When they turned around and looked at us, the twenty or so people filling the folding chairs, I saw faces that were almost cartoons of joy and grief and fear and hope as they sang out, immigrant faces scrubbed clean for churchgoing, unlovely faces for the most part, mountain people of the deep South who’d trekked up to the Midwest several generations ago but had never fundamentally changed, a problem for cops, social workers, doctors, clerics, and neighbors. Some of these people still clung to the precepts of “granny medicine,” where you cure lockjaw by crushing a cockroach in a cup of boiling water and drinking it down, and staunch the bleeding of a wound by rubbing chewing tobacco on it.
You can’t estimate the effects of poverty on generation after generation of people, that sadness and despair and madness that so quietly but irrevocably shapes their thoughts and taints their souls.
The Muldaurs lived off by themselves, a good half-mile from the others, who lived in trailers and shacks in an area called The Corners and mostly worked for large tenant farms. Ten, twelve families that crossbred with alarming regularity. The women mostly wore faded housedresses, their hair beribboned for church.
The men mostly wore threadbare white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. A couple of them bore dark neckties. There were six or seven very young children who wore shorts and shirts because of the eighty-degree heat. There was a certain apprehension in the eyes of the young ones. They had not yet been fortified with the certainty of their elders-that those who did not practice the ways of their faith would perish in hell, and that all strangers meant you harm. Especially, according to the pamphlets Muldaur had been circulating in town, the Jews and Catholics all huddled behind Jack Kennedy in this fall’s election. And of course it was the diabolical Jews stirring up all the trouble down South with the “coloreds.”
Naturally, I had mixed feelings about these people.
About the only good thing I could say for their religion was that they didn’t wear hats of any kind. I’ve often wondered if God wears a fedora. I mean, have you ever noticed that about religions, their thing for hats? But the rattlesnakes kind of balanced things back in the other direction. The priests and monsignors I grew up with all wore various liturgical hats, caps, and beanies, but one thing you could say in their favor was that they never brought any rattlesnakes to mass, God love ‘em. If they had any rattlesnakes, they kept them in the privacy of the rectory and didn’t tell us about it.
But then there was the sadness of these people. Not even Steinbeck had gotten to it. The Okies were just displaced farmers who wanted to work and prosper. I never read anything about Okies and rattlers.
Dreiser kinda got to these people, I guess. That opening scene of An American Tragedy where the family is there on that twilight street corner. I could see these people on that same corner, snakes and all. They were the lost ones and didn’t even know it. Few of them would have indoor plumbing; some of them wouldn’t even have electricity. A good number of them would die young because they didn’t see doctors. And they would spend too much of their time fearing a Jesus who was a parody of the man or god who lived not quite 2eajjj years ago. In their version, He despised them and they were appreciative of that fact. It gave some explanation, I suppose, for their smashed and shabby lives.
The singing continued even though John Muldaur set down his microphone and suddenly walked down the aisle between the folding chairs. By this time, his entire upper body glistened with sweat and he was muttering some kind of prayer to himself in the sort of hypnotic fashion people speaking in tongues get into.
No doubt about where he was going, what he was doing.
He swooped up the two cages of snakes and transported them back to the makeshift altar.
The air changed. Not just because of the hissing and the rattling. Because of the excitement. I’d never been to an orgy before but I was sure at one now.
Kylie nudged me. Whispered, “This is scary.”
I knew what she meant. There was a sense of violence in the orgiastic response to the snakes. Women moaned in sexual ways; men stared as if transfixed. The children looked confused but excited and afraid, their tiny faces darting up to survey the faces of their parents, wanting some sort of verbal explanation.
Muldaur reached out his hands. His wife, Viola, took his left one; his teenage daughter, Ella, his right. Both were buxom, frizzy-haired, and aggrieved-looking. They looked as troubled and angry as the rattlesnakes. All three Muldaurs raised their locked hands and said a brief prayer. “That I am pure of soul, I have no doubt, my Lord. Bless me in my purity, Father.
Bless me.”
Muldaur dropped the women’s hands and turned to the snakes once again. A collective emotional upheaval rumbled through the church. The big moment was approaching. The electric guitar played quick, exotic, crazed, off-key rifts.
Moans; shouts; cries. The snakes were coming.
Orgasm.
My body spasmed when he reached into the cage and brought forth snake number one. Now slow down and think about this: You have a small cage containing four or five poisonous snakes, all right?
So what do you do? You just plunge your hand in the open lid up top and grab one of the buggers?
Aren’t you risking being attacked by one if not more of the snakes in the cage?
But if he was afraid-or even hesitant-he sure didn’t show it.
“God has sent us the serpent to reveal our true nature,” Muldaur said. Or intoned, I guess. The rattler had brought out his intoning side. “Who wants his soul judged by the serpent?”
This part, I suppose, you’re familiar with.
You go up there-y, not me-and let the good Reverend Muldaur hand you off the rattler. Then you proceed to grasp it while all the time trying to keep it from biting you. If you manage to hold it for a minute or two without being bitten, that means that your soul is pure and you’re one of the chosen. If the snake bites you, you’re a sinner whose sins must be redressed. Right after they rush you to the hospital.
Two men and a woman went up and it was about what you might expect. There was a lot of Bible-quoting and a lot of prayer-shouting and one very tiny little girl crying. The snakes scared her.
What an irrational reaction. Timber rattlers, in case you don’t know, usually have black or dark brown crossbands on a yellow or tan body. The head is yellowish and unmarked. Every once in a while you find one that’s black, misleading you into thinking you’ve got a river rattler, as they’re called hereabouts.
Makes no difference. Timber rattler or river rattler, you really shouldn’t treat them like toys.
The last adult to handle a snake-a heavyset bald man with a milky blue left eye-took on two snakes. He slung them over his shoulders, he let one wrap about half its body around his neck, and he shook one so furiously that the thing went into snake psychosis.
Then the two men and the woman stood as a group below the lectern and let the congregation touch them, as if they were anointed figures with divine powers.
Singing all the time. Everybody was singing. I’m not sure, but I think that even the snakes were singing.
True, these people didn’t wear hats, but they did sing their collective asses off. The serpents had not bitten these three and so the trio had proved its godliness and what better way to celebrate than with a slightly off-key electric guitar and twenty-some people (and some snakes) joining in congregational song.
I wondered if the ceremony was over. In a Catholic mass everything depends on the sermon.
If the sermon’s short, you’re home free. A short sermon, you can be out of mass in twenty-five minutes flat. I once got an eighteen-minute mass, in fact, leading to my belief that the priest had the trots and needed to get back to the rectory quickly. But God help you if you get the rambling old monsignor. With him, you should pack a lunch.
I had the same feeling here. The snake stuff hadn’t taken so long-or been all that terrible, since nobody’d been bitten-s maybe Muldaur wasn’t as far gone as I’d feared.
Then the little girl went up and stood next to Muldaur.
She was skinny, pigtailed, terrified. She wore white walking shorts and a blue sleeveless blouse. She looked to be about seven.
“Satan hides even in the hearts and souls of children,” Muldaur said.
And the congregation answered him variously with “Yes, Brother” and “The Lord is the Light” and “I do not fear the darkness.”
And it all changed for me. This whole experience. Until now a part of me was thinking about how I’d tell my friends about this little adventure.
