Salvation on Sand Mountain (21 page)

Nothing much happened, he continued, except that when one of the other visitors asked the girl what she was going to do when the Lord put her in hell, the girl replied: “What’re you going to do when he puts
you
there? You belong to me, too.” Punkin said he almost fell off his seat when she said that. He and Allen tried to pray for her. “But every time the spirit of God would start to move, them other people would jump up and start speaking some kind of tongue or other, and it’d just kill it out. I told Allen, we’re going to have to cast the devils out of those other people before we can do any good for her.”

Billy and Joyce Summerford, of the Old Rock House Holiness Church near Macedonia, had their own stories about demon possession. Billy and Joyce lived in a neat little farmhouse behind a collapsed chicken farm outside Section. Billy was telling about a rattler that had bit Gene Sherbert on the foot. “Like to killed him,” Billy laughed. “He was so swollen he looked like a toad frog, and he was itching, and the juice was running out of his hands and feet.”

“Besides the venom, Gene has an allergy to the venom,” Joyce explained. “He breaks out like you would if you had the measles or the chicken pox.”

Billy and Joyce looked at each other and smiled. “We throwed him in a tub of water,” Billy said. “And then we called this other preacher who’d been through all this before, and he said, ‘Now, boys, make sure you don’t put him in any water, or he’ll die.’ ” They both laughed.

That Gene Sherbert was a card.

“And then he just got stiff,” Billy said. He paused, real serious. “We thought he was dead. But then awhile later, he opened his eyes. He said, ‘I believe I need to handle that snake again.’ So he did!” And the Summerfords started cackling again.

War stories.

I finally asked if they’d ever cast out any demons.

Billy paused. He stroked his angular chin. He looked out the window where the curtains were blowing in a breeze drawn by the kitchen fan. “We’ve seen demons come out of people,” he said. “One of them looked like the man had been eating chocolate, and it smelled like I don’t know what.”

“Tell him about that other boy,” Joyce said. She had put her hand to her chest, the signal of an unpleasant memory, I supposed.

“Well, some people might not believe this,” Billy said.

I assured him I was not one of them.

“Well, we went down to this other boy’s house,” he continued. “I put my hand on him and asked that demon to
leave in the name of Jesus.” Billy slapped one of his palms against his knee. “That boy turned flips for two hours, and when that demon came out, it was like a pint of spaghetti, but it had, like,
slather
all around it.”

Joyce leaned forward confidentially. “That demon had been in him so long, it called itself David,” she sad. “I’d never seen one like that, that had a name.”

Next time I saw Billy and Joyce Summerford, it was at a Sunday night service at their Old Rock House Holiness Church in Macedonia. After the service, Sister Joyce said, “Well, Billy got initiated.”

I asked what she meant.

“He got bit. Copperhead. Friday night.”

We were standing at the front of the sanctuary. I looked for Billy in the group of men gathered around the serpent boxes. He looked all right to me, same loose joints, same cowlick. Most of the congregation had already left. The men who had stayed were doing their customary snake trading. One of them would offer a friend a rattlesnake, say, and the friend would reciprocate with a trio of copperheads. They were like women swapping recipes after a church social. At that moment, Charles Hatfield was poking through a serpent box full of copperheads, looking for a big one that Brother Carl Porter had promised him. Gene Sherbert had two rattlesnakes he wanted to pass on to somebody. He had opened the lid to their box, but he was looking over at Charles
Hatfield to see if he’d found the copperhead he wanted. Outside it was storming. Through the open side door, lightning illuminated the trunks of the old oaks that surrounded the church.

“I guess she told you I got bit,” Billy said as he walked over to Joyce and me. He rolled up one of his shirtsleeves to reveal an arm swollen and red from the elbow to the wrist. Because of the long sleeves, I hadn’t noticed the swelling when Billy had been handling rattlesnakes earlier in the service.

“I had about fifteen serpents laying up here,” Billy said, gesturing toward the pulpit. “Brother Carl said, ‘Well, don’t look like the Lord’s gonna move to handle these tonight,’ and I just reached up there and got ‘em, and one reached around and bit me.”

Snakes will do that, I wanted to say.

“The good thing is,” Billy continued, “I had a cold and a stomach virus. It stopped that stomach virus.” He waited to let that sink in. “I feel like it could have been a reason for me to get bit,” he finally said.

I looked down and happened to see that one of Gene Sherbert’s rattlesnakes had escaped from its box and was headed across the floor in the direction of my leg. I just stood there in a kind of daze watching its sinuous progress, thinking how pretty it looked. About that time, James Hatfield shouted, “Watch that rattler! Watch that rattler!”

My heart did a double flip. I tried to move, but couldn’t. My feet seemed bolted to the floor. The rattlesnake came within an inch or two of my foot before Charles Hatfield managed to get to it with a snake stick and steer it back into its box.

“They got them snakes mad,” said one of the women who had stayed behind. “I can smell ‘em.”

I tried to be nonchalant. “I wonder where he thought he was going,” I said to Joyce and Billy. My heart was still pounding, but it was more than fright. I felt like that snake had been a sign. I’d later learn that it was the same snake that would bite Allen Williams up in Tennessee.

This is what I’m dreaming when Brother Carl calls after midnight on a Sunday morning in late July. It’s Vicki, not Aline, in the bed next to me, and we’re at home in Birmingham. “Hey,” Carl says. “Kirby Hollins got bit. Up in West Virginia.”

“Which one’s Kirby?” I ask.

“He’s one of Gracie McAllister’s boys. She was a Hollins before her husband died. Kirby’s married to Lydia, the organist there at Jolo. You remember him. He’s a polite boy, wears a tie.”

I do remember him, but only vaguely. Carl says it was a four-foot rattler whose fangs went so deep they had to pry the snake off of him. Kirby is in real bad shape, vomiting blood and everything. It’s especially hard on Lydia because her mother died of snakebite. Now her husband has been bit. “You never know what shape somebody’s faith’s in when they’re handling,” Carl says.

I ask him what he means. “Wait on the Lord’s about all you can say. Just wait on the Lord.”

I don’t know what he means, but I ask him to let me know how things go with Kirby. He says he will.

I hand the phone back to Vicki. “Who was that?” she asks.

“Carl Porter. One of the guys in West Virginia got bit bad.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” She asks me if I knew him well and whether he’s likely to survive. I tell her I know which one he is, that’s all, and that it doesn’t look good. We talk awhile longer, about snake handling, and other things. “You sound different about it,” Vicki says. “Have your feelings changed?”

I ask her what she means. She used to be a therapist, and she almost always has reasons for questions she asks. “It just seems that you had reached a point where you really believed in what the handlers were doing.”

I tell her I still do, I think. In my way. It’s a delicate thing. She knows I’ve handled. She wants me to be careful. In a little while, she falls back to sleep. I watch her shoulder blades under her gown, the rhythm of her breathing. In the other bedrooms, our daughters are also asleep, and the sound of their breathing is audible, too. Laura has a chest cold. Ashley often talks in her sleep. These are the sounds my household makes. I lie awake listening, thinking things through. The news about Kirby Hollins unnerves me. Terrifies me, in fact. Handling isn’t a parlor trick. The rattlesnakes haven’t been tampered with or defanged. Brother Carl goes to great lengths to demonstrate that to anyone who dares get close enough to see. And rattlesnakes do not tame, not in the normal sense of
the word. “They might get used to being handled, but they sure don’t get out of the notion of biting you,” Dewey Chafin has told me. “Snakes are unpredictable. They don’t care who you are. They’ll bite you. And if they don’t kill you, they’ll make you wish you were dead.”

When you’re under an anointing to handle, you feel certain the snake can’t hurt you, but handlers disagree about the extent of protection the Spirit actually offers. Kentucky handlers will sometimes talk of a “perfect anointing,” during which the handler can’t get bit. But Jeff Hagerman, a friend of Kirby’s, told me once that the Kentucky doctrine was a lie. Jeff had been bitten four times, twice while handling on faith and twice while handling under an anointing. “Just because the Spirit’s upon you don’t mean you’ll live,” he said. He was standing outside the church at Jolo on a hot summer day, dressed in black from head to foot. He was wearing a Jesus belt buckle, and his shirt had silver studs.

Jeff was in his twenties and new to the faith. He originally came to the church, he said, in order to get his wife and children out of it. But then he became a believer himself. His own brothers sometimes broke into the church and killed the snakes in order to keep Jeff away from them. It hadn’t done any good. Jeff said he’d no more give up serpent handling than he’d give up praying for the sick. He watched his father-in-law,
Ray Johnson, die of rattlesnake bite. They used to drink strychnine together. He paused, as though the memory were pleasant. “I’m not long for this earth,” he said.

Lying in bed, thinking of him and Kirby and all the others, I knew that I was in way over my head.

T
he week after Kirby Hollins got bit, I ran into Dewey Chafin at a snake-handling homecoming in Middlesboro, Kentucky, just west of the Cumberland Gap. We were standing in front of the Church of Jesus Christ, where the service was reaching the first of many noisy crescendos. It was a hot, humid day; the church wasn’t air-conditioned, and a lot of us had come outside for fresh air. Dewey looked exactly the same as he had in Jolo the year before, even down to the bandage on his hand. “A copperhead bit me on a Saturday,” he said, “and a week later a rattlesnake bit me on the same hand.” That made bite one hundred and seventeen. Dewey either had uncommonly bad luck, or good, depending on whether you thought it was good luck to survive a bite only to be bit again.

I asked him how Kirby was doing.

Dewey shook his head. “That rattlesnake gave him a hard lick. In thirty seconds, he was down. It took two of us to handle him. He weighs around two hundred pounds.”

“That’s like dead weight,” added one of the Kentucky handlers.

“We laid him on the floor at Barb’s house,” Dewey continued. “It was Wednesday before he could say anything. Then his eyes rolled back, and he said, ‘Goodbye, Dewey, I’m going, I’m going.’ ”

Dewey seemed amused by this. “I said, ‘Where you going, Kirby?’ I mean, he couldn’t even walk yet. He said, ‘To heaven.’ I said, ‘Oh, you don’t want to go there yet.’”

“Maybe he did,” the Kentucky handler said.

“Maybe so,” Dewey replied with a grin.

The Kentucky handler said his uncle had gotten bit recently by a copperhead. “You know, that copperhead with a skinned place on his back where a motorcycle ran over him?”

Dewey knew the one.

The Kentucky handler was worried because his uncle had gotten bit in the stomach and it was “starting to rot down in there.”

About that time, the door of the church opened, unloosening an avalanche of sound, and Brother Carl Porter stepped out. “Y‘all come on in here and get you a blessing!” he shouted.

Inside, the sermon was being preached by Brother Bill Pelfrey from Newnan, Georgia. Brother Bill was a big man with a topknot of white hair and a perpetually annoyed look on his face. Earlier in the service, he’d almost been bitten by a little yellow rattler that Punkin Brown said had just been caught the day before and hadn’t been prayed over good. As it was being handled by somebody else, the rattler had struck within inches of Brother Bill’s waistline. Like everything else, the close call seemed to have annoyed him. His own father had died of snakebite in 1968, and that’s what he was talking about when we entered the sanctuary.