Wildwood

by Farris, John

  When he thought they ought to try to do something about their situation, Terry awakened her by brushing her lips gently with his fingertips. Faren sat up with a deep sigh, rubbing her upper lip, which tingled from his touch.

  "Reckon we can get on to the church now."

  "I haven't heard any music or singing. Maybe the service is over and they went home."

  "Somebody would've come by on the road and seen us stuck here. You shouldn't have let me sleep so long."

  "It was still raining, and you looked really tired." Terry rolled the window up and stepped out of the car, the, ig so he could see where he was going in a wet tangle of high weeds. He helped her out. "Which way?"

  "Let me try to get my bearings," Faren said, taking the flashlight. She switched it around. The narrow roadway, dipping into a hollow that was as white as beer foam in a glass, looked uninviting straight ahead. The hill behind them was black with trees.

  "Do you know where we are?"

  "Can't say for certain, one hollow's like another, this far back in the—listen!"

  They heard muffled but lusty singing, so far away the words were hard to make out. A hymn.

  When my time comes to go

  When my time comes to go

  I want to lay my head on Jesus' breast

  When my time comes to go!

  "There they are," Faren murmured.

  "Which way?" Terry asked. He couldn't tell where the singing was coming from.

  "Church has to be just up the next rise. We didn't pass it yet, I know that."

  The road was slippery and, in the hollow, awash. They held on to each other in the fog, which diffused the beam of the flashlight in Faren's hand until it was nearly useless. The hill they had to climb, blindly, was a steep one. But they were going in the right direction. The singing was louder, instruments were distinguishable. First a rollicking piano, then guitars and tambourines. Handclapping. The brassy light of distant uncovered windows became visible through mist and murk.

  "Hallelujah," Faren said. "At last."

  The second of two hymns ended. For a few moments they heard only themselves, effortful breathing. They were coldly doused by a quivering dogwood tree Terry blundered into. Then voices began calling out randomly, exulting. "Yea yea yea yea yea! Hallelujah!" "Thank you, Jesus!" "Spirit's moving here tonight." "Say it, say it." "Go devil, commmmme Jesus!" "All right!" The tambourines started again, a snaky, jangling, compelling rhythm. A small building surrounded by vehicles haphazardly parked took shape as they approached the top of the hill. The light in the windows was a low unsteady shining. No electricity here either, but lack of light hadn't dampened the enthusiasm of the worshippers in the backwoods church, which was made of unpainted concrete block, with a shingle roof, a metal awning over the doorway.

  Terry saw dim jumping figures behind wet glass, shadows in collision with shadows. It looked like a riot in progress. "Are we going in there?" he asked, stumbling to a halt.

  She tugged at his hand. "Sure. You're welcome. Nobody's going to bite you. It's like homecoming tonight. They're all moving with the Spirit. Just a'joyful in the Lord." A pulse of lightning was repeated in the windshield of a truck next to her face. Faren looked happy, eager. She was shivering. "Terry, Church of God's not like other old churches, dry as dust, where you sit in rows like waitin' on a bus and the preacher tells you what's good and what's bad for you and they pass the collection plate and nobody dares say boo. Here you prove your faith; anybody is welcome to get up and preach, testify, or pray when he feels called upon by the Lord. It's just a great feeling to know you're blessed by the Holy Ghost. Everybody moving with the spirit and indivisible—that's what this church is all about."

  They went in. The one-room building, about twenty by thirty feet and plain as a shoebox, was packed. Most of the worshippers were white or, Terry presumed, White Cherokee; there were few obviously Indian faces. Benches lined three walls. There was a high flat-topped lectern near the back wall with a Bible as big as a scrapbook lying open on it. Strictly centered between two windows was a framed lithograph of Christ, twice life-size and with a well-trimmed beard, golden light of sanctity around his head. Kerosene lanterns hung from rafter hooks between the powerless, cone-shaded electric lights. Some casually dressed worshippers were sprawled on the benches, looking done-in but with a thin shine of ardency. A zinc pail of water with a dipper in it was passed around. A youngster, thumb in mouth, slept faceup in the hammock of his mother's dress as if drowned in tumult, his other hand out flung. In one corner two men and a hefty girl about Terry's age sat round-shouldered on stools beside the upright piano, acoustic guitars on their knees. Everyone else was circulating as freely as they could: weaving, shuffling, edging in random patterns from one side of the church to the other, as if to stand still were to deny the energy of the spirit that possessed them. Many hands writhed and waggled, dumbly magical, above their heads and in Christ's printed, patient line of sight. The windows at the back of the church were open, there were flowers in crocks and jars on the sills, furry iris and blood-red tulips. But the stilled cool air outside made little difference in the church. There the atmosphere was thick as gravy: oiled, humid, metallic with the salts of people's bodies, their sogged clothing and hair.

  Few people paid attention to Faren and Terry. A woman she knew grasped her hand in welcome. A tall, severe-looking Indian who seemed unnervingly familiar to Terry stood in shirt-sleeves behind the lectern. His dark eyes were on Faren but he didn't smile. Terry remembered. The gallery in town, the artist's self-portrait. This was Hickory Smith, her half brother.

  "Grab you a seat if you want," Faren said into Terry's ear.

  "No, I'll stand."

  A middle-aged woman in the forefront of the worshippers near the lectern was testifying. Terry leaned against a wall and paid attention. She was a little hard to understand, as if she had only a few teeth in her head.

  "Ain't nobody on this earth worth nothin' 'less he be used of God. It ain't no good abusin' yourself with mankind, with the o-fenders and the malefactors, you got to turn loose a that mess and give account to God yourself. Glory! For he sayeth unto you, 'Brethren, I would not have you ignorant.' What is ignorance if it ain't wickedness? Praise God, I quit my wicked ways, thank Godddd I'm saved! Fill me up, Jesus! And you know, if God looks down and picks you up, you got somethin' to praise upon. Hallelujah to God, I will enter my Father's house justified!" She began to mumble words like Terry had never heard before, which provoked ecstatic shouts from other worshippers. After a minute or two of gibberish and dancing rather stiffly up and down, as if she were standing barefoot on live coals, she resumed. "There is a spirit movin' between these yere walls tonight! I say if you're sane and holy, stay with the old way, 'cause if you get with the new way you ain't gonna sing and shout, no sir! And if you ain't got it, and you can't get it, what you oughter do is just go and stick your head in a hole and let somebody kick you till you say yes to the Lord. That's the way I feel, alla shabba shalla golem sabbeth wetum. Yea! I'm saved and sanctified and I'm sooooo-o glad!" She left off testifying and began to sing in a quavering voice, "Devil can't do me no harm, nooo-o, devil can't do me no harm—"

  The piano player went wild, ripping at the keys, tearing frenziedly into the hymn several bars ahead of the crashing, shimmering tambourines and the guitars. Thunder outside could barely be heard. Lightning flashed on wheeling, dancing, shouting worshippers.

  When my soul is a' resting in

  the presence of the Lord—

  I'll be sat-is-fied.

  Terry had lost track of Faren. She had edged away from and into the melee, he caught a glimpse of her face behind a bulky man whose shirt had ripped down the back. Faren was singing, too, clapping her hands, thoroughly at home. She had forgotten about him, about the fact that the hour was late and they were stranded. This development turned him sullen. He wondered how long the service, if that's what it could be called, would go on. The music was a pulverizing force, he was picking up vib
rations from the paneled wall at his back. He'd never seen people act like this; he was a little afraid of them, of mob ecstasy that seemed, despite his resistance, to be working its way into his own blood; his face tingled from the energy crashing wall to wall and -his mind began to feel bludgeoned. One rocking hymn Segued into another, it was as if there could be no end until everyone passed out in a heap on the floor, the last faint "Hallelujah!" whispered in the night.

  Faren's half brother Hickory Smith was the next to speak. With Bible in hand he rejoiced in the fellowship of the preachers assembled there, the solidarity of their belief in the church founded by Jesus on the rock of Peter.

  "'And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.' " Hickory Smith's voice was powerful, a match for thunder, the patter and then the slash of rain on the roof. His dark eyes had the off-center shine that Terry remembered from the photo in the gallery, as if more than one person occupied his body, and both were using his eyes simultaneously. Terry felt a creeping at the base of his spine but he couldn't look away from the preacher's face.

  "WE BELIEVE THE WORD OF GOD!" Hickory Smith shouted. And they responded.

  "HE THAT BELIEVETH AND IS BAPTIZED SHALL BE SAVED!"

  "Praise God! Holly-holly-holly-hollylujah!"

  "GOD HAS PUT THAT IN OUR HEARTS. AND WE BELIEVETH!

  "IN HIS NAME AND IN HIS BLOOD HE PURCHASED THE CHURCH FOR SINNERS! DO YOU BELIEVE IT!"

  "Thank you Jesus!"

  "WE SHALL HAVE VICTORY IN HIS NAME!"

  "WE SHALL HAVE POWER IN JESUS'S NAME. DO YOU BELIEVE IT!"

  "Praise God, praise God!"

  "NOW IN JESUS'S NAME, HALLELUJAH, SHALL WE CAST OUT DEVILS OF SICKNESS AND DISEASE!

  "NOW IN JESUS'S NAME, SHALL WE SPEAK IN TONGUES!

  "NOW IN JESUS'S NAME, IF WE DRINK OF ANY DEADLY POISON, IT SHALL NOT HURT US!"

  "Yea hallelujah!"

  The tambourines began again, a metallic sizzling to Terry's numbed ears. And handclapping. Every face a beacon of faith.

  "I BELIEVE IN THE WORD OF GOD! I BELIEVE IN HIS SIGNS. I BELIEVE IN WHATEVER TASK GOD PUTS FOR ME TO DO. BECAUSE I KNOW IF I'M FEELING WITH THE SPIRIT OF GOD IN MY HEART THEN NO HARM CAN COME TO ME, HALLELUJAH! DO YOU SAYYYYYYY HALLELUJAH?"

  The "jah" bitten off and pronounced "yah" after the long, sung "say"; and they responded like a wave smashing in, country voices in blended adulation, with the grit and strength to burnish the high gates of heaven, they had stature in their ecstasy. Terry saw for a moment the gleam of Faren's teeth between parted, half smiling lips, lips that had kissed him, he stood coldly alone in carnality amid the chaste and the cleansed. Her tousled dark head lolled. Her body was slumped and twisted downward as if something woeful at her feet exerted a pull, an influence: then she sprang erect in an excited, vital way: began to throb and swing to the rhythm of many spangled tambourines in palm-banging broadcast. The power that had enlivened her Terry found repellant, threatening. He yearned to rudely shove aside those who seemed clustered protectively around her, grab her by the arm and reclaim her from the unpleasantly indentured state she looked to be in, and, although it was storming outside, return them both to the solitude in which their affections had thrived. But once the impulse peaked and guttered, he felt less than bold, a prisoner outside the walls of rapture. He made no move.

  The lanterns hung from rafters swayed in the spray-laden wind coming through the open windows; the unsteady flames nearly touching the sides of the chimneys gradually blackened the glass, lowering the level of light in the church. Faces failed in the duskier corners while preacher Smith, in the forefront of other preachers, gleamed like a fisherman from the wetting-down he had received.

  "IF GOD SAYS FOR ME TO DO IT, I SHALL DRINK OF STRYCHNINE AND LYE, AND NO HARM SHALL COME TO ME, BECAUSE MY FAITH WILL SPARE ME!

  "IF GOD SAYS TO TAKE UP POISONOUS SERPENTS, THEN I SHALL HAVE NO FEAR, BECAUSE THE LORD JESUS CHRIST HAS CAST AWAY FEAR FROM MY HEART. GLORY TO GOD IN THE NAME OF JESUS, THEM THINGS IS DEADLY BUT I SHALL HAVE-A BOLLA BUBLUM SHABETH WALLA COSHEM NO FEAR! PRAISE JE-SUSSSSS!"

  Then they were singing.

  Well, some folks say a serpent

  is a man;

  There's a higher power.

  Those kind of people don't

  understand;

  'Cause there's a higher power.

  Hickory Smith resumed preaching; his cadence more staccato, voice rising thrilled while his face, always expressionless, settled into an even more trance-like mask, sweat or blown rain beaded on his skin, his white shirt drenched and transparent on a hard brown hairless torso that was webbed with vein and muscle, his nipples hard, small and dark like another pair of eyes long ago charred by fervor.

  "I LOVE THE LORD! HE'S BEEN UH GOOD TO ME! I KNOW I'VE GOT UH THE HOLY GHOST TONIGHT! I KNOW WE ARE ALL WITH SWEET JESUS TONIGHT! I'M NOT AFRAID UH WHEN IT'S THE LORD TELLIN' ME WHAT TO DO! PREACHERS, BRING 'EM ON OUT!"

  A woman sang in a pure lilting voice, but the words were gibberish; the musicians went their own way, wide-eyed, bearing down brutally to harvest a hymn, big holes worn in the soundboards of their old guitars; every second child had a tambourine batting against elbows or knees. Some of the preachers had knelt behind Smith, but not to pray. They were opening flat corrugated boxes with religious symbols painted on them. And in a violet burst of lightning Terry saw snakes.

  Bunches of dappled diamondback pied snakes, some nearly six feet in length and thick as a man's wrist. Some earthy, some ashen, a few with the liquid darkness of eels, all heatless as death. Writhing snakes in the hands of preachers, his stomach plunged to the level of his knees and he gasped in shock. No one was paying the slightest attention to him. No one could hear the sounds the timber rattlers were making, either, but a couple of them were vibrating their tails to a blur as they were lifted aloft, pointedly positioned inches from faces drowsily delighted in the opiate of yellow eyes.

  Snakes: everywhere: mouths their open mouths like many kinds of wounds, deep-raw, pink-healing, scarred scary white: snakes: limber clockworks winding tight the deathwatch hour despised but honored in the ritual: handlers with no rational means of defense, moving to music and some fiery internal beat, heads also moving mimicking the staring lazy lethal motions of the toned snake heads:

  Bodies pale underbellies all drawn with a fine needle cruising flowing snugly round flushed limbs necks bloodlines so near a bitten man might be dead in moments:

  (Will you say hallelujah?) thrashing, vomiting up the fatally tainted blood.

  (Thank you Jesus)

  But the guests of honor, to Terry's unbelieving eyes, did not strike, even as they were passed hand over hand to those who craved snakeflesh, the better to believe, to certify their faith.

  And not everyone took up serpents. Most of the preachers did, and a few members of the congregation. But one was (slowly) corning Terry's way, sinister tattooed overlong arm with a head and not a fist foremost, flat bald babyish head with flickering spirit tongue, godsame but inimical eyes, he was nearly paralyzed until a preacher claimed it for his own, adding it to the one already worn casually down to his waist like an untied necktie.

  Hickory Smith had a long rattlesnake on one arm. His outstretched steady hands held three more snakes.

  Suddenly Faren was there, as if Smith had summoned her telepathically to his side.

  Terry's mouth was open, but his throat had locked, he couldn't make a sound. Only his mind screamed at Faren.

  Don't!

  Thunder shook the little church. Lightning nearly blinded Terry.

  When he focused on Faren again, he saw a snake's spade head, bent rigidly to the horizontal and less than an inch from the bridge of her nose. She was staring, tame to the wildness she withheld, into the snake's complex, radiantly burning, oil-gre
en eyes. Terry almost fainted.

  A copperhead was entwined around her other arm, its head lifted slightly away from the pulse in her wrist, tongue flicking at the bared palm of her hand.

  Someone jostled against him in a frenzied jig. Terry caught a devastating whiff of bad teeth, grabbed his stomach, doubled over and projectile-vomited on the floor, something he hadn't done since he was a kid. His body was instantly cold and quivering, his mind filling with a dense blackness. He might have fallen in his own vomit, out cold, but lightning blasted a tree near the church, ripping off a heavy limb. The singing and shouting went on without pause. He recovered from the fainting spell, but the nausea hit him again, hemstitching his gut.

  When he was able to look up, dreading what he might see, Faren wasn't there anymore.

  His first thought was that she had been bitten and had fallen to the floor. But it was impossible for him to sort out exactly what was happening around the lectern.

  He shoved his way through the crowd of worshippers. Someone seized him roughly by the arm before he reached the spot where he'd last seen Faren. He looked around at Hickory Smith, who had given her snakes to handle. There was a stifling musk, from serpentine anal glands, but his own hands were empty now. Smith nodded curtly to the floor, where Terry was about to put his feet.

  A copperhead was inches from one shoe, masseteric muscles bulging ominously.

  Before Terry could react, a preacher stooped and softly picked up the loose snake.

  Terry looked around frantically, but Faren was gone.

  Gone where? She would have had to leave through one of the open windows; she hadn't had time to lay down the long snakes or pass them on to someone else, then make her way through the entire congregation, nearly a hundred people, to the front door. The only door, near which Terry had been standing when he was briefly but violently taken sick. He was sure of that: Faren could not have left by the front door.