Salvation on Sand Mountain (9 page)

Brother Charles was standing with his hands clenched at his side and a wild look in his eyes. He was a big man, an enormous man. It was not the first time I’d noticed that, but it was the first time I had considered the damage he might do if he ever had a reason.

“God’s been good to me!” he said as he started pacing again.

“I said He’s been good to me!”

He suddenly stopped in his tracks. “But I wasn’t always good to Him.”

“Now you’re telling it,” Brother Carl said.

“When I was sixteen, I went to live with my real daddy in Tennessee,” Charles said. “He was one of the biggest moonshiners in the state, and I wanted to learn the trade. I dabbled
in it a good long time. I was bad. I went up to Chicago and did some other things I shouldn’t have.”

“When I came back South, I drove a long-haul rig twice a week to New York City. Then I bought me a thirty-three acre farm in Minor Hill, Tennessee. Two-story house. Fine car. I had a still upstairs that could run forty to fifty gallons of whiskey, and in another room I stored my bales of marijuana. Pretty good for a boy who’d grown up picking cotton.”

He raised his Bible and shook it at us. “I don’t have to tell you that’s the deceitfulness of riches talking, boys.”

“One day, things had really got bad on me. I had just got under so much that I couldn’t go no further, and I was getting ready to kill myself. The devil spoke to me and said, ‘Just go ahead and take that gun and kill yourself and get it over with’ ”

He walked to the edge of the arbor and pantomimed picking something up from the grass. “I went over there and got the gun and was fixing to put a shell in it, and when I did, this other voice came to me and said, ‘Put that gun back down and walk back over in front of that wood heater.’ ”

“I walked back over there in front of the wood heater, and suddenly that power from on high hit me in the head and knocked me down on my knees, and I said six words. I won’t never forget what they was. I said, ‘Lord, have mercy on my soul.”’

“He took me out in the Spirit and I came back speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gave utterance. The devil said, ‘Look, look now. Now what are you going to do?’ He said, ‘Look at all that moonshine, all that marijuana you got. What are you going to do now? Ain’t you in a mess now? Here you are, you’ve got the Holy Ghost, and you’ve got all this in your house.’ And the Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Just set your house in order.’ ”

“He said, ‘Just set your house in order!’ ”

“So that’s what I did. I set my house in order. I got rid of that moonshine and marijuana. I told the devil to depart that place in the name of Jesus, and within a year I’d taken up my first serpent.”

“We’ve got to set our house in order!” Charles said, and now he was leaning toward us, red-faced, with flecks of white spittle in the corners of his mouth. “We’re in the last day with
the Lord, children! He won’t strive with man forever! He’s a merciful God, he’s a loving God, but you better believe he’s also a just God, and there will come a time when we’ll have to account for these lives we’ve led! We better put our house in order! ”

There were only thirteen people under that brush arbor, but it seemed like there were suddenly three hundred. They were jumping and shouting, and pretty soon Brother Carl was anointing Burma and Erma with oil, and Brother Charles had launched into “Jesus on My Mind” on his guitar, and J.L. and I had our tambourines going. There was so much racket that at first it was hard to hear what Aline was doing over in the corner by a length of dog wire that the morning glory vines had twined around. Her back was to us. Her hands were in the air, and she was rocking slowly from side to side, her face upturned and her voice quavering, “Akiii, akiii, akiii. Akiii, akiii, akiii....”

It was the strangest sound I had ever heard. At first, it did not seem human. It sounded like the voice of a rare night bird, or some tiny feral mammal. And then the voice got louder, mounting up on itself, until it started to sound like that of a child who was lost and in great pain. But even as the hairs on my arm started to stand on end, the voice turned into something else, a sound that had pleasure in it as well as torment.
Ecstasy, I would learn later, is excruciating, but I did not know that then.

“Akiii, akiii, akiii....” The singing and praising elsewhere in the brush arbor had started to diminish. Brother Charles had stopped strumming his guitar. Brother Carl had put away his oil. Burma and Dorothea kept their hands raised, but except for an occasional amen or praise Jesus, the air fell silent around Aline’s voice. Everyone was listening to her now. I could not disentangle myself from the sound of her voice, the same syllables repeated with endless variation. At times, it seemed something barbed was being pulled from her throat; at other times, the sound was a clear stream flowing outward into thin air. Her voice seemed to be right in my ear. It was a sobbing. A panting after something she could not quite reach. And then it would be a coming to rest in some exquisite space, a place so tender it could not be touched without “Akiii, akiii, akiii....” The sun had set and the electric lights were not yet turned on, but the arbor seemed filled with a golden light. We were swaying in it, transfixed, with Aline silhouetted against the dog wire and the morning glory vines. All but her trembling voice was silent, or so it seemed, until I realized with horror that my tambourine was still going, vibrating against my leg, almost apart from me, as if it had a motive and direction of its own.

My hand froze. It was as though I had been caught in
some act of indecency. But Aline’s voice reacted with renewed desperation, “Akiii, akiii, akiii,” and so I let the tambourine have its own way, now louder and faster, until it almost burst into a song, and then softer and more slowly, until it resembled the buzzing of a rattlesnake in a serpent box. It anticipated every move that Aline’s voice made, and vice versa. The intimacy was unnerving: her voice and the tambourine, perfectly attuned to one another and moving toward the same end. I was unreasonably afraid that Charles would be angry with me. I didn’t yet know the full dimensions of passion. It was much later that I would come to understand what had gone on in that moment. The tambourine was simply accompanying Aline while she felt for and found God. And I mean “accompany” in its truest sense: “to occur with.” And nobody could predict when something like that might happen. Through the tambourine, I was occurring with her in the Spirit, and it was not of my own will.

I cannot say how long the episode lasted. It seemed to go on for a very long time. J.L. turned the lights on at the end. The men hugged the men. The women hugged the women. Aline and I shook hands. If the snake handlers found anything unusual about our curious duet afterward, they never spoke directly to me about it. But I do know one thing: It was after that brush-arbor meeting on Sand Mountain that they started to call me Brother Dennis.

B
y late summer I was feeling comfortable among the handlers. In fact, I was getting restless in my home church in Birmingham, where I’d occasionally want to put my hands up in the air. I didn’t. But sometimes I’d tap my feet during the choir’s anthem or mumble an amen or two. And I was pretty much obsessed with snake handling, though I had not, in fact, handled one myself. When Jim and Melissa and I found ourselves at a party together, we’d get off in the corner and talk about the handlers, especially Aline McGlocklin, whose childlike beauty continued to arrest and mystify us. She always seemed to be on the verge of ecstasy. Sometimes, she said, the Lord would move on her in the ladies room at work. We’d never seen her take up a serpent, though, and we wondered if we ever would. Other friends in Birmingham started to ask about the services. Some of them wanted to go. But
soon the brush-arbor meetings would be over. The nights would turn cool. It rains on Sand Mountain in the fall, and there’s fog. Without a church building of their own, the handlers would have to travel more often to Brother Carl’s church in Georgia, or to churches in East Tennessee, Kentucky, or West Virginia.

“You going up to Jolo?” Brother Carl asked me after one of the brush-arbor meetings behind J.L.’s house. It was one of the last days of summer, a dry, lingering heat, and the fields around us had turned an exhausted shade of yellowish green.

I shook my head. I hadn’t understood the question. The service had just ended, and I was watching Carl load snakes back into the bed of his truck.

“Me and Carolyn are going up there,” Carl said. He hoisted a serpent box onto the tailgate and then slid it into the bed. Inside the box was a velvet-tailed timber rattler that he and Charles McGlocklin had both handled during the service that afternoon.

“Charles and Aline are going, too,” he said, “if she can get off work.” Carl lifted the tailgate and secured it while a trio of curious children from J.L.’s neighborhood tried to peer into the boxes.

“It’s a ten-hour drive,” he said to me, “but we like to take our time going up. You and Jim and Melissa ought to come.”

That’s when I remembered Jolo was in West Virginia. There was a famous snake-handling church there.

“I don’t know,” I said. “When is it?”

“Labor Day weekend. It’s their twentieth annual homecoming. You’ll miss some good services if you don’t go,” Carl said. “They always have a lot of serpents in Jolo.” He stopped, smiled.

It had never come up between us before, but I knew what was on the tip of his tongue: Maybe I’d take up a serpent in Jolo. It made me wonder why he’d want me to. What would be in it for him if I did?

 

 

 

On the Friday of that Labor Day weekend, Jim, Melissa, and I left Birmingham in a driving rainstorm, the spent fury of Hurricane Andrew. It rained all the way to West Virginia, except for a spot in East Tennessee, where the clouds lifted momentarily to reveal the high green walls of the Appalachians. These mountains aren’t as raw and angular as the Rockies, or as mystical and remote as the Cascades. Instead, they seem mannered and familiar, predictable in the way they roll westward in alternating ridges and valleys. But in East Tennessee, the Appalachians converge in a chaos of intersecting planes. There, the mountains still look as wild and formidable as they must have to the first Europeans who entered the New World — entered it only, in ways, to become lost in it.

In preparation for our trip to Jolo, I’d read David Hackett Fischer’s remarkable book
Albion’s Seed
, a treatise on patterns
of immigration to America from the British Isles. I had it in mind that in going back up the spine of the Appalachians toward Jolo, I’d be retracing the route the snake handlers’ ancestors had taken as they descended toward Alabama. I had not yet come to understand that these were my ancestors too.

Fischer says that most of the immigrants who settled the Appalachians arrived in waves from North Britain during the middle of the eighteenth century. Predominantly Protestant and poor, many of them had migrated first to Ireland, where they felt trapped between the contempt of their own church hierarchy and the hostility of Ireland’s Catholic majority. But unlike some of the earlier immigrants to America, the Scotch-Irish, or Anglo-Irish, as they sometimes preferred to be called, were not fleeing religious persecution. Instead, their motives were primarily economic, a reaction to high rents, low wages, and scarcity of food. Their flight to America, though, suggested biblical themes.

That they survived the ocean crossing was itself a triumph, for the mortality rate during such ventures approached that
of the slave trade. Like most new arrivals, the survivors faced discrimination because of their relative poverty and their odd appearance and behavior. The Scotch-Irish had a reputation for being noisy, quarrelsome, and proud. They were easy targets for ridicule in the streets of Philadelphia and the other eastern seaports where they first disembarked. The men, lean and angular, dressed in sackcloth shirts and baggy pants. They stood out among the neatly dressed Quakers in leather breeches and carefully cut doublets. The young Scotch-Irish women were equally inappropriate in their tightwaisted skirts, openly sensual by some accounts. The Quaker women wore handkerchiefs to cover their bodices.