by Amy Jo Burns
During a Sunday service at the abandoned gas station, the local kids played in the gravel lot next to the open maws that Texaco had left in the earth. Before that day the ramshackle building had closed when a crowd of hardwoods toppled after a blizzard and blocked the main road to the station. The faithful started to squat there every Sunday morning until it felt like home. They’d been looking for a place to gather, and God had provided one. The only way to reach it was to double back down a mule path and circle the rear of the building by following the creek line. The seclusion lent to the excitement. Whenever an outsider in Trap asked for directions to the snake-handling church, they got the same response: You can’t get there from here. My father had groomed a congregation of secret keepers, and the only directions they offered were how to get off the mountain.
My father claimed to remember that day he first took up a serpent without error: autumn, unseasonably sunny, the aging leaves bloodred against a periwinkle sky. A group of boys huddled around the old preacher’s truck, where some snake boxes had been left. They dared one another to open the lids that kept them safe from copperheads, cottonmouths, and rattlesnakes. Boys five years older than my father refused.
“Briar?” one of them finally said. “You game?”
He was game, all right. My father hopped into the back of the truck and lifted the lid from one of the boxes. Inside it lay a serpent, spun up like a whip. It had the colors of a burned field. The serpent raised its head and reached out for him, the way my father told the story. Not to strike, but to be embraced. The crowd of boys peered over the lip of the truck, not a blink among them.
My father took the snake in both hands, one close to its head and the other near the tail. The snake wavered. The boys shrieked. Young Briar fell under the serpent’s spell by looking into its elliptical eyes.
The screams had drawn a crowd. Behind him a man spoke in a steady voice.
“Briar, do you know what that is?”
“It’s a snake, sir.”
“It’s a canebrake.”
“The unicorn of the South,” my father whispered as the snake held him in its thrall.
The man nodded. “That’s it. As rare as it is venomous. If your daddy was here, he’d tell you one nip from that serpent will send you to the grave. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You scared?”
“No, sir.”
“You ought to be. Put it back in the box, son.”
My father obeyed, but the canebrake had charmed him. He had an itch only a venomous snake could scratch, and no church in our hills would let him. If he wanted to take up serpents, he’d have to capture them first. He made his own catcher from an old broom handle and a wire hanger. At twelve years old, he forged up the mountain, armed only with his tool and a pillowcase. There wasn’t a companion in sight who dared go with him.
My father played the lone hero in all his stories. He had no faithful friend, a trait that followed him into adulthood, as far as I could tell. As he grew from a young boy into a man, he first caught a water snake, then a queen snake, and finally a copperhead and a yellow rattler. He kept them boxed in the fireplace until he married my mother, who demanded he keep them in the shed.
Surviving a lightning strike gave Briar Bird the kind of power folks longed to follow. My father was leading the church that had first denied him his serpents by the time he was twenty. I was just shy of a year old. In a community that feared its way of life was dying, word of the young snake handler should have traveled fast. Briar was proof of God’s favor on our hills. People should have come from all over to see my father and his snakes, but White Eye didn’t want them to.
Trap was an exit off an exit from the highway, a town caught in the mountains between Interstates 79 and 81. It was a hard place to get to and an even harder one to leave. We were a stone’s throw from Judy Gap and the thrilling heights of the gorges and straight-backed stone spires West Virginia is known for. Trap wasn’t even a town, even though we called it one. “Unincorporated” is how outsiders referred to us, as if we’d been disassembled from the inside out. There just weren’t enough people in Trap with the mining industry dwindling, the coal treatment plant laying off workers, and folks taking any escape route they had. It puzzled my mother most of all, who used to believe that our mountain didn’t need anyone as long as we had Briar Bird.
My father swore he first noticed her with his white eye, even though I knew he couldn’t see much out of it. Ruby was the prettiest girl on the mountain, sparkling like the stars, he used to tell me. They grew up down the creek from each other, but it took a lightning strike to spark the attraction between them. My parents fell in love when they were seventeen, and for my father it was simple. He saw her, he wanted her. But knowing my mother’s heart was more like searching for the sun on an overcast day.
“Was there ever anyone else?” I’d asked my mother, as hungry for her stories as I was for my father’s. “Besides Daddy?”
Her answer was flat. “No.”
All my father had to do was set a trap and wait. It took time for my mother to fall in love with the man behind the snakes. The man who whistled in his mother’s garden. The man who cried when he laughed. The man who could bag a snake and fry an egg but couldn’t hang a porch swing to save his life. The man who would never stop loving my mother. His love for her was bare-hearted and deep, and he didn’t care who saw it. But he did care that it made him weak.
My father thought people ought to be as easy to maneuver as his serpents. For all the gifts he had, he could never rule my mother’s heart. It made him love her in a selfish way. This was the truest lesson my father taught me: Love that hopes to conquer only twists itself into hate.
* * *
As a child I came to know every mountain-snake myth by heart, because my parents told them to me once they could no longer find a way to speak to each other. My favorite was the story about the black serpent who wove itself among the branches of an elm shade tree and sang out an aria. When my father told the tale, the snake had the bellow of an angry god. When my mother told it, the snake was a lonely mountain siren. My father’s stories strutted with prowess, and my mother’s wept with sorrow.
I listened to these stories long after I outgrew them, because they kept me from having to share any of my own. There were things I couldn’t speak of, too.
I trusted my father’s God, but not his religion.
I believed in the kind of evolution I read about in Bobby’s textbooks.
I thought about sex.
“Sex is best when it’s wrong,” Ivy had once whispered in my ear on one of our swims at the creek.
My mother swatted her hand as Ivy laughed, though I’d never seen her look so sad. She and my father never had any more children, and I wondered if it was because my mother flinched every time he touched her.
“Sex ain’t so great,” my mother whispered, and it was the most heartless thing she’d ever said to me. “You’ll see.”
Those words were the only ones I’d heard about sex, because my mother was the only teacher I’d ever had. There was a small school for the kids in our hills if you took the creek road all the way down to the south end of Trap, but I’d never set foot inside it. My school days were spent at the kitchen table, reading books assigned by my mother and doing my own research on the growing patterns of wild ginger in the fields surrounding the cabin. In the mornings I recited lengthy passages from the Old Testament for my father. In the afternoons I drew reproductions of the photosynthetic process on a handheld chalkboard. I grasped what mathematics I could from a book and an old calculator. My mother taught me geometry with the plastic protractor she’d once used in Trap’s high school classrooms twenty years before. Every spring my mother took my father on a daylong hike to lay flowers on his mother’s grave deep in Logger’s Nook on the other side of the mountain while Ivy drove me to the county seat f
or testing. Somehow I always managed to pass, thanks to Bobby’s abandoned schoolwork.
His textbooks called it Darwinism, but I taught myself about evolution as I witnessed its opposite in my parents’ marriage. I charted its demise in my school notebook alongside the calls of barred owls in winter and the bashful violets in spring. Viola rotundifolia. Viola canadensis. Viola pedata. Sometimes love doesn’t die. It reverses itself like a watch ticking backward.
There’s no one lonelier than the wife of a preacher. My mother loved her husband but didn’t trust him. She used to tell me she fell in love with him on the day he got struck by lightning.
“Briar had experienced something real,” my mother said, soft enough to make it feel like we were finally sharing secrets. “Something that exists on the other side of this life. Something that came from our land. That’s what Briar brought here. And I wanted to be part of it.”
I understood. As a girl, I’d adored my mystical father. Even as my mother’s reverence for him waned, I couldn’t help but fall in love with him when he held a serpent. He looked regal and bold. Venomous snakes turned to silk in his hands, and he treated them the way I wanted him to treat me—with tenderness and wonder. Folks said he was born to take up serpents, and I’d never doubted it. I once asked my mother if she thought my father would handle snakes in heaven.
She laughed. “If he does, I won’t be watching.”
She’d meant it as a joke, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her words: I won’t be watching. I knew that her fiercest longing had just slipped out of her mouth.
I caught glimpses of her lost freedom on those long afternoons my father spent in Jolo every year until I turned fifteen, when my mother and Ivy laughed in the back of the movie theater like they were girls again. That’s when I felt my loneliest, and the lurch in my stomach drove me to the library’s computers to find out what we were to the rest of the world.
I got my answer a week before Ivy caught fire. At the back exit of the library, I’d dropped my pile of books when I pushed through the door. Bobby’s spring reading list included East of Eden and Shakespeare’s tragedies, and I’d tucked Tiger Eyes in between the stack so my mother wouldn’t see it. The books fell from my hands when I stumbled into a clump of kids who were smoking a shared Virginia Slim after school had let out. I held my breath and looked at the cement. I waited to hear their laughter. When I bent to collect the books, a boy kicked Tiger Eyes away from me and left me on my hands and knees.
“Don’t let Mommy see the smut you’re reading,” he said.
The others snickered, and a red heat crawled up my neck. I bit the inside of my cheek and pressed my palms to the ground until a girl with dirty-blond hair shushed the laughter.
The cigarette dangled from her lips as she knelt and handed me the book. Her fingernails shimmered bright pink, and they matched the muddy, glittered tips of her cowboy boots. I stood and smoothed my skirt before looking at the boy.
“Don’t you think I want to live, also?” I asked, too quietly.
He looked away, and I knew that no one had heard me, the same way I felt when I stood at the ravine behind my father’s snake shed and screamed into the abyss. The girl stamped out the cigarette with her boot as I walked away.
SPEAKING IN TONGUES
The Sunday service following Ivy’s miracle began as nothing special. A faithful band of two dozen had gathered from the farthest pockets of the mountain in the gutted gas station. The air filled with heads nodding like breeze-blown rocking chairs as Hawley Boggess, a farmer with a beard as long as his suspenders, lazily beat a snare drum. My mother sat in the corner and shook her tambourine. Light struggled to break in through the whitewashed windows, but I could still see something new. Aunt Bette brought her clan to church, and Caleb had driven them.
I sat across a makeshift aisle from him with Ivy’s boys, who were as antsy as ever. I felt Caleb watching me as I slipped butterscotch into the boys’ palms. During the sermon Caleb’s eyes slid toward me. An animal warmth curled its way from my stomach into my chest.
This was a dangerous game. My father didn’t fool around with outsiders. He waited until the gas station emptied each Sunday before locking it and scaling the back ridges through the holler with his snakes in tow. It was five miles home to our cabin, and Ivy always gave my mother and me a ride. It took my father most of the afternoon to dodge through the overgrown paths and make sure he wasn’t followed. He loved his solitude, and he’d forfeit anything to protect it. If my father took notice of Caleb’s stares, he’d tell Aunt Bette not to return, and I’d never see him again.
I wasn’t the only one watching Caleb. Old Lady Frye sat in front of me and squinted at him while stroking her gray braid. She was no friend to strangers.
Beside him sat the girl with the dirty-blond hair and glittered nails who had handed me my book outside the library. When she noticed Frye’s leer, she touched Caleb’s shoulder. Together they stared Frye down, but she would not relent.
Ivy’s boys nodded off beside me. At the pulpit my father lifted his favorite serpent—a yellow timber rattlesnake—toward heaven. His heart got overcome, and his breath whittled to a gasp. Before us he preached on. He spoke of God’s word being made manifest in our hearts. Then he went to his pine box, lifted out a copperhead, and held it aloft next to the rattlesnake. He closed his eyes and squinted, like he was listening for an oncoming storm. Soon he began to speak in tongues, and his eyelashes fluttered. He babbled: Na-shadada-dannah. It was a sound I’d grown up hearing, a sound I couldn’t repeat. Only God could grant it.
My father never looked more like his serpents than when he spoke in tongues. It sounded like a lullaby. Everything here echoed the snake’s delicate anatomy. The chattering tambourine, the quivering tongues, the outstretched hands gliding toward the sky.
For the first time in her life, Ivy joined him. Her mouth shuddered with words no one could understand.
My father laid the copperhead back in its wooden lair and looked toward the crowd. “I witnessed a miracle this week,” he said.
The room stilled. These were the words the faithful had waited for since the day my father had been struck by lightning. Finally White Eye’s legend continued. He gestured toward Ivy, who rose from her seat like a fog. My mother looked up at her friend. The bonnet she’d sewn for Ivy’s bare head lay deflated in her lap. Ivy looked otherworldly. Her eyes bored into the waiting crowd. I closed my own eyes and saw her burning.
As Ivy recounted the fire, I started to feel like I couldn’t breathe. I stood and bowed my head as I backed out of the room.
Once I left the building, I fled to the rear of the church, where I’d found the empty flask last April. The trees shivered. I closed my eyes again, slumped against the building’s wall. I heard no footsteps, only a voice.
“Wren.”
I opened my eyes.
“I scared you,” Caleb said.
“No.” I straightened myself. “I don’t scare easy.”
He held his post. “Meet me later at sundown,” he said. “At the swimming hole.”
“Why?”
He fastened his eyes to the ground. I waited.
“I want you to teach me to swim,” he said.
“Swim?”
He nodded.
“In the dark?” I asked.
His eyebrows lifted, and his thick lashes shielded his eyes. “You think daytime is better?”
I considered it, and he was right. “Why me?” I asked.
“Because I don’t know anyone here, and neither do you.”
“That ain’t true.” I almost laughed. “I know everyone here.”
“But you don’t trust them.” He stared at me for a moment. “And that’s the same as being alone.”
He waited. I could feel the ghosts of Ivy’s and my mother’s younger selves when they’d been my age, urging me forward, coaxing me ba
ck.
“What good is falling in love,” Ivy had asked one afternoon when she thought I was dozing, “if it feels like jumping off a cliff?”
“Love doesn’t always feel like that,” my mother answered as she tore out the stitches of an old dress. “But the best kind does.”
Ivy had laughed, and I knew then there were stories they’d never tell me. The kind of stories that hurt to remember. The kind I wanted for myself.
“Come,” Caleb said. “And bring the whiskey.”
He slipped back into the church, and I followed a few minutes later so no one would know we’d spoken. Inside the gas station, my father pronounced that the time had come to pray over Ivy, to thank God for healing her. She had turned magnetic, drawing most of the crowd to a cluster at the front of the room. She stood in the center of them, looking reborn. The hands of the faithful covered her bald head, and a chill coiled up my back. This was what folks had been waiting for. A sign that God hadn’t forgotten us, even if the rest of the world had.
My mother stood off from the crowd, eyes wide open. She stared at my father as he prayed for Ivy with foreign utterings, her best friend falling to the floor as a soft sigh escaped his mouth. After a life of predictable magic, my father had finally surprised his wife.
I asked her once why she never took up a serpent, and she paused for a long time before answering. “I always had you,” she said. “I saw no point in the risk.”
The hive of prayers hushed when Ivy finally opened her mouth.
“When White Eye put his hands over me,” she said, “I felt a chill like I’ve never known.”
All eyes were on Ivy, but I watched my mother from the back. I saw her skepticism melt away and then return twofold as Ivy’s words dripped from her mouth. Ivy was Ivy, and then she wasn’t. She’d never called my father White Eye before, and she’d never lifted her hands to the sky and moaned as her body shook. My mother watched her best friend disappear and glared at my father, who had taken her away.
