Reckless: Shades of a Vampire (2 page)

They were just that – peers at church, since anytime over the years she’d get close enough in the waiting times between church services to one to have more words than casual small talk her father’s admonishment was nearby to break it up.

“Best we keep the members in the pews,” he said.

Sand Mountain United Pentecostal Church had fewer than 100 members on the roll and most of them were older, their children long gone out of the house. There was one girl Emma’s age in the church, but she had dropped out of school the year before when she married her distant cousin and had his baby a few months later.

Judith, the girl, used to whisper and giggle with Emma at the church about what dirty words were, and meant. Emma was often curious, and asked, starting at about the age of 13, and Judith was quick with answers, explaining words like "fuck" and terms for genitals including "cock," "dick," and "pussy." Emma's mother never taught her about sex, and she barely knew the proper terms beyond penis and vagina.

She had never heard those used, either. Emma's mother called her period "the family way" and her vagina was called "down there."

"Here are these," her mother said when giving her thick white pads for her menstrual cycle when she was 13, "for when you get in the family way down there."

That piqued her interest, so when Judith started talking, Emma had started listening.

"To make a baby," Judith once explained, "he sticks his cock in your pussy and it feels good."

"How do you know?" Emma had asked.

"Everybody knows," Judith had said.

"Hmm," Emma had said, trying to imagine how something as large as a cock -- she had only seen her father's limp penis in short glances but that was still hard to grasp at the age of 12 -- could fit in there. 

 But Judith hadn't talked to Emma much in the later teen years before she got married, presumably thinking the word play no longer amusing. After the baby was born Judith mostly stood between services with the women of the church, not the youth, talking about recipes, children, and chores.

There were four other girls and two boys in the church of high school ages – slightly younger. They went to Ider High, and had little in common with Emma anyway, since they watched television, had driver’s licenses, went on dates, and went to movies sometimes in Chattanooga, despite the fact that her father preached to them from the pulpit that Hollywood was the “Devil’s den.”

Billy, one of the two boys, made Emma’s neck and cheeks splotch red and her crotch throb when he stood near. She thought of him sometimes at night, when the house was quiet and she pulled up her nightgown to do her thing. But Billy’s father was a Deacon in the church and, just as her father pushed her to keep distance from the members, the members and deacons in turn pushed their children to keep a healthy distance from the preacher’s daughter.

“They respect our role as leaders of the church,” her father said.

Or maybe they were just scared, Emma thought.

Similarly, Emma was taught to respect her father’s role as leader of the family, and her role of keeping it all in order as a support agent and worker bee for her mother. Chores were distributed to Emma daily on must-do lists waiting for her at the breakfast table. They were left on top of the napkin, but under the fork, at the morning table set by her mother.

“A woman’s work is never done,” her father said.

He was right about that, Emma thought.

Emma learned to cook at an age so early she didn’t recall. She learned to count from measuring cups. By the age of six, she helped her mother make the dresses they wore, cutting different pastel colored materials according to the same pattern, and sewing the pieces together by hand with needle and thread colored the same as the fabric chosen. Fabric colors were never mingled, and the only deviation involved weight of the material according to the season for which the dresses were made.

Cooking and sewing were neither easy nor hard for Emma. They were just things to do, like breathing, and eating. Schoolwork had been the easiest for Emma. Longing for boys had been the hardest.

Once Emma’s home schooling had ended in the early summer, it had become all chores like cooking or sewing or tending to the grounds and floors of the parsonage and church that filled her days. The books Emma used for school were gone from the house after her father had given the state required texts minus the absent science book to the Judith, thinking that when her toddler child grew of age they wouldn’t have to buy books.

Emma missed them, the books, having read them in the evenings while her parents slept over and over gain. But she dared not complain. Besides, she knew them already by heart, word for word, page by page.

Emma wasn’t much interested in reading the Bible. She did not live in fear, and anguish, and therefore, didn’t cling to the Bible for guidance or salvation since she hadn’t been acquainted with sin that she knew of. Sure, her father accused her of disobedience every now and then, especially when she had asked to go along on trips, but she knew she had felt differently in her heart.

She had only asked to go to Henegar because she wanted to go. That had nothing to do with disobedience, from her perspective. And she had always done what her father demanded, without disagreeing. Emma just considered such issues between she and her father as differences in how they saw things rather than swipes by her at following the Devil. 

Emma viewed her current predicament as a very different situation, though. She knew now that she had a problem, and a big one at that. She understood that she had everything to do with it. Those gathered around her -- some on knees, some standing and pacing around her -- knew this too, considering that Emma’s vital signs bounced erratically with her state of consciousness, even if they did not know the culprit.

The serpent, her father often preached, can see evil that the human nature cannot.

Kneeling at Emma’s side, her mother pressed a white cloth dampened by her dripping tears with two hands against the fork-like puncture wound on her daughter’s neck. Women wearing faded, pastel-colored smock dresses that fell just below the knees connected to her mother in rope-like fashion -- arms extended with one tethered to another. They muttered words with pleading and flailing tongues that, blended together, sounded like desperate mush.

Emma knew the language well. Listening to her father’s sermons Sunday upon Sunday since she was old enough to remember, she had been taught fate rests in the hands of the deal made with either God, or the Devil, a choice ultimately determining the sinners and saints of the world. If a person, or plight, is to be spared on the Earth, then, that sparing can only come from the hand of God, the Father, Emma had learned.

That’s why her father and members of the Sand Mountain United Pentecostal Church congregation lived as true believers, those who do not turn to medical science in times of physical distress. They prayed for healing from God, instead, as a one-and-only means of treatment instead rather than asking someone trained in medical science to fix them.

Why bother with doctors? God was in control, her father preached.

As Emma lie sprawled across the sanctuary floor, weaving in and out of her semi-conscience state, those gathered and pacing around her did just that – praying for her healing in lieu of dialing 9-1-1.

The row of women tethered to her mother prayed. The three-dozen or so other parishioners who popped nervously about the sanctuary like kernels of corn basking in oil heated over an open flame prayed. And, her father prayed, murmuring aloud in repeated exclamation.

“Dear God!” he cried.

Yes, Emma thought.

“Dear God!”

She never liked handling the snakes in the first place. And she did not like the thought of dying from the venom of one now, with three cartons of eggs worth of people watching her writhe on the floor in a compromised position as serpent poison coerced her veins, making her heart pump harder and faster just to keep the tainted blood flowing.

But neither was she given a choice in the matter, the handling of snakes.

The practice had been a part of the church since it was founded more than 100 years before and her father, who grew up in the church, believed the scripture clear in its command that followers take up with serpents. Emma did so beginning a few months before when she turned 18, the age the church both allowed and encouraged the practice. She did not want to, but her father was the preacher, after all – the commander of the serpents. Besides, she hadn’t been worried before about being bitten.

Not before, anyway.

The handling was just another chore, like mopping the floor.

Now, however, as the rattler’s poison spread and the people prayed around her mother’s bent knees -- her quickening pulse prodding her mother’s worst fears -- Emma had a decision to make in an instant.

And it wasn’t an easy one.

Emma is wearing a pale yellow cotton dress made by the hands of both she and her mother that cropped close to the neck, and covered lace undergarments also made by she and her mother. Her father believed lace material was created to adorn the angels. So she and her mother made it and wore it liberally, displaying both in view and out, as collars, socks, brassieres, skirts, and panties, according to his command. On this day, that's a good thing, since on the floor her knees are spread apart and her panties on flashing those gathered around her.

Emma’s golden, mid-shoulder locks are tucked neatly, as always, behind her well placed ears to rest rested gently on the floor. Her light, sun-kissed skin glistens in the misty sweat beading on her forehead and cheeks. Emma’s right knee is cocked, placing the sole of her foot flat on the ground and the bottom hem of her dress pointing upward.

A soft evening breeze scented with a dash of honeysuckle is blowing through the church’s open front and side doors, cooling her over-heating body just enough for pondering clarity and solution amid the decision at hand.

The time she has to make it ticks down like a game show clock in sync with her heart beat -- five, four, three...

An only child, Emma knows her parents would not handle her departure from the Earth well, despite their faith, which promises to soothe such angst. So leaving the world by her selfishness through a choice made now wasn’t as easy, then, as it might have seemed. Neither, though, was she interested in repenting for the sin that she was now paying such a dear price for. She wasn’t even sure in the dire moment if she could give more than lip service to repentance even if she tried.

God would know her true heart wasn’t truly sorry.

If she wasn't.

No, she had not known sin before, beyond doing her thing in the bed several nights a week and thinking about it the others. If that really was sin. She did not think so. But in the past week, she had gotten well acquainted with what might be real sin, according to her father's interpretation. That, more than anything else, is why she wanted to live beyond the moment.

Nothing had ever felt so right, and she wanted more of that wrong.

If not for the snake, Emma might have managed just fine, with no problems at all. She supposed that’s why her father loved snaking handling so – for how it could reveal one's digressions. Throughout the week leading up to the bite, she had effectively hid her consumptive thoughts so well that nobody else seemed to notice anything different with her.

The sun came up, and she was there, doing her chores. The sun went down, and she was there, cleaning up as the last crumbs of the day.

Nobody knew that a mighty fire was broiling inside of her.

But then came Sunday evening, and the moment at the church service that her father announced time for the children and women with small children to leave the sanctuary; the moment her father instructs church deacons to fetch the half-dozen rattlesnakes kept in a wooden box out back and bring them into the sanctuary; the moment her father shouts scripture from the book of Mark to the remaining members of the congregation who have migrated from the back pews to the area around the pulpit at the front of the church.

“
And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover
.”

When Emma saw the deacons walk through the open side sanctuary door with agitated snakes in hands, escorting them toward the outstretched hands of her scripture-reading father, she knew she was in trouble by the sweat that erupted in her palms, and the tension that balled up in her groin.

“Uhh,” she gasped to herself with a quiet exhale.

The other dozen or so times that Emma had handled snakes, her palms did not sweat at all as they were brought in, and she was not moved to mutter in tongues, as the others did, when grasping the serpents. If anything, Emma had felt more sorry for the snakes than for herself before, thinking that God and most everybody else might be more pleased if they were set free rather than clutched in her hands.

She had not feared for her own life, as she did on this night when she saw them. Emma wanted to cry out, turn and run out the back church door when the deacons walked the snakes into the sanctuary. But all she could do was watch, and wait, quietly and patiently, like a lamb awaiting the slaughterer’s blade since she knew the bite was coming.

Some church members had died during the handling ritual over the years, including her uncle from her father’s side, about a decade before. They say Billy had started gambling and drinking alcohol heavily every week at Saturday night cockfights held in the outskirts of Henegar.