This Tender Land (26 page)

“Snakes?”

“Oh, right. You ain’t seen Sid and her handle the snakes yet. Now that’s something, let me tell you.”

“What do they do with them?”

“Use them to make folks understand that Satan can be handled if
you got God on your side. It’s quite a show. They don’t do it much up North, but in the South, man, those crackers eat it up.”

“Can I see them?”

“Don’t suppose it’d do any harm.”

Within the crusade’s tent village was a small tent just back of the kitchen where Sister Eve prepared herself for the service each evening. Whisker lifted the flap over the opening and beckoned me to enter. Inside was a dressing table with a mirror, and in front of it a padded bench. Next to the vanity stood a rack where a number of white robes hung, along with other clothing. There was a big traveling trunk and scattered around it lay several pairs of shoes, mostly the plain, white flats that Sister Eve wore during the meetings, but also a couple of pairs of cowboy boots. On a low, narrow table near the back wall of the tent sat three glass enclosures, what I would learn were called terrariums, a word that was new to me. There was some vegetation in each terrarium and also a big rock or two for the snakes to slither around and, I supposed, hide behind.

“What kind are they?”

“Them two snakes look exactly like corals.” He nodded toward the glass cage where a couple small, black-yellow-and-red-banded snakes slithered over one another. “You know about coral snakes?”

I told him I didn’t.

“Terrible poisonous. And that one there we call Mamba. Watch.” He tapped the glass of the middle terrarium, and the snake inside, which was dark gray and three feet long, rose up, spread the skin around its neck and head, and looked prepared to strike at him. Whisker laughed. “Just like a cobra.”

“But it isn’t?”

“They just look dangerous but they ain’t. They’s just snakes that people mistake for the poison ones. But this one”—and he nodded toward the largest of the terrariums—“this one is different. He’s the real thing. We call him Lucifer.”

“Lucifer?”

He leaned toward the glass and the snake coiled and lifted itself to strike. “This here’s a bona fide rattlesnake. When Lucifer shakes his tail, let me tell you, little brother, it makes my bones shiver.”

“Sister Eve handles all the snakes?”

“The coral-looking snakes and Mamba. Only Sid handles Lucifer. Him and that snake been together a long time, I guess. Was part of the carny act he was doing when Sister Eve found him.”

“They never get bit?”

“Sometimes. But the corals and Mamba, their bite don’t do nothing. And Sid, he always milks out the venom before he handles Lucifer.”

The snake was coiled, so it was hard to tell its length, but its body was as thick as my wrist. It looked right at me, forked tongue darting in and out, as if trying to taste me.

“What does he eat?”

“We drop mice in there mostly. He swallows those critters whole. Sometimes little rats, too, if we catch them running around the kitchen tent.”

I thought of Faria in the quiet room back at Lincoln School. I imagined him being gobbled up whole by that big rattler, and it made me hate the snake.

“You don’t be trying to handle these snakes,” Whisker cautioned. “Only Sister Eve and Sid do that.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, backing away from Lucifer. “I’m never touching those things.”

THE CRUSADE WAS
family. They worked together, trusted one another, found pleasure in each other’s company. Before Albert and Mose were taken on, there’d been six men and four women. Until Emmy showed up, there’d been no children, and everyone in the crusade took her under their wing like mother ducks. Although she was often in the company of Sister Eve, even when she was alone, Emmy moved freely about the little tent village, helping where she could, but mostly bringing delight. She wore the wide-brimmed straw hats Sister Eve had given her all the time so that she could tip the brim low to hide her face whenever someone from the outside world came around. I’m sure everyone in the crusade knew that she wasn’t really kin to Sister Eve, but I don’t think they knew her true identity, or if they did, they didn’t care.

Some of the men were pretty rough-looking. Dimitri, with his bald head and huge chest and tattoos. Torch, one of the musicians, whose hair looked like something coughed up by a cat. Tsuboi, a kid about Albert’s age whose face, the whole right side of it anyway, was a mutilation of scar tissue. Whisker told me it had happened when he was thrown from a train he was trying to snag for a ride. Though no children traveled with the crusade, not all the women were childless. Cypress, an exotic-looking woman with long hair the color of a river at night, had three children who’d been taken from her because of drink. She didn’t drink anymore, at least not that I ever saw, and when Emmy was around her, her face lit up as if a warm fire was burning in her heart. What few belongings each of them had were kept under their cots, where anyone could have stolen something. No one did.

In a way, they weren’t that different from the kids at Lincoln
School, who’d been thrown together with almost nothing. But Lincoln School had been overseen by the likes of DiMarco and the Black Witch and her lizard-on-two-legs husband, and fear had been what we’d all shared the most. With the crusade, the spirit of Sister Eve ran through everything, and that made all the difference.

There was routine to the days, and seldom idle time. Whatever work needed doing was accomplished in the morning—potatoes peeled, canvas mended, the big tent and the whole area around the village cleaned of every bit of litter. A couple of men took one of the trucks and went to neighboring towns, posting notices of the crusade. When our work was finished, Sister Eve often sent us out to help in the community. I learned that she’d preceded the crusade to New Bremen and had visited local ministers and the Catholic priest and had asked about parishioners in particular need of assistance. There weren’t many farmers who could afford to pay hired help, and wherever possible, Sister Eve offered her people, men and women alike, whose labor was free. From almost the day we joined the crusade, Mose and Albert and I went out to help. Our first day we mended fences, the next day repaired a barn roof. A couple of days later, I helped Albert fix the engine on a tractor the farmer swore would never run again. We cut jimsonweed from a cornfield, and the next day bucked hay, just as I’d done for Hector Bledsoe, but it was different this time because we were helping folks desperately in need so the labor didn’t feel onerous. I thought how different it might have been at Lincoln School if the reason we were helping out Bledsoe had simply been that he was a man in need and not that he and the Brickmans got wealthy from our labor.

Every morning, after he and Sister Eve had gone over the books, Sid disappeared for a couple of hours, God knew where. Every afternoon, Sister Eve took a powder as well, and it was a while before I discovered the why of her vanishing.

At the end of a week, while Mose was at work in the kitchen tent and Emmy with him, and Albert was trying to repair the gas
generator that powered the electric lights for the revivals every night, and we hadn’t been promised out to help some farmer in need, I found myself with rare free time on my hands. I decided I would get to know New Bremen a little better.

I came to a park with a ball field where a group of neighborhood kids had thrown together a pickup game. They called to one another and joked, and their lives seemed to be all about play and the comfort of easy friendship. I descended a steep hill to the flats along the river, where grain elevators rose like castle keeps at the edge of the railroad tracks. A steepled, white church also stood near the tracks, and on the dirt streets around it were more houses, smaller and cheaper-looking than those built among the hills above. Through the opened church door came the moan of an organ as someone practiced hymns for the upcoming Sunday service. I followed the tracks to a wooden trestle, which crossed the Minnesota River. I sat on the crossties, staring down into the opaque, cider-colored water below, and tried to imagine what it might have been like if I’d been born to the quiet life in New Bremen.

Which turned out to be a thing I couldn’t do. Not because imagination failed me, but because I was afraid to dream in that way. In my whole life, I could recall no dream ever coming true.

I walked from the trestle along the riverbank, following a path the locals had worn, maybe kids coming down to enjoy all the adventure that a river offered. On the far side were fields of young corn, nearly knee-high and verdant green, and beyond them rose hills that carried the sky on their shoulders. On that lazy summer afternoon, alone with the river and the lovely valley it had carved, I felt a deep desire to belong there, to belong anywhere.

Without realizing it, I had walked all the way to the place just below the meadow where we’d landed the canoe the first night I’d heard the voice of an angel call to me from the revival tent. To my great surprise, Sister Eve was there, sitting cross-legged on the sandy spit where she’d talked us all into joining the crusade. She was alone,
her head bowed, and it was clear to me that she was deep in prayer. I didn’t want to interrupt her reverie, so I turned and began up the riverbank as quietly as I could.

“Odie,” she called to me softly.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“No intrusion. Join me.” She patted the sand at her side.

“This is where you come?” I said. “Every afternoon?”

“Wherever we take the crusade, I try to find somewhere set off a bit so I can be by myself. It’s not always a place as lovely as this.”

“So you can pray?”

“So I can refresh myself.” She spread her arms wide as if to embrace the river. “And so I can open my heart to the beauty of this whole divine creation. If that sounds like prayer to you, then call it prayer.”

It was painfully clear that she felt something I didn’t, something wondrous and fulfilling in that place where I possessed only a deep longing. She lifted her face to the sun, and her hair fell away from her cheek, exposing the long scar that ran there.

“This reminds me a little of the Niobrara,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“A river in Nebraska, where I grew up.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

I knew it was rude, but curiosity was eating me alive. “That scar.”

Which didn’t seem to surprise her in the least, and I wondered if it was a question she got asked a lot.

“Remember I told you God gives us all cracks so that his light has a way to get inside us? This scar, Odie, that’s my crack. It was given to me the day of my baptism.”

“I thought you just got dunked in water for that.”

“In my case it was a horse trough.”

I figured this had to be a good story, and I wanted to hear it, but before I could ask, someone called from the riverbank above us, “Sister Eve. Come quick. It’s Emmy.”

THEY’D LAID HER
on a cot in the women’s tent, and much of the crusade had gathered around her. Albert hovered over her, and Mose knelt at her side holding her little hand. Emmy’s eyes were closed, her face drained of color. I went down on my knees beside my brother.

“What happened?”

“Another of her fits.”

“What is it?” Sister Eve asked.

“We don’t know exactly,” I said. “She hit her head on a fence post a while back. She’s been like this ever since. She usually comes out of it.”

Her eyes fluttered open and she stared up at me, dazed.

“He’s okay,” she mumbled. “He’s okay.”

“Who, Emmy?”

She gripped my hand with a sudden, unexpected fierceness. “Don’t worry, Odie,” she said. “We beat the devil.”

Then she let go, closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and was asleep.

“Let’s get her to the hotel,” Sister Eve said.

Everyone cleared away. Mose carried Emmy out to the automobile that Sid usually drove, a shiny red DeSoto. He laid her on the backseat, and Sister Eve covered her with a blanket that had been folded there. I sat with her and cradled her head on my lap. Mose and Albert sat up front with Sister Eve, and she drove us to the Morrow House. Upstairs, Mose laid Emmy gently on the bed, then he and Albert headed back to the crusade village. Sister Eve sat with Emmy, holding her hand, and asked me to leave and to close the door behind me. I stood at the window of the parlor room, where we usually ate breakfast, and stared outside at the town square. I watched people going about their business in a normal fashion. And I knew that would never be me.

The door to the hallway opened and Sid came in. He eyed me in a way that reminded me of how Lucifer, the rattlesnake, had looked at me.

“Heard about the little girl.”

“Her name is Emmy,” I said.

“I told Evie you kids would be nothing but trouble.”

“Everyone is trouble, Sid, you included.” Sister Eve came from Emmy’s room, leaving the door open behind her.

“How is she?” I asked.

“Fine, Odie. Awake now. She’s asking for you.”

Emmy was sitting up, her back propped against a couple of pillows. She smiled at me.

I sat on the bed. “You okay?”

She nodded. “Sister Eve told me what happened.”

I hadn’t closed the door completely, and I could hear raised, angry voices from the other room. I’d never heard Sister Eve and Sid argue before. It scared me, in large part because they were arguing about us—Emmy and me and Albert and Mose. I’d figured from the start that our time with Sister Eve would become like every other good thing I’d ever had. Gone.

Sid said, “When we leave this burg, those kids go their own merry way.”

“I say what we do and don’t do, Sid.”

“You want to keep me in this show, you cut those kids loose.”

“If you want to leave, Sid, I won’t stop you.”

“Listen, Evie, you remember how it was before you met me? You were a two-bit sideshow act. I made you Sister Eve.”

“God made me Sister Eve.”

“Was it God got you an offer of a weekly radio broadcast in Saint Louis?”

“What?”