Snakeskin Road (32 page)

We had never gone to church unless someone was married or dead, but I had seen enough of the white walls and colored glass to know the church didn’t want me—not the way I was dressed, not in my worn shoes, and my hair that Mam butchered on the porch, always cutting out bald patches.

I looked over at Granddaddy. He had fallen asleep. I crossed my arms.

“All right,” she said. Mam was such a pushover. “Go wash your face.”

“My face isn’t dirty,” I told her but I did it, and did it fast, ’cause sometimes she’d say wash your face, and by the time I come out, she’d be gone. But this time she was waiting, leaning on the porch railing with her back to me.

My mam had a nice figure, her hair up in a swirling bobby-pin bun I could never figure out how she put together. And the length of her body tapered from her shoulders to a red ribbon she had tied loose around her waist so it caught her hips. The afternoon shadows crossed over her back, and when she breathed, the shadows carved out different pieces of her shoulders and neck, and some of her was left in the sun, a late sun, making those other places brighter than normal. I stood watching and would’ve stayed that way content, but somehow she noticed me and turned and looked at me so strange.

“What?” she said. Then, “Come on now, Rosser.” I had said nothing.

   We walked down Twelfth, up Grandview. It was a long curvy hike up into the hills behind our house, and for a while I thought my mother didn’t know where she was going. She wasn’t the best with directions, and I asked her several times, and she said, “I’ve got it, Rosser. You can go home if you’re tired.” But I wasn’t even sure I’d figure out how to get back home.

At the top, down a side street, Biehl, there was a square tent. I remember it was all staked out with new rope and wooden stakes, but the green canvas was old and blackish-green. It smelled wet from rain.

As soon as we got in, Mam sat down on one of the back folding chairs and I sat beside her. There were people still coming in, taking up seats, and the preacher, he was this thin man with gray eyes. Those eyes had an energy to them, a brightness like my mam’s hair earlier, and his hair was slicked back and parted down the center over his nose and the buttons of his shirt. He came up the aisle and gestured, “Y’all come on up to the front, if you want, you can come closer.” Mam said we were good where we were.

“If you change your mind,” he said, gesturing his hand toward a wooden box with a wire-mesh front—a cage—sitting on the grass. It had a Bible on top. “You’re always welcome. My name’s Preacher Spoon.” He smiled.

My mother thanked him by batting her hand, and he took it, just for a second, then let go and trotted back down the aisle.

Wasn’t long before another man came and sat next to her. He said something low. I couldn’t quite make it out, but Mam laughed like she knew him, and leaned that way, leaving the side of my arm tingling, chilly despite the heat. They were laughing, laughing too easy, and in front was Preacher
Spoon, just him and his Bible, those gray eyes all serious. Next to his legs, the small cage. Something kept slipping around in that cage. It was a snake. Two snakes.

He cleared his throat, everyone quieted and settled, and he started.

I was watching Preacher Spoon when Mam got up all of a sudden, dusted the bottom of her skirt, and began to walk out. I grabbed hold of her arm. Hadn’t done that in years, hadn’t done that since the last time we had gone somewhere together.

“I’ll be back,” she said.

“No, Mam. I don’t know how to get home.”

“I’m not leaving for good,” she whispered. We were both whispering because the preacher’s voice, it was already in a steady cadence.

“No,” I said, and she shrugged me off, made sure not to look at me.

I watched them cross onto Biehl—he had his arm low around her waist. The preacher raised his voice. I turned back around, the emptiness in those chairs growing, and I kept thinking at any minute a snake would leap up from under one of the seats and bite me, that those serpents were already slithering behind my legs where I couldn’t see them, choosing the best, most juiciest part of my ankles.

They weren’t under there. It was crazy talk to think that way, and then Preacher Spoon said, “Jesus,” drew out the name Jesus like the wind had forced it into his mouth and Jesus had come for his name here and now, the savior’s spirit was with us.

The talking got stronger and louder. He was going into it. That voice, the way he talked and breathed—I couldn’t move.

   I followed the three vans to Cairo, saw them park across the river at the St. Charles brothel, and I turned around.
Teal Dennis was going farther, I was certain of it, but he only had a few women left. Most were sold in Kentucky to Bixon Farms—that was the logo on the truck, a beat-up Ford with a shit-soaked trailer, and I had come across the logo on several fences rusting. Bixon would be the second stop, St. Charles the last, and Whaike’s farm in Hohenwald first. If I was lucky, I’d finish the whole run by August, taking just a few deserters from each place, only my share.

   Pearson Whaike’s farm was in a hollow looped inside a grove of evergreens, and the compound was as I’d remembered it. He kept the field slaves in quarters outside the main house, and parked his tractors and harvesters and trucks next to the barn. Half the outside lights needed bulbs, and there were broken holes in the chain-link fence where small deer could wind through. His overseers walked two together across the grounds at night. I watched them fall asleep, and on the next night with new guards, the same thing happened.

In the mornings, the slaves came out to be fed, and then to the fields, but whenever the slaves were allowed a break, only one guard took them to the woods. Pearson was never out in his fields, and they were harvesting cantaloupes now instead of tobacco. A long rectangular box had been hooked to the rear of the tractors—only three were in the field, sixty acres, each tractor culling different rows, and I could hear other voices and equipment in the adjacent clearings divided by this narrow strip of woods and could smell the dirt being spun out of the wheels and diesel.

All the new slaves, the women from Teal Dennis, had been placed in one gang with two overseers and a driver. They took turns walking the women to the edge of the field to piss.

It was the third morning, and the driver and one overseer stayed up at the tractor, guzzling water as usual. Their
laughing and talking echoed like the ghosts of circling birds as the other guard walked down to the woods behind the slaves.

He said, “Don’t go far in. I’m watching,” and stood on the periphery with his rifle on them. They must’ve kept the workers in chains at night ’cause they rubbed their wrists and ankles continually, painfully.

Slowly he came out of the sun, it was hot, and moved under the shade of the trees where a draft had started leavening; he moved under the shadow until his whole body was swathed in the cool dark. I slipped behind him, gagged his mouth, and cut across his neck. Then I lifted my shotgun on the women.

“Keep quiet,” I said and tossed out pieces of rope. I had them tie each other’s hands.

They kept looking at me and at the overseer’s body.

“Don’t look at him,” I said. “He’s gone,” and I snagged the loops onto a leash and hurried the slaves down the center of the wooded strip where an old cow path still winded.

The other guards yelled for their dead man, not knowing he was dead. They were yelling loud, something about
Stop messing
and
Come on—Pearson wants this field done today
, and I knew they were coming for him, their echoes getting louder and more urgent. I shut the women in, locked the back doors, drove off humming. Humming has always relaxed me some, takes my mind just enough out that I can drive straight. It’s never a particular song, just the sound, the noise of it rattling in my throat. Once I hit Highway 43, I knew the guards wouldn’t catch up.

   That first night of the revival, Preacher Spoon closed with the hymn “Serpent Handler”:

While everyone sang and clapped, he brought up the wooden cage. He carried it down to the first row and everyone passed it, the rattlers backing up heavy in one corner and striking against the screen-mesh front. Some people refused to hold the cage. One person bobbled it and dropped it, which caused four women to faint. Preacher Spoon promptly revived them.

When the box came to me, the snakes were coiled and rattling, growing heat. My heart was ready to burst, holding on to the wooden ground underneath those snakes, and I could feel them coiling tighter and tighter around my veins, a tightness my blood couldn’t escape or catch up to.

Preacher Spoon had to pull the box from my grip and he carried it back down. That ended the sermon, except to tell your friends, your kin, your neighbors. I felt all woozy in the chair, like all the wooziness was going out of my pores, and I couldn’t put myself back together. But finally my sweat hardened into salt and I ran home.

Next evening I asked Mam if she was going. The revival was happening every night through Friday, but she said she had a date and started humming “At Calvary.” Though we had hardly ever gone to church, Mam had gone as a child, and when she was in a good mood she hummed and sang those hymns, and when Mam cut my hair she did, and taught them to me for the hour it took, and that made me hope cutting my hair was something she liked to do.

So I walked to revival by myself, moving up two rows closer, and someone had brought in a set of wooden pews from an abandoned Tabernacle Church on Ninth, slid them over the grass earth in front.

Preacher Spoon appeared from the back this time, not
showing up until after seven and the people talking louder than normal, which I’ve found they always do when something hasn’t started they believe should, and there was a slightly larger crowd. He tapped my shoulder.

“Where’s Mama, little lamb?” he asked and looked at the empty chair beside me.

“I’m here,” I told him.

“Yes,” Preacher Spoon confirmed and patted my head, and moved up, speaking to the women in the next row. He talked with everyone down the aisle like he knew them, like they had all been friends since birth and had at last found one another again. It was so relaxed under that green, musty canvas, like what afternoons are like before thunderstorms, and everyone glad it wasn’t nothing worse once it’s over.

Preacher Spoon started preaching, his box of snakes right beside him and a table on the other side and only one lamp on the floor which reversed the shadows up the buttons of his shirt and face toward the top pole of the tent.

It became hard for him to breathe he had so much to say, his eyes shut. But at the closing of a thought as he gasped for air, he opened those eyes, and that gray and that energy behind them shined out on you. It had to be God or the Devil or Jesus, someone with more power than Preacher Spoon. The congregation said amen. He inhaled a breath and they amened back, like there was an exchange of breath from those of us in the chairs, and Preacher Spoon, back and forth the word of God, and his voice rising, falling, rising, until he said, “In Mark, chapter 16, verse 17, follow along with me, the words, ‘These signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents.’” He reached down with his eyes still closed and hauled up that cage and set it on the small table and felt around the wooden sides of the box, then the steel front like he had no eyes at all, never had them, didn’t need them.

“In Luke, chapter 10, verse 19, the Lord says, ‘Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.’ So says the word of God; it is truth. The word will abide forever.”

He opened his eyes and opened the latch, pulled out the bottom shelf, and took one snake in his hand, up his arm, sliding, like a long vein of his own, the flat head pointing into the congregation, and Preacher Spoon closed the other one in.

“Ye shall not be harmed, ye shall not be harmed,” he said, holding the snake in the reverse light, its white belly blinding. “Now I call you down here to the front, to the Lord. Ye shall not be harmed.”

A man the size of two men walked down. He quivered but managed to open his fingers all the way and Preacher Spoon gave the snake over, a diamondback that glimmered, then was eclipsed by the man’s body. He turned to face us, fell to the ground with the snake trying to coil and jut. It wanted nothing more than to be let go of. The man, it was like he’d been chopped at the knees, sent down to pray, but he hadn’t been bitten. Not yet. I was waiting to find out what that rattler would do.

Preacher Spoon took up the other snake and called everyone to rise, to come down and join, to give over to the Holy Ghost. He started singing “Serpent Handler.”

And while he sang, the congregation prayed for the word, for forgiveness, and truth, rising, but each prayer was its own, with its own cadence and offerings—the words clashed against one another, yet wanting the same disparate, holy thing.

One snake was a copperhead, the other a diamondback, venomous snakes you couldn’t hold, and yet they were being held. Their bodies crooked and jutted—no easy place for their motion along the hands and arms that would never replace the flat of the earth. Everyone was trying to latch
onto the rapture and some people rising up, singing it,
“Lay hands on the sick and raise the Dead, Ye shall not be harmed,”
going down. All of the women going down, but none were my mam.

   It was easy, one of the easiest hauls I had made. My luck was running good.

The whole trip to Adamsville, nothing happened on the roads, and in back the deserters never yelled or tried to break out the doors like one guy did back in April. He jumped onto the highway like it was a river that would catch him soft and it killed him.