Snow in Summer: Fairest of Them All: Fairest of Them All (12 page)

Another woman, small, wiry, came forward with a tray on which sat three glasses and a pitcher in which a tiny bit of clear liquid sloshed. She put it to the side of the boxes, then nodded at the preacher.

“And death as well as life . . . ” the preacher continued, “in the drink.”

“Strychnine,” whispered Stepmama, leaning forward eagerly.

It wasn’t just plain water in that pitcher. I knew how poisonous strychnine was—Papa used it to get rid of mice where he stored the seeds. I started to stand up, thinking that there was little that was holy in
this
church, but Stepmama gripped my arm and pulled me down and closer to her.

“Mark chapter 16, verses 16 to 18,” cried a man’s voice somewhere in the room.

The preacher nodded. “Amen, brother.”

The trickle of
amen
s around the room opened up again until it was a flood. This time I wasn’t carried on the wave of emotion but began whispering
amen
over and over out of fear, until it began to sound just like the other woman’s gibberish.

At that, Stepmama let go of my arm, misreading my response, and I let her think I was under the church’s spell. If that let me get away from With Signs, I’d babble away all night.

The preacher raised his hand to quiet everyone and then, in a small, almost secretive voice, he whispered, “Where there is the Believer, there, too, is the Way.”

This time when he turned to the table, he slapped the Bible down on it, and the strange buzzing noise started again.

There was
something
in those boxes, but I didn’t know what.

“Let us sing,” the preacher said. And we began a rousing chorus of “We Shall Not Be Moved,” which drowned out all other sounds.

While we were singing, the two helpers got up, went over to the stove. One came back with a jar of what turned out to be kerosene because when the other stuck a burning brand from the stove into it, flames flared up.

I wondered what the jar was for but didn’t have to wait long for an answer. When they got back to the preacher with the burning jar, he reached out for it and held it under his chin with the flames still flaring up. His lips darkened till it looked as if he’d been eating ashes. The sight made me shudder again, tremors rippling across my shoulders, partly with horror and fear, partly with wonder and awe.

The congregation started out singing again, “Wheel in a Wheel,” and the room almost burst with the song. I found myself singing along. Stepmama didn’t sing, of course, but she nodded in time as if satisfied with me joining in.

The preacher licked his blackened lips and gave the jar back to the dark-haired man. Only then did horror and fear win out, and I felt my stomach turning sour as if I’d eaten something rotten. I wondered if I was going to throw up and fought it down. But a kind of shadow of that sour taste remained in my mouth.

“Stepmama,” I said, turning to her, wanting to ask where the toilet was or if this place only had an outhouse. More than that, I had to get away from the church, where boxes buzzed, people screamed out in gibberish, there was strychnine in a pitcher, and a preacher held burning kerosene under his chin till his lips turned black. I wanted to be back in Cousin Nancy’s church, where Jesus—heart in hand—looked down on me with his comforting gaze.

“Be quiet,” Stepmama snapped, but continued to stare at the preacher, her lips curved up in a semblance of a smile.

I tried to quiet my stomach, my heart, my fear. I was not entirely successful.

The woman behind me started up again, shouting out her nonsense, and then I heard her stand up. When she walked past me to the front, I saw it was the pregnant girl. Her arms were up in the air and she had her head thrown back. All the while she kept on gabbling, “Noo-na-nannno-sing-a-bam-Lord Jesus-mam-a-bobble,” babbling over and over. And then she flung herself down onto the floor onto her side and then her back—it would have been hard to go forward onto her stomach for she was
that
pregnant. Her legs and arms began to flail about. But she never missed a beat.

At last her gabbling sank to a murmur. The two helpers on either side of the preacher came over to get her up, propping her into a sitting position till her voice trailed off in silence. Then they eased her onto her feet and steered her back to her seat while all around the
amen
s came fast and furious, though this time I resisted joining them.

I couldn’t understand why Stepmama had brought me to this place and just as I was about to say something to her, the preacher started speaking again. His voice was at first like a dry rustle but it soon gained in power and intensity. I turned back, drawn in by his words.

“I’ve
seen
the spirit of the Lord,” he whispered. And then, louder, “Spirit. Of. The. Lord.” He rocked back and forth on the last four words.

“Amen!” called out the pregnant woman.

“It follows me like a cloud overhead,” said the preacher. “But not a thundercloud, oh no. This cloud is long and blue and electric. The color of God’s true love for us.”

“Let it shine, brother,” someone called out, and the congregation answered with the hymn “This Little Light of Mine,” which I know and so I sang along for a while, just to calm myself more than anything else. But soon half the congregation was up and dancing in front of the table, arms in the air swaying, including the pregnant girl.

I thought about getting up and dancing my way around the room, then making a break for the door. But it was dark, there was a long road home, and Stepmama was sure to catch up with me. Her punishment would be . . . Well, I couldn’t guess what it would be. But something awful, I was sure.

Just then, the pregnant girl started to flail about again and sink to her knees, but this time someone caught her, a man—maybe her husband—who held her in his arms and they swayed together until the hymn was done and he walked her carefully back to her seat and the dancing was over and so was my chance to get away.

The whole thing seemed like playacting somehow. We’d done plays in school, but none as strange as this, and I was having trouble getting my mind around it. I couldn’t laugh though it had some funny moments, because underneath there was a deep strangeness that was truly scary.

As it turned out, the strangeness still had a ways to go, for when everyone who’d been dancing sat down again, the preacher walked back to the table and moved one of the wooden boxes forward.

“The devil comes in the night,” he declared, now in full throat. No more whispers. “The devil
riiiiiiides
the south wind.” He strung out the word
ride
until it was like he was singing it. “The hot wind. The wind from Hell.”

“It’s been blowing, brother!” shouted the blond-haired helper.

“And we know . . .” said the preacher, stepping forward and then back, rocking as he spoke, “we
KNOW
what that means.”

“Tell us, oh, tell us!” someone from the back cried out.

Stepmama moved a bit, shifting her weight forward, leaning toward the preacher again, her mouth unaccountably open as if to receive some kind of communion.

“Who’s ready to go?” the preacher continued. “Who’s ready to do what the apostle tells us to do? Shall we? Shall we
alllllll
do it? Shall we take up our deaths? Show the Lord we’re not afraid because we live forever in His holy name? Shall we . . . ?” He stepped forward till he was standing over Stepmama and me, sweating now as he had not been sweating when the fire had been held beneath his chin. I saw a drop roll down his forehead and slide down his cheek, resting on the point of his long chin. I was hypnotized by that drop. I couldn’t stop staring at it.

Then Stepmama slipped a white handkerchief out of her pocketbook and handed it up to the preacher, who took it without a word, wiped his face, then handed it back to her and she spread the handkerchief on her lap. Neither one of them looked directly at the other the entire time, and it felt like a long-practiced move.

Turning back to the table, the preacher put his hand atop one of the boxes. The strange rustling sound commenced again. “If we
belieeeeeve
in the Lord, if we follow his wishes, we will not be taken this night,” he said. “Not you, brothers. Not you, sisters. Not any of us. Because we believe.”

Stepmama sat back on the bench, as if satisfied. She crossed her right ankle over her left, her hands down by her sides. The white handkerchief, damp with the preacher’s sweat, was still spread out across her lap.

“Do it, brother,” a man called out. “Do it now, Brother. We’re with you. Let the Lord see how much you believe.”

The pregnant girl started babbling again.

The preacher took the top off the box and pulled out something long and thick and dark. And when it started to twine itself round and about his hand, I realized it was a rattlesnake. The preacher moved toward the congregation again with his now-familiar rocking step. “And these signs,” he said, “shall follow them that believe.”

He turned to the left. “In my name they shall cast out devils. Yes, they shall!” He turned to the right. “They shall speak with new tongues. Yes, they shall!” He stood dead center and held the snake above his head with one hand. “They shall take up serpents. And if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them. That’s in Mark, verses 16 to 18.”

With his free hand he gestured toward the pitcher and the glasses, which up till that moment I’d forgotten all about. After that he began inching closer and closer to the front benches, the snake now cradled in his arms.

Where we sat.

Stepmama and me.

Caressing the snake’s spade-like head, the preacher suddenly leaned over and kissed the top of it.

The snake paid him no attention but looked straight at me, its smile startlingly familiar. It took me a moment before I realized it was exactly Stepmama’s smile.

Then the rattler opened its mouth. That mouth was dark, cavernous, the teeth shiny. Its forked tongue flicked out. At me.

That was when I felt myself slipping sidewise into the darkness, down and down and down right onto Stepmama’s lap, with the left side of my head on the damp white handkerchief.

 

 

I don’t recall being carried to the car or anything about the drive home. I don’t remember getting sick. When we arrived back in Addison, Stepmama left me there in the car, its windows all opened wide, to wake up on my own, my dress spoiled and smelling of vomit.

It was early Monday morning when I woke at last, the sun not yet over Elk Mountain, so the sky had that pearly look. My mouth felt full of cotton. My stomach ached. I was shaking with the cold. And the smell in the car was unbelievable.

I gathered myself together slowly, managed to get out of the car, and hobbled to the house on wobbly legs. At least Stepmama had left the front door unlocked. For such small favors I had to be grateful.

As I walked into the house, my left hand on the wall to keep from falling, I remembered some of what had happened at the church as if it was a series of small black-and-white photographs: the handsome blond boy looking at me, the preacher speaking about Mark 16 to 18, the pregnant girl reciting gibberish, the wild singing and clapping that had set up echoes in my heart, the burning kerosene in the jar turning the preacher’s lips black, the poison in the pitcher. I could scarcely make sense of it. Images tumbled about in my head like water over stones.

Papa used to say water had to travel over twenty-one stones to be pure. I shook my head. I didn’t believe there was
anything
pure going on in that church last night, and I trembled with the memories.

But once I’d washed my face, brushed my teeth, changed out of my stinking clothes, and fallen into bed, it was the snake I dreamed about.

Only the snake.

AN UNWANTED VISITOR

I
stayed home from school Monday because my legs were still trembling and my stomach threatened to empty again. I had what Stepmama called the cramps and she was—all unaccountably—nice to me. She brought me warm milk and buttered toast, leaving it outside my door for she still could not come in because of the rowan branch. She even dropped off a note at school saying as how I was going to take a few days off to recover from a “visitor” though there was no one visiting us at all.

When I protested the lie, she laughed without humor. “That’s what we call it in Charleston,” she said. “Your teacher will understand.”

But I didn’t. Not until later did I find out that “the visitor” was what more sophisticated girls called the monthlies. That and saying they’d “fallen off the roof.” And “Aunt Flo’s come to stay.” And even “on the rag.”

I felt listless and crampy, so I napped a lot and read—reread, really—all of the fairy tales in my books as well as
A Girl of the Limberlost
and
Anne of Green Gables.
I looked out the window of my bedroom at the sunny days going by. I did my homework, which Stepmama brought back from school for me.

All in all, I stayed away from school two days. The cramping came and went, as did the blood. The first day it was spotty, the next day not there at all.

Stepmama waited on me, which should have made me suspicious, but only gave me hope that the worst with her was finally over. Maybe she’d just needed that much time till she realized she loved me. Then Papa would get better and we’d be a real family instead of—what we were.

Of course, that kind of hope is just a parcel of magic thoughts without the actual magic to make anything happen.

 

 

By the third day, I went to school because at home it had begun to feel as if I’d been imprisoned. No bars on the door, but shut in nonetheless. Stepmama’s concerns now seemed as if the show was more important than her actually being there. What hope I had was gone. Somehow that made me even sadder than before.