Having seated the groom’s mother, Punkin greeted Vicki and me just inside the door. He kissed me on the cheek, the traditional holy kiss, and reminded me that he and Steve were cousins. When he started to escort Vicki down the aisle, we told him we were waiting for Melissa, who had gone into the women’s bathroom to take photos of the bride getting dressed.
Punkin chatted with us awhile. He said he had driven his aunt’s car down from Tennessee for the ceremony. Nancy had told him not to take any snakes in the car with him, but he said, “If I don’t, I don’t go.” Out of respect for Nancy, no snakes would be in evidence during the wedding. They’d be there, though, that night for the regular service, which the bridal parties had been invited to attend. “I don’t have to bring my snakes every time,” Punkin said. “But if somebody tells me not to, I’ll sure bring them then.”
Punkin had introduced Steve to Diane, he said, and he thought their marriage would be a fine and holy affair. He and his own wife, Melinda, had been married eleven years. They’d met at a homecoming in 1982, when Punkin was eighteen and Melinda fifteen, and now they had four children, including a set of three-year-old twins. Punkin remembered the first time he had seen Melinda. “She was speaking in tongues and handling a big rattlesnake. I told Daddy, ‘I’m gonna marry that girl.’ ”
He excused himself then to seat the other guests.
That’s all I knew about Punkin’s own marriage, but Carolyn Porter said she disapproved in general of the way the Tennessee handlers treated their wives. “I just don’t like the way they boss their women around,” she said. She’d tried to talk Diane out of marrying Steve for that very reason, not because she had anything against Steve personally, but because they’d be living among what she and Gracie McAllister called “them old Tennessee.” No handlers, Carolyn and Gracie said, were more strict in their attitudes about the roles of men and women than those from Tennessee. Some of them didn’t even believe in men and women shouting together during a service. The women did their shouting on one side of the church. The men did theirs on the other. And the idea of a woman preaching the gospel was heresy, pure and simple, in Tennessee.
When Brother Carl saw me, he also greeted me with a holy kiss. He was a little nervous, what with it being the first wedding in the new building, but he was just happy to see we’d made the trip.
“Come on and get you a seat up front,” he said to me and Vicki. “You ain’t never seen a snake-handling wedding, have you?”
We shook our heads, afraid to consider what he had in mind.
“Well, I’ll tell you a secret,” he said. “It ain’t no different from any other kind.”
The crowd was modest, mostly family, and just a dozen or so handlers outside that. Carolyn Porter was there, and Charles and Aline McGlocklin. It was a strange and wonderful sight, the male handlers dressed up in tuxes and suits and ties, a way they’d never be in regular church. Melissa still hadn’t appeared, so Vicki and I sat in the middle, next to the aisle, with Charles and Aline and Aline’s youngest son, Matthew, to our right. Aline took Vicki’s hand. It had been months since they’d seen each other. I smiled at Charles, and he gave me a comical look. Our friendship with the McGlocklins had been brief but intense, and like many unlikely friendships, it appeared destined to last.
When the families had all been seated on the appropriate sides of the aisle, the ceremony began. The pianist played the traditional wedding march. The bride, wearing white, entered on the arm of her father, Brother Bill Pelfrey. Diane had luxuriant, waist-length hair, and considerable poise. She smiled confidently at the friends she passed. The groom, who stood between Punkin Brown and Brother Carl, looked pale and wild eyed, like a startled hare. Carl asked who gave this woman in marriage. Brother Bill replied, “Her mother and I.” Then he delivered Diane to her maid of honor and slid into the pew next to his wife.
Brother Carl rocked forward on the balls of his feet, as officious and ecclesiastical as a snake-handling preacher can be. He read the passage from Matthew in which the sacrament of marriage is described as separate flesh becoming one, and then asked if anyone had objections to the union, and if not, to forever hold their peace. The church was silent, so Brother Carl continued with the vows. The phrase as long as we both shall live had a particular resonance that day, given the fact that Diane and Steve intended to continue handling rattlesnakes and copperheads in their new life together. But Brother Carl had been right. It was a perfectly normal wedding. More tasteful than most, as a matter of fact, simpler, I think. The single detail that set the wedding apart occurred in the moment after Carl had pronounced the couple man and wife, and they kissed each other for what they said was the first time. Ever. For this reason, it was a longer and more involved kiss than I was accustomed to seeing at weddings, and I hoped they’d both liked it well enough. The stakes, after all, seemed awfully high.
After the reception in the basement, with a cake made by Sister Jane Collier and punch served up by other women from the church, the couple left under a shower of rice. The usual pranksters had been at work on the car. “I got me a good Georgia woman” was scrawled in shaving cream on one side. Bill Pelfrey, the father of the bride, took one glance at the car and said, “God, they look like a bunch of Tennessee trash.”
It was what happened after the wedding that caused the day to veer off in a new direction and reverberate like a tuning fork. Vicki and I and Charles and Aline were standing outside the church after all the guests had left. Melissa had dismantled her camera gear and was stowing it back in the van. We were going to grab dinner before the regular service later that night, and we had asked the McGlocklins to join us. We’d assumed they were staying, and we were surprised when Charles said they weren’t.
“I just don’t think I can make it through the service,” he said. “My neck’s hurting me too bad.”
I knew what an ordeal Charles had been through with his neck, but it seemed odd that he would have ridden all this way from New Hope, a three-hour drive, only to turn back now, before the snake-handling service had even begun. Months later, Charles would tell me his other reason for not staying. “The Lord allowed me to see the spirits in the church during that wedding,” he said. “I knew what was going to happen to you, and I just didn’t want to have to watch you go through it.”
But if he’d told me at the time, I wouldn’t have believed him. I had my own premonition about the service. I saved it, though, until Vicki, Melissa, and I had driven the seventeen miles from Kingston into Rome. It was a foggy evening, and the road was nearly deserted. The land along that stretch had always seemed desolate to me, but never as much as it did then, despite the hope I nursed.
We went to a popular chain restaurant in Rome, one of those places that specialize in baby back ribs and honey mustard dressing. I waited until we had finished eating, and then I told Vicki that she was going to get a blessing that night at the service. She asked what I meant. I didn’t exactly know myself, but I had a feeling that without the girls there, she might find it easier to give herself to the moment. There was something special in store for her. I knew that, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.
“All I want,” she said, “is for Aunt Daisy to lay hands on me.”
Melissa and I laughed.
“I’m serious,” Vicki said. “I’ve been watching her. Have you seen what she does with her hands? It’s like she’s fighting her way through webs to get to the Spirit. And when she gets there, it’s as though she’s touched something alive. I can’t take my eyes off her.”
“Neither can I,” Melissa said. “But she doesn’t like to have her picture taken.”
We hadn’t seen Aunt Daisy at the wedding. The last time we’d seen her during a service, Brother Carl had preached standing on top of the pulpit, and Aunt Daisy had tried to climb it from the altar side. After the service, our younger daughter, Laura, had said, “Didn’t you see what that woman was drawing with her hands?”
“Where?” we asked.
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p; “In the wood,” Laura said. “She was drawing a cross with a snake wrapped around it.”
The fog on the way back to Kingston was heavy, and I was so focused on the road, I forgot about the blessing Vicki was going to receive. She reminded me, though, as we pulled up the driveway to Brother Carl’s church, that the blessing she wanted was to have Aunt Daisy lay hands on her.
Aunt Daisy showed up at the service, all right, but she was seated at the front of the congregation. She’d never met Vicki, and it looked like she was already lost in the Spirit. Her fingers seemed to be plucking invisible threads from the air. The rest of the crowd filtered in slowly. Among the last to arrive were the newlyweds and their parents, the Pelfreys and the Fraziers. Steve’s mother, Nancy, had told us she probably wouldn’t come to the service, and I was pleased she’d had a change of heart. It’s never a mistake to face one’s fears, I reasoned, and I hoped that, out of courtesy, Steve and Diane wouldn’t handle that night. I knew I wasn’t going to. I didn’t feel the craving. Instead, as I thumbed through my Bible, I felt something similar, but oddly reversed, as though the urge were not to step off the ledge, but to step up onto it. It was a calm and secure impression of well-being that kept building, but I didn’t know toward what, until Brother Carl stopped in the aisle, pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, and said, “Are you gonna preach tonight?”
Unlike some of my friends growing up, I had never, ever, wanted to be a preacher, not even when I thought I might go to college at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. A number of older boys from our church in East Lake had decided to go to Asbury, a Methodist school. I looked up to them and almost followed in their footsteps. They were extraordinary young men — sober, reliable, and possessed of a social conscience, a rare thing, it seemed to me, in the white neighborhoods of Birmingham in the early 1960s. Only one of these Asbury boys actually became a minister, I believe, but out of the others would eventually come a doctor, a dentist, a professor of religious studies, and a church youth director. In the summers between academic years, they’d do missionary work overseas or in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, where they lay preached at churches without indoor plumbing or electricity. I particularly remember the slides of Costa Rica that one of them, Glenn Truitt, showed during a Sunday night worship service. The images were grainy and out of focus, but the country they approximated, with its volcanoes and brilliant birds, struck me as terribly exotic and remote. I craved adventures of any sort and resolved to go to Costa Rica some day, although I had no idea it would be as a journalist, or that I would have to get there by way of the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua first.
The Asbury boys were on to something I wanted, but however much I admired them, I went my own way. I didn’t go to seminary in Kentucky: I attended the University of Virginia, instead. Mine was the last group at Virginia to wear coats and ties to class, the last to be exclusively male. My mother had hoped I would become a doctor. My father had said that all work, if honest, was honorable. The only advice he gave was that I should do something in life I enjoyed, which was the best advice I ever received. To say that I enjoy writing, though, is like saying I enjoy having fingers and toes. It’s difficult to imagine life without them.
Of all the things I might have become, I had never wanted to be a preacher, but I became one that evening in the middle of December when Carl Porter stopped in the aisle, looked me over once good, and asked if I was going to preach.
I shrugged and told him I was.
It’s difficult for me to recall now the sequence of events or the exact words. I remember that the service began in customary fashion, and that the snakes came out early, but not very many of them. The boxes were kept out of sight behind the altar, and the men who did handle seemed careful to do it behind the plane of the pulpit and prayer rail. The idea must have been to make a good impression on Steve’s parents and the other guests from the wedding. But the restraint had a curiously paradoxical effect that became apparent only when Brother Carl himself began to preach. After addressing his preliminary remarks to the Tennessee brethren lining the deacons’ bench, Brother Carl came down into the congregation, citing scripture from memory as he descended. “You can’t do both!” he shouted. “You can’t walk in the flesh and walk in the Spirit!” Melissa followed him unobtrusively with her camera. She wasn’t using a flash, and she was dressed in a style befitting a Holiness woman — an ankle-length black dress, uncut and unadorned hair, a blouse buttoned modestly at the neck. But there was one thing about herself that she could not disguise. Her husband and children weren’t by her side. She was a hundred and fifty miles from home on a Saturday night, and she was at work. At one point, Carl was preaching directly to Junior McCormick, who was sitting on the first pew in his red and white plaid pants, his elbows on his knees and his head nodding with every amen he uttered. Carl patted him tenderly on the shoulder. “God’ll affirm you in that!” he said. “In Jesus’ name, He will!” Then he looked up and came face to face with Melissa. He suddenly seemed not to know her. His customary bashfulness gave way to a humor I can only describe as sexual discomfort. It was as though her camera had finally caught him naked. His cheeks reddened. His jaw set. He pointed his finger in Melissa’s face. He was glaring at her, and the sermon that suddenly poured out of his mouth was a diatribe about the necessity for women to stay in their place. “It’s not godly for a woman to do a man’s job!” he said. “To wear a man’s pants! Or cut her hair like a man does his! It doesn’t please God to go on like that, acting like Adam was made out of Eve’s rib instead of the other way around!” He wouldn’t let up on her, not even to pace.
Melissa kept on working, bobbing to get the best shots.
“A woman’s got to stay in her place!” Carl shouted. “God made her for a helpmate to man! It wasn’t intended for her to have a life of her own! If God had wanted to give her a life of her own, he’d have made her first instead of Adam, and then where would we be!”
I don’t know what Carolyn Porter was thinking, but I could feel Vicki stiffen beside me. Carl was directing his comments to Melissa, but Vicki knew they were intended for her as well. I was embarrassed, for Melissa’s sake, for Vicki’s, but mainly for my own. I’d told her she was going to receive a blessing from the service that night, and it looked like she would receive just the opposite. And finally, of course, I was disappointed with Carl. He had always been so gentle and encouraging. He knew better than that. I thought he was doing it on purpose to humiliate us. But I couldn’t figure out why. This was a side of him I’d never seen before. I thought the sermon would never end. But finally Carl seemed to come to his senses. I wondered if he would remember everything that he had said. He stepped back toward the pulpit, told a few self-deprecating stories about baldheaded preachers, including one about children who were eaten by bears because they’d made fun of Elijah’s pate. Then he invited more songs and testimony from the congregation, as though the message he’d just delivered had been his usual fare. At the pulpit, though, he turned and came up short, as if he had just remembered an unpleasantness. “Brother Dennis,” he said into the microphone. “Why don’t you come up here and preach?”
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
I took a deep breath and glanced at Vicki. She and I, at least, were of one accord. I walked down the aisle as I’d done many times before, to testify, to sing, to lay on hands, to take up serpents. When I stepped up onto the platform, I looked once at the congregation. They were hushed and attentive, even the teenage boys with slicked-back hair and unbuttoned shirts. I took the microphone from its stand and slung the cord out so I’d have slack to move around. Then I went to each of the brethren on the deacons’ bench. I shook hands with Bill Pelfrey, Jamie Coots, and the rest. I gave Steve Frazier, the new husband, a hug. He’d handled beside me at Macedonia, and I had always, for that reason, held a speci
al affection for him, and for Diane. Against the wall behind the pulpit sat Punkin Brown, his eyes hooded and dark. I had an unsettling premonition that if Punkin survived the serpent bites and lived to middle age, his face might wind up resembling Glenn Summerford’s, so I passed him by with only a nod and lay my hand instead on the head of Billy Lemming, Brother Carl’s lean and mysterious guitar player. And then I came face to face with Carl. He was sitting in a folding metal chair with his hands on his knees, a man who had been generous and fatherly to me, and recommended me to his congregation. I couldn’t help but smile at him. What was about to happen had been ordained. I think we both knew it. I think we were both savoring that fact.
“I love to testify,” I said into the microphone, “but I’ve never preached before. I just want you to know that I submit myself to your authority, Brother Carl. You’re the pastor of this church, and if I step out of the Word, I want you to tell me.” He smiled back and nodded. He would.
The choice of text was simple — the chapter the handlers believed so deeply, they were risking their lives to confirm it. “Let’s look at Mark 16,” I said.
Salvation on Sand Mountain Page 17
