Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  But where were the snakes?

  It was October outside but summer inside, too warm despite two electric fans on chrome stands. The music was intense. The first hymn made the windows rattle and the pews shake. Jackson didn’t care for “I Wonder What They’re Doing in Heaven Today,” but they moved on to some great old hymns: “I’ll Fly Away” and “Nearer My God to Thee,” and “Jesus, Won’t You Come By Here,” an old Lightning Hopkins song that he’d learned from the movie Sounder. He’d rented a VCR and listened to it over and over again until he had learned the song.

  The hymns were followed by some preaching. Earl didn’t shout and jump up and down, but Jackson felt that Earl was speaking directly to him.

  “I want you to remember why we are gathered here tonight, and to remember to keep Jesus at the center of our thoughts. Unbelievers can’t see God, they can’t see Jesus. If people around here knew that Jesus was here tonight, the walls would be busting out with folks from Naqada and Elizabethtown and Rosiclare, and from Carbondale and Cairo, and from across the river too. But I’m telling you, Jesus is here just the same as you and me are here, and Sister Glenna at the piano, and Brother Lawson number one on the guitar, and Brother Lawson number two on the bass, and Brother Jones here from up north, and these little children with their tambourines, making a joyful noise unto the Lord, because the Lord is joyful. He fills our hearts with joy and takes away the darkness.

  “His presence is here. I can feel the Spirit startin’ to move on us. Slow at first. But it’s startin’ to fill this church. The Church of the Burning Bush, where Moses met God.”

  He elicited some amens and other ejaculations from the congregation.

  “The Jews had their holy places. Right here in the world. This world. Places where you could meet God. In the Garden, on Mount Moriah, Mount Sinai or Horeb, the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and it was rebuilt. Then it was destroyed by the Romans. The Jews are still waiting for it to be rebuilt again, but we couldn’t wait. We built the temple right here. In this holy place. Like Mount Sinai, or Mount Horeb, where Moses took his father-in-law’s flocks. It may be the backside of the desert, but God is here, and he’s calling to us just the way he called to Moses. Out of a burning bush. And he isn’t calling for a friendly chat, he isn’t calling to shoot the breeze. He’s got a job for Moses. To lead the Jews out of Egypt. And he’s got a job for us.

  “God tells Moses to take off his shoes, because it’s a holy place. And we’re gonna take off our shoes tonight, because this is a holy place.”

  Ushers started moving to the front of the church with metal bowls, like big dog-food bowls, and pitchers of water. Earl went on preaching.

  “And after supper, Jesus girded a towel about Him, took water in a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet.”

  Jackson had a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  “Not everyone believes exactly the same. All right. That’s between you and the Lord. I’m not going to judge you if you don’t want to do it. But I’m going to tell you what it was like for me the first time I got my feet wet in a pan of water. I wanted to shout for victory. I was filled with the Spirit. It was a great blessing, knowing I was doing what Jesus Christ himself had done, getting down on his knees before his disciples and taking their feet in his hands and washing them. I never done it before I come here. I never done it back in Middlesboro. It was Brother Phillips who started it, and I was scared to death. What was I scared of? I was scared to look foolish. But then I did it, and I got pretty wound up. Praise Jesus’ name.”

  Earl closed his eyes and began to pray silently. And then people started coming up to the front, lining up to have their feet washed and to wash some feet themselves. Taking turns. Men washed men’s feet to the left of the pulpit, women washed women’s feet to the right.

  Jackson was thinking that Victor Turner’s classic distinction between ritual and ceremony might be a fruitful approach to clarifying the social dynamics of the service. In a ritual such as baptism, or marriage, or consecration you become a different person. In a ceremony, on the other hand—Memorial Day, Thanksgiving—your status or role is confirmed. When Earl called his name, Jackson was taken by surprise. But not really. He looked up. Earl was looking at him, not giving him a choice. Jackson experienced his own resistance like an inner wall dividing him from the other people in the church. Where were the snakes? He’d rather pick up a rattlesnake than wash Earl’s feet, or have Earl wash his feet. But he went up to the front, feeling foolish. He sat down on the front pew and took off his shoes and socks. His laces got tangled, twisted into a knot. Forty years old and I can’t even untie my own shoes. But the knot came loose. He rolled his pants up and put his feet in the pan of fresh water. The water was cool. About four inches deep. Earl’s tough, rough hands on his feet caused him to seize up. His shoulders tensed. But then he felt warmth, maybe even love? Forgiveness? Or maybe a request? Earl soaped up his feet, massaged them. Earl had a towel around his neck, like an athlete in the locker room. He didn’t push on any pressure points. Just washed and massaged.

  And then it was Jackson’s turn. It wasn’t clear what the others were doing, but Earl was already barefoot. His pants were rolled up. He put his feet in a pan of fresh water. Jackson knelt in front of him and closed his eyes. He took one foot in both his hands. He massaged and rubbed. He put his fingers between Earl’s toes, on his rough heel, on a corn that must have been painful. Earl’s third toe was longer than his big toe. There’s a name for this, Jackson thought, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Then the other foot. What message was he sending to Earl? What was he trying to communicate? Earl put his hands on Jackson’s head. Enough. Jackson washed more feet. The power of touch created an overwhelming intimacy.

  Ritual or ceremony? Writing up his field notes that night, Jackson got out a Gideon Bible from the drawer in the stand next to the bed and looked up the passage that Earl had read that night, John 13:6–20. He realized that the first part of the passage had all the earmarks of ritual: Jesus washes Peter’s feet, over Peter’s objections, so that Peter may become clean; that is, Peter is transformed, his status is changed. In the second half of the passage Jesus commands the disciples to wash each others’ feet to confirm their status as disciples by performing an act of hospitality. This is a ceremony. Jackson’s thesis was becoming clear.

  Services were held on Friday night and Sunday night. On Saturday night Jackson and Earl had dinner at DX and Sally’s. In Colesville, especially in the hospital, Earl had seemed out of his element. Even a little pathetic. Jackson had gotten the better of him. But on his home turf, Earl was a formidable figure, and Jackson had begun to think of him as a kind of shaman, an earlier type of human being, predating the anthropological types produced by capitalism—the Weberian bureaucrat, the disgruntled worker, the dedicated teacher, the devoted husband and father, the impotent intellectual. In the pulpit Earl acted as an intermediary between the natural and the spiritual worlds. On the river and in the forest, he acted as an intermediary between the human and the animal worlds. On the river that morning, sauger fishing above the Smithland Lock and Dam, Earl had told him where to put his line down, and more often than not he’d come up with a fish. Walking in the woods that afternoon—in the Shawnee National Forest—Earl would stop and point to a pile of leaves snagged around the root of a tree, and Jackson would look and see nothing but the leaves and the root of the tree, until Earl would poke at the pile with a stick and reveal a timber rattler. It was the tail end of the great snake migration, he explained. Every spring thousands of snakes, frogs, toads, lizards, and turtles leave their dens beneath the outcroppings of the Shawnee Hills and head for the swamps and bogs in the bottomlands. And every fall, they head back to hibernate for the winter. “Over by Carbondale,” he said, “they even close one of the roads in the LaRue-Pine Hills from the first of September to the last of October. Too many snakes getting killed. They close it in the spring too.”

  Sunny’s co
usin Sally sautéed four nice sauger that Earl had cleaned. She cooked them the way Jackson’s grandfather had cooked walleyes—in bread crumbs and Lawry’s lemon pepper—and served them with coleslaw and macaroni and cheese. And coffee. DX drank Coca-Cola; Earl and Sally drank coffee; Jackson drank a 7-Up.

  After supper they sat on the porch until it got dark. It was chilly, but no one suggested going in. It was a clear night and from the porch they had a good view of the southern sky. “Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion,” Earl said, and DX went into the house to get a two-headed snake he’d caught a week before. The snake had been crossing the road on its way to winter quarters in the river bluffs.

  “That serpent ain’t been prayed over,” Sally said. “You got no business handling it tonight.”

  The snake was in a wooden box with a screen over the top. On the side of the box someone had carved JESUS SAVES.

  “I call ’em Moloch and Belzebub,” DX said, setting the box down on the floor. “They pretty much work together, but Belzebub does most of the feeding.”

  Jackson was thinking that this man had been Sunny’s lover. Once upon a time. All three of them, in fact, had enjoyed her favors. Earl he could understand, but not DX. Maybe she just wanted someone she wasn’t afraid of.

  “Let’s pray over it right now,” Earl said.

  “I don’t know,” Sally said.

  But Earl started to pray. And DX and Sally joined in. It was a wordless prayer, but when Jackson closed his eyes and listened, he could hear words fluttering in the air all around him, like moths around a candle. Certain words fluttered by again and again, words from another language. He could feel something tugging at him, but he resisted, as a man might resist a sexual urge. Sally took his hand. She was a beautiful woman, and Jackson wondered why DX would ever fool around with anyone else, even Sunny. Her fingers burned his and he pulled his hand away, but she took his hand again, and he could feel something in him yielding. But then, just as suddenly as they had started, they stopped, and Sally resumed her knitting. Earl, who was sitting in a rocking chair back in the shadows, got up and went over to the snakebox. He knelt over the snakebox, opened the latch on the front, reached in, and took out the snake. He went back to his chair, holding the snake against his chest. The snake raised its heads up and looked Earl in the face. Earl stroked it with one hand. He scratched the top of one head, then the other. He stroked the neck, running his finger back and forth where the neck split into two. The snake gave a few sharp rattles and then settled down. Earl held the snake against his body to keep it warm.

  They sat in the darkness for a while, listening to the night sounds, the end-of-October sounds, and then Earl said, “What I been thinking on is what we don’t understand about dyin’. It ain’t easy. It ain’t pretty. It ain’t just going to sleep and flying away and leaving your old body behind. I know that’s the way we talk. And we sing that old hymn ‘I’ll Fly Away.’ We sung it last night. But that ain’t the way it was for Jesus. When he washed the disciples’ feet he knew he was going to die, and he didn’t want to. When he was dying on the cross, it was his body was suffering. So bad he thought the Father had betrayed him at the end. But then he come back. His father hadn’t betrayed him after all. And when he come back, he come back in his body. He didn’t come back like a ghost or a spirit. It was his body. Doubting Thomas had to stick his finger in the wounds. His wounds were part of his story, do you see? His story was written on his body. God didn’t want him to fly away and leave his body behind, and he don’t want us to leave our bodies behind. Our stories are written in our bodies. You can’t leave that out of the big picture. Look at that little scar on Fern’s neck where she got bit when she was sixteen. That’s a story inscribed on her body. And look at me. I been bit thirty times. My stories are inscribed on my body. That’s what the Bible’s trying to proclaim—the resurrection of the body.”

  “ ‘Inscribed on her body,’ ” Jackson said. “You’re starting to sound like an anthropologist.” He looked down at his own hands, thinking, Earl’s an interesting guy. Too bad he doesn’t have a sense of humor.

  But maybe he did. “Come on over here,” Earl said. But Jackson shook his head.

  “You know you want to hold him,” Earl said. “You know it. I know it. DX and Sally know it.” All three of them were watching him. They were all smiling.

  “I’d better get back to the hotel,” Jackson said.

  Earl laughed. “Next time.”

  In the truck Earl turned the heater on. “You know you want to hold him,” he said again. And he was right. Jackson did want to hold the snake. He could feel his hands cupping. But he had other business to take care of.

  “Earl, did you think about the divorce petition?”

  Earl didn’t say anything for about a mile. “Them papers you was wantin’? They’s in the glove compartment. All signed and notarized.”

  Jackson opened the glove compartment. The papers were in an envelope underneath a pocket knife, a pair of pliers, a flashlight.

  “That envelope,” Earl said. “That’s the papers.”

  “Thanks, Earl.” Jackson didn’t open the envelope.

  The cab of the truck was warm. Earl turned off the heater.

  “DX thinks he can get a lot of money for that snake,” Earl said. “What do you think?”

  “I haven’t got any idea,” Jackson said. “Do zoos pay good money for something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Earl said.

  In the hotel parking lot Earl kept his hands on the steering wheel and looked straight ahead at the sign on the lawn: Naqada Inn. “I done my part,” he said. “Now you got to do yours.”

  Jackson was alarmed. “What do you want me to do? I took care of your truck, didn’t I?”

  “You did, and I thank you, but now I want you to pray with me.”

  “Here?”

  “Unless you want me to come up to your room.”

  “Here is fine.”

  Earl bowed his head. His lips began to move in and out again. Jackson closed his eyes and bowed his head. The truck was still running and some of the exhaust was leaking into the cab.

  “Lord,” Earl said after a long two or three minutes of silence, “look after this man, and look after little Fern. Turn their hearts back to you. Spare them at the last day as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.”

  Jackson folded the envelope and stuck it into the pocket of his windbreaker. “Thanks, Earl,” he said, opening the door and sliding out of the truck.

  10

  A Faustian Moment

  The divorce was final. The road had opened up before them. They could move ahead, cross the border into new territory. It was possible to imagine a future. But Jackson didn’t want to look too far into the future. He was too interested in what was going on all around him. It was Sunny that was going on all around him, clearing out dead trees, putting a culvert under a low spot in the drive, painting the kitchen. She was strong, physically strong, and her strength communicated itself to him, drew forth from him an opposing counter force. He stopped taking doxycycline. His yoga exercises become easier. It was easier to get out of bed in the morning. And she had a gift for creating beauty wherever she went. The house, which was on the gloomy side, soon became bright and cheerful. A few flowers from the grocery store on the kitchen table and a few more in a vase in the upstairs bathroom. A potted aspidistra on the landing, an avocado seed (supported by toothpicks in a glass of water) starting to sprout in the window over the sink, a new lamp for the big library table in the living room, three-way light bulbs in the floor lamps, an enameled humidifier to sit on the wood stove, wicker hampers for dirty clothes. He didn’t have to work at loving her, or pleasing her. He didn’t have to work at being interesting, because she was interested in everything: the fossil record, the Peloponnesian war, Camus’s L’Étranger, and, especially, in biology, in the theory of evolution, which seemed to her to explain everything, including Earl and the Church of the Burning Bush—
evolutionary dead ends, like the hybrid eel or the soccer kangaroo.

  This was the only issue that divided them. She could not, or would not, understand why he insisted on making two more trips to Naqada in November. Each time he invited her to go with him and each time she not only refused; she begged him not to go. “Why can’t you transcribe Claude’s notebooks or write another book about the pygmies? I don’t understand.” What she didn’t, or didn’t want, to understand was that for Jackson the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following provided a professional opportunity too good to be passed up. Other anthropologists had been there before him, to be sure, but they’d been looking at the beam of light instead of along it. Jackson wanted to look along the beam, and he thought he was in a good position to do so, because he wasn’t afraid, because Naqada took him back to the times he’d spent with his grandparents in Kendallville, Indiana, while his parents were off in Iraq or Syria, took him back to hymns on Sunday mornings and prayer meetings and church suppers with ham and split-pea soup and scalloped potatoes, which he’d never cared for, but which now appealed to him. He was even starting to like yams, the way Mawmaw Tucker fixed them—roasted and sliced into thick rounds. No brown sugar. Vinegar. It was good people, as Earl put it. Warm, friendly, ready to help each other in hard times.

  On the second of these trips he took along half a dozen harmonicas, and when the lead guitarist, Phil Stone, invited him to sit in, he stepped up to one of the vocal mics. He held back at first, but not for long. The harp is the least intellectual of instruments. (And cheapest!) You breathe through it, in and out. It’s the closest instrument to the human voice. It becomes your mouth, your voice. And you can play between the notes of the piano. You can wail like an old freight train. You can howl and waiver and cry like a woman in pain. You can grab your audience by the ears, which is what he did. And later that night he touched DX’s two-headed snake with the back of his fingers and then jerked his hand back. It was like touching an electric fence, which he used to do with Steve Decker in Kendallville, when he stayed with his grandparents during the summer. Steve lived on a farm a mile down the road from Jackson’s grandfather’s grain elevator, and they used to shoot the cows in the field with BB guns, until Steve’s father caught them and made them currycomb the cows as if they were horses.