Salvation on Sand Mountain (22 page)

“People say, ‘Brother Bill, sometimes we see you up there, and you look just like your dad,’” he said.

Amen
.

“And the devil speaks sometimes and says, ‘Boy, you’re gonna
die
just like your dad.’ ”

Brother Bill leaned down toward the congregation like he suspected us of insubordination. It was a good crowd, nearly two hundred people, and nearly all waving funeral-home fans with Jesus on the front. He said, “Well, praise the Lord, the way my daddy died is a good way to go! I’d whole lot rather cross over to the other side with a serpent bite than with a bullet in my heart because I was chasing another man’s wife!”

Some choice
, I thought, but the rest of the congregation said,
That’s right! Preach on!

I’d known Brother Bill since the Scottsboro days, and at first his no-nonsense, regimental style had put me off. One time, he said he believed if you didn’t handle rattlesnakes, you were going to hell. That seemed to me to make for a very small heaven. But despite his theology, he’d grown on me. His language could be vivid and succinct. “I’ve seen the Holy Ghost so strong that you couldn’t see the back of the church for the haze,” he would say. And he often called seminaries “cemeteries” because they were so full of dead men’s bones.

Born and raised in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, Brother Bill had gotten the Holy Ghost in 1966, on his way to Vietnam, but he hadn’t started handling serpents until 1987, after he retired from the air force. Brother Bill’s wife, Anna, carried the distinction of having died twice. Both times, she was revived by prayer. “I’ll never forget the first time she died, in our living room,” Brother Bill would say. They had a daughter named Diane who worked as a waitress at the Shoney’s in Newnan. She’d sometimes drive the three hours to Scottsboro after her shift ended so she could sing “In My Robe of White, I Will Fly Away,” one of her daddy’s favorite songs. Diane handled serpents, too, in spite of the fact that a snake had killed her grandfather before she was born. Toward the end of my journey with the handlers, she’d get married, and for reasons best left to that part of the story, I’d know it was time then for me to move on.

Brother Bill was right in the middle of what I thought was
one of his best sermons ever when a skinny Kentucky handler suddenly leapt to his feet and ran over to a woman sitting in the third row. He grabbed the back of the pew in front of her, and his eyes rolled up in his head.

“
Oooooooohhhh!
” the Kentucky handler said. “
Mmmmmmmmm!
” His head snapped back. “
Lalalala, shhhh!
” And then: “Oh, child, I heard you the first time that you prayed! When you called out on my name, I said, surely you do this that I’ve taught you to do and you’ll see the enemy flee!” His head jerked up and down, and his mouth went all gooey again. “
Ooooooh! Mmmmmm! Lalalala, shhhh!
And I say, surely he won’t return!” With these last words, the boy did a flamenco across the floor, his cheap shoes pounding on the wood.

“Can you hear what the Spirit has to say?” Bill Pelfrey asked, cupping his ear with his hand.

But the Kentucky boy wasn’t finished yet. “
Ohhhhhhhh, lalalalala!
Oh, surely I know the trouble, I know the heartache, and I know the pain that the Wicked One’s caused, but surely I’ll come and I’ll cut him off without leaving him a single thing!”

Brother Bill seemed perplexed by this last part. “Don’t you come to me with no tricks of the words of the devil,” he said, “or trying to confuse the words of God, because there is no confusion in the Holy Ghost!”

I didn’t know what was going on, and I wouldn’t until the service was over and I tracked down the skinny Kentucky boy in the grassy parking lot that sloped down from the church. If anything, the heat and humidity had increased. The handlers’ shirts were sticking to their backs as they popped the releases on their car trunks to get to their ice chests.

The boy had just gotten a cup of cold lemonade. His name was Wayne. He had a narrow head, widely spaced eyes, and what looked like the beginnings of a goiter.

“Was that prophecy?” I asked him.

“That was the Lord speaking,” he said.

I asked him how he knew.

“The Bible said that when men are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God,” he said. “And the son’ll know what his father’s gonna do.”

“Who you think that Wicked One is, Wayne?” a voice asked.

Wayne squinted into the sun, and I turned to see a handsome young man in a mustache and a tropical-looking shirt. He didn’t resemble any of the other handlers, although I knew he was one. I’d seen him take up a rattlesnake earlier in the service.

“Who do you think that Wicked One is?” the man repeated. He waved a sweat bee away from his forehead.

Wayne’s eyes blinked rapidly. “I don’t know, brother,” he said.

“Is it anybody in particular?”

“It’s a person,” Wayne said slowly. “I don’t know who it is, but I know somebody’s in trouble.” He finished his lemonade, excused himself, and went on back up the hill toward the church, where Brother Bill Pelfrey and Brother Carl were coming down the steps, a serpent box in each hand.

The man in the tropical shirt smiled and introduced himself as Elvis Presley Saylor. “That was me he was talking about,” he said. “I’m the Wicked One.”

“
You’re
the Wicked One?” I asked.

He looked me in the eye and said, “That’s who they say I am.”

 

 

 

 

The times when I most felt I was closing in on the truth about the handlers, I also felt I was somehow being led by the Spirit. I don’t believe it is a conceit to think you are being led by the Spirit. It may be a conceit to say such a thing publicly. But if you accept the idea of a universe set into motion by an intelligent hand, then it seems to me you need to consider the possibility that the hand may still be at work in its movement. Things happen. But chance and coincidence don’t mean much to me anymore. Elvis Presley Saylor is an example of what I’m talking about. I believe there was a reason I ran into him that day. It’s an idea I never would have entertained a year or two ago. But among the handlers, I’d learned not to dismiss anything as meaningless. Mystery, I’d read somewhere,
is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.

I lost Elvis after the service that day in Kentucky. I assume he joined the rest of us at the dinner held outdoors under stretches of bright blue canvas in the backyard of a nearby house, but I didn’t see him there. The tables groaned under the fried chicken, potato salad, and field peas. Fleshy red tomatoes. Corn bread burned on the bottom. Fried corn. String beans. Collard greens. Platters layered with thick pink slices of ham. Homemade butter pickles. Olives. Iced tea. Ambrosia and lemon meringue pie for dessert. It was a chance for the handlers from five or six states to swap stories and renew acquaintances. The favorite topic of conversation seemed to be the crazy little yellow rattler that had almost gotten Bill Pelfrey that day. Otherwise, it was just another church social. But for the first time it struck me how small the circle of handlers actually was. At least this circle. By now I’d been to homecomings in Georgia, Alabama, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and I had been seeing the same faces wherever I went: Dewey Chafin, Carl Porter, Bud Gregg, the Summerford brothers, Punkin Brown, Jamie Coots, Gene Sherbert. While the churches themselves are not associational — there is no denomination, for instance, of snake-handling churches, and their beliefs often seem irreconcilably incompatible — the handlers and their families
visit each other’s churches regularly and even marry into them. The congregations are not connected in any organizational sense, but they are often connected by blood. Bill Pelfrey’s daughter, Diane, wound up marrying a cousin of Punkin Brown’s. Jimmy Summerford’s daughter, Melissa, had married the son of Bud Gregg, pastor of the church in Morristown, Tennessee. Gracie McAllister’s son, Kirby Hollins, had married into the Elkins clan. On Sand Mountain, the snake-handling Millers and Mitchells and Hatfields were all tangled up together by marriage. The snake-handling congregations, widely separated by geography, often seem to constitute a series of extended families. Scholars call them “stem families.” The Elkins in West Virginia, the Saylors (no relation to Elvis) in Kentucky, the Greggs in Tennessee, and the Mitchells and Summerfords in Alabama. And as in any clan, the outsider, particularly the interloping male, is kept at bay.

I felt oddly detached at the dinner that day. By now, I’d heard all the patterns of small talk, the snake-trading stories, the disguised bravado. Jimmy Summerford invited me to a homecoming at Old Straight Creek on Sand Mountain. He said they hadn’t handled there much in recent years, and he and some of the others from Old Rock House in Macedonia were trying to help them out. “I guess they got a little slack after their pastor got bit and died,” he said.

“I guess so,” I replied.

Verlin Short, of Mayking, Kentucky, began reminiscing about his father, who was out of snake handling for the moment, but might get back in at any time. In particular, Verlin remembered with a certain wistfulness one of the last times he’d seen his father handle. “He had a rattler across his glasses, I don’t know how many rattlesnakes he had in his hand, along with some southern copperheads, and he had that green tree viper that just crawled up there on his head like a crown.”

Punkin Brown passed along the latest on two famous Tennessee snake-handling preachers, one of whom had quit handling and was living now in what used to be his church. The other had also denied the faith. “He’s been married three times,” Punkin said, “the last time to a sixteen-year-old girl. He said the Lord told him to do it.”

Not even gossip aroused my interest, though, as it once had. Without knowing what I had missed, I was vaguely dissatisfied. Everybody else seemed to be riding on the high of the service. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t. I left the dinner earlier than I’d intended, gassed the car up in Middlesboro, filled myself up with coffee, and that’s when I saw him thumbing along the side of the road, Elvis Presley Saylor. The Wicked One. The tropical-print shirt had given him away.

I pulled onto the shoulder, and Elvis hopped in the front. All he had with him was his King James Thompson Reference Bible. He said he was trying to get home to Harlan, Kentucky, and if I wasn’t headed in that direction, he’d understand. I told him I wasn’t headed in any particular direction, except that I needed to wind up in Akron, Ohio, the next day to do a magazine article. I’d be happy to drop him off in Harlan if he’d show me the way.

Elvis smiled. “I just asked the Lord, if it was his will, that somebody would pick me up and give me a lift,” he said.

We rode in silence for a while. Occasionally I’d glance at Elvis to confirm my suspicion that he looked different from the other snake handlers in pretty much the same way that I looked different. His hair was longer, he seemed to still have most of his teeth, and his clothes, although basic, betrayed at least some weakness for the worldly. I couldn’t help but ask about his name.

It wasn’t something he seemed eager to talk about. “My daddy named me,” Elvis said. “He was a bootlegger, worked in the mines. I got five brothers and five sisters, all half. My dad was the type that went with one woman for a while, and then another. I reckon every one of us was named after somebody famous.”

Elvis himself had worked in the mines for fifteen years, until an injury forced him to quit. He said he had a pinched
nerve in his back and a case of black lung disease. He’d signed up for benefits and hoped a check was coming soon. He’d been a bridge man, a belt man, and a wall builder who sealed rooms so air would flow toward the face of the coal. He’d set pumps, jacks, and timbers. He’d shoveled a lot of coal. But unlike many of the other miners, he’d never taken to drink. “From what I’ve seen of drinking,” he said, “I don’t want no part of it.”

We were winding through spectacular country, steep green mountains and precipitous ravines. Where the highway bisected the mountains, the cuts revealed layers of gray limestone and black seams of coal.

“I had a kind of bad experience back there,” Elvis said, “but you know that. I was jumped on, told not even to talk to you. What they’re doing is taking sides in a marital problem that is none of their business.”

I asked him what had happened.

“My wife, Brenda, is wanting a divorce,” he said. “They’re teaching her that since I’ve been married before, it’s fornication, and she’s got to get out of the marriage.”

Elvis opened the Bible and thumbed through it, as if searching for the appropriate text. The pages were underlined and highlighted in several different colors. Handwritten notes filled the margins. “The Word doesn’t back that up,” he said, “but they’re filling her head with it anyway.” The
irony, he said, was that his first wife had run off with a snake-handling preacher.

Elvis had an exceptionally quiet voice, but tuned to that East Kentucky dissonance, so that it seemed to come from a broken instrument. “They’re saying I’m the devil,” he said. “Even Punkin Brown took a fit, almost a fighting fit against me, and I don’t even know the man that well.”

It didn’t surprise me that Punkin Brown’s name had come up. There was something dark and brooding about Punkin. He had an admirable knowledge of the Bible, but his sermons, preached in a guttural monotone while he stalked in front of the congregation with a rattlesnake draped over one shoulder, had always struck me as short on grace and long on tribulation. Of all the handlers I’d run into, Punkin Brown seemed to be the one most mired in the Old Testament, in the enumerated laws and the blood lust of the patriarchs. He didn’t have much to say about redemption. And he was unpredictable and combative, the handlers’ equivalent of a mad monk.