The Day of Small Things (29 page)

Dorothy looked past the preacher to the front of the sanctuary where a tapestry version of Leonardo’s
Last Supper
shared the white-painted concrete block wall with
a good-sized rectangle of varnished plywood. Here the same hand that had lettered the sign above the church door had copied down the significant verses: the lines from Mark that set this church apart as Signs Following.

Her gaze shifted to the snake boxes and a feeling of nausea swept over her.
I can’t stay in here with them things
, she thought, and tried to stand so as to slip out the door but her legs felt as if they were made of butter. Beside her, Birdie was staring gape-mouthed at the slim-hipped, lazy-eyed Brother Harice, who was working his way down the short aisle, capping each child’s head with his outspread hand.

“Maneda sujornam,”
he called out, as his hand left the last child.
“Haremma loyavan bekoot!”

Swinging his arms up and down as if trying to fly, the preacher turned in a slow circle, still spouting a gibberish of tongues, then hopped back down the aisle toward the dais, riding an invisible pogo stick. The congregation began to respond, at first with amens and hallelujahs, then with unknown languages as well.

The little building rocked in a Babel of tongues as Brother Harice reached the dais and picked up the largest snake box. Pitched just beneath the unintelligible phrases sounding on every side, Dorothy could hear a dry whirring.

She frowned and strained her ears to identify the
sound, then, with a sudden and involuntary shudder, realized that what she was hearing was the warning hum of several very agitated rattlesnakes.

Mesmerized, she watched as Brother Harice, his face contorted in an expression halfway between pain and rapture, undid the sturdy latch of the box. Without pausing, he pulled open the top and plunged his hand in amongst the quivering shapes that slid, coiling and uncoiling, just behind the hardware cloth screen.

Dorothy covered her eyes with one hand, praying for deliverance.

(Birdie)

P
oor Dorothy! I hadn’t thought how hard this might be for her. She went white as a sheet when Brother Harice picked up his serpent box, and she looks yet like she might faint. Of course, some folks is fearful of any snakes at all—like my Luther. He purely couldn’t abide them, even the rat-killing blacksnakes or the pretty little ringnecks, hardly bigger than a worm. He’d go for a hoe quick as ever he saw one. But after I spoke with him some on the subject and told him I’d catch them and move them if they was harming aught, he agreed to leave them be. He never could stand to see me holding one though, always found somewheres else to be when I went after the snakes.

Now Dorothy has both hands over her face like she is praying but I know that it’s on account of the serpents she don’t want to look at. I hate it that she’s so scared and I reach over and pat her shoulder, trying to let her know it’ll be all right.

She lets out a squeak and jerks away from me, keeping them hands over her face just as tight.

“Dor’thy,” I say real quiet and close to her ear, not that it’s likely anyone is paying any mind to us with all that’s going on up at the front of the church. “Honey, if you feel sick-like, why don’t you go set in the car? Belvy’ll understand and ain’t none here will take it wrong.”

Her voice comes out from between her hands. “I’m all right, Birdie, really I am. I’ll stay here. I’ll do it for Calven—anything to get my boy back. I just …”

I don’t get the rest of what she says, what with the racket of the guitar and the rattle and ring of tambourines and a confusion of voices all around. Some folks is standing, waving their hands in testimony; others is kneeling and praying aloud. A few rows ahead of us there’s a woman dancing a little two-step out in the aisle, and seeing her face, how she is lost in the music and the movement, makes me remember a time when I danced till my feet bled—with a smile on my face the whole time.

Brother Harice hands the yellow rattler he has been holding to one of those big fellers from the elders’ bench who lays it across his shoulders and goes to skipping across the platform. They’ll keep the snakes up there or near the front; Dorothy needn’t fear that one of them’ll come near her.

They’s some of the Signs Followers treat the serpents awful rough—laying them down to walk on and slinging them around ever which way. I have heard of one feller who used a big rattler like a skip rope, but that was way back when Belvy and her man first took up with these folks, back when the church still met in Marshall County.

Not too long after I talked to Belvy about how them fellers was doing the snakes, she had an Anointing and
prophesized that them what didn’t respect the serpents as instruments of God’s will would be bit. At first, didn’t nothing change, but after the one who was using the rattler for a skip rope got bit and died within the hour, the handlers, in this church anyhow, begun to treat the serpents better.

Up at the front, Belvy is setting quiet in the midst of all this commotion. I can’t see but the back of her head but I know she is something set apart—a calm center in this storm of worship.

Seems like long as I’ve knowed her, Belvy has been seeking after God. When first she was married and away from her mother, she tried one church then another till she must have got saved more times than she can remember. Made her feel good, somehow. But then it would kindly wear off and she’d find something wrong with the preacher or the teaching or the other folks in the church and she’d move on to another—mostly Baptist, of course, Hardshell, Freewill, Missionary, and I don’t know what all. One time she even got mixed up with the Presbyterians—but that didn’t last. Belvy likes her preachers to work up a sweat when they bring the Word.

Brother Harice has pulled out two copperheads now, one of them kindly dusty and pale looking, being just a few days from shedding his skin. Snakes is often extra touchy before they shed, as they can’t hardly see, the old scales over their eyes having got all cloudy, but this one don’t give the preacher no trouble. It just hangs there quiet as Brother Harice brings it up to his face and stares eye to eye with it. The second snake, its skin shiny and new, is rank and ill-tempered. It twists in the preacher’s hands, thinking about escape.

The first time I saw a snake shed its skin, I thought it was a miracle—the snake looking like it was dying and then the old tired skin just shucking off and a new snake coming out the mouth of the old, leaving behind the too-small skin and crawling off to start life all over. The scales is fallen from its eyes, like Saul in the Bible, I thought to myself back then.

There is a hush falling over the congregation and now Belvy is on her feet, one hand raised high. I wonder if she’s getting an Anointing, if she’ll be given a message that will help us find Calven.

The other time she sought an answer for me, Belvy spoke in tongues and whirled about before she come and stood in front of me to speak the prophecy. But now she is just standing there, not moving a muscle—like she had been turned to stone. She could be one of them prophetesses of old—mighty women like Miriam or Deborah in the Bible.

She stands there like a tall tree, so straight and still, and I see how folks look at her—how they step back and give her room. Every one of them calls her
Aunt
Belvy, like they all want to claim kinship with her. She is the cornerstone of this church, no matter that being a woman, she can’t preach. She can still prophesize and, buddy, when she speaks under an Anointing, they all of them perk up their ears and listen.

It was ’40 or ’41 when Belvy first went to a Signs-Following church; I know she had gone several times and had already made up her mind to join before she finally come by the house and told me about it. I could see right off that something was different for her face was shining like the dawn of day.

Now, Belvy was always a pretty woman and she liked to
dress up fine and fix her hair just so whenever she went out but on this day she’d left off the red lipstick and the earbobs she was so proud of. I didn’t know it at the time but that’s the way of the Holiness women. Vanity, they call it, to wear makeup or jewelry.

“Birdie,” she said to me, taking my hands the moment she come up on the porch, and I remember thinking that even her voice sounded different, kindly
humming
, like a plucked guitar string. “Birdie,” she said, “I have at long last found what I been looking for—a church so filled with the Spirit that it just naturally overflows. I have been an empty vessel all this time but now the Spirit has filled me clean to the brim.”

She smiled at me then, a smile I remember just as plain—like there was light pouring out of her mouth and her eyes. And even without the lipstick and with her pretty hair slicked back from her face and pulled into a knot, at that moment she was the most beautiful woman I ever seen. Buddy, that light was just
pouring
out of her, like she was so full of the Holy Spirit that it couldn’t be held back.

And that was it for her—there weren’t no more shopping around for just the right preacher or church. Belvy and her man both joined with the Signs Followers and afore long it was the center of their life. Of course, she was after me to join and I did go with her a time or two. But Luther’d not put a foot in that church and it didn’t set so well with him when I did. So after a time I told Belvy, as kind as I could, that her church weren’t right for me.

Back then and now too, watching the Spirit move on the folks in the Holiness church, whether they’re singing or testifying or taking up serpents or drinking poison or shaking tambourines or dancing before the Lord—it all puts me in mind of that time in my life that I promised
Luther to forget. But most of all, it is the dancing brings it back.

In another place I had seen people dancing till they was crazy … had danced that way myself till I like to run mad … and I knowed well how powerful that feeling could be and where it could lead. No, I was happy for Belvy but I told her then I’d not be joining her church. There was too many sleeping memories—

“Mabor abakad! Oowdutto mebavnith!”

And all at once Belvy is standing in front of me, shouting out words the Anointing has brought upon her. Her hair, still long but white as snow now, has come loose from its knot and is falling round her shoulders and down her back. Her eyes is rolled back in her head but she stands there looking at me with that blind stare and I know full well she sees me. I am on my feet now, drawn up by her power.

She is full of the Spirit again and this time it’s not beauty that I see in her but Power and terrible knowledge. The Spirit clothes her like a garment and reaches out in a mighty swirling cloud—all dark blues and purples like a storm—to cover me too. I feel a stirring deep inside and the sounds in the church falls away. All I can hear is a mighty humming that crowds into my head and goes to working its way all through me. My body is trembling with the Spirit and I am held inside this spinning place of dark and light. And the humming breaks into many voices that sing and shout their different messages and then come back together, joining up to make one voice—one message. Inside the whirlwind I can hear the one voice speaking to me and I marvel to see God Himself in pieces, turning into many Gods, and not all of them human-like neither. They are whirling all around me—long white
robes and naked bodies, fur and feather, fin and scale, male and female and neither and both they are—but all Gods past knowing. And then, like the voices, the Many join into One and the One is whispering inside my head.

Yes
, I answer,
now I see … yes, I know now … yes, I will
.

And the whirlwind slows and becomes a cloud and the cloud melts away and it is me and Belvy standing there face-to-face, the each of us filled with a dreadful knowledge. She is speaking her words of prophecy and I …

And now I begin to remember … and now I begin to know …

I know that the old paths—the ones I turned away from when I made my promise to Luther—those old paths are alive with power and waiting … waiting for me … if I dare to walk them again.

“Was that a prophecy—those things she said to you?”

Dorothy is feeling right much better, now that we’re in her vehicle and heading home, away from the church and the snakes. Her face was pale and sheeny with sweat all through the service and once I saw her sway like she was going to faint but she stayed in her seat.