he even gives us the power to heal as a reward for our faith.

“Now you all remember that story in Acts when a viper come out and fastened on Paul’s hand. I know you do because I told it to you just last week! Remember how he shook off that serpent into the fire and suffered no harm?

“Well, it’s writ large on the walls outside this here church. We handle snakes to declare our faith. That’s just what we do! Any folks in here too scairt to watch us then you best leave now!”

Nobody left, but Sadie reckoned that even if they wanted to leave they’d be too afraid to, not with the preacher up there staring them all down and shaking his Bible with that terrible, vengeful hand.

“Okay then.” He nodded and smiled hugely showing all his teeth. “Let’s get her going. Let’s have some of my saints up here to witness!”

Sadie didn’t really understand who these saints were. Some looked to be people who’d been going to this church a long time. Others, the bigger ones, the taller ones, all of them men, reminded her of soldiers, the preacher’s soldiers.

A few of the men in the crowd got up, a couple of those who had carried the box in and some others she had seen being active earlier in the services, and a couple she was sure she hadn’t seen before — two skinny male twins who were probably in their seventies, and had identical sunk eyes and no expressions on their faces. There were also some women, older ones mostly, and a couple of ancient ladies who looked like they might die if they got a whiff of bad breath, much less a snake biting them. She saw a teenage girl rise up on the other side of the church, then get jerked back down by her mother.

The thing that struck her about all these volunteers, these saints, was that she didn’t know any of them, which seemed strange in a community this small. So they must have all been folks from out on the farms who didn’t get into town much, or maybe they lived somewhere a long way away, and had these hard journeys every week to get into the services. All the people she knew, including the ones she was related to, were content to just watch. Oh, they might get up and praise Jesus and dance around celebrating their love for Him, but they knew the preacher too good to be standing up there next to him when he had snakes all around. They might accept him as their leader, they might respect him as a preacher of the gospel, but that didn’t mean they were going to trust him with their lives.

Even the loyal ones that did get up, they were walking up to him so slow, not excited like they were before. The preacher spread his arms to them, his black coat bunching up on either side of his neck like a buzzard’s shoulders. “Come on now, come on,” he said, like he was speaking to a child, or some critter he wanted to catch. “Dont be shy. None of us got nothin to be bashful about in front of the Lord.” He stretched his arms out even wider, letting his head fall back in some kind of secret pleasure, wiggling his fingers, welcoming, directing. “Now boys,” he said to a couple of the men, “I’d like you to stand at both ends, and you women, you line up behind, watching. I want you to watch me handling them snakes. Then it’s your turn.” He winked, and it made Sadie go cold.