Blood Kin Read online

  At last the preacher came to the center of the church, his body stiff and his legs locked like a statue in the middle of the aisle, only his knees twitching, and his hands making grabbing motions with his fingers dancing as if they expected money to be dropping out of the rafters at any second and they were anxious to grab some. The people started pushing around him, climbing out of their seats and making a tight but writhing circle, like the muscles spasming around the mouth of someone trying to swallow their own tongue, but the preacher was the tongue, the preacher was the muscle making the words that were going to draw the Lord’s grace down upon them all. And he threw his head back, his neck swelling like a serpent in the act of devouring the sacrificial lamb, and then there was this gorgeous flood of ahs and esses and m’s from so deep inside him it was as if he was dredging it from the floor beneath, from the ground beneath, from somewhere deep within the mountain that fed and sheltered and buried them all. The sound started low enough to stir the belly but kept climbing higher and higher until it broke apart into this high speed chatter that was like a thousand tiny mouths eating the thoughts right out of Sadie’s brain.

  SHE MUST HAVE fainted because after another slow blink she saw the preacher floating over her, the sweat pouring off his face and gathering in her eyes. “Will my saints come help me with this poor lamb?” She almost expected angels to descend. Instead it was several men who came around and lifted her, so that she rose up out of the midst of that congregation and was brought forward to a seat in the front row with the older women who stroked her arms and fanned her face murmuring “praise you child, sweet Jesus praise this innocent lamb.”

  The preacher stood before them with his arms outstretched like he was Jesus himself crucified and his sleeves rolled part way up to show off his terrible scars. A long scar on his left arm curved through the crook of the elbow and wandered down almost to the wrist. She’d heard tell that once in his early times he’d got snake bit in his arm so bad they had to cut it down its entire length because it swelled up dark and evil. And then there was that terrible place on his palm. The preacher was close enough that hand hung down right by her face. The veins looked gathered and tied in that dark place and there was a gob of skin and muscle missing. Some said it was actually because he’d paid a man to take some ten penny nails and nail him to that big tree on the side of his house, but most agreed to that bad snake bite story, how the poison had made a portion of his hand rot away.

  The preacher didn’t always handle snakes in his sermons. She’d heard that in one service he drank poison. In another he held the flame of a torch to his bare hand. But there was something about the way he stood there that made her think there’d be snake handling tonight. Somebody opened the doors. She could see some of the people twisting around but she couldn’t take her eyes off the preacher. Then she heard the heavy feet coming up the aisle, and four men carrying a wooden box wide as a big man’s chest and long as a coffin coming around the preacher and setting it down behind him. It had black iron hinges and straps and a scattering of holes about as wide as your finger along its sides and every now and then something glistened and moved behind those holes. Afterwards the men passed in front of the preacher and he gave each of them a holy kiss mouth to mouth and they went back to their seats and everybody was still, watching him.

  Then an old woman came up beside him and handed him a bundle wrapped in a ragged bit of bed sheet stained with dark rusty blotches and yellow streaks and green marks and Sadie couldn’t imagine what might have made all those different stains. He unwrapped the bundle and there was a big old worn Bible inside — its cover scarred and broken and bits of paper and ribbon and string hanging out in all directions from within its pages and the whole of it out of true. The old woman took the torn bit of sheet and held it to her cheek and returned to her seat.

  The preacher stood there thumbing through the giant Bible at his leisure as if he was the only one in the room, his lips moving, and sometimes his gaze floating toward the ceiling. He kept pulling out ragged pieces of paper that had things written on them, scrawled pictures and doodles and the handwriting so thick on some of them she couldn’t see how a body could make out enough to read. He kept mumbling things nobody must have been meant to hear except maybe God and His angels, and the congregation must have been used to it because nobody said a word. They didn’t even seem restless. He’d read a passage to himself and then he’d pull out a slip of paper and read whatever he’d written on that. Finally he opened to a page and laid his hand there, gazing out over his flock. “Folks ask me why I do this. I tell them it’s because it’s writ down here in my Bible, plain as day. They ask me do I do everything that’s writ down in this here book and I tell them no, no I dont. I aint Jesus. I dont exactly perform miracles, but I’ve seen my share of miracles happen. I dont feed the multitudes with a couple of fish and a little scrap of bread. And I aint been crucified and Lord knows that I aint come back from the dead. I’m just a mortal man and try as I might that’s all I’m ever likely to be.

  “But I believe even a poor man, an ordinary man can do wonders. I believe the people we come from could do wonders. I believe some of them we come from could trace our line all the way back to the olden times, the biblical times of the old disciples, the times of Jesus hisself. I aint saying they was as great as Jesus, but I believe they was great enough for poor folk like us.

  “I say we got some today with this wonder in them. I say maybe some here right in this room got this wonder in them. I say maybe we got a saint or two here today greater than all the old saints what ever lived.”

  He held up his Bible and started shaking it like he was angry. The ribbons and the strings and different pieces of paper fell out all over the place but he didn’t seem to care. He kept shaking it and shaking it and he seemed to get angrier and angrier. Some of the congregation looked nervous and afraid. Even his small group of saints up close kept their mouths shut.

  “In Genesis the Lord tells us that the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field. And in Matthew he advises us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Then in Mark he reckons that maybe we ought to pick up them serpents because they give us power; so that even if we drink poison, it wont kill us, and he even gives us the power to heal as a reward for our faith.

  “Now you all remember that story in Acts when a viper come out and fastened on Paul’s hand. I know you do because I told it to you just last week! Remember how he shook off that serpent into the fire and suffered no harm?

  “Well, it’s writ large on the walls outside this here church. We handle snakes to declare our faith. That’s just what we do! Any folks in here too scairt to watch us then you best leave now!”

  Nobody left, but Sadie reckoned that even if they wanted to leave they’d be too afraid to, not with the preacher up there staring them all down and shaking his Bible with that terrible, vengeful hand.

  “Okay then.” He nodded and smiled hugely showing all his teeth. “Let’s get her going. Let’s have some of my saints up here to witness!”

  Sadie didn’t really understand who these saints were. Some looked to be people who’d been going to this church a long time. Others, the bigger ones, the taller ones, all of them men, reminded her of soldiers, the preacher’s soldiers.

  A few of the men in the crowd got up, a couple of those who had carried the box in and some others she had seen being active earlier in the services, and a couple she was sure she hadn’t seen before — two skinny male twins who were probably in their seventies, and had identical sunk eyes and no expressions on their faces. There were also some women, older ones mostly, and a couple of ancient ladies who looked like they might die if they got a whiff of bad breath, much less a snake biting them. She saw a teenage girl rise up on the other side of the church, then get jerked back down by her mother.

  The thing that struck her about all these volunteers, these saints, was that she didn’t know any of them, which seemed strange in a community this small. So
they must have all been folks from out on the farms who didn’t get into town much, or maybe they lived somewhere a long way away, and had these hard journeys every week to get into the services. All the people she knew, including the ones she was related to, were content to just watch. Oh, they might get up and praise Jesus and dance around celebrating their love for Him, but they knew the preacher too good to be standing up there next to him when he had snakes all around. They might accept him as their leader, they might respect him as a preacher of the gospel, but that didn’t mean they were going to trust him with their lives.

  Even the loyal ones that did get up, they were walking up to him so slow, not excited like they were before. The preacher spread his arms to them, his black coat bunching up on either side of his neck like a buzzard’s shoulders. “Come on now, come on,” he said, like he was speaking to a child, or some critter he wanted to catch. “Dont be shy. None of us got nothin to be bashful about in front of the Lord.” He stretched his arms out even wider, letting his head fall back in some kind of secret pleasure, wiggling his fingers, welcoming, directing. “Now boys,” he said to a couple of the men, “I’d like you to stand at both ends, and you women, you line up behind, watching. I want you to watch me handling them snakes. Then it’s your turn.” He winked, and it made Sadie go cold.

  The saints did as he said. Then he made a couple of the women slide over a few inches one way or the other. Finally he smiled and ran up to the box, unlatched and flipped open a little door set in the top, smiled at Sadie, and reached inside the box without looking.

  She gasped when he pulled out a big copperhead and slapped the little door back shut. She heard a little squeal from someone, and a whole lot of nervous laughter, and a whole lot of Praise Bes and Hallelujahs.

  Sadie knew her snakes. She had to, living in the hollow. When she was little her ma or her daddy would kill one and bring it up on the porch for her to look at so she’d know the different kinds, and be able to tell the poisonous ones from the safe ones. This copperhead was a good four foot long, about as long as they ever got in those hills, with those dark brown hourglasses all up and down. She only knew they were called hourglasses because her granddaddy had one — it had been in his family a long time and sat up on the mantel.

  The preacher handled that snake like it was no more than a cut off piece of rope, waving it around and teasing it, moving his own head side to side like he was the snake and the copperhead was the one in danger of getting bit. Sadie thought the snake looked a bit confused, but she was probably just thinking silly.

  The preacher started stamping his feet and hollering, waving the snake overhead like it was some kind of skinny flag. “I can feel its power!” he shouted. “Oh Lord, it’s a powerful thing! Lord I beseech you to bless me by taking this old snake’s will and giving it to me so I can be powerful too!”

  People in the congregation started getting up and edging closer to where the preacher was with his box full of snakes. “Praise the Lord! Thank God for Jesus! Hallelujah to Glory!” they shouted, both separately and at the same time, their words folding one upon the other until they made a kind of music, a kind of thunder that shook the very blood in Sadie’s veins.

  The preacher brought the snake down in front of him and started speaking right at it, like he was preaching to the snake every bit as much as he was preaching to the congregation. “In Acts the Lord God told us we will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon us!”

  Then the preacher handed off the snake to one of them old twins and that man started dancing and whooping with it and waving it around. Then the preacher opened up the box again and took a bunch of snakes at once and handed them to the other saints and they started acting much the same. Sadie gritted her teeth against the noise and she felt herself rocking, praying the preacher would Please Lord Jesus stop and let her go home.

  But he looked like he had no plans for slowing down. He looked at the congregation and he raised his arms shouting, “Come up now and have victory over these serpents!”

  And the congregation did exactly like he said. A few held back but they were like peaceful trees in the middle of a wind storm, the rest of them waving around and uprooting and dancing around.

  The preacher was pouring sweat. He was still wearing his heavy black wool coat, now drenched shoulder to shoulder with his sweat. He took one of the snakes and slowly wiped his brow off with it. Then he tossed that snake up and someone reached out and caught it and the preacher slipped out of his coat and threw it in a corner where it lay like a buzzard all broken up after falling out of the sky.

  The excited crowd was passing around copperheads and diamondback rattlers with them awful black heads and the last bits of them mostly black, and those V-shaped marks all in between. And some of them rattlers were kind of yellowish and some of them blacker than the rest.

  Sadie stayed back as far as she could, moving when she had to. Once some fellow tried to kiss her and she pushed him away.

  “Member Isaiah forty, ‘He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint!” With each word it seemed he stamped his feet ever louder. The crowd, too, screamed harder with every word and passed holy kisses mouth to mouth.

  The preacher twisted a snake around his neck and held the head in front of him so he could kiss it. He pulled up a copperhead that was just then coming out of its skin and he rubbed some of that skin off and held it up for all to see. “This is life everlasting!” he declared.

  He brought out a couple of ugly, dull brown snakes that looked all ghostly white inside their mouths. She’d never seen a snake like that before. Then she overheard someone say cottonmouth, and another said no, it was a water moccasin. They had to be close to five feet long. Somebody else said they didn’t have them around here, they lived over on the coast, and wasn’t it a miracle that he had one here to handle?

  Sadie’d always been told that if you looked into the center of a snake’s eyes the black part was all round and friendly in the safe ones but in the poisonous ones it was narrow and up and down and wicked looking. What kind of fool waited around to take a good long look at a serpent’s eyes when there were dangerous ones around?

  She didn’t see the preacher for a few minutes and she was wondering what happened to him when she saw him coming out of the crowd prancing around like one of those ballerinas wearing a crown made out of snakes he’d piled on his head. He started spinning himself in circles and those snake heads all came out on the end of curved bodies like he had long hair flying.

  One of the snakes writhed and snapped, and she was sure the preacher got bit but he just kept moving and shouting like nothing had happened. If anything it just made him crazier. He got two snakes and thrust them through his hair then right into his chest like he was daring them to bite. When they didn’t bite he tossed them into the air and then caught them again.

  After a few more minutes the preacher was carrying three and four snakes at a time, kissing their heads and tongues, sliding them down his body, wrapping them around his arms, laying one across his forehead so that he was wearing it like a living bandana.

  The front of the church was a mass of bodies moving up and down swaying, singing, shouting, trembling hands passing snakes back and forth like they were sharing food or cigarettes. Sadie couldn’t follow it all, and she wondered what would happen if she got up and walked out the door. Would anybody even notice?

  But then the preacher was standing right in front of her with those two old twin saints and he was saying, “Come on up! Come on up! Folks, we got us a shy one here!” And before she could say anything the twins had hold of her on either side and they were helping her up like she was some kind of cripple and leading her into that crowd of snakes and saints and unfortunates like her who didn’t want to be there but didn’t know how to get out of it.

  The preacher had a big thick rattler in both hands a
nd he was passing that snake back and forth in front of her eyes like it was the grandest prize that ever was and he was teasing her knowing she couldn’t wait to get her hands on it. The snake arched its back and swayed back and forth, rotated its head, and stared at her. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. Each of the twins had one of her arms and they were pulling them toward the snake, turning them so that her palms faced upwards ready to receive His bounty.

  They laid the snake into her hands and it was like holding a length of pure muscle. It bent and it stretched and it made curls through the air and she so wanted to drop it but couldn’t. Sadie’s body shook so badly she was forced to close her eyes to keep from throwing up. She jerked as if something was being yanked out of her and even with her eyes closed she could see the shape of the snake like a smooth and heavy bolt of lightning glowing in the darkness.

  She opened her eyes again or at least she thought she was opening her eyes but she didn’t see the church, instead she saw the endless folds of mountains like a mass of giant snakes that had been cornered and piled into this part of the world. She screamed and opened her eyes again and there was the preacher hisself rising like a snake off the floor until he towered over her. Something appeared to rise out of the preacher’s body, smoke or fire or just anger and bitterness and all the hatred she could imagine stored in one place. He howled like a wolf in pain. Sadie disappeared inside herself and everything went white and she was just this tiny speck of no-account nothing trying to hide herself in that endless sea of white.