Salvation on Sand Mountain

by Dennis Covington

  For once, Jim and I were early. We stepped up on a cement block to get through the back doorway of the church. The door itself was off its hinges, and none of the windows in the church had screens. There were no cushions on the pews and no ornaments of any kind, except a portrait of Jesus etched into a mirror behind the pulpit and a vase of plastic flowers on the edge of the piano bench, where a boy with a withered hand sat staring at the keys. We took our places on a back pew and watched the handlers arrive. They greeted each other with the holy kiss, women with women, men with men, as prescribed by Paul in Romans 16. Among them was the legendary Punkin Brown, the evangelist who I’d been told would wipe the sweat off his brow with rattlesnakes. Jamie Coots from Kentucky and Allen Williams from Tennessee were also there. They sat beside Punkin on the deacons’ bench. All three were young and heavyset, the sons of preachers, and childhood friends. Punkin and Jamie both wore scowls, as though they were waiting for somebody to cross their paths in an unhappy way. Allen Williams, though, looked serene. Allen’s father had died drinking strychnine in 1973, and his brother had died of snakebite in 1991. Maybe he thought he didn’t have anything more to lose. Or maybe he was just reconciled to losing everything he had. Within six months of sitting together on the deacons’ bench at the Old Rock House Church, Jamie, Allen, and Punkin would all be bit.

  The church continued to fill with familiar faces, many from what used to be The Church of Jesus with Signs Following in Scottsboro, and the music began without an introduction of any kind. James Hatfield of Old Straight Creek, a Trinitarian church on the mountain, was on drums. My red-haired friend Cecil Esslinder from Scottsboro was on guitar, grinning and tapping his feet. Cecil’s wife, Carolyn, stood in the very middle of the congregation, facing backward, as was her habit, to see who might come in the back way. Also in the congregation were Bobbie Sue Thompson, twins Burma and Erma, J.L. Dyal and his wife and in-laws, and just about the whole Summerford clan. The only ones missing were Charles and Aline McGlocklin. Charles was still recovering from neck surgery on an old injury, but I knew from the conversation we’d had in New Hope that even if he’d been well, he wouldn’t have come.

  One woman I didn’t recognize told me she was from Detroit, Michigan. This came as some surprise, and her story seemed equally improbable. She said her husband used to work in the casinos in Las Vegas, and when he died she moved to Alabama and started handling rattlesnakes at the same church on Lookout Mountain where the lead singer of the group Alabama used to handle. “Didn’t you see the photo?” she asked. “It was in the National Enquirer.”

  I told her I’d missed that one.

  Children were racing down the aisles. High foreheads. Eyes far apart. Gaps between their front teeth. They all looked like miniature Glenn Summerfords. Maybe they were. He had at least seven children by his first wife, and all of them were old enough to have children of their own. I started to wonder if there were any bad feelings among the Summerfords about the way Brother Carl Porter had refused to let them send the church offerings to Glenn in prison.

  About that time, Brother Carl himself walked in with a serpent box containing the biggest rattlesnake I’d ever seen. Carl smelled of Old Spice and rattlesnake and something else underneath: a pleasant smell, like warm bread and apples. I associated it with the Holy Ghost. The handlers had told me that the Holy Ghost had a smell, a “sweet savor,” and I had begun to think I could detect it on people and in churches, even in staid, respectable churches like the one I went to in Birmingham. Anyway, that was what I smelled on Brother Carl that day as he talked about the snake in the box. “I just got him today,” he said. “He’s never been in church before.” Carl looked over his glasses at me and smiled. He held the serpent box up to my face and tapped the screen until the snake started rattling good.

  “Got your name on him,” he said to me.

  A shiver went up my spine, but I just shook my head and grinned.

  “Come on up to the front,” he said. I followed him and sat on the first pew next to J.L. Dyal, but I made a mental note to avoid Carl’s eyes during the service and to stay away from that snake of his.

  Billy Summerford’s wife, Joyce, led the singing. She was a big woman with a voice that wouldn’t quit. “Remember how it felt, when you walked out of the wilderness, walked out of the wilderness, walked out of the wilderness. Remember how it felt, when you walked out of the wilderness ...” It was one of my favorite songs because it had a double meaning now. There was the actual wilderness in the Old Testament that the Israelites were led out of, and the spiritual wilderness that was its referent, the condition of being lost. But there was also the wilderness that the New World became for my father’s people. I don’t mean the mountains. I mean the America that grew up around them, that tangled thicket of the heart.

  “Remember how it felt, when you walled out of the wilderness ...” My throat tightened as I sang. I remembered how it had felt when I’d sobered up in 1983. It’s not often you get a second chance at life like that. And I remembered the births of my girls, the children Vicki and I had thought we’d never be able to have. Looking around at the familiar faces in the congregation, I figured they were thinking about their own wildernesses and how they’d been delivered out of them. I was still coming out of mine. It was a measure of how far I’d come, that I’d be moved nearly to tears in a rundown Holiness church on Sand Mountain. But my restless and stubborn intellect was still intact. It didn’t like what it saw, a crowd of men dancing up to the serpent boxes, unclasping the lids, and taking out the poisonous snakes. Reason told me it was too early in the service. The snakes hadn’t been prayed over enough. There hadn’t even been any preaching yet, just Billy Summerford screaming into a microphone while the music swirled around us like a fog. But the boys from Tennessee and Kentucky had been hungry to get into the boxes. Soon, Punkin Brown was shouting at his snake, a big black-phase timber rattler that he had draped around his neck. Allen Williams was offering his copperhead up like a sacrifice, hands outstretched. But Brother Carl had the prize, and everyone seemed to know it. It was a yellow-phase timber, thick and melancholy, as big as timber rattlers come. Carl glanced at me, but I wouldn’t make eye contact with him. I turned away. I walked to the back of the church and took a long drink of water from the bright yellow cooler propped up against a portrait of Jesus with his head on fire.

  “Who knows what this snake is thinking?” Carl shouted. “God knows! God understands the mind of this snake!” And when I turned back around, Carl had laid the snake down and was treading barefoot on it from tail to head, as though he were walking a tightrope. Still, the snake didn’t bite. I had heard about this, but never seen it before. The passage was from Luke: Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you. Then Carl picked the snake back up and draped it around his neck. The snake seemed to be looking for a way out of its predicament. Carl let it nuzzle into his shirt. Then the snake pulled back and cocked its head, as if in preparation to strike Carl’s chest. Its head was as big as a child’s hand.

  Help him, Jesus! someone yelled above the din. Instead of striking, the snake started to climb Carl’s sternum toward his collarbone. It went up the side of his neck and then lost interest and fell back against his chest.

  The congregation was divided into two camps now, the men to the left, with the snakes, the women to the right, with each other. In front of Carl, one of the men suddenly began jumping straight up and down, as though he were on a pogo stick. Down the aisle he went and around the sanctuary. When he returned, he collapsed at Carl’s feet. One of the Summerford brothers attended to him there by soaking his handkerchief with olive oil and dabbing it against the man’s forehead until he sat up and yelled, “Thank God!”

  In the meantime, in the corner where the women had gathered, Joyce Summerford’s sister, Donna, an attractive young woman in a lime green dress, was laboring in the spirit with a cataleptic friend. She circled
the friend, eyeing her contortions carefully, and then, as if fitting her into an imaginary dress, she clothed her in the spirit with her hands, an invisible tuck here, an invisible pin there, making sure the spirit draped well over the flailing arms. It took her a while. Both of the women were drenched in sweat and stuttering in tongues by the time they finished.

  “They say we’ve gone crazy!” Brother Carl shouted above the chaos. He was pacing in front of the pulpit, the enormous rattlesnake balanced now across his shoulder. “Well, they’re right!” he cried. “I’ve gone crazy! I’ve gone Bible crazy! I’ve got the papers here to prove it!” And he waved his worn Bible in the air. “Some people say we’re just a bunch of fanatics!”

  Amen. Thank God.

  “Well, we are! Hai-i-salemos-ah-cahn-ne-hi-yee! Whew! That last one nearly took me out of here!”

  It’s not true that you become used to the noise and confusion of a snake-handling Holiness service. On the contrary, you become enmeshed in it. It is theater at its most intricate — improvisational, spiritual jazz. The more you experience it, the more attentive you are to the shifts in the surface and the dark shoals underneath. For every outward sign, there is a spiritual equivalent. When somebody falls to his knees, a specific problem presents itself, and the others know exactly what to do, whether it’s oil for a healing, or a prayer cloth thrown over the shoulders, or a devil that needs to be cast out. The best, of course, the simplest and cleanest, is when someone gets the Holy Ghost for the first time. The younger the worshiper, the easier it seems to be for the Holy Ghost to descend and speak — lips loosened, tongue flapping, eyes rolling backward in the head. It transcends the erotic when a thirteen-year-old girl gets the Holy Ghost. The older ones often take time. I once saw an old man whose wife had gotten the Holy Ghost at a previous service. He wanted it bad for himself, he said. Brother Charles McGlocklin started praying with him before the service even started, and all through it, the man was in one attitude or another at the front of the church — now lying spread-eagled on the floor, while a half dozen men prayed over him and laid on hands, now up and running from one end of the sanctuary to the other, now twirling, now swooning, now collapsing once again on the floor, his eyes like the eyes of a horse that smells smoke, the unknown tongue spewing from his mouth. He got the Holy Ghost at last! He got the Holy Ghost! you think, until you see him after the service eating a pimiento cheese sandwich downstairs. His legs are crossed. He’s brushing the crumbs from his lap. He agrees it was a good service all right, but it sure would have been better if he’d only gotten the Holy Ghost. You can never get enough of the Holy Ghost. Maybe that’s what he means. You can never exhaust the power when the Spirit comes down, not even when you take up a snake, not even when you take up a dozen of them. The more faith you expend, the more power is released. It’s an inexhaustible, eternally renewable resource. It’s the only power some of these people have.

  So the longer you witness it, unless you just don’t get into the spontaneous and unexpected, the more you become a part of it. I did, and the handlers could tell. They knew before I did what was going to happen. They saw me angling in. They were already making room for me in front of the deacons’ bench. As I said, I’d always been drawn to danger. Alcohol. Psychedelics. War. If it made me feel good, I’d do it. I was always up for a little trip. I figured if I could trust my guide, I’d be all right. I’d come back to earth in one piece. I wouldn’t really lose my mind. That’s what I thought, anyway. I couldn’t be an astronaut, but there were other things I could do and be. So I got up there in the middle of the handlers. J.L. Dyal, dark and wiry, was standing on my right; a cleancut boy named Steve Frazier on my left. Who was it going to be? Carl’s eyes were saying, you. And yes, it was the big rattler, the one with my name on it, acrid-smelling, carnal, alive. And the look in Carl’s eyes seemed to change as he approached me. He was embarrassed. The snake was all he had, his eyes seemed to say. But as low as it was, as repulsive, if I took it, I’d be possessing the sacred. Nothing was required except obedience. Nothing had to be given up except my own will. This was the moment. I didn’t stop to think about it. I just gave in. I stepped forward and took the snake with both hands. Carl released it to me. I turned to face the congregation and lifted the rattlesnake up toward the light. It was moving like it wanted to get up even higher, to climb out of that church and into the air. And it was exactly as the handlers had told me. I felt no fear. The snake seemed to be an extension of myself. And suddenly there seemed to be nothing in the room but me and the snake. Everything else had disappeared. Carl, the congregation, Jim — all gone, all faded to white. And I could not hear the earsplitting music. The air was silent and still and filled with that strong, even light. And I realized that I, too, was fading into the white. I was losing myself by degrees, like the incredible shrinking man. The snake would be the last to go, and all I could see was the way its scales shimmered one last time in the light, and the way its head moved from side to side, searching for a way out. I knew then why the handlers took up serpents. There is power in the act of disappearing; there is victory in the loss of self. It must be close to our conception of paradise, what it’s like before you’re born or after you die.

  I came back in stages, first with the recognition that the shouting I had begun to hear was coming from my own mouth. Then I realized I was holding a rattlesnake, and the church rushed back with all its clamor, heat, and smell. I remembered Carl and turned toward where I thought he might be. I lowered the snake to waist level. It was an enormous animal, heavy and firm. The scales on its side were as rough as calluses. I could feel its muscles rippling beneath the skin. I was aware it was not a part of me now and that I couldn’t predict what it might do. I extended it toward Carl. He took it from me, stepped to the side, and gave it in turn to J.L.

  “Jesus,” J.L. said. “Oh, Jesus.” His knees bent, his head went back. I knew it was happening to him too.

  Then I looked around and saw that I was in a semicircle of handlers by the deacons’ bench. Most had returned their snakes to the boxes, but Billy Summerford, Glenn’s bucktoothed cousin, still had one, and he offered it to me, a medium-sized canebrake that was rattling violently. I took the snake in one hand without thinking. It was smaller than the first, but angrier, and I realized circumstances were different now. I couldn’t seem to steer it away from my belt line. Fear had started to come back to me. I remembered with sudden clarity what Brother Charles had said about being careful who you took a snake from. I studied the canebrake as if I were seeing it for the first time and then gave it back to Billy Summerford. He passed it to Steve Frazier, the young man on my left. I watched Steve cradle it, curled and rattling furiously in his hands, and then I walked out the side door of the church and onto the steps, where Bobbie Sue Thompson was clutching her throat and leaning against the green shingles of the church.

  “Jesus,” she said. “Jesus, Jesus.”

  It was a sunny, fragrant day, with high-blown clouds. I looked into Bobbie Sue’s face. Her eyes were wide and her mouth hooked at the corner. “Jesus,” she said.

  I thought at first she was in terrible pain, but then I realized she wasn’t. “Yes. I know. Jesus,” I said.

  At the conclusion of the service, Brother Carl reminded everyone there would be dinner on the grounds. Most of the women had already slipped out, to arrange their casseroles and platters of ham on the butcher paper that covered the tables the men had set up under the trees. Jim and I waited silently in line for fried chicken, sweet potatoes, and black bottom pie, which we ate standing up among a knot of men who were discussing the merits of various coon dogs they’d owned. “The next time you handle a snake,” Jim whispered, “try to give me a little warning. I ran out of film.”

  I told him I’d try, but that it was not something I’d be likely to do in the future, or be able to predict even if I did. There was more I wanted to tell him, but I didn’t know how, and besides, I figured he knew. We’d lain in a ditch together thinking we were dead
men. It was pretty much the same thing, I guessed. That kind of terror and joy.

  “This one I had, it was a cur,” said Gene Sherbert, a handler with a flattop and a scar. “He treed two coons at the same time.”

  “Same tree?” one of the other men asked.

  “Naw,” Gene said. “It was two separate trees, and that fool dog nearly run himself to death going back and forth.”

  The men laughed. “Was that Sport?” another man asked.

  “Sport was Brother Glenn’s dog,” Gene said, and he turned his attention back to his plate.

  I remembered then that Gene Sherbert was the man Glenn Summerford had accused Darlene of running with. I tried to imagine them in bed together — his flattop, her thick auburn hair. Gene was also Brother Carl’s cousin. He’d kept the church in Kingston going while Carl did drugs and chased women on the Coast. Where was Brother Carl? I found a trash bag for my paper plate and went off to find him. I still felt like I had not come back all the way from the handling. My feet were light, my head still encased in an adrenaline cocoon. The air in the oak grove was golden. A breeze moved in the leaves and sent a stack of paper plates tumbling across the grass. On the breeze I heard snatches of a sweet and gentle melody. It was coming from a circle of handlers at the edge of the grove. Some were standing, some leaning against cars, some squatting on their heels in the dirt. As I got closer, I saw that Cecil Esslinder, the redheaded guitar player from Scottsboro, was sitting in the center of the circle. He was playing a dulcimer under the trees.

  I stopped and listened. I’d never heard music more beautiful. It was filled with remorse and desire. When it ended, I asked Cecil what song he’d been playing. He shrugged. A hymn about Jesus. I asked how long he’d been playing the dulcimer.