Salvation on Sand Mountain

by Dennis Covington

  Bless him, Lord!

  “He said, ‘Just set your house in order!’ ”

  Amen!

  “So that’s what I did. I set my house in order. I got rid of that moonshine and marijuana. I told the devil to depart that place in the name of Jesus, and within a year I’d taken up my first serpent.”

  Amen.

  “We’ve got to set our house in order!” Charles said, and now he was leaning toward us, red-faced, with flecks of white spittle in the corners of his mouth. “We’re in the last day with the Lord, children! He won’t strive with man forever! He’s a merciful God, he’s a loving God, but you better believe he’s also a just God, and there will come a time when we’ll have to account for these lives we’ve led! We better put our house in order! ”

  Amen. Thank God. Bless the sweet name of Jesus.

  There were only thirteen people under that brush arbor, but it seemed like there were suddenly three hundred. They were jumping and shouting, and pretty soon Brother Carl was anointing Burma and Erma with oil, and Brother Charles had launched into “Jesus on My Mind” on his guitar, and J.L. and I had our tambourines going. There was so much racket that at first it was hard to hear what Aline was doing over in the corner by a length of dog wire that the morning glory vines had twined around. Her back was to us. Her hands were in the air, and she was rocking slowly from side to side, her face upturned and her voice quavering, “Akiii, akiii, akiii. Akiii, akiii, akiii....”

  It was the strangest sound I had ever heard. At first, it did not seem human. It sounded like the voice of a rare night bird, or some tiny feral mammal. And then the voice got louder, mounting up on itself, until it started to sound like that of a child who was lost and in great pain. But even as the hairs on my arm started to stand on end, the voice turned into something else, a sound that had pleasure in it as well as torment. Ecstasy, I would learn later, is excruciating, but I did not know that then.

  “Akiii, akiii, akiii....” The singing and praising elsewhere in the brush arbor had started to diminish. Brother Charles had stopped strumming his guitar. Brother Carl had put away his oil. Burma and Dorothea kept their hands raised, but except for an occasional amen or praise Jesus, the air fell silent around Aline’s voice. Everyone was listening to her now. I could not disentangle myself from the sound of her voice, the same syllables repeated with endless variation. At times, it seemed something barbed was being pulled from her throat; at other times, the sound was a clear stream flowing outward into thin air. Her voice seemed to be right in my ear. It was a sobbing. A panting after something she could not quite reach. And then it would be a coming to rest in some exquisite space, a place so tender it could not be touched without “Akiii, akiii, akiii....” The sun had set and the electric lights were not yet turned on, but the arbor seemed filled with a golden light. We were swaying in it, transfixed, with Aline silhouetted against the dog wire and the morning glory vines. All but her trembling voice was silent, or so it seemed, until I realized with horror that my tambourine was still going, vibrating against my leg, almost apart from me, as if it had a motive and direction of its own.

  My hand froze. It was as though I had been caught in some act of indecency. But Aline’s voice reacted with renewed desperation, “Akiii, akiii, akiii,” and so I let the tambourine have its own way, now louder and faster, until it almost burst into a song, and then softer and more slowly, until it resembled the buzzing of a rattlesnake in a serpent box. It anticipated every move that Aline’s voice made, and vice versa. The intimacy was unnerving: her voice and the tambourine, perfectly attuned to one another and moving toward the same end. I was unreasonably afraid that Charles would be angry with me. I didn’t yet know the full dimensions of passion. It was much later that I would come to understand what had gone on in that moment. The tambourine was simply accompanying Aline while she felt for and found God. And I mean “accompany” in its truest sense: “to occur with.” And nobody could predict when something like that might happen. Through the tambourine, I was occurring with her in the Spirit, and it was not of my own will.

  I cannot say how long the episode lasted. It seemed to go on for a very long time. J.L. turned the lights on at the end. The men hugged the men. The women hugged the women. Aline and I shook hands. If the snake handlers found anything unusual about our curious duet afterward, they never spoke directly to me about it. But I do know one thing: It was after that brush-arbor meeting on Sand Mountain that they started to call me Brother Dennis.

  5

  JOLO

  By late summer I was feeling comfortable among the handlers. In fact, I was getting restless in my home church in Birmingham, where I’d occasionally want to put my hands up in the air. I didn’t. But sometimes I’d tap my feet during the choir’s anthem or mumble an amen or two. And I was pretty much obsessed with snake handling, though I had not, in fact, handled one myself. When Jim and Melissa and I found ourselves at a party together, we’d get off in the corner and talk about the handlers, especially Aline McGlocklin, whose childlike beauty continued to arrest and mystify us. She always seemed to be on the verge of ecstasy. Sometimes, she said, the Lord would move on her in the ladies room at work. We’d never seen her take up a serpent, though, and we wondered if we ever would. Other friends in Birmingham started to ask about the services. Some of them wanted to go. But soon the brush-arbor meetings would be over. The nights would turn cool. It rains on Sand Mountain in the fall, and there’s fog. Without a church building of their own, the handlers would have to travel more often to Brother Carl’s church in Georgia, or to churches in East Tennessee, Kentucky, or West Virginia.

  “You going up to Jolo?” Brother Carl asked me after one of the brush-arbor meetings behind J.L.’s house. It was one of the last days of summer, a dry, lingering heat, and the fields around us had turned an exhausted shade of yellowish green.

  I shook my head. I hadn’t understood the question. The service had just ended, and I was watching Carl load snakes back into the bed of his truck.

  “Me and Carolyn are going up there,” Carl said. He hoisted a serpent box onto the tailgate and then slid it into the bed. Inside the box was a velvet-tailed timber rattler that he and Charles McGlocklin had both handled during the service that afternoon.

  “Charles and Aline are going, too,” he said, “if she can get off work.” Carl lifted the tailgate and secured it while a trio of curious children from J.L.’s neighborhood tried to peer into the boxes.

  “It’s a ten-hour drive,” he said to me, “but we like to take our time going up. You and Jim and Melissa ought to come.”

  That’s when I remembered Jolo was in West Virginia. There was a famous snake-handling church there.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “When is it?”

  “Labor Day weekend. It’s their twentieth annual homecoming. You’ll miss some good services if you don’t go,” Carl said. “They always have a lot of serpents in Jolo.” He stopped, smiled.

  It had never come up between us before, but I knew what was on the tip of his tongue: Maybe I’d take up a serpent in Jolo. It made me wonder why he’d want me to. What would be in it for him if I did?

  On the Friday of that Labor Day weekend, Jim, Melissa, and I left Birmingham in a driving rainstorm, the spent fury of Hurricane Andrew. It rained all the way to West Virginia, except for a spot in East Tennessee, where the clouds lifted momentarily to reveal the high green walls of the Appalachians. These mountains aren’t as raw and angular as the Rockies, or as mystical and remote as the Cascades. Instead, they seem mannered and familiar, predictable in the way they roll westward in alternating ridges and valleys. But in East Tennessee, the Appalachians converge in a chaos of intersecting planes. There, the mountains still look as wild and formidable as they must have to the first Europeans who entered the New World — entered it only, in ways, to become lost in it.

  In preparation for our trip to Jolo, I’d read David Hackett Fischer’s remarkable book Albion’s Seed, a treatise on patterns of i
mmigration to America from the British Isles. I had it in mind that in going back up the spine of the Appalachians toward Jolo, I’d be retracing the route the snake handlers’ ancestors had taken as they descended toward Alabama. I had not yet come to understand that these were my ancestors too.

  Fischer says that most of the immigrants who settled the Appalachians arrived in waves from North Britain during the middle of the eighteenth century. Predominantly Protestant and poor, many of them had migrated first to Ireland, where they felt trapped between the contempt of their own church hierarchy and the hostility of Ireland’s Catholic majority. But unlike some of the earlier immigrants to America, the Scotch-Irish, or Anglo-Irish, as they sometimes preferred to be called, were not fleeing religious persecution. Instead, their motives were primarily economic, a reaction to high rents, low wages, and scarcity of food. Their flight to America, though, suggested biblical themes.

  “On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand and cast a wish ful eye,” they would sing, “to Canaan’s fair and happy land where my possessions lie. I am bound for the promised land, I am bound for the promised land, oh who will come and go with me? I am bound for the promised land.”

  That they survived the ocean crossing was itself a triumph, for the mortality rate during such ventures approached that of the slave trade. Like most new arrivals, the survivors faced discrimination because of their relative poverty and their odd appearance and behavior. The Scotch-Irish had a reputation for being noisy, quarrelsome, and proud. They were easy targets for ridicule in the streets of Philadelphia and the other eastern seaports where they first disembarked. The men, lean and angular, dressed in sackcloth shirts and baggy pants. They stood out among the neatly dressed Quakers in leather breeches and carefully cut doublets. The young Scotch-Irish women were equally inappropriate in their tightwaisted skirts, openly sensual by some accounts. The Quaker women wore handkerchiefs to cover their bodices.

  The Scotch-Irish were encouraged by the more sedate Quakers to seek land on the western frontier, and after the coldness and clamor of the cities, the new immigrants, with names like Rutherford, Graham, Armstrong, and Bankhead, must have ached for familiar terrain, places like the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, or the Sequatchie and Grasshopper Valleys of Tennessee: long, sheltered valleys between hills with rocky outcroppings, settings that might remind them of the starkly beautiful border regions they had left behind in southern Scotland and northern England. The climate here would be temperate, the water plentiful, and once the trees had been cleared, the land might roll beneath their feet as it had in the shadows of the Cheviot Hills. But to get to these interior valleys, the immigrants had to cross the mountains, a journey with dangers we are unable to fully appreciate now.

  Fortunately, these were a people accustomed to privation and sudden violence. Fischer says their heritage as border dwellers had turned them into tight-knit warrior clans that feuded endlessly over matters of real or perceived violations of honor. In their homeland, leadership had been bestowed on those with the strength and cunning to enforce it. Other forms of authority were rejected, whether from the local landowner, the state, or the church, so that even minor theological disputes became occasions for war. A particularly bloody rebellion was waged by an anticlerical Presbyterian sect called Cameronians, after their leader, Richard Cameron. Unable to defeat the Cameronians in battle, the British authorities eventually made use of their temperaments by enlisting them in the army to fight against Roman Catholics in the Scottish Highlands.

  Not surprisingly, says Fischer, the culture that arose in the Appalachian mountains resurrected the character of that life along the border between Scotland and England. The Scotch-Irish had brought few material possessions with them, but they did bring their feuds, their language, and their love of music, strong drink, and sexual adventure. They also brought their fear of outsiders and their hostility toward clerics and established religions. Their own brand of Anglicanism or Presbyterianism would have seemed peculiar in the population centers of the Atlantic seaboard, but it was appropriate for life on the frontier. They sometimes called themselves People of the New Light, to distance themselves from the formalities and rigidity of Calvinism. The established churches emphasized good works or election as the means of salvation. But the New Lights celebrated what they called “free grace” and often worshiped outdoors under the stars, a practice that would culminate in the phenomenon of Cane Ridge.

  The rigors of mountain life came to suit the Scotch-Irish, and instead of coming out of the mountains into the fertile valleys, many of the new settlers stayed, eking out a subsistence from the thin soil of the highland slopes. They grew their own produce and slaughtered their own livestock. They built their own cabins and furniture. They wove their own clothes, made their own whiskey. They were poor but selfsufficient. And although most, by the beginning of the twentieth century, had been lured into the coal fields, the mill towns of the Piedmont, or the industrial cities of the Midwest, many never found their way out of the mountains, or found their way out too late to apprehend the culture that had grown up in the promised land around them. Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, these descendants of fierce Scotch-Irish immigrants awoke from their sojourn in the mountains to face the bitter reality of an industrialized and secularized society. Their sense of purposeful labor was eroded in the mines and factories. Their formerly close-knit families fractured. And they confronted a largely urban culture that appeared to have lost its concept of the sacred. The hill people had awoken to discover that the new Eden they’d inherited was doomed — mechanized and despoiled beyond recognition — and that they were lost in the very heart of it.

  All along the highways through Tennessee and southwest Virginia, the signs were everywhere: Crazy Joe’s Fireworks, Jack Daniel’s whiskey, drag racing, turkey shoots, and barbecue. The South they suggested was straight out of the movies — idiosyncratic, lazy, restless, and self-absorbed. And that was what Jim and Melissa and I talked about on the drive, the discrepancy between the South of the popular imagination and the one we lived and worked in every day. But once the road narrowed and entered the mountains, the signs disappeared, replaced by mine tipples, mantrips, and long lines of train cars filled with coal that steamed in the rain. The last motels and hospital were at Grundy, Virginia, a mining town on the lip of a winding river between mountains so steep and irrational, they must have blocked most of the sun most of the day. It is difficult to imagine how children can grow up in such a place without carrying narrowed horizons into the rest of their lives.

  But Grundy was an oasis compared with the country between it and Jolo. Jim had taken the wheel on that stretch, and I was able to see the landscape for what it was. The topography was like a crumpled sheet of tin. And in that driving rain, at night, the road without guardrails seemed to be a metaphor for our condition. We were barreling down a rain-slick mountain after ten hours solid on the road, and the safe haven at the end of our journey was a place where strangers would be picking up rattlesnakes and drinking strychnine out of mason jars. We wondered if we’d lost our minds. Despite the fact that all three of us love danger, this was a little much. Plus, we were lost. When we finally came out of the mountains, we stopped at the first frame meeting house with a crowd. It sounded Holiness from the outside, all light and hubbub and an amplified nasal voice, but when I got out of the van to investigate, I discovered that it was simply a Friday night auction and Bingo game. I asked a table of players near the open door if they knew where I could find a snake-handling church.

  “A what?” asked a woman in a United Mine Workers sweatshirt. The others at her table glanced up in alarm, and I got back in the van.

  Farther on down the road, we found a man at a gas station who had heard of the church and could give us general directions. His name, Doyle, was stitched on his shirt pocket, and his forearm sported a tattoo of a sea monster. “Before you cross the bridge, take a right,” he told us. “You’ll see it up the road a ways. I wouldn’t get n
ear those snakes if I were you.”

  Doyle’s directions were so vague that we missed the church on the first pass, but saw it doubling back, a small frame building perched on the edge of a ravine.

  We parked and got out.

  It was still drizzling. The door of the church was open. Yellow light poured out onto the parked cars. The sanctuary had paneled walls and ceiling fans. Gravel crunched under our feet as we passed a dark man in a late-model car. He cupped his hand to light a cigarette. Near the front door of the church we could see the rusted remains of a car that lay suspended just over the edge of the ravine in a net of kudzu and sweet gum.

  Inside the church, the air smelled of camphor and damp wool. Nobody in the congregation looked back at us, and I didn’t see anyone I recognized right off the bat. There was no sign yet of Charles and Aline. A few other photographers were present, though, so Jim and Melissa found seats near them and got their cameras ready. But just before I sat down, on a pew three away from the front, I saw Carl Porter at the front, far right. I caught Carl’s eye, and when he smiled, his glasses glinted in the overhead lights. Carolyn wasn’t beside him, so I looked around the sanctuary until I saw her near the back. She nodded and waved. Her red hair had been cut and styled, and she was wearing a high-necked dress trimmed in lace. Carolyn didn’t handle often, but when she did, it was with frightful abandon. At the last homecoming at Carl’s church in Georgia, the snakes had been piled up on the pulpit. Carolyn picked up the entire pile. A rattlesnake struck at her and missed, but it was not so much the close call as Carolyn’s reckless passion that unnerved us. Red hair flying, speaking in tongues, she had lifted up the pile of snakes to eye level and shouted at them until her face turned crimson, and then she had dropped them back onto the pulpit with such force that Carl had to come over and straighten them up.