“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
