Salvation on Sand Mountain (19 page)

It’s not true that you become used to the noise and confusion of a snake-handling Holiness service. On the contrary, you become enmeshed in it. It is theater at its most intricate
— improvisational, spiritual jazz. The more you experience it, the more attentive you are to the shifts in the surface and the dark shoals underneath. For every outward sign, there is a spiritual equivalent. When somebody falls to his knees, a specific problem presents itself, and the others know exactly what to do, whether it’s oil for a healing, or a prayer cloth thrown over the shoulders, or a devil that needs to be cast out. The best, of course, the simplest and cleanest, is when someone gets the Holy Ghost for the first time. The younger the worshiper, the easier it seems to be for the Holy Ghost to descend and speak — lips loosened, tongue flapping, eyes rolling backward in the head. It transcends the erotic when a thirteen-year-old girl gets the Holy Ghost. The older ones often take time. I once saw an old man whose wife had gotten the Holy Ghost at a previous service. He wanted it bad for himself, he said. Brother Charles McGlocklin started praying with him before the service even started, and all through it, the man was in one attitude or another at the front of the church — now lying spread-eagled on the floor, while a half dozen men prayed over him and laid on hands, now up and running from one end of the sanctuary to the other, now twirling, now swooning, now collapsing once again on the floor, his eyes like the eyes of a horse that smells smoke, the unknown tongue spewing from his mouth. He got the Holy Ghost at last! He got the Holy Ghost! you think, until you see
him after the service eating a pimiento cheese sandwich downstairs. His legs are crossed. He’s brushing the crumbs from his lap. He agrees it was a good service all right, but it sure would have been better if he’d only gotten the Holy Ghost. You can never get enough of the Holy Ghost. Maybe that’s what he means. You can never exhaust the power when the Spirit comes down, not even when you take up a snake, not even when you take up a dozen of them. The more faith you expend, the more power is released. It’s an inexhaustible, eternally renewable resource. It’s the only power some of these people have.

So the longer you witness it, unless you just don’t get into the spontaneous and unexpected, the more you become a part of it.
I
did, and the handlers could tell. They knew before I did what was going to happen. They saw me angling in. They were already making room for me in front of the deacons’ bench. As I said, I’d always been drawn to danger. Alcohol. Psychedelics. War. If it made me feel good, I’d do it. I was always up for a little trip. I figured if I could trust my guide, I’d be all right. I’d come back to earth in one piece. I wouldn’t really lose my mind. That’s what I thought, anyway. I couldn’t be an astronaut, but there were other things I could do and be. So I got up there in the middle of the handlers. J.L. Dyal, dark and wiry, was standing on my right; a cleancut boy named Steve Frazier on my left. Who was it going to
be? Carl’s eyes were saying, you. And yes, it was the big rattler, the one with my name on it, acrid-smelling, carnal, alive. And the look in Carl’s eyes seemed to change as he approached me. He was embarrassed. The snake was all he had, his eyes seemed to say. But as low as it was, as repulsive, if I took it, I’d be possessing the sacred. Nothing was required except obedience. Nothing had to be given up except my own will. This was the moment. I didn’t stop to think about it. I just gave in. I stepped forward and took the snake with both hands. Carl released it to me. I turned to face the congregation and lifted the rattlesnake up toward the light. It was moving like it wanted to get up even higher, to climb out of that church and into the air. And it was exactly as the handlers had told me. I felt no fear. The snake seemed to be an extension of myself. And suddenly there seemed to be nothing in the room but me and the snake. Everything else had disappeared. Carl, the congregation, Jim — all gone, all faded to white. And I could not hear the earsplitting music. The air was silent and still and filled with that strong, even light. And I realized that I, too, was fading into the white. I was losing myself by degrees, like the incredible shrinking man. The snake would be the last to go, and all I could see was the way its scales shimmered one last time in the light, and the way its head moved from side to side, searching for a way out. I knew then why the handlers took up serpents.
There is power in the act of disappearing; there is victory in the loss of self. It must be close to our conception of paradise, what it’s like before you’re born or after you die.

I came back in stages, first with the recognition that the shouting I had begun to hear was coming from my own mouth. Then I realized I was holding a rattlesnake, and the church rushed back with all its clamor, heat, and smell. I remembered Carl and turned toward where I thought he might be. I lowered the snake to waist level. It was an enormous animal, heavy and firm. The scales on its side were as rough as calluses. I could feel its muscles rippling beneath the skin. I was aware it was not a part of me now and that I couldn’t predict what it might do. I extended it toward Carl. He took it from me, stepped to the side, and gave it in turn to J.L.

“Jesus,” J.L. said. “Oh, Jesus.” His knees bent, his head went back. I knew it was happening to him too.

Then I looked around and saw that I was in a semicircle of handlers by the deacons’ bench. Most had returned their snakes to the boxes, but Billy Summerford, Glenn’s bucktoothed cousin, still had one, and he offered it to me, a medium-sized canebrake that was rattling violently. I took the snake in one hand without thinking. It was smaller than the first, but angrier, and I realized circumstances were different now. I couldn’t seem to steer it away from my belt line. Fear
had started to come back to me. I remembered with sudden clarity what Brother Charles had said about being careful who you took a snake from. I studied the canebrake as if I were seeing it for the first time and then gave it back to Billy Summerford. He passed it to Steve Frazier, the young man on my left. I watched Steve cradle it, curled and rattling furiously in his hands, and then I walked out the side door of the church and onto the steps, where Bobbie Sue Thompson was clutching her throat and leaning against the green shingles of the church.

“Jesus,” she said. “Jesus, Jesus.”

It was a sunny, fragrant day, with high-blown clouds. I looked into Bobbie Sue’s face. Her eyes were wide and her mouth hooked at the corner. “Jesus,” she said.

I thought at first she was in terrible pain, but then I realized she wasn’t. “Yes. I know. Jesus,” I said.

 

 

At the conclusion of the service, Brother Carl reminded everyone there would be dinner on the grounds. Most of the women had already slipped out, to arrange their casseroles and platters of ham on the butcher paper that covered the tables the men had set up under the trees. Jim and I waited silently in line for fried chicken, sweet potatoes, and black bottom pie, which we ate standing up among a knot of men who were discussing the merits of various coon dogs they’d
owned. “The next time you handle a snake,” Jim whispered, “try to give me a little warning. I ran out of film.”

I told him I’d try, but that it was not something I’d be likely to do in the future, or be able to predict even if I did. There was more I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t know how, and besides, I figured he knew. We’d lain in a ditch together thinking we were dead men. It was pretty much the same thing, I guessed. That kind of terror and joy.

“This one I had, it was a cur,” said Gene Sherbert, a handler with a flattop and a scar. “He treed two coons at the same time.”

“Same tree?” one of the other men asked.

“Naw,” Gene said. “It was two separate trees, and that fool dog nearly run himself to death going back and forth.”

The men laughed. “Was that Sport?” another man asked.

“Sport was Brother Glenn’s dog,” Gene said, and he turned his attention back to his plate.

I remembered then that Gene Sherbert was the man Glenn Summerford had accused Darlene of running with. I tried to imagine them in bed together — his flattop, her thick auburn hair. Gene was also Brother Carl’s cousin. He’d kept the church in Kingston going while Carl did drugs and chased women on the Coast. Where was Brother Carl? I found a trash bag for my paper plate and went off to find him. I still felt like I had not come back all the way from the handling.
My feet were light, my head still encased in an adrenaline cocoon. The air in the oak grove was golden. A breeze moved in the leaves and sent a stack of paper plates tumbling across the grass. On the breeze I heard snatches of a sweet and gentle melody. It was coming from a circle of handlers at the edge of the grove. Some were standing, some leaning against cars, some squatting on their heels in the dirt. As I got closer, I saw that Cecil Esslinder, the redheaded guitar player from Scottsboro, was sitting in the center of the circle. He was playing a dulcimer under the trees.

I stopped and listened. I’d never heard music more beautiful. It was filled with remorse and desire. When it ended, I asked Cecil what song he’d been playing. He shrugged. A hymn about Jesus. I asked how long he’d been playing the dulcimer.

“Never played one before in my life,” he said.

His wife, Carolyn, was leaning into the fender of a battered Dodge Dart behind him. “Come on, Cecil,” she said. “I want to go. My head is killing me.”

Cecil smiled up at me, but he was talking to Carolyn. “You ought to go up and get anointed with oil. Let ‘em lay hands on you. Ask for a healing. God’ll heal you.”

“I know that,” Carolyn said. “But you’ve got to have faith.”

“You’ve
got
faith,” Cecil said, still smiling at me.

“My faith’s been a little poorly.” She took a pill bottle from the pocket of her dress. “I’m putting my faith in here,” she said.

Cecil just laughed, and so did the other men. He handed the dulcimer back to its owner and stood up from the grass. “There’s something I forgot to tell you,” he said to me, although I couldn’t even remember the last time we’d talked.

“You have to be careful when you’re casting out demons,” he said. “An evil spirit can come right from that person into
you
.”

That’s when it washed over me, the memory of the story I’d written when I was nineteen. “Salvation on Sand Mountain.” About a church like the Old Rock House Holiness Church, and two brothers, family men, who pretend to get saved, so they can fake their own rapture, caught up like Elijah in the air, when what they’re really doing is running off to live with their girlfriends in Fort Payne. I’d never been on Sand Mountain when I wrote the story, but twenty-five years later, I knew that this was the place. This was the church, in a grove of oak trees, surrounded on all sides by fields of hay. I don’t mean it resembled the church in my story. What I mean is that this was the church
itself.

At the heart of the impulse to tell stories is a mystery so profound that even as I begin to speak of it, the hairs on the
back of my hand are starting to stand on end. I believe that the writer has another eye, not a literal eye, but an eye on the inside of his head. It is the eye with which he sees the imaginary, three-dimensional world where the story he is writing takes place. But it is also the eye with which the writer beholds the connectedness of things, of past, present, and future. The writer’s literal eyes are like vestigial organs, useless except to record physical details. The only eye worth talking about is the eye in the middle of the writer’s head, the one that casts its pale, sorrowful light backward over the past and forward into the future, taking everything in at once, the whole story, from beginning to end.

 

 

I found Brother Carl by his pickup truck. He was talking to J.L. Dyal. They’d just loaded the big yellow-phase rattler into the bed of the truck, and they were giving him one last look.

Carl hugged me when I walked up. “I sure am proud of you,” he said.

I asked if he was leaving for Georgia already.

“I’ve got to get back to God’s country,” he said.

While Carl went to say goodbye to some of the others, J.L. and I stared at the snake in the back of the truck. I told J.L. I just couldn’t believe that we’d taken it up.

“It’s something, all right,” he said.

I asked what it had been like for him.

“It’s love, that’s all it is,” he said. “You love the Lord, you love the Word, you love your brother and sister. You’re in one mind, one accord, you’re all combined together. The Bible says we’re each a part of the body, and when it all comes together ... Hey!” He whistled through his teeth. “What was it like for you?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say.

It’s hard for me to talk about myself. As a journalist, I’ve always tried to keep out of the story. But look what had happened to me. I loved Brother Carl, but sometimes I suspected he was crazy. Sometimes I thought he was intent on getting himself, and maybe the rest of us, killed. Half the time I walked around saying to myself, “This thing is real! This thing is real!” The other half of the time, I walked around thinking that nothing was real, and that if there really was a God, we must have been part of a dream he was having, and when he woke up ...
poof!
Either way, I worried I’d gone off the edge, and nobody would be able to pull me back. One of my uncles by marriage was a Baptist minister, one of the kindest men I’ve ever known. I was fifteen, though, when he killed himself, and I didn’t know the whole story. I just knew that he sent his family and friends a long, poignant, and some have said beautiful letter about how he was ready to go meet Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I believe
he ran a high-voltage line from his basement to a groundfloor bedroom. He put “How Great Thou Art”on the record player. Then he lay down on the bed, reached up, and grabbed the live wire. He left a widow and two sons. My uncle’s death confirmed a suspicion of mine that madness and religion were a hair’s breadth away. My beliefs about the nature of God and man have changed over the years, but that one never has. Feeling after God is dangerous business. And Christianity without passion, danger, and mystery may not really be Christianity at all.