Salvation on Sand Mountain (23 page)

“Punkin prophesied once that I was the god Baal walking in the flesh. He said I was coming in there as a trap for my wife to deceive the church.” Elvis shook his head. “I come to find out that he was wanting my wife, and he’s married and got kids.”

The shadows thrown by the mountains were black and razor-sharp across the roadway. I realized how much I’d
always hated this about churches, the inevitable darkness on the underside of any human enterprise. Envy. Bitterness. The division that always seems to doom even the best of intentions. I was guilty of all that, too.

“I didn’t even know what Baal was,” Elvis said, “and my wife told me to look it up, and I looked it up, and Baal is a stone idol or something. There’s also a Baal spirit, of false religion. But I don’t prophesy, and I believe in the apostles’ teachings, so according to the Word, I couldn’t match up to be that false prophet.”

He turned his Bible this way and that in the fading light, his restless fingers moving across the page. He was trying to find it, the key word or phrase that could defeat his accusers and reinstate him in the family of faith. All at once the dimensions of Elvis’s tragedy struck me. He was an outcast from his own people. He had been prophesied against, driven away, accused of blasphemy and idolatry, of breaking the sacred laws. He was an exile from the only religious establishment this corner of the world had. Like Jesus.

“Not too long ago they prophesied to me that I was a son of God,” he said. “Now they’re saying I’m the devil. But if you’ve got the spirit of God in you, you won’t be prophesying one thing one day and another thing the next day. The Lord’s straight. He’s got a map. He doesn’t change his mind from day to day. He’s the same today and forever.”

Amen
. I wanted to tell him that I understood what he was going through and that he was right. God would never turn on him the way they had. But who was I to talk? What did I know? And what kind of weird transformation had I been going through? Why did I think the Holy Spirit had a hand in this? Who was I kidding? Had I lost my mind?

“There’s a lot of foolishness goes on in serpent-handling churches, but that doesn’t change the fact that serpent handling’s right,” Elvis said. “I’ve handled eight or nine times. I’ve drunk the strychnine. When the Spirit of God comes on me, it’s like electricity. It doesn’t make my hair stand up, but it goes through my body. And the fruits of the Spirit is how you know true love, and that’s your evidence of salvation.”

“Well, I hope I haven’t brought my personal problems into our conversation too much,” he said.

I told him he hadn’t.

“A lot of people get obsessed with serpents,” he added. “They may accept you at first, but if you see something that’s not right and mention it, they’ll prophesy against you or say you’re lost.”

I told him I’d remember that. It was nearly dark when we got to the house he still shared with Brenda, although he said he had to sleep in the basement now. “When you pray, pray that God’ll work things out for me,” he said.

I told him I would.

“If we can’t love one another here on earth, there ain’t no way we can make it to heaven,” he said. “Were you looking for me today, at the dinner?”

I told him I was.

“It was meant to be, then,” he said. “I’m glad you came along. ”

I watched Elvis walk toward the house, his shirt a bright piece of color against an otherwise dark landscape. Then I made a U-turn and retraced the route back through the mountains. The radio stations were few and far between, but occasionally I could pick up snatches of an East Kentucky boy preacher.
There are wells without water
, he said,
clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved forever
. I thought about Elvis, and the way he had been ostracized. What I didn’t know was that what had happened to him was about to happen to me. At the time, I just turned the radio off when I got to the interstate that would take me to Akron, the same one that would eventually lead me home.

M
y career as a snake-handling preacher was a brief one. It began and ended on a single day in December of 1993, when Vicki and I and photographer Melissa Springer went to a wedding at Carl Porter’s church in Georgia, an occasion that seemed to arouse all the passion, violence, and mystery that lay at the heart of snake handling itself. It was a little over two years after Glenn Summerford had put a gun to his wife’s head and forced her to stick her hand into a cage filled with rattlesnakes.

In those two years, I had been drawn by chance and inclination into a close relationship with the handlers. I had come to admire them and to respect their faith. In the process, I had even taken up serpents myself. It was perhaps a measure of the intimacy I shared with the handlers that I had also come to see their faults. They surely saw mine. My faith had grown;
so had my doubts. But the mystery of snake handling had deepened. For the mystery was not
how
the handlers did what they did, or even how it
felt
. The mystery was
why
, and toward what particular outcome.

The handlers say they do it in order to confirm the Word. Jesus says that believers shall take up serpents. Somebody’s got to do it, or the Word is found to be a lie. The handlers insist they’re the ones. But that explanation only scratches the surface of motivation, and in looking at motivation, I understood I had become my own subject. Why had
I
taken up serpents? I knew that I had a need to experience ecstatic worship, an addiction to danger, and a predictable middleage urge to find out who my people were. But still, the answer seemed incomplete. I turned again to the questions I was asking. What motivated the handlers to do what they did, and what would happen next in their lives as a result? Suddenly I realized those were the same questions I posed about characters in stories. And the answers could never be found outside the story, but only within. I was in a story, and the story I was in had no predictable end. But it had to end somewhere, sometime. I should have seen the end coming. The story had begun with a man trying to kill his wife. It made sense that it would end with a wedding. Then I would know what all this meant.

It was to be the first wedding ever held in the relatively new sanctuary of The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in
Kingston, Georgia. Halfway between the mill towns of Cartersville and Rome, Kingston looked as though it had once been prosperous. Now it was little more than a whistlestop fronted by a row of abandoned brick buildings, among them one that had housed the Famous People’s Opry. The only businesses that appeared to be open in Kingston on the day of the wedding were an establishment that manufactured cement lawn statuaries, a gas station, a video arcade, and Margo’s Groceries, home of a half border collie and half Australian shepherd named Worm.

The bride, Diane Pelfrey, twenty-one, a former waitress at the Shoney’s restaurant in Newnan, Georgia, was set to marry Steve Frazier, twenty-four. Diane was a third-generation handler. Her paternal grandfather had died of snakebite before she was born, and both of her parents took up serpents. Her father, Bill Pelfrey, had preached the gospel with signs following at revivals and homecomings all over the South. He spoke in tongues, healed the sick, and occasionally drank strychnine with no obvious ill effects. Diane’s mother, Anna Pelfrey, had died twice and been revived by prayer, once on the shoulder of an interstate near Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and once in the family’s living room.

Steve, on the other hand, was relatively new to handling. He’d been introduced to it two years earlier by his uncle, John Brown, Sr., and his cousin, the legendary Punkin Brown of Newport, Tennessee. Steve’s parents, though, were Catholic
and lived on Michigan’s upper peninsula. They had never handled poisonous snakes or drunk strychnine. Steve’s mother, Nancy, had never even been to Georgia before. She told me this moments before the service started, when I saw her standing outside the church, deduced her identity, and introduced Vicki and myself.

Nancy Frazier was an attractive woman about my age. She appeared serene and composed. Only her hazel eyes gave her away. They were the eyes of a woman who is imagining how she will survive a catastrophe that has not yet begun. “I’m concerned,” she said to me in a level voice. “I’m praying about it.” She said this would be her first Holiness church service, and she had not, until the day before her son’s wedding, met her future daughter-in-law. She already had lost one of her four sons, stabbed to death by hitchhikers two and a half years before. Now she feared she was losing another son, to a family of snake handlers.

But she smiled when Punkin Brown, dressed in a tux, came out of the church to escort her inside. Punkin was not only her nephew, but her son’s best man. It must have given her pause. But she took the snake handler’s arm anyway and bravely disappeared into the church.

Brother Carl was proud of his church, and he had reason to be. Nothing could have been further removed, in snake-handling circles at least, from Glenn Summerford’s converted
service station in Scottsboro than Carl Porter’s white masonry church in Kingston. It comfortably sat more than two hundred worshipers on oak pews with sky blue cushions, each pew adorned with crosses and brass plaques engraved with the names of donors, including Aunt Daisy, the prophetess. The building had central heat and air, a water fountain in the vestibule, and spacious bathrooms off either side. The basement had been partially finished, as had the old sanctuary next door, to provide bedrooms for visiting handlers. And the whole complex was fully paid for. The place looked particularly inviting decked out in pink roses for the wedding. A slanting afternoon light fell across the pulpit and prayer rail. It looked more like a Presbyterian meeting house in New England than a snake-handling church in a crumbling Southern mill town.

Having seated the groom’s mother, Punkin greeted Vicki and me just inside the door. He kissed me on the cheek, the traditional holy kiss, and reminded me that he and Steve were cousins. When he started to escort Vicki down the aisle, we told him we were waiting for Melissa, who had gone into the women’s bathroom to take photos of the bride getting dressed.

Punkin chatted with us awhile. He said he had driven his aunt’s car down from Tennessee for the ceremony. Nancy had told him not to take any snakes in the car with him, but
he said, “If I don’t, I don’t go.” Out of respect for Nancy, no snakes would be in evidence during the wedding. They’d be there, though, that night for the regular service, which the bridal parties had been invited to attend. “I don’t have to bring my snakes every time,” Punkin said. “But if somebody tells me not to, I’ll sure bring them then.”

Punkin had introduced Steve to Diane, he said, and he thought their marriage would be a fine and holy affair. He and his own wife, Melinda, had been married eleven years. They’d met at a homecoming in 1982, when Punkin was eighteen and Melinda fifteen, and now they had four children, including a set of three-year-old twins. Punkin remembered the first time he had seen Melinda. “She was speaking in tongues and handling a big rattlesnake. I told Daddy, ‘I’m gonna marry that girl.’ ”

He excused himself then to seat the other guests.

That’s all I knew about Punkin’s own marriage, but Carolyn Porter said she disapproved in general of the way the Tennessee handlers treated their wives. “I just don’t like the way they boss their women around,” she said. She’d tried to talk Diane out of marrying Steve for that very reason, not because she had anything against Steve personally, but because they’d be living among what she and Gracie McAllister called “them old Tennessee.” No handlers, Carolyn and Gracie said, were more strict in their attitudes
about the roles of men and women than those from Tennessee. Some of them didn’t even believe in men and women shouting together during a service. The women did their shouting on one side of the church. The men did theirs on the other. And the idea of a woman preaching the gospel was heresy, pure and simple, in Tennessee.

When Brother Carl saw me, he also greeted me with a holy kiss. He was a little nervous, what with it being the first wedding in the new building, but he was just happy to see we’d made the trip.

“Come on and get you a seat up front,” he said to me and Vicki. “You ain’t never seen a snake-handling wedding, have you?”

We shook our heads, afraid to consider what he had in mind.

“Well, I’ll tell you a secret,” he said. “It ain’t no different from any other kind.”

The crowd was modest, mostly family, and just a dozen or so handlers outside that. Carolyn Porter was there, and Charles and Aline McGlocklin. It was a strange and wonderful sight, the male handlers dressed up in tuxes and suits and ties, a way they’d never be in regular church. Melissa still hadn’t appeared, so Vicki and I sat in the middle, next to the aisle, with Charles and Aline and Aline’s youngest son, Matthew, to our right. Aline took Vicki’s hand. It had
been months since they’d seen each other. I smiled at Charles, and he gave me a comical look. Our friendship with the McGlocklins had been brief but intense, and like many unlikely friendships, it appeared destined to last.