Reckless: Shades of a Vampire (6 page)

Her father leaps to his feet.

“Praise God!” he shouts, raising his hands to the ceiling. “Praise God! God’s will is done! Praise God. Praise God!”

The Reverend prances around his daughter, raising his hands toward the ceiling.

“Hallelujah,” he chants.

The Reverend stops after one round, and drops his hands.

He lets out a sigh, and drops to his knees.

Emma’s father recognizes he broached the commands, interfering with God’s will by reaching beyond prayer to spare his daughter's life.

“What have I done, O God?” he says, softly, looking up to the sanctuary ceiling.

His moment of praise turns, as thunder rumbles in the distance, into a tearful apology.

“Dear father,” he says, reaching his hands back toward the ceiling. “Forgive me. Forgive me for my weakness. Forgive me for trying to walk in your path. Oh, Dear Father, forgive me.”

Emma’s mother leans close to her daughter, thrusting her hands upon her belly and dropping her face between them. She buries her face into Emma’s dress while crying tears of joy.

“My angel,” she says, a muffled voice. “You’ve come back.”

“Yes mother,” whispers Emma, touching her mother’s hair with soft strokes. “I’m here. I’m here mother.”

“
Joyful, joyful, we adore thee
,” she hears her mother singing.

Dishes are clanging in the kitchen. The smell of frying bacon permeates the room. Emma clutches her pillow, twists, and smells it.

She is home, in her room. She rubs her eyes.

“Ahhhhh,” she says, grimacing.

Emma recalls the snakebite, but wonders if she had a dream. She reaches for her neck. She touches a bandage.

“Owwww.”

A simmering summer morning sun is pouring through the window. Emma squints, and looks away. She hears a Mourning dove cooing just outside her window, and locusts whirring in the distance.

Emma sits up, slowly, and looks out her window, toward the Denton farm. She can see the edge of the blacktop and ripples of heat wafting up from it. She wipes thick crust from her eyes, and twists her neck around to shake the stiffness.

Emma gets out of the bed, pulls a robe from her closet, slips it on, leaves the tie dangling open, and walks taking careful steps in her slumbering state to the kitchen.

She sees her mother standing over the stove, watching the bacon frying in a pan that is spewing smell throughout the house.

Her father is at the breakfast table. Her parents look to her simultaneously.

“Why, good morning Glory,” her mother says. “We thought maybe you really did up and die and go to Heaven.”

Emma’s mother laughs.

Emma clutches her neck.

“Nope. Heaven was not ready for our Emma,” her father says. “He had other plans for you.”

“What day is it, Mother?” Emma says.

“Another day behind on your chores,” he father says.

“Thursday dear,” her mother says. “It’s Thursday. You’ve been in the bed since Sunday night.”

“Thursday? Since Sunday night? What happened, Mother?”

“Why Emmaline Margaret Mays. What happened? You don’t you remember?”

“Tell me, Mother. I don’t really. What happened mother?”

“God even blesses the troubled,” he father says. “He is relieving you from the pain by sparing your memory.”

“I don’t want spared,” Emma said. “What happened? Tell me, exactly.”

“Emma, Dear, you know, why … you were bitten by that snake. Your father said it was all a mistake, of course. He was holding the snake and says he did not let go. His entire fault, he said.

“Why God put you in the way of that snake we don’t know. But you are alive today. Praise God, Amen.”

“The serpent was confused, Emma,” her father says. “Confused, that’s all.”

“It’s nothing to worry about,” her mother says. “It’s all over now, Dear.”

Emma takes a seat at the table.

“It’s nothing to worry about, Dear,” her mother says, again. “You father already has his sermon written for Sunday, explaining to everybody how the serpent sometimes gets confused and bites the wrong person.”

“The Lord can giveth,” says her father, “and the Lord can taketh away, whenever he wants to. The serpent struck at you wrongly to test our faith –- to see if we would trust Him. He brought you back to us because we did trust him, and because you are pure in your heart, Emma.”

Emma stares at a row of bright red, round tomatoes the size of softballs lining the windowsill.

“I picked those this morning, honey,” her mother says. “Don't they look good? Just doing your chores for you while you rested. Looked like they needed picking. I know you like to do it.

"Your father said that would be okay. You’ll be back up to picking tomatoes soon.”

“They’re so red,” Emma says, focusing on the tomatoes.

Her mother reaches to Emma’s neck and pulls away the bandage covering her wound.

“This needs some air,” her mother says.

Emma turns her head to the left and downward so her mother can reach the bandage. Emma sees a list of chores at the breakfast table.

Weed the garden.

Wash the linens.

Wipe the baseboards.

Mop the floors
.

She suspects the list was left for her on Monday, and it’s been there ever since, waiting for her to return and resume.

“So do I,” she says.

“What honey?”

“Air,” Emma says. “Air. So do I. I need some air.”

“Well, let’s have your breakfast first,” her mother says.

Emma’s father starts saying a blessing.

“Let’s bow our heads," he says. "Our heavenly father we thank thee for our many blessings. We thank you for this meal, as we use it for the nourishment of our bodies, to be strong and serve you on this day with our deeds. Heal our angel with your blessings and unleash the serpent upon the world's evildoers.

“Amen.”

“Amen,” said her mother.

Emma sits silent.

Her parents look at her, and then glance at one another.

Emma reaches for the orange juice, pouring her glass half full.

“What’s for breakfast?” Emma says. “I’m quite hungry.”

“Well, I’m sure you are. I thought maybe you were dead back there. Came back to life and died again. But I kept checking you’re breathing, and, sure enough. You were breathing just fine.

“Just sleeping like a dead person,” her mother says.

“What’s for breakfast,” Emma repeats.

“Eggs, bacon and toast, Dear,” her mother says.

“Can you slice a tomato, too?” Emma says. “They look so ripe.”

Everything seemed to be as it was before – after her schooling had ended, but before she had met Michael and fallen prey to the snake. Emma woke up, had breakfast, got her list of chores, did them, went to bed, and did it all over again until Sunday, when she woke up, went to church, went home, went back to church and then went home and soon to bed.

But one big difference. After the bite, and what came after it, she wasn't doing her thing -- not one day a week, much less three while having to fight off doing it the other four. 

Michael had disappeared, and so had her want to act on self gratification. Something still burned, but she longed for more.

At the Denton farm, the old tractor was dormant, and Michael was nowhere to be found. Not a tool, not the tractor – nothing had been moved at the farm since she left Michael at the barn that night.

Emma found herself gazing across at the farm often, only to see dove flying around the barn, and little else moving beyond the field grass swaying in the breeze. Emma had not been back to a snake handling service since the night she was bitten.

Once the main service ended each week, and her father made the call for the deacons to fetch the snakes from the box out back of the church, Emma got up and left quietly with those under the age of 18 who were not yet invited or allowed in and those who did not share the same calling or enthusiasm for snake handling like the others.

Her father thought the numbers had dropped in attendance at the snake handling service after Emma went down. His suspicion was they figured if Emma went down, anybody could go down. 

This bothered her father, who considered snake handling the key to his job, just as fire is to a cook or a saw is to a carpenter. Thus, he was eager to groom some new passion among the membership for the serpents amid their waning enthusiasm.

But not at the expense of making Emma return before it was time. It was his idea that Emma stop coming to Sunday night snake handling, for a while at least. He suggested she wait a bit, until God called her back.

"He'll tell us when it is time for you to take the serpent in hand again," her father said.

Emma was still fuzzy about how it all happened that Sunday night, beyond what her mother told of the details and the remaining scar she on her neck. But she wasn’t afraid of the snakes, now, not at all. That's not why she wasn't going back. She just didn’t want to spend any extra time in the church that she didn’t have to.

Her father wasn’t making her go, and she wasn’t going.

If he would let her out of the Sunday morning and evening church services, she would skip those too. She had no recollection of it meaning anything to her, anyway.

The experience with Michael, Emma remembered.

Being consumed by lust the week after that, she remembered.

The snakebite did nothing to erase those memories, or the coinciding fire that burned along with them.

Michael wasn’t there, but her memory of him was firmly intact as the last summer days checked off the calendar as Labor Day arrived.

For her father and the church, Labor Day was a major annual event -- when the Sand Mountain Pentecostal Church held its annual Pastor Appreciation picnic on the parsonage grounds. Most every member came to the picnic, since her father made careful note of who wasn’t there. They knew her father kept a mental roll, as if he were a first grade teacher. 

Emma helped prepare for the event, with a double-long list of chores in the days approaching Labor Day. The summer’s heat was beginning to break and Sand Mountain was always four of five degrees cooler anyway than the rest of the region due to its elevation. It is still the Deep South, and Northern Alabama can only get so cool until October.

But every little bit of respite helps.

A late summer cool front had passed through on Sunday, and the sky is deep blue on Labor Day. A soft northerly wind cleansed humidity from the air, and the temperature just after the noon hour hovers between 75 and 76 degrees, according a thermometer near the parsonage back steps.

Birds chirp, and the call of the locusts has quieted to just a murmur in the late season. Butterflies flitter lazily about amid the smell of warm ham and deviled eggs.

Emma is wearing sandals, and a lavender cotton dress that drops to just beneath her kneecaps. The sleeves of her dress are cropped tightly, just covering her armpits, and they are accented in white lace, matching the rim around the neckline that covers her collarbone. Emma’s hair, pulled back on each side and connected at the back with a barrette, shines brightly in the holiday sun.

Tables line the parsonage grounds. The pastor, keeping with tradition, provided the main course of the day – a ham he paid for with money from the church’s entertainment fund. Emma’s mother made the deviled eggs and jugs of sweetened iced tea, also per tradition, and the church members are bringing everything else potluck style, offering up whatever they felt like making.

Some made main courses, like tuna casserole, while others brought vegetable side dishes made from produce they had grown over the summer, including black-eyed peas cooked with bacon, green beans sautéed with onion, and corn shaved from the cob and prepared in a peppery-sweet style.

Deacons had come over early that morning to set up tables and chairs.

The crowd is steadily arriving just after noon, and after a short iced tea social, Emma’s father calls all together near the front of the food line for a prayer.

“Dear Heavenly Father,” he says. “Bless the men who work so very hard each and every day to provide for their families on this special day. We honor them today.

“Amen,” he says.

“Amen,” say the members.

Smiles abound in the crowd as the line formed at the serving table for lunch. The annual picnic is a highlight for the church. It is the one time that Emma’s father relaxes with congregation members, and the one time the members don’t have fear in the name if scripture flaunted at them.

Emma works in the serving line, carving ham and serving it onto plates held by members passing through one by one. Each says a pleasantry to her like “nice dress” or “Bless you, dear” as Emma serves them a slice.

The men, she's sure, just want to fuck her. They want a big piece of ham all right. But what they really want, she thinks is to fuck her.

She sees them stare at the points where her medium sized breasts strike the dress with perky nipples. She sees them gaze at her calves, working their way up to the hemline. She thinks her father knows this, and wonders if that's not why he makes her serve from the front of the line -- just to make sure everybody in attendance is well fed.

Her father had assigned that job to her years before, just after her breasts budded, saying her bright smile would start them off right. He also told her to serve generous portions, so they felt “God’s love.”