Salvation on Sand Mountain

by Dennis Covington

  “Who do you think that Wicked One is?” the man repeated. He waved a sweat bee away from his forehead.

  Wayne’s eyes blinked rapidly. “I don’t know, brother,” he said.

  “Is it anybody in particular?”

  “It’s a person,” Wayne said slowly. “I don’t know who it is, but I know somebody’s in trouble.” He finished his lemonade, excused himself, and went on back up the hill toward the church, where Brother Bill Pelfrey and Brother Carl were coming down the steps, a serpent box in each hand.

  The man in the tropical shirt smiled and introduced himself as Elvis Presley Saylor. “That was me he was talking about,” he said. “I’m the Wicked One.”

  “You’re the Wicked One?” I asked.

  He looked me in the eye and said, “That’s who they say I am.”

  The times when I most felt I was closing in on the truth about the handlers, I also felt I was somehow being led by the Spirit. I don’t believe it is a conceit to think you are being led by the Spirit. It may be a conceit to say such a thing publicly. But if you accept the idea of a universe set into motion by an intelligent hand, then it seems to me you need to consider the possibility that the hand may still be at work in its movement. Things happen. But chance and coincidence don’t mean much to me anymore. Elvis Presley Saylor is an example of what I’m talking about. I believe there was a reason I ran into him that day. It’s an idea I never would have entertained a year or two ago. But among the handlers, I’d learned not to dismiss anything as meaningless. Mystery, I’d read somewhere, is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.

  I lost Elvis after the service that day in Kentucky. I assume he joined the rest of us at the dinner held outdoors under stretches of bright blue canvas in the backyard of a nearby house, but I didn’t see him there. The tables groaned under the fried chicken, potato salad, and field peas. Fleshy red tomatoes. Corn bread burned on the bottom. Fried corn. String beans. Collard greens. Platters layered with thick pink slices of ham. Homemade butter pickles. Olives. Iced tea. Ambrosia and lemon meringue pie for dessert. It was a chance for the handlers from five or six states to swap stories and renew acquaintances. The favorite topic of conversation seemed to be the crazy little yellow rattler that had almost gotten Bill Pelfrey that day. Otherwise, it was just another church social. But for the first time it struck me how small the circle of handlers actually was. At least this circle. By now I’d been to homecomings in Georgia, Alabama, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and I had been seeing the same faces wherever I went: Dewey Chafin, Carl Porter, Bud Gregg, the Summerford brothers, Punkin Brown, Jamie Coots, Gene Sherbert. While the churches themselves are not associational — there is no denomination, for instance, of snake-handling churches, and their beliefs often seem irreconcilably incompatible — the handlers and their families visit each other’s churches regularly and even marry into them. The congregations are not connected in any organizational sense, but they are often connected by blood. Bill Pelfrey’s daughter, Diane, wound up marrying a cousin of Punkin Brown’s. Jimmy Summerford’s daughter, Melissa, had married the son of Bud Gregg, pastor of the church in Morristown, Tennessee. Gracie McAllister’s son, Kirby Hollins, had married into the Elkins clan. On Sand Mountain, the snake-handling Millers and Mitchells and Hatfields were all tangled up together by marriage. The snake-handling congregations, widely separated by geography, often seem to constitute a series of extended families. Scholars call them “stem families.” The Elkins in West Virginia, the Saylors (no relation to Elvis) in Kentucky, the Greggs in Tennessee, and the Mitchells and Summerfords in Alabama. And as in any clan, the outsider, particularly the interloping male, is kept at bay.

  I felt oddly detached at the dinner that day. By now, I’d heard all the patterns of small talk, the snake-trading stories, the disguised bravado. Jimmy Summerford invited me to a homecoming at Old Straight Creek on Sand Mountain. He said they hadn’t handled there much in recent years, and he and some of the others from Old Rock House in Macedonia were trying to help them out. “I guess they got a little slack after their pastor got bit and died,” he said.

  “I guess so,” I replied.

  Verlin Short, of Mayking, Kentucky, began reminiscing about his father, who was out of snake handling for the moment, but might get back in at any time. In particular, Verlin remembered with a certain wistfulness one of the last times he’d seen his father handle. “He had a rattler across his glasses, I don’t know how many rattlesnakes he had in his hand, along with some southern copperheads, and he had that green tree viper that just crawled up there on his head like a crown.”

  Punkin Brown passed along the latest on two famous Tennessee snake-handling preachers, one of whom had quit handling and was living now in what used to be his church. The other had also denied the faith. “He’s been married three times,” Punkin said, “the last time to a sixteen-year-old girl. He said the Lord told him to do it.”

  Not even gossip aroused my interest, though, as it once had. Without knowing what I had missed, I was vaguely dissatisfied. Everybody else seemed to be riding on the high of the service. I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t. I left the dinner earlier than I’d intended, gassed the car up in Middlesboro, filled myself up with coffee, and that’s when I saw him thumbing along the side of the road, Elvis Presley Saylor. The Wicked One. The tropical-print shirt had given him away.

  I pulled onto the shoulder, and Elvis hopped in the front. All he had with him was his King James Thompson Reference Bible. He said he was trying to get home to Harlan, Kentucky, and if I wasn’t headed in that direction, he’d understand. I told him I wasn’t headed in any particular direction, except that I needed to wind up in Akron, Ohio, the next day to do a magazine article. I’d be happy to drop him off in Harlan if he’d show me the way.

  Elvis smiled. “I just asked the Lord, if it was his will, that somebody would pick me up and give me a lift,” he said.

  We rode in silence for a while. Occasionally I’d glance at Elvis to confirm my suspicion that he looked different from the other snake handlers in pretty much the same way that I looked different. His hair was longer, he seemed to still have most of his teeth, and his clothes, although basic, betrayed at least some weakness for the worldly. I couldn’t help but ask about his name.

  It wasn’t something he seemed eager to talk about. “My daddy named me,” Elvis said. “He was a bootlegger, worked in the mines. I got five brothers and five sisters, all half. My dad was the type that went with one woman for a while, and then another. I reckon every one of us was named after somebody famous.”

  Elvis himself had worked in the mines for fifteen years, until an injury forced him to quit. He said he had a pinched nerve in his back and a case of black lung disease. He’d signed up for benefits and hoped a check was coming soon. He’d been a bridge man, a belt man, and a wall builder who sealed rooms so air would flow toward the face of the coal. He’d set pumps, jacks, and timbers. He’d shoveled a lot of coal. But unlike many of the other miners, he’d never taken to drink. “From what I’ve seen of drinking,” he said, “I don’t want no part of it.”

  We were winding through spectacular country, steep green mountains and precipitous ravines. Where the highway bisected the mountains, the cuts revealed layers of gray limestone and black seams of coal.

  “I had a kind of bad experience back there,” Elvis said, “but you know that. I was jumped on, told not even to talk to you. What they’re doing is taking sides in a marital problem that is none of their business.”

  I asked him what had happened.

  “My wife, Brenda, is wanting a divorce,” he said. “They’re teaching her that since I’ve been married before, it’s fornication, and she’s got to get out of the marriage.”

  Elvis opened the Bible and thumbed through it, as if searching for the appropriate text. The pages were underlined and highlighted in several different colors. Handwritten notes filled the margins. “The Word doesn�
�t back that up,” he said, “but they’re filling her head with it anyway.” The irony, he said, was that his first wife had run off with a snake-handling preacher.

  Elvis had an exceptionally quiet voice, but tuned to that East Kentucky dissonance, so that it seemed to come from a broken instrument. “They’re saying I’m the devil,” he said. “Even Punkin Brown took a fit, almost a fighting fit against me, and I don’t even know the man that well.”

  It didn’t surprise me that Punkin Brown’s name had come up. There was something dark and brooding about Punkin. He had an admirable knowledge of the Bible, but his sermons, preached in a guttural monotone while he stalked in front of the congregation with a rattlesnake draped over one shoulder, had always struck me as short on grace and long on tribulation. Of all the handlers I’d run into, Punkin Brown seemed to be the one most mired in the Old Testament, in the enumerated laws and the blood lust of the patriarchs. He didn’t have much to say about redemption. And he was unpredictable and combative, the handlers’ equivalent of a mad monk.

  “Punkin prophesied once that I was the god Baal walking in the flesh. He said I was coming in there as a trap for my wife to deceive the church.” Elvis shook his head. “I come to find out that he was wanting my wife, and he’s married and got kids.”

  The shadows thrown by the mountains were black and razor-sharp across the roadway. I realized how much I’d always hated this about churches, the inevitable darkness on the underside of any human enterprise. Envy. Bitterness. The division that always seems to doom even the best of intentions. I was guilty of all that, too.

  “I didn’t even know what Baal was,” Elvis said, “and my wife told me to look it up, and I looked it up, and Baal is a stone idol or something. There’s also a Baal spirit, of false religion. But I don’t prophesy, and I believe in the apostles’ teachings, so according to the Word, I couldn’t match up to be that false prophet.”

  He turned his Bible this way and that in the fading light, his restless fingers moving across the page. He was trying to find it, the key word or phrase that could defeat his accusers and reinstate him in the family of faith. All at once the dimensions of Elvis’s tragedy struck me. He was an outcast from his own people. He had been prophesied against, driven away, accused of blasphemy and idolatry, of breaking the sacred laws. He was an exile from the only religious establishment this corner of the world had. Like Jesus.

  “Not too long ago they prophesied to me that I was a son of God,” he said. “Now they’re saying I’m the devil. But if you’ve got the spirit of God in you, you won’t be prophesying one thing one day and another thing the next day. The Lord’s straight. He’s got a map. He doesn’t change his mind from day to day. He’s the same today and forever.”

  Amen. I wanted to tell him that I understood what he was going through and that he was right. God would never turn on him the way they had. But who was I to talk? What did I know? And what kind of weird transformation had I been going through? Why did I think the Holy Spirit had a hand in this? Who was I kidding? Had I lost my mind?

  “There’s a lot of foolishness goes on in serpent-handling churches, but that doesn’t change the fact that serpent handling’s right,” Elvis said. “I’ve handled eight or nine times. I’ve drunk the strychnine. When the Spirit of God comes on me, it’s like electricity. It doesn’t make my hair stand up, but it goes through my body. And the fruits of the Spirit is how you know true love, and that’s your evidence of salvation.”

  Preach it.

  “Well, I hope I haven’t brought my personal problems into our conversation too much,” he said.

  I told him he hadn’t.

  “A lot of people get obsessed with serpents,” he added. “They may accept you at first, but if you see something that’s not right and mention it, they’ll prophesy against you or say you’re lost.”

  I told him I’d remember that. It was nearly dark when we got to the house he still shared with Brenda, although he said he had to sleep in the basement now. “When you pray, pray that God’ll work things out for me,” he said.

  I told him I would.

  “If we can’t love one another here on earth, there ain’t no way we can make it to heaven,” he said. “Were you looking for me today, at the dinner?”

  I told him I was.

  “It was meant to be, then,” he said. “I’m glad you came along. ”

  I watched Elvis walk toward the house, his shirt a bright piece of color against an otherwise dark landscape. Then I made a U-turn and retraced the route back through the mountains. The radio stations were few and far between, but occasionally I could pick up snatches of an East Kentucky boy preacher. There are wells without water, he said, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved forever. I thought about Elvis, and the way he had been ostracized. What I didn’t know was that what had happened to him was about to happen to me. At the time, I just turned the radio off when I got to the interstate that would take me to Akron, the same one that would eventually lead me home.

  11

  THE WEDDING

  My career as a snake-handling preacher was a brief one. It began and ended on a single day in December of 1993, when Vicki and I and photographer Melissa Springer went to a wedding at Carl Porter’s church in Georgia, an occasion that seemed to arouse all the passion, violence, and mystery that lay at the heart of snake handling itself. It was a little over two years after Glenn Summerford had put a gun to his wife’s head and forced her to stick her hand into a cage filled with rattlesnakes.

  In those two years, I had been drawn by chance and inclination into a close relationship with the handlers. I had come to admire them and to respect their faith. In the process, I had even taken up serpents myself. It was perhaps a measure of the intimacy I shared with the handlers that I had also come to see their faults. They surely saw mine. My faith had grown; so had my doubts. But the mystery of snake handling had deepened. For the mystery was not how the handlers did what they did, or even how it felt. The mystery was why, and toward what particular outcome.

  The handlers say they do it in order to confirm the Word. Jesus says that believers shall take up serpents. Somebody’s got to do it, or the Word is found to be a lie. The handlers insist they’re the ones. But that explanation only scratches the surface of motivation, and in looking at motivation, I understood I had become my own subject. Why had I taken up serpents? I knew that I had a need to experience ecstatic worship, an addiction to danger, and a predictable middleage urge to find out who my people were. But still, the answer seemed incomplete. I turned again to the questions I was asking. What motivated the handlers to do what they did, and what would happen next in their lives as a result? Suddenly I realized those were the same questions I posed about characters in stories. And the answers could never be found outside the story, but only within. I was in a story, and the story I was in had no predictable end. But it had to end somewhere, sometime. I should have seen the end coming. The story had begun with a man trying to kill his wife. It made sense that it would end with a wedding. Then I would know what all this meant.

  It was to be the first wedding ever held in the relatively new sanctuary of The Church of the Lord Jesus Christ in Kingston, Georgia. Halfway between the mill towns of Cartersville and Rome, Kingston looked as though it had once been prosperous. Now it was little more than a whistlestop fronted by a row of abandoned brick buildings, among them one that had housed the Famous People’s Opry. The only businesses that appeared to be open in Kingston on the day of the wedding were an establishment that manufactured cement lawn statuaries, a gas station, a video arcade, and Margo’s Groceries, home of a half border collie and half Australian shepherd named Worm.

  The bride, Diane Pelfrey, twenty-one, a former waitress at the Shoney’s restaurant in Newnan, Georgia, was set to marry Steve Frazier, twenty-four. Diane was a third-generation handler. Her paternal grandfather had died of snakebite before she was born, and both of her parents took up serpe
nts. Her father, Bill Pelfrey, had preached the gospel with signs following at revivals and homecomings all over the South. He spoke in tongues, healed the sick, and occasionally drank strychnine with no obvious ill effects. Diane’s mother, Anna Pelfrey, had died twice and been revived by prayer, once on the shoulder of an interstate near Big Stone Gap, Virginia, and once in the family’s living room.

  Steve, on the other hand, was relatively new to handling. He’d been introduced to it two years earlier by his uncle, John Brown, Sr., and his cousin, the legendary Punkin Brown of Newport, Tennessee. Steve’s parents, though, were Catholic and lived on Michigan’s upper peninsula. They had never handled poisonous snakes or drunk strychnine. Steve’s mother, Nancy, had never even been to Georgia before. She told me this moments before the service started, when I saw her standing outside the church, deduced her identity, and introduced Vicki and myself.

  Nancy Frazier was an attractive woman about my age. She appeared serene and composed. Only her hazel eyes gave her away. They were the eyes of a woman who is imagining how she will survive a catastrophe that has not yet begun. “I’m concerned,” she said to me in a level voice. “I’m praying about it.” She said this would be her first Holiness church service, and she had not, until the day before her son’s wedding, met her future daughter-in-law. She already had lost one of her four sons, stabbed to death by hitchhikers two and a half years before. Now she feared she was losing another son, to a family of snake handlers.

  But she smiled when Punkin Brown, dressed in a tux, came out of the church to escort her inside. Punkin was not only her nephew, but her son’s best man. It must have given her pause. But she took the snake handler’s arm anyway and bravely disappeared into the church.

  Brother Carl was proud of his church, and he had reason to be. Nothing could have been further removed, in snake-handling circles at least, from Glenn Summerford’s converted service station in Scottsboro than Carl Porter’s white masonry church in Kingston. It comfortably sat more than two hundred worshipers on oak pews with sky blue cushions, each pew adorned with crosses and brass plaques engraved with the names of donors, including Aunt Daisy, the prophetess. The building had central heat and air, a water fountain in the vestibule, and spacious bathrooms off either side. The basement had been partially finished, as had the old sanctuary next door, to provide bedrooms for visiting handlers. And the whole complex was fully paid for. The place looked particularly inviting decked out in pink roses for the wedding. A slanting afternoon light fell across the pulpit and prayer rail. It looked more like a Presbyterian meeting house in New England than a snake-handling church in a crumbling Southern mill town.