Running on Red Dog Road Read online

  A woman handed her baby to the man standing next to her and walked to the front as if in a trance. She stood with arms outstretched, her face lifted to the heavens in ecstasy. Her hair, so light I could see the blue of her dress through it, came past her waist.

  Tolerable Thigpen spoke to her and she dipped her chin in a nod.

  He pulled a good-sized copperhead from a bag and draped it around her neck. I thought of the colored picture of Eve and the serpent in Grandpa’s Bible. The snake lifted and looked her in the eye. She held the gaze for a heartbeat, then fell into a heap on the floor. Not a soul moved to help her. The snake slithered across her motionless body. All of a sudden the woman began to shake and tremble and roll around. I heard the singing start up again, just one voice this time, high and quivering, shaping the words into prayers and lifting them over the little congregation.

  ’Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,

  And to take him at his word,

  Just to rest upon his promise,

  And to know, Thus saith the Lord.

  Jesus, Jesus, how I trust him

  How I’ve proved him o’er and o’er.

  Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus

  O for grace to trust him more.

  I’m so glad I learned to trust him

  Precious Jesus, Savior, Friend.

  And I know that thou art with me

  Will be with me to the end.

  The snake coiled next to the makeshift pulpit. A large man, red faced and sweating, reached toward its head to pick it up. The snake’s tongue flicked out to taste the smell of its foe before it struck. The man jerked back, stumbling over the box that held the snakes.

  I didn’t get to see if anybody got bit, because Grandma yanked us away from the window, Vonnie by one hand and me by the other. She was walking so fast my feet only hit the ground every other step.

  “Those people are snake handlers. Sometimes they drink poison, strychnine, I’ve heard tell, and most of them live to tell about it. Better not let me catch you going anywhere near that road again. I wouldn’t venture to guess how many snakes got loose around here.”

  “Yes ma’am,” we said.

  “Now I mean it,” Grandma said, her voice pitched a little higher than usual. “You two stay close to the house because your Uncle Teel’s got plenty of property for you to find mischief without going off looking for it. And don’t either one of you mention a word of this to your Aunt Annie or anybody else once we get back to the house because a man’s religion is his own business as far as I’m concerned and if he wants it told he’ll tell it his own self.”

  “Picking up snakes is about the dumbest thing I ever heard of,” I said.

  Vonnie spoke up quick and agreed with me, which didn’t happen all that often.

  “I don’t doubt the man is sincere in his beliefs,” Grandma said, “but I think God gave us sense enough to leave snakes alone, sense enough not to drink strychnine—or the rubbing alcohol either for that matter. But then, it’s not my place to be judging them. The Bible is plain about that. It also says that He who is for me is not against me.”

  I asked Grandma what would make them think of picking up snakes in the first place.

  “The Bible says if you have enough faith, you can pick up serpents and not be harmed, but I don’t think God’s going to be offended if I don’t take Him up on it.”

  Grandma always knew what God thought.

  She and God were on real good terms.

  12

  A Handful of the Mountain

  Just as the old rooster crowed the beginning of a new day, Uncle Teel took his last breath on this earth. Grandma said the early morning hours were when a man’s life force seemed to ebb at its lowest, but she didn’t know why. Uncle Teel, who had been on the mend, had taken a sudden downhill turn. Grandma and Aunt Annie sat with him all night long, moistening his lips with cool mint tea and praying, him not knowing who they were or where he was, fighting them when they tried to cool his brow or straighten his covers.

  Grandma and Aunt Annie prepared him for burial. They dressed him in the black suit with the long jacket.

  The coffin was a plain pine box, lined with the worn crazy quilt Uncle Teel favored. It was what he wanted. Several stout poles, three, or maybe four, were placed underneath and extended out a couple of feet on each side. Men in overalls, some with a jacket if they had one, and some in full Sunday-go-to-meeting garb, picked the coffin up by the poles and carried it to a grave dug in the family plot right there on Flat Mountain. The men and women, somber in black and brown and navy, stood in silhouette against buckets of rhododendron. Someone had woven flowers through a wreath of wild grapevines and laid it at the head of the grave.

  Uncle Teel’s name and birthday and deathday were printed on a piece of paper and placed in a Mason jar, the lid screwed down tight. A man placed the jar at the head of the grave. Some graves had simple wood crosses with the names and dates carved out and a few had real tombstones, but most were marked with the makeshift jars. Other jars held flowers, and one held a picture of a baby that had no name. The traveling preacher was off in the next county, so Tolerable Thigpin, holding an open Bible, stepped from the group of mourners and read from Psalms,

  “Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled; thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust.

  “Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created; and thou renewest the face of the earth.

  “The glory of the LORD shall endure forever; the LORD shall rejoice in his works.

  “He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth; he toucheth the hills, and they smoke.

  “I will sing unto the LORD as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have my being.

  “My meditation of him shall be sweet; I will be glad in the LORD.

  “Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth, and let the wicked be no more. Bless thou the LORD, O my soul. Praise ye the LORD.”

  Tolerable Thigpen prayed and said, “Amen,” and everybody else said, “Amen,” then the pallbearers lowered the casket on ropes. While we sang “In the Sweet By and By” and “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder,” each mourner walked past and threw a handful of the mountain back into the open grave. Then Tolerable Thigpen rolled up his shirtsleeves to help shovel dirt into the grave, stopping to pay his respects to Grandma and Aunt Annie.

  “Teel Adkins wuz a fine fellow. Once he helped me get my cow on her feet when she wuz down. Me and him lumbered all around these parts years past. Like to interduce my eldest, Virginia Thigpen,” he said, nodding toward the young woman standing next to him. “She was named Virginia after her sainted mother, who was called Virgie, God rest her, so we called her Ginny. Then she give this baby girl she’s holdin’ the name Virginia. She’s called Nia.”

  To anybody meeting her that day, Ginny Thigpen would seem like an ordinary person, but I knew better. The last time I saw her, she was wearing a copperhead snake around her neck.

  Most of the mourners came back to the house after the funeral. The women brought in food and set it out on the big picnic tables, then busied about picking up plates and washing them under the waterfall in the yard as people finished eating. Men took turns chopping logs into firewood to replenish the stack of kindling on the porch. From time to time they passed a pint jar of moonshine, turning their backs so the women on the porch could pretend they didn’t notice.

  Grownups with death clouding their eyes talked about life while children laughed and played in the yard. Vonnie and I joined in endless rounds of Red Rover and Ring Around the Rosie. After that, someone started a game of Hide and Seek. From my hiding place high in the saddle fork of a maple tree, I could see people gathered on the porch. The big picnic tables were filled and overflowing. I thought Uncle Teel would be pleased. Grandma said he always did like a lot of company.

  Aunt Annie had too nervous a disposition to stay alone where Uncle Teel died, so she went to stay with relatives in another county, leaving us to close up the hou
se.

  Tolerable Thigpen sent Ginny to help us. Vonnie and I played with baby Nia, making her a sugar tit from a spoonful of sugar tied up in a piece of cloth and taking her for rides in the wheelbarrow. We scattered corn to bait the coop so Grandma could catch a chicken most any time she wanted. One whole day she lured the chickens in one by one and wrung their necks. She chopped the heads off, watching as they ran around spurting blood from headless bodies. After they fell over dead, she dipped them in boiling water, plucked the feathers, lit a pine knot torch to singe the pinfeathers, then gutted and cut them up.

  Turkey vultures held watch from a dead pine tree, lifting grotesque bodies to rearrange their wings from time to time.

  After Grandma boiled the chickens in the big outdoor kettle, she added a handful of salt, boned the meat, and packed it in mason jars, pouring broth to an inch from the top. She had Ginny wipe the rims of the jars with cider vinegar to cut any grease so the lids would seal properly in the big canner. There were fourteen chickens put up and ready to use for chicken and dumplings. Grandma sent four of the jars home with Ginny.

  Tolerable Thigpen stopped by to say he was right sorry to see us go. Grandma asked him to keep an eye on the place since Aunt Annie was figuring to come back to Flat Mountain in the spring. He perked up at that. Grandma gave him the stack of newly cut firewood from the porch, and he took Pony home with him.

  I sat on the porch and watched him walk away, dipping to one side with each step.

  The vultures settled to the ground and picked at the guts and bones and the bloodied dirt until no trace of death remained.

  13

  Lead a Horse to Water

  The house felt strange when we got home from Flat Mountain. Like being in a cemetery, where the air was always flat as a flitter. I’d heard it said you couldn’t fly a kite in a cemetery even on a windy day because the air didn’t have any lift to it. I’d never tried it though. Although Grandpa had been home all along, a house needed more than one person to give it life so as there could be a give and take, at least according to Grandma, and the more people in it, the more life there was. It must have been true because something important had left our house while we were gone, and we’d have to laugh and cry and pray and fuss and work inside those rooms to get it back.

  Grandma thought Grandpa was looking a little peaked, but she reckoned all he needed was a few biscuits and gravy to give him some color. Nobody talked about Uncle Teel dying, not a single word. It seems like we would have, but we didn’t. That’s just how we were. Grandma made a big supper and kept putting more on Grandpa’s plate until he finally told her he was up to his eyeballs and couldn’t eat another bite and besides, it was time to get ready for prayer meeting if she was really set on going. She was.

  A few trees concealed a stone-circled fire site that had seen too many butts and not enough fires. Most everybody called it the ash pit, but I’d heard some call it the arm pit. The odor of stamped-out cigarettes and unrepented sins soured the air.

  Roby Stover made a beeline there as soon as he could escape the Wednesday night prayer meeting for a couple of minutes. I didn’t know why we called him Roby when everybody else was called Brother This or Sister That. Grandma would know, but I wasn’t so sure she’d tell me. There was a lot of stuff she said wouldn’t hurt me one iota not to know.

  While everybody shook hands with the people around them, even those they’d seen earlier at the post office or the Piggly Wiggly, Roby ducked back in. He wasn’t fooling me. A person needn’t smell the Sen-Sen on him to know that he’d been sneaking a smoke. Sen-Sen was a licorice candy advertised as “breath perfume.” Most of the men at the ash pit carried a packet of it tucked away. But Sen-Sen did little to cover the lingering smell of the Chesterfield or Lucky Strike or Camel cigarettes they tried to keep secret from meddling wives and girlfriends.

  My grandpa preached hard as any man could against smoking and drinking. He said Roby hadn’t quit his sinful ways because the Holy Ghost hadn’t convicted him yet. When he got convicted, he’d lay those poisons down and never be tempted to pick them up again. It hadn’t happened yet, but Grandpa had faith it would. In the meantime he’d keep praying for Roby to be delivered. That was all a man could do. God would do the rest. Grandpa was sure of it.

  “You can lead a horse to water,” he said, shaking his head, “but you can’t make him drink.”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I just nodded.

  Grandma and Grandpa were talking about how Roby Stover had been sorrier than a hound dog before he took up with Roberta Crawford. Roby’s real name was Roberts, like there was more than one of him, but I’d never heard him called that. It was funny how their first names matched up—Roberts and Roberta. They even favored some. Both were tall and rangy. And both of them had thin hair, except Roby’s was reddish and Roberta’s a dirty blonde. Dishwater blonde, Grandma called it.

  “Roberta’s not much on looks,” Grandma said.

  Grandpa said that was being downright generous. He’d heard one of the men say if that girl’s face got any longer they’d have to put a feedbag on her.

  Grandma started to laugh, then caught herself. “That’s a terrible thing to say about a nice girl like Roberta. She’s smart too. Graduated high school and is in the college downtown studying stenography. I wouldn’t have thought she would have the likes of Roby on a buttered biscuit. Now they’re married and she’s got him coming to services regular. There’s not a one among us who thought that would come to be.”

  Grandpa said he was wrong to have repeated that talk about Roberta.

  “I’m as much to blame as you are,” Grandma said, “but neither of us spoke anything that wasn’t the truth.”

  Grandpa put a serious look on. “Speaking in jest is a mighty poor excuse for being unkind. We best seek the Lord’s forgiveness for acting the fool.”

  According to Grandpa and Grandma, eavesdropping and gossiping were sins just the same as stealing and lying and wearing feathers. If you eavesdropped, you stole things that weren’t meant for your ears, and if you gossiped, you could besmirch a person’s good name. As for wearing feathers, all I knew was it said not to in The Rules. My mother wore a hat with feathers and no harm came, but she wasn’t a Pentecostal. I hadn’t worn any feathers unless the one I wore as Hiawatha for a program at school counted.

  But I had eavesdropped and gossiped.

  And I was fixing to do it again.

  I could not wait to tell Sissy every word. I rehearsed it in my head, toying with the idea of whinnying when I got to the part about putting the feedbag on Roberta.

  The church was dark when we arrived for the Sunday evening service. Grandma cut on the lights and started down the pews straightening hymnals, while I looked for the fan with the picture of a blue-eyed Jesus. Paper fans always stood ready in the wooden rack on the back of each pew, along with the hymnals. Each fan was the size of a small paper plate and had a flat stick attached as a handle. Sometimes you got a fan with a picture of Jesus on one side and Scripture verses on the other, while another time your fan might advertise a bank or a furniture store.

  At the last meeting Sister Persinger got to the Jesus fan first and I’d had to ask her to trade, which made me uneasy because that woman had a snurl on her face all the time. She didn’t like children all that much, and she clearly harbored a particular dislike for me. It could have to do with me catching her in the vestibule pinching her cheeks all rosy before she went wringing and twisting down the aisle to sit next to Clive Farleigh, one of the few available men we had.

  I looked her square in the eye.

  Her lips pursed up like she had a drawstring around her mouth, but she handed me the fan before Grandma was any the wiser. Roby came in and slouched down next to Roberta, who had arrived early with some neighbors. She said something to him, and he took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. The rest of the congregation arrived in twos and threes, until there were people scattered on most of the pews, though not
as many as at the morning service.

  Grandpa said most wanted their salvation served up in small portions.

  “You might take that into consideration Sunday morning when I’ve got dinner drying out in the oven,” Grandma said.

  “The Lord leads me, Rindy. I am but a lowly servant doing His will.”

  “I don’t expect His will is for me to serve up a stringy roast for Sunday dinner.”

  “I’ve been eating your cooking since you were but a girl of eighteen and haven’t felt compelled to complain yet,” Grandpa said.

  “It wouldn’t do you to, even if you did feel the need.” Grandma turned back to straightening hymnals.

  The opening hymn was sung by Sister Singletary. She was the only one up to doing a solo since we’d lost Brother Bennett to the Nazarenes. After that, Grandpa made some announcements: The roof had sprung a leak and he’d need a volunteer to help him tar it before the next rain caught them unawares. The Ladies Home Missionary Society was organizing a prayer chain for the missionaries overseas. The 7:00 p.m. Thursday men’s Bible study was starting back up again. Sunday next was Valentine’s Day, so the preaching would be on God’s love, the greatest love of all. “Now for all you fellows out there, remember to get your sweetheart a valentine or a box of chocolates,” he’d added.

  Then Grandpa called for testimonies. A testimony was when someone got up and said what a terrible person he had been until he got saved.

  “Why don’t the women get up and tell the bad things they’ve done?” I asked Grandma.

  “It’s not seemly for women to put themselves forward. Besides,” she continued, “the women aren’t as sinful as the men, at least by my thinking. Not a one comes to mind that smokes or drinks or gambles. Now the women do sin, each and every one of us does, but our sins are things like backbiting or being covetous or stingy or vain. Folks don’t get themselves as worked up about those sins, but I reckon they should. Women,” she said, “are held to a higher standard. Men are a different story.”