Salvation on Sand Mountain (12 page)

The rain stopped completely sometime during the night. The next morning started off cool and bright, but by afternoon the last of the summer heat had returned. The air stayed clear, though, as fine as glass, and that evening when we drove up to the church again for the Saturday night service, the light through the trees was low and red.

The crowd was larger that second night. There were many more members of the press there, among them a television crew from North Carolina who had shown up with their blinding lights and impeccably dressed Asian-American anchorwoman. Her suit was gray flannel, her hair perfectly in place. She was poised and articulate in front of the camera, but she didn’t seem to have a clue about what was going on in the church itself.

Sister Barbara Elkins, the ailing matriarch, had shown up with a fruit jar of strychnine solution. She had mixed it herself. “She mixes it strong,” Jeff Hagerman said to me. “If you get scared or get your mind off God, you start to feel it.” Throughout most of the service, Sister Barb sat behind the pulpit with her handkerchief to her head. She was a large, flaccid woman in a black shift. She seemed to be in enormous pain. Her husband, Brother Bob, preached awhile, as did visiting pastors from neighboring states. When the snakes came out, the handling seemed a bit less spontaneous than it
had the night before. Maybe it was the television crew’s lights, maybe the presence of Sister Barb. I was at the front with the handlers, as I had been the previous night, when Brother Bob suddenly unscrewed the lid of the fruit jar on the pulpit and took a few swigs. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and handed the jar down to Jeff Hagerman, who did the same. After drinking from the jar, Jeff shook his head and then started whirling with his arms outstretched, faster and faster, while he clicked his heels on the hard wooden floor.
Bless him
! someone said.
Give him victory!
said someone else. The music mounted higher. Jeff threw back his head and howled like an animal in heat. Then he careened out of his whirling dance and staggered to a nearby pew. He was smiling. He was fine, just dizzy, and the congregation erupted in amens and thank Gods.

Sister Barb stood on unsteady feet, and Brother Bob handed her the microphone. She started at one end of the platform and worked her way down. She was wincing in pain, but there was something she wanted to make clear. She’d had it with outsiders in the midst of the handlers, and she had a few words to say about the subject: “These reporters need to stay back. This up here is for the saints of God. And it’s not a show. It’s for people that worship God.” She emphasized each word with a flick of her handkerchief. “We’re not a hateful people, we’re not haughty people, but these reporters, if
they want to make their money, can make it back there and not up here where they endanger people’s lives.”

Sister Barbara walked back behind the pulpit, occasionally touching her handkerchief to her temple. Brother Timmy and his wife gave her an amen, but most of the other handlers were silent. I felt my own face flush as I realized she was talking most particularly about me.

“I’ve been in this little better than fifty years,” she said. “I’ve been bit about sixteen times. It was the making of me. But I know you go down in the jaws of death. Just about all of us here that handle serpents has come to that point.” She leaned into the pulpit for support. “I hope I make it. I hope we’re saved.” It was not rhetorical. She seemed to understand her time was short, and that she and the other handlers had better have chosen the right way. “There’s more to it than handling serpents, anyhow,” she said. “They come to get pictures of serpents, but you know there’s more to it.”

I knew that full well, but the idea seemed fresh to her. It seemed to rouse her. She brought herself up to full height and stepped back from the pulpit. “I know my blessing was handling serpents,” she said with dignity. “Handling fire. But they was other things that went with it.”

“God don’t play games,” she said.

“And if he sent me to you, I don’t care what was wrong with you, you’ll be healed.”

“I just love God’s people,” she said. “I’m glad some of my children turned out. I noticed one of my grandsons by marriage, he had enough respect; he wanted the pictures for his own use and he stayed back.”

“You know you can dishonor God.”

She was looking straight at me, but I held her gaze. Her eyes were flat, reptilian.

For most of the rest of the service, I stayed behind an imaginary line with the other journalists. When I stepped outside later for some fresh air, I could see the mountains clearly, great black silhouettes against the sharp-edged sky. The sight of them stirred something like homesickness in me. But if it was homesickness, it was for a place I’d never been. Brother Carl had followed me out. He hugged me and said, “I knew she was talking about you. I should have come to your defense. I’m sorry.”

I assured him it was all right, that I understood. Besides, my mind was somewhere else by then. The rain had moved on through the valley we were in, and the moon was visible through some high, gauzy clouds. Carl went back inside the
church. As I stood in the dark outside, listening to the cicadas and the tambourines, I wondered about those border dwellers who had sailed for the promised land two hundred years before, in search of a new Eden. I thought about them finding their way through these mountains, the People of the New Light. I wondered whether they’d crossed the mountains around here somewhere, or farther south at the Cumberland Gap or Saluda Gap, or even farther still, at the great bend in the Tennessee River near Chattanooga, where the states of Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia meet, and the last great plateau of the Appalachians, Sand Mountain, begins its dead aim straight for the furnaces of Birmingham.

When I finally went back inside the church, my mind was still lingering on the mountains and the clouds that nearly hid the moon, but when I saw what was happening at the front of the sanctuary, my heart nearly turned in my chest. Aline McGlocklin had left her seat in the middle of the congregation and was standing near the front, exactly as she had stood under the brush arbor on Sand Mountain. Her hands were raised, her face upturned. Her lower jaw was trembling, and I imagined the sound before I heard it: “Akiii, akiii, akiii....” In front of Aline stood her husband Charles, with the four-foot black timber rattlesnake outstretched in his hands. He was getting ready to hand it to her.

The rattlesnake was so big Charles could hardly get a hand around it. He would later tell me that the Lord spoke to him in that moment and asked him, “Who do you love more, me or your wife?” Charles said the answer was God, and so he decided to go ahead and give her the snake. It was a moment that suggested that most ancient of stories — a garden, a serpent, a man and his wife. But now the story seemed oddly reversed, as though by giving his wife the serpent, the man could restore the communion with God that had been broken. Aline’s hands, which had been stretched upward, now suddenly turned to receive. But as Charles began to hand the rattlesnake to her, it rolled. He steadied it. It rolled again, doing a full turn in his hands, as though it were on a lathe. Charles stepped back and handed the serpent to Carl Porter, who prayed over it aloud before he stepped forward and lay it into Aline’s hands. Her face changed. It seemed to open out. The sound that she made did not resemble human speech.
Have your way, Lord.
someone said as Aline trembled in ecstasy with the big black rattlesnake outstretched in her hands. I was only an observer, but I felt I had been drawn into something so painfully intimate that I was morally obliged to look away even as I stared the harder. I wanted to step in and rescue Aline, but from what? Wasn’t it the same thing that was happening to me?

 

 

 

R
ight before he died, my father got interested in genealogy. “As far as I know,” he said, “no Covington has ever left anything to anybody, and I’m not going to be the one to break the tradition.” Dad meant it as a joke. He had already given me the best gifts — unqualified love, a moral education, and a good name. But there were three tangibles that he left as well. Before his death he deeded me two and a half acres of palmetto scrubland in central Florida, fifty miles south of Orlando. It was part of a massive real estate venture that had turned belly-up, the largest bankruptcy in the history of the state. River Ranch Acres, it had been called.
Ranch,
because it wasn’t on the coast.
River,
because there was supposed to be one nearby. The sales literature had been filled
with drawings of horses and cattle. But the development had no roads, no power, no water. The plots hadn’t even been surveyed. My dad bought the two and a half acres anyway, as an investment, he said, the only investment he had ever made. But I think he really bought the land because he had always loved Westerns. His favorite movie was
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

The second thing Dad left was a wooden cigar box that had belonged to my grandfather Covington. In it were a straight razor, two shaving brushes still caked with dried lather, my father’s tortolseshell pocketknife, and a few yellowing buttons.

The third thing Dad left me was a green binder containing what little family research he’d been able to do before his lungs gave out. I couldn’t bear to look at it, the spidery handwriting on green ledger paper, done in pencil in case of mistakes. My father had been a supervisor in the production planning department at Tennessee Coal and Iron. His responsibilities included seeing to it that Continental Can received the exact quantity of tin they had been promised, and on time. He was, therefore, a perfectionist. Decades after his office moved to a hill overlooking the mills, he continued to get his hair cut by the same black barber downtown because the man always remembered, without having to be asked, to clip the hairs in his nose. The records Dad kept on his 1977
orange Astre station wagon included the original car dealership’s ad cut neatly from the paper. He had kept that ad for nearly twelve years. At the time of his death, he had the warranties for every electrical device, including can openers and toasters, that he and my mother had ever purchased, arranged in labeled envelopes. It broke my heart to open the green binder and see him hard at work again, trying to get one last record straight.

Glenn Summerford