I saw a young snake glide
Out of the mottled shade
And hang, limp on a stone:
A thin mouth, and a tongue
Stayed, in the still air.
It turned; it drew away;
Its shadow bent in half;
It quickened and was gone
I felt my slow blood warm.
I longed to be that thing.
The pure, sensuous form.
And I may be, some time.
DH Lawrence, 1917
Faith and submission. The tenets of belief they say. Ignore at your own peril. But what if the actual peril is in the faith and especially the submission? The tale that I’m about to tell will test and make you question both.
Scales and non vocal hisses. Silent movements and warning rattles. All things that a little boy is attracted to. It is the forbidden temptation that is out there, and the allegory isn’t lost on a reader of the Good Book. There is a concerted effort to vilify those who slither to and fro in the grass and the shadows, the snakes have always lured children because they are off-limits. So of course, when George Hensley saw one slink under the woodpile, he was intrigued.
He glanced around the yard, looking for his Mama or Papa, knowing that they would know he was up to something. Kids think that they are good at hiding their transgressions but a parent always knows. It didn’t help that his very actions became suspicious as he assessed the yard for would-be foilers of plans. Namely his parents, or even worse his little sister Evelyn. She would tattle on Jesus himself if she caught him sneaking a piece of chocolate from the countertop in the kitchen when he knew he wasn’t supposed to. Not that George thought himself Jesus. He’s just saying, she would do it.
The coast was clear, and George slinked toward the edge of the woodshed, hoping for a glimpse of the slithering creature that he was quite sure he saw head into its shadows just moments ago. At first, as he was scanning the yard like a predator and glanced around, he didn’t see anything, but his young eyes were still keen, and despite its brown and black camouflage, he saw the very end of the tail recede into the shadows of a fresh cut pile of hickory logs. He had him now. He just knew it.
George made his best efforts at being a ghost as he tiptoed across the dirt floor of the woodshed, being as careful as an excited kid could to not make a sound. He reached the stack of logs and the smell of freshly cut wood filled the air around him. He always liked that smell. He crouched slowly to his knees so that he could peer under the cinder block and wood rack that his father had built to keep the wood off of the damp earth so that it could dry. He could see nothing but darkness, his eyes adjusted to the sunny mid-day afternoon of an early fall day.
He should have known better when the rattle began to issue its warning. Starting slowly and then increasing in intensity, he should have left right then. But boys will be boys, and curiosity is a hard addiction to quell at that age. He kept peering into the shadowy underbelly of the wood pile hoping to catch a glimpse of the forbidden snake that he shouldn’t have been chasing to begin with.
Some events in life read like a story in the penny comics when you look back on them. This would be one of them. You can predict the story’s progression just by the way the tension and the anticipation are written into them, luring the reader to keep reading, even though you know what is coming. When the snake struck George on the forearm, he thought “Well that’s not so bad.” He jerked his arm away quickly, and no serpent was to be found still attached to it, though he knew by the sting what had happened. He was wearing his long-sleeved button-up, not bothering to change after they had gotten home from church. He would be scolded enough for not taking it off, he didn’t need the amplified ire of his mother to multiply if she discovered that he had chased a snake and had been bitten. So he made sure his sleeve was in place and covered his arm as he ran back toward the house.
Only a kid of a certain age could have the self-assured naïveté that they could get away with hiding the fact that they had been bitten by a rattlesnake that they knew that they were forbidden to chase, so it was no surprise that George’s adolescent mind had convinced him that he could. he was of that certain age where adolescent bravado is your weapon that you wield toward the prospect of adulthood. The irony is that such things sometimes prevent the would-be grown-ups from reaching the age to call themselves one.
He went on about his day, eating fried chicken that his mama had cooked for Sunday supper. It wasn’t until he was washing up for bed a couple of hours later that he began to worry. As he took off his good shirt that he had insisted on wearing throughout the rest of the day, he saw that the skin on his arm didn’t look right. It was red and swollen, and even though he was pretending to be tough, he had to admit that his arm feeling numb was worrying him.
That worry didn’t compare to the concern that his parents were enduring over the next few days. George started not acting himself the next morning, and his parent’s concern was activated then. He didn’t want to eat, which for him was a sure sign that something was wrong. He was normally ravenous every minute of the day just like most boys his age. For him to turn down a breakfast of cathead biscuits with leftover chicken was certainly a cause for concern. Worry amplified. It only got worse throughout the next few days. He could barely get out of bed. On the third day, his mother discovered the bite and it all made sense. He had lost some of his composure, so a scolding in his current state wasn’t something that she could muster, but knowing that he had been bitten by something full of venom drove her to the point of a breakdown. The telltale twin pricks in his skin surrounded by dying flesh left no room for questions. She called the doctor to come see him, and he told her that faith alone would get him through this predicament at this point, so the reverend was the next to be called on.
He came somberly as most preachers seem to do, and his prayers echoed in George’s head. He spoke of expelling fire and brimstone, and pleas for George’s soul and forgiveness on his behalf. George had dreams of angels and light and shadows shrinking from them. He didn’t know at the time, but those visions carried on for a tumultuous pair of weeks that sent his parents to the edge as they stood watch over him in his bed. The shadows and the sunlight continued to battle in his head throughout the duration, and he wasn’t aware of what was happening to him in reality. He dreamed of the snake, and he dreamed of a man wearing all black as he chased the serpent away without saying a word. The man in black was pleased and grinned a hearty grin in response to his success in ridding George’s mind of the venom.
George wasn’t scared, he knew that the man in black was God, and with him there, nothing would harm him. George survived, much to his parents’ surprise and relief, but when he walked out of the other end of his predicament, he wasn’t the same anymore.
The next years came in a fervor. You see, to hear George speak, and speak he did often, that day in the woodshed was a sign from God, and it was his lot in life to tell people about it and how His hand surely touched him that day and saved his life in the end. He saw his draw to the snake in the woodshed as a test of faith that he prevailed over with the grace of the holy spirit. He knew deep down in his heart that the man in black had graced his shoulder with his hand and brought him back from the brink of death to speak the gospel. People began to listen.
George still had dreams that haunted him, visions of shadows and darkness that lulled him restlessly through attempted slumber almost every night. He awakened, not fully rested each time with a newfound sense of purpose. He would speak the lord’s words and join the fight against the void that he knew now was around every corner. He would wander from town to town telling the good word, filling ears and hearts with fears of impending fire and impending doom and pleas for salvation and submission. He truly felt that fear and overcoming it through the gospel was the path to salvation, and in time he had a strong following and even four walls to call home in which he spoke with wild-eyed surety to the growing parishioners that attended at the invitation of a word of mouth or in the form of a local legend.
The snakes were in his head each night, their unblinking eyes reminding him that he held domain over them, as he had conquered not once but forever their venom and temptation.
It was a rainy Sunday morning, the pews filled with warm bodies, many of whom fanned themselves with hand-driven paper fans in an attempt at quelling the insistent heat and humidity of the crowded room. His voice boomed across the tops of the heads of the parishioners and he could feel the spirit moving him and guiding his words with every breath. They weren’t expecting what was to come next.
“ And he said unto them, Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth shall not be damned.
And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues;
They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.
So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven and sat on the right hand of God.
And they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following. Amen!
I said AMEN!”
George’s face was red and sweating and the congregation replied back to him a convicted “Amen!!”
George knelt down behind the pulpit and closed his eyes somberly, taking a deep breath to steady his nerves against what he had planned to do next. He pulled a white pillowcase over to him from under the rough-hewn podium, and the cloth coiled and wriggled with an unnatural coldness under the touch of his palm. He carefully untied the knot from the cloth and with a silent prayer, he plunged his hand inside of the pillowcase and withdrew a young timber rattler from the belly of the fabric sack. The snake didn’t recoil, it only stared at him through slitted pupils and a flickering tongue.
George held the snake with two hands and slowly emerged from his temporary cover to face the congregation. He raised the snake over his head with a retort of gasps and shrieks from the attendees who now uncomfortably mulled in their seats, recoiling from the visage in front of them.
“Fear not children of God! Fear not the serpent, for as his will states, none who believe shall be harmed. Behold, my flock, the dominion over the evil of poison and aggression. Behold, God’s will!”
The audience, still taken aback by the actions of their preacher standing above them, snake clutched above his head, began to settle as they realized that the snake indeed meant him no harm, it just languidly reserved itself to his clutching hands around its body and made no attempt at aggression or defense. It in fact seemed to be without any ill intent at all. He continued to preach to them, assuring them that his faith protected him from harm, as it would them as well if they just relinquished themselves to a complete subordination to their faith in their savior.
Little Nelly Smith, who sat in the middle of the church with her father John, and her mother Eugena Lee, feared for her life. Not of snakes, she always thought they were beautiful and even helped a few of them across a dangerous roadway in the past, but of the shadows around Pastor Hensley. Around him and in his eyes. She hated coming to this new church. She thought that a man who screamed for an hour straight about the horrors of hell and spoke about how much of their life revolved around fear and submission was somebody to be wary of. Her parents, especially her mama, wanted to hear nothing of the sort. Any time she protested, she had gotten scolded or disciplined, so every Sunday and Wednesday she had resigned herself to the pulpit scolding that she always got as a matter of habit from the reverend. What he said was always something about being in sin and requiring submission. She felt like no matter what she did, she was destined to make God frown. There were just too many rules for her 10-year-old mind to remember. All of this reservation was compounded by the fact that going to this church gave her nightmares.
She had made the connection after the third or fourth visit that they had made to Cane Creek Baptist, the home of the prophetic minister that everyone had been talking about all around town. The first few times when she awakened in a sweat she chalked it up to simple restless dreams, but the nightmares were always the same. Shadows and snakes and fire and laughter. They didn’t start until her family had started allowing the reverend to berate them as parishioners with fear and folly.
Today, as Reverend Hensley held aloft almost in reverence a rattlesnake, she cowered and buried her head in the crook between her mom’s shoulder and the pew that they were sitting in.
“Hush now Child, quit making a fool a yerself! Look, glory be! The snake has submitted to the will of the lord through the reverend’s hands!
Almost as if on cue, the congregation stood and started a din of awe-inspired gasps sprinkled with a hefty portion of “Amens” and “Glory Be’s”. Nelly wanted no part of it.
“But Mama! What if he gets bit? What if it gets loose and bites us too? Mama, don’t you see the blacks of his eyes?!”
Her protests were drowned out by the noise of the congregation and her mother brushed her away with a fluttering of her hand and a crooked scowl at her on her eyebrows. The reverend was walking the floors of the church, serpent held aloft and somehow placated and resigned to its newfound role, and the people around him whooped and hollered in amazement and a solidified sense of faith.
That night the dreams came again. Slithering snakes and shadows in black hats, cold air and no warmth to be found. And the cackling laughter. She awakened in a cold sweat in the middle of the night and heard herself panting like a dog like she had been running and was out of breath. None of this was right, and she knew it down deep. But when you’re young and small, the world feels the need to set you on the “right” path and your protests are usually hushed or spanked away if you were to swim against the tide that you are supposed to conform to. She pulled on her jacket over her nightgown and wandered to the edge of the woods in the yard. Something about the smell of pine and the quiet that she found there gave her peace and solace, so she came here often between the attentive glances of her parents. Every child knows that there are chinks in the armor of their parents’ vigilance to exploit when the time was right. Little did she know that the path of the snakes with George Hensley had begun much the same way with a similar undermining of his parents’ will.
The sweet smell of pine graced Nelly’s nose and she welcomed it like a warm embrace. Something about the darkness of the forest was the thing that she realized made her actually feel close to God. The night song of the whippoorwill or the crickets and cicadas chanting together like a choir in reverent celebration made her feel like that is what God wanted to hear, not the ramblings of men and their interpretations of him. The cool night air soothed her away from the anxious state that her nightmares had left her in, and she felt the shackles around her mind loosening.
The quiver of nervousness found her again as something was rustling ever closer to her somewhere in the dark and leafy ground that carpeted the woods in front of her. It wasn’t long until she knew what it was, even though she couldn’t see it. The tell-tale whisper of a rattle broke the somber silence of the evening and she froze in place, looking at her feet to make sure that she wasn’t in striking distance.
It wasn’t uncommon to find snakes in the yard, her papa always said that they came out of the forest to sunbathe and warm their cold blood, and he was never slow to dispatch them from this earthly plane to give them a line that shouldn’t be crossed. This one however, was here in the dark on its own accord, and she didn’t rightly feel like there was anything that she could do about it except slowly back away and retreat toward the security of the house, so that’s what she did.
She was halted in her footsteps by an unearthly hissing.
“Sssssstop there child. Sssssstop before you leave.”
Nelly’s heart was in her throat and she could hear it pounding in her ears.
“Lissssssssten to the Reverend. He sssssssspeaks of your god!”
Nelly turned and ran as fast as she could, slamming through the screen door and running to her bed where she threw the quilt over her head and panted in the darkness, fear driving her quickened breath as much as the labor of running. She heard footsteps on the floor and a creaking of her bedroom door. Even though her mind was telling her that snakes don’t have feet to make footsteps, they were nevertheless unnerving in light of the evening events that had transpired thus far.
“Nelly? Nelly, what in the world…”
It was her papa. His strong as-an-oak voice instantly soothed her into a place of safety, and she relaxed by pulling the covers off of her head. Her father was standing there, a worried look on his face, eyeballing the wet footprints on the wooden planked floors that she hadn’t realized that she had left in her wake.
“Nelly, honey, what is going on? I heard the door slam, and I came out of the bedroom and found a trail of footprints leading to your room. Were you just outside?”
“Well…yes papa, I was outside by the woods because I had a nightmare and the trees always make me feel safer and calmer, and while I was out there there was this snake and he started rattling his rattle at me and hissing and I couldn’t see him and then all of the sudden I swear he started talking to me and so I ran and ran and ran until I was back in the house and I didn’t know what else to do I was so scared something isn’t right I don’t know what…”
Her father had walked over and embraced her while she was stringing together her nervous run-on sentence in a stream of verbal vomit and just letting it all flow out of her before she started bursting at the seams from keeping it inside. Papa’s even keel settled beside her on the bed where she was still sitting halfway under a quilt, and he scooted next to her and embraced her with his massive arms. He smelled of hay and tobacco, and he exuded a quiet and even keel as he patted her head and shushed her as one would do to pacify a weeping baby.
He could feel the tension release from Nelly’s shoulders when he finally, after thoroughly soothing her, spoke about what she had just told him. If he were being honest with her, he would have told her that he had been having nightmares recently too, but sharing in misery with a child isn’t the best way to comfort them. The plight of a father was always going to be remaining stoic when everyone else was falling apart if you were doing your job right. The mighty foundation to a beautiful house so to speak. So he didn’t tell her his nightmares about snakes and shadows that she had told him about, he merely soothed her with words that only mattered because they came from him.
“That snake in service today really ruffled your feathers didn’t it little dove? I’m not going to lie, it did me too. But your mama has a point, seeing the reverend handling that timber rattler like it was a pet was something to see. Surely God was behind that, right? You know how ornery those critters can be.”
“Not God Papa. It can’t be God at all. That doesn’t feel like God”
Nelly said the last sentence with nails and grit in her voice like she was standing her ground despite the turmoil that she saw in front of her.
“Nelly, baby, there are a lot of things in this world that I don’t understand, and today is probably the first time you saw one of those things in the flesh that left me speechless. I try to be a good man and protect you from seeing me falter, but the will of the Lord is something that I can’t bring myself to question. And that’s that.”
“But Papa, I don’t want to see that anymore. Something about it just ain’t right. It makes me feel yucky inside.”
Papa kissed her on the head and said like a period at the end of a sentence. “Get some sleep now Little Dove. And no more trips to the woods tonight. I’ll see you in the morning, ‘k?”
He needn’t worry that she was going to go back to the woods after what had happened, but she also knew that arguing with him anymore tonight would be like trying to break down a brick wall with a toothpick so she simply replied “Okay Papa”. And with that, he softened his gaze into a smile, kissed her on the forehead, and left her to her bedroom alone. She didn’t sleep much more that night. The shadows were hiding right behind her eyelids.
The week progressed without much to speak of, and the dreams got a little less foreboding for Nelly, but when her Mama came calling on them after they got home from school on Wednesday night telling them to get ready for church, that same acid cauldron of worry bubbled up in an instant from inside of her stomach and into her throat. She knew that she was always going to lose the argument about attending church with her mother, she had been down this road before, so she resigned herself to not being able to escape attending.
She didn’t have to be happy about it though.
She sulked for the entirety of the walk to the chapel, making a show of keeping her arms crossed in defiance and kicking rocks poutingly. Her Papa would have normally been irritated with her showing out and being rotten, but he knew that she was thinking about the snake in the room and the ones in her dreams. He assumed that she saw the shadows there too, because he had been as well.
When they reached the steps of the church, Reverend Hensley stood there like a mixture between a statue and a scarecrow, smiling and shaking hands as he greeted the steady stream of people waiting to walk through the doors. Some were still wearing their work clothes, dirty from the day’s labor since many had no time on a Wednesday night to change into something more appropriate for the house of the Lord. The reverend always told them to “come as you are, as long as you come” and that was that. Nelly didn’t mind since it meant she didn’t have to wear the frilly dress with the lace on the sleeve cuffs. It itched something fierce, but Mama wouldn’t have her not showing it off every Sunday.
When Mama and Papa reached the reverend, they exchanged pleasantries and Nelly hid herself behind Papa’s leg, hoping not to be noticed. She could feel Mama’s eyes scowling down at her even though she couldn’t see them, and it wasn’t long before she grabbed her by the ear and chided her.
“Nelly that’s no way to greet the Reverend. Now say hello proper like a good girl!”
The reverend was tall, taller than most men were. He was also slim and slender. His pants were drawn tightly under a black leather belt and you could tell that without it they would fall down. This made Nelly laugh a little which was to her benefit in lightening her somber mood. The Reverend Hensley reached down his hand, fingers longer than normal fingers, and held it out for Nelly to take and to shake. Reluctantly she reached her hand out and he took it gently, his skin moist and cool. This made shivers run up Nelly’s spine, but for fear of her mother’s wrath, she just smiled at him as if she was accepting of his pleasantries. His eyes were dark and there was something foreboding in them that made her skin crawl. Luckily the interaction didn’t last long as there were still many in line waiting to enter the church.
The church was as stifling as it always was. So many people packed into one place, and Nelly knows that each time they gathered that number increased. There were always so many faces that she didn’t recognize. There was something else that she didn’t recognize as well. At the front of the church, in front of the pulpit was a long wooden box. It was longer than a man is tall, with sides that were 2-3 feet tall. In front of it was a low padded wooden bench, the kind that she was used to taking communion on in the past. She didn’t think much about it, as the heat of bodies was causing her to breathe the air around her like she was eating warm pudding. She hated the way it felt in here, but it gave her a cause to look forward to breathing in the fresh air when they were all allowed to leave after each service.
The light from the setting sun streamed through the westward plain glass windows of the church, a myriad of dust particles floating in motes and painting a picture of something ethereal inside of the building. Nelly was focusing in on it and allowing the streaming light to hypnotize her and take her mind off of the suffocating heat of the interior of the building. She heard the big oak door where they entered creak closed as the reverend’s black-heeled shoes clacked down the center aisle as if he was a bride marching to be wed to an anticipating groom, all eyes turning toward him as he passed.
He crept his lanky body u[ the short flight of stairs to the pulpit and took several moments gazing over the crowd with his black eyes, the hint of a smile on his somber face. It made Nelly uncomfortable, and she squirmed in her seat, costing her the disapproving glare of her mother who sat to her left. Papa was on the right.
Hebrews 13:2 says “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
“My name is George Hensley and I’m the reverend here. We here at Cane Creek Baptist want to welcome you in the Name of Jesus…even if you’re not a stranger!
We are so blessed to have all of you here with us today. First and foremost, I want you to know about Jesus’ gift to you. Luke 10:9 says ’I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.’
If you have any questions about that verse and what it means, I hope to answer them for you in my sermon for today.
Our church family loves to get together around The Bible each week. We’re so happy you’ve come to join us. The word of the Lord is powerful, and no doubt it is what has drawn you to our humble congregation.
The ones of you familiar with our walls and roofs will notice some changes in the decor today. It will all make sense soon, Lord’s will be done!
Now let’s stand as we worship the Lord together and dive into His Words for us!”
The Reverend started raising and lowering his arm up and down in a rhythmic fashion and Nelly knew that this meant that the congregation was about to start singing. Papa and mother picked up one of the hymnals from the back of the pew in front of them where there was a slip of paper marking the page for the hymns for the day. Those that were new to the church picked up quickly what was happening. The Reverend nodded at Deacon Phillips and he nodded back and began setting the tone.
As the song dwindled into nothing, Nelly saw Reverend Hensley uncover the white sheet from the box that she had noticed when she walked in. He reached inside and to her horror, he raised a hissing snake from its bowels. She felt Papa tense and she recoiled, hiding her head in her father’s arm crook.
“Fear not children of God! By now I am sure you have heard about Sunday’s sermon, and no doubt that is why some of you have come. The Lord tells us that if we walk in faith with him, then no harm shall come to us. When I was a small boy, I was approached by the Lord, and my faith was tested when one of his serpents struck me on the arm. It was much like the one that I hold here in front of you today. I got sick, but I did not die. I saw the lord in my dreams, hovering above me as a shadow as my body fought the poison that inhabited my blood. The Lord prevailed, and I prevailed and that day changed my life!” You see, fear is an emotion of the weak and faithless, so what is it that we should fear with the Lord our God on our side? Walk in faith and you can scale mountains and survive any venom and poison. As I stand here, bear witness to that truth! Do you feel it? Do you feel the Lord’s Fire inside of you? If you do, then I invite you forward to the pulpit! Take up a snake with me and spit in the face of the Devil and his demons! Show your faith, and fear no harm!”
He walked around the sanctuary as he spoke these words, the people looking on at him in awe and in reverence. Nelly noticed that where there was fear worn as a mask, the Reverend quelled it with his gaze. The sun was beating through the windows now, making its last protest to sinking below the horizon to signal the end of the day. It cast shadows in the packed room, and they were long in relation to the sun. But Nelly didn’t use this excuse to explain what she saw in the wake of the reverend, trailing him like a stream. His shadow…long and slender…she swore it looked like…a snake.
One by one as the crowd murmured in the background, starting with Deacon Phillips, they trailed to the front of the church. Many began speaking in tongues as this happened which was an absurd thing on a regular day, but today it only stood to frighten Nelly further in this particular moment. She couldn’t shake the Reverend’s shadow.
She was mortified to see that as each of the parishioners went to the altar and knelt in front of what Nelly could only assume was a pit of vipers, they had a hand placed on their head and something was said by the reverend to the particular person, though it was unheard by her.
One by one they emerged from their kneel, reached into the wooden chest, and emerged clutching a viper of some sort which they then held aloft over their heads and began walking in a line around the chapel interior. Mama was one of them. When she stood, compelled by what she thought must be God himself, Nelly wanted to reach out and grab her. Papa must have sensed it and stilled her hand with his own. When she looked toward Papa, he only shook his head “no”, but she could see the whites of his eyes in a rare display of shock for him.
Mama followed the lead of those who came before her, kneeling, receiving the whispered words, and then emerging with a snake before filing in line to take her place within the grotesque march. Papa gripped Nelly’s hand tighter. The room began to darken…
Part 2:
She ran. She ran so hard that the corners of her vision were turning black like you would see when you looked through Mr. Wilson’s fancy camera that he brought out when he came through town on his wagon. But what was happening wasn’t the kind of thing that you would want to memorialize with a picture. That picture would be a constant reminder of the horror that was taking shape into something tangible right in front of her eyes, and consuming the people she knew and loved within the wake of its seemingly all-consuming reach.
Papa had protested, but not much. Nelly thought it must be because he didn’t want to be left alone with…them. She was feeling a little guilty about that. Leaving him behind. If she allowed her mind to dwell on it, but she had no time for that. For now, she just needed to get to the trees. Her trees. At least she thought of them that way since the only eyes that had ever shared them with her in her presence were the squirrels and very occasionally a startled deer or three, and on one occasion: a snake who whispered to her.
Thinking of the serpent slithering in the dark leaves, announcing itself with a rattle, and then attempting to goad her into listening to a reverend whom she had almost been willing to say that she hated (if that wasn’t the wrong feeling to have for another man that is), caused her to run even harder. She was ignoring the burning in her legs and her lungs, and she kept telling herself inside of her head “Just one step at a time. Keep going.” Nelly knew where she was going. She was going to where she knew it would be quiet. The place where she did her best thinking, and the place where she felt god. The Real God.
Her mother would likely burst into a flaming anger if she told her how she really felt: that she never heard the voice of God in church. It felt honest to say it to herself, but to think about saying it out loud to her pious parents gave her a great deal of anxiety, so she never has. Papa seems to know though, even though he would never speak against Mama and her beliefs. She would watch as the other parishioners would become filled with the Holy Spirit (so they say), and they would speak in a language that she didn’t understand, hands cast toward the sky in reverence. She tried to pretend to speak that language when she was by herself, mostly in the forest, but to her, it felt silly and forced. She was only 9 years old, and she knew that there was a lot about the world that she didn’t know, but she knew that this didn’t feel like what God felt like to her. God spoke in raindrops and sunlight through branches, not in unintelligible tongues. She wished that her community speaking in a silly language was the least of her worries like it used to be. Now it was so much worse since…he came to town. The Reverend George Hensley had brought her nothing but nightmares and dismay. Everyone else, Papa aside, disagreed.
Today, as they paraded around the wooden sanctuary at Cane Creek Baptist, their eyes darkening, serpents held aloft above their heads, she would call that image out as seeing nothing less than the devil himself to her young eyes. She longed for the gentle song of sighs that the trees emanated when they were tickled by the invisible hands of the wind, so she needed to get there to gather her thoughts and find some peace and…well she didn’t know what else. She just didn’t know where else to run, and the forest felt safe.
The ire of her parents from running out of a church service that would inevitably find her later on when she had to go home could be worried over later. For now, she just wanted the solace of her woods to hide her from the 4 walls of the church which to her was an affront to the god that they professed to worship. It just felt…wrong. The crows cackled in an out of tune and many voiced songs in the distance as if they were agreeing with her sentiment. The gravel crunched under her feet until she got to the bend in the road going into Sanie Drive where she continued straight as the well-kept road turned into a single-track footpath no doubt carved out by the deer and the coyotes and whatever else needed a pathway from their domain to that of the humans’.
She instantly felt better and her relief was palpable. It was as if the encroaching verdancy lowered her heart rate. Where the trees had been cleared for the roadway, and slowly trimmed further and further back to make room for taller and taller trucks that seemed to get bigger with every passing year, here they wrapped over her head like a skeletal cocoon. It made her feel measurably better even though she was only a few paces into the interior of the trees. She knew this way by heart. She didn’t tell her parents, but she always took this trail after school had let out to make her way home. It was her own personal treat each day after enduring another grueling lesson of arithmetic or history. She could easily navigate it even at night, but after the incident with the snake and its sibilant talking a prior night that found her sleepless, the thought of actually doing that gave her a shot of cold fear through her veins like ice water in a hot skillet.
The birdsong and the wind’s laughter was all around her and her mind had just started to wander toward things other than serpents and the insanity of an unhinged town when she heard a voice. It was a sing-song woman’s voice echoing through the valley that inhabited the bubbling creek at its floor. It was coming from exactly the direction that she was heading. You see there was a tree, with the perfect crook for sitting that hung over a particularly serene curve within the creek’s pathway, complete with miniature waterfalls when the water was up. It was her place. Her happy place where she prayed. Actual prayer, not the false piety to forked-tongued prophets. She always felt like out here, if she listened hard enough, she always got an answer to her sincere entreaties. But now, her curiosity slowed her once jovial steps on the leafed pathway turning them from crunching disregard into an intentionally soft and near-silent forward momentum.
She was close enough now to realize that the voice wasn’t speaking in words, but rather humming sweetly. She didn’t feel threatened, in fact, quite it was the opposite. The sing-song humming was soothing. She wasn’t ready to admit a lack of danger with everything going on in the town, so she proceeded with a silent caution.
“Nelly, you can quit sneakin’ around like a cat back there in the trees. I’ve known you were there since before you heard me singin’!”
If butterflies had lived in Nelly’s stomach, and surely they did considering how her guts were currently churning, then they would all now be aflight in hearing her name called out when she was so hyper-focused on not being heard or detected. Those prickled nerves were just settling into a dull and all-consuming hum as the woman stood up with her back still turned to her. Her chestnut hair cascaded messily down her back and stood out in stark contrast to the cornflower blue of the loose-fitting dress that she wore. The birds chirped in the background as if they were greeting her emergence from her crouched position near the creek bank.
Stupidly, Nelly was frozen in place, barely concealed from the waist down by an unruly privet hedge that grew from the side of the down-sloping landscape toward the water’s edge. It was at that moment that she realized her hands had reflexively darted to her mouth to cover the gape that her sudden state of startle had put her in. Later on, perhaps she should feel a bit of pride in the fact that she stood her ground and hadn’t tucked her tail and run off into the trees like a deer, but for now, she was teetering on the edge between fear and curiosity. This woman knew her name, but being one of only a handful of children in Cane Creek, she supposed that she likely stood out more than she wanted to just by default.
The woman was clutching a handful of reeds that looked like they had just been pulled from the creek bank. In her other hand was a gruesome looking hawkbill knife, glinting the reflection of the sun that peeked through the canopy of tree limbs. Once again, the rush of fear crept up like a creeping lava from Nelly’s belly and took residence in her solar plexus. The urge to flee like a scared fawn was again paramount at the gateway of her thoughts, demanding the front of the line in the cue of emotions that she could be experiencing. The sun was behind the woman in blue, causing enough of a glare to obscure the features of her face. Nelly squinted against the pervasive light, trying to gain a semblance of traction over the cascade of emotions that had been wrought by the day. The woman must have sensed her fear, but rather than charging her as Nelly had suspected from her irrational brain, the woman tucked the knife out of sight somewhere among the cloth along the waist of her dress and relaxed her posture.
“Relax Miss Nelly, you know I mean you no harm!”
At that moment, the puzzle pieces of Nelly’s mind all clicked into place when recognition washed over her in a warm cascade of emotions. It was none other than Maggie Jenkins standing there in the grove by the creek with her. She should’ve known, but the fear that she had been conditioned to over the last few weeks had put her on edge and she hated that.
“Maggie!” Nelly enthusiastically blurted out as she emerged from behind her privet and hastily ran to her side. Maggie opened her arms, still clutching the bushel of fresh reeds in her right hand, and embraced her like she was a long-lost friend.
“Oh Maggie, I’m so glad it’s you, I wasn’t sure who would be out here in the woods, and my mind just wandered, and I saw the knife, and well I didn’t know what to…”
Hush now. What’s got you all up in a tizzy Nelly Smith?
If Nelly had been able to see Maggie’s face in the midst of her embrace, she would have been able to see the worry and a sense of knowing that Maggie was wearing like a mask. It had been 2 weeks now since her dreams had started, and combining them with the escalating talk around town, there was an impending and increasing sense of dread. Maggie got that from her mother. She could…sense things before they happened. Mama had called it “the sight” and Maggie found it more often than not a curse rather than a blessing since foreboding was the feeling that came along with her nocturnal visions.
Recently she had seen the scaled coils wrapping around a mental diorama of the little town of Cane Creek. Monstrous cold-blooded bodies wrapping around the town, tightening and squeezing, causing her to wake from the visions many nights in a cold sweat and panting. She didn’t know what it all meant until she heard the words and promises of one Reverend Hensley mimicked on the lips of a previously pious and docile community. Every day there was talk of the casting off of fears by embracing them and holding dominion over them. She didn’t know how deep this well was dug until little Nelly Smith told her side of the tale to her.
She heard her speak of talking snakes in the woods’ edge at night. She heard of ill omens in the form of dreams that she was having every night. She listened to her intently as she sat alongside her on a moss-covered and rotting log that was perched along the creek bank. Her eyebrows knit a pattern on Maggie’s face as she listened to her intently. She knew, as she heard the girl speak, that she had the sight as well, though she surely was unaware. If the crease between her eyes wasn’t already forming a spot of permanence between her eyebrows in concern, that cavern deepened into a black hole when she began regaling her tale of what led her to the woods, out of breath and shaken.
“Mama makes us go twice a week. If I protest, it usually ends up at the least with a scolding and at the worst a wrapping on my behind with Papa’s leather belt, so there’s no arguing with her about it. I quit trying a long time ago. It’s no offense to the church, I don’t want to sound like I’m not grateful to God. I just never really felt him in those echoey rooms where the preachers scream and yell. Normally I don’t mind. It’s mostly quiet there and some of the stories that the preachers tell are good and interesting. A few weeks ago, Reverend Hensley came though, and…I swear…things are getting worse. It all started when he pulled out a snake and talked about casting off the fear of the devils. He said that they hold no dominion over him because he survived their venom as a little boy. That scared me. And Papa too. But today…”
Maggie’s eyes glazed over and developed a thousand-yard stare as she peered into the bubbling cauldron of the nearby creek.
“What happened Nelly?” Maggie prodded sweetly, fearing with the certainty of the sight where this conversation was heading. “I can see it in your eyes, sweetie, you’ve been shaken.”
Nelly proceeded to tell Maggie about the congregation today, the pit of snakes at the foot of the pulpit. The dark communion that had commenced and the parade of elevated serpents that were marched around in reverence inside the sanctuary. The pit of Maggie’s stomach churned with dread. She knew that something was going on. She sensed the shade settling over the valley that she called home, but she would have never guessed how deep the darkness had grown.
When Maggie was a little girl, she was picking herbs behind her cabin with her mother. There wasn’t anything particularly special about this event other than the fact that it was the first day that her Mama had let her carry the paring knives that she kept razor sharp for the specific purpose of harvesting from the land.
“Clean cuts and the plants will never know that we have taken from them. They will just happily keep on growing as if nothing happened. It’s the roots. We don’t disturb them and the gift that they provide will continue in abundance.”
So after some coaching that’s what Maggie had done. Foxglove, peppermint, bee balm, Blue Cohosh, witch hazel, butterfly weed, mayapple, Indian Tobacco, Queen Anne’s Lace, the list was long, and she had been learning it by heart. And now she was harvesting just as he mother had instructed her. Maggie always knew that she would grow up to be just like her mother, and never protested it. Knowing the land and the people in it was a blessing. Greater still was the blessing to be trusted to help them when their time of need came. Maggie had never imagined any other life than being a granny one day. Her mama wasn’t an old woman, but the title ‘granny’ was one that she carried with great responsibility and she taught her daughter just the same. Maggie had asked her on many occasions how she came to know all of the things that she did. She had watched in amazement as her mother had done everything from delivering a baby whose feet came out first, to calming the fits of a dying man as he struggled to breathe. She looked up to her, and it steeled her with a determination to be as good as she was one day.
This day, the first day she was harvesting without her mother leering over her shoulder with judgment, something changed in her. Looking back in the following years, she would surmise that Mama had known what was going to happen, as she had left her alone to her task and that really just wasn’t like Mama at all. Nonetheless, it would be a day that she never forgot.
Maggie was gently holding the stem of a Blue Cohash branch, filled with its tiny blue berries still as she was moving in with the hooked paring knife for a clean cut, past the split in the branch (that mama called the sucker), just like mama taught so that it would keep growing. That’s when it seemed like a shadow had settled over the valley. The air chilled at the same time and Maggie became dizzy. All around her, whispers began emanating from nowhere and everywhere all at the same time. The air was unnaturally cold, but she could see a clear path ahead of her, like a trail that she was meant to follow. It’s hard to describe in words, but she just…knew that she was meant to go a certain way. She wasn’t scared, and to this day she doesn’t know what made her wander to the forest’s interior when things all around her seemed to be awry and askew. She knew now that it was instinct, but back then she was putting trust into something that she couldn’t explain.
Wandering into the trees she noted the lack of the normal bird song and forest soundscapes. Gone were the whispers of the wind, gone were the insect noises and creaking of limbs high up in the canopies. All she could hear were her footsteps on leaves. Ahead of her, the world of the forest was dark. An inexplicable dark that reminded her of a void, gaping like a maw at the head of a great beast. The air grew colder. Still wielding the pruning knife, she wielded it in front of her like a beacon against the unknown, slicing through the silent air slow step after slow step. She could see the steam of her breath in mid-July, but even still, fear did not drive her, she felt more curious than anything. She walked into the darkness and felt as if she were trying to find her way through a root cellar in the middle of the night. But still, she knew which way to go, and she followed the unknown path further into the depths of a thing that she could not explain.
There in the distance, she saw a spring in the ground. It was a hole, filled with water that did not look like water. It was black as tar and it seemed to be breathing with a life of its own, acridly detesting the confines of its cavity. Stepping carefully to its edge, she chanced a glance into its surface. At first, it reflected her image back to her like a distorted mirror, the swirling lines of her face leering at her from the bowels of the earth on the surface of the liquid. She watched in amazement at the foreboding visage and then it started to…change. Inside it, she saw the face contort and morph into many different forms. First, that of men, scowled faces and scars running down their cheeks grimacing at an unknown displeasure. Next, she saw a little girl, screaming and cowering with her palms shielding her face from an unknown terror. Then silence. She saw the girl with glossed-over eyes, mouth agape and lifeless. The men laughed with malice and darkness in their eyes.
There was a flash of light and she found herself sitting in the hollow of a valley next to a bubbling spring, the birds happily cackling in the treetops, all seemingly back to normal. She walked back the way she came, the forest looking as if nothing had ever happened. She had followed the trail in the darkness further than she realized, and by the time she arrived at the back of her cabin, the sun had set over the hills in the distance, and darkness was descending on their patch of land. Her mother sat in her rocking chair and watched her as she came walking up to the edge of the porch. She simply said “Well?”
Maggie told her the story, and her mother told her of the sight for the first time. She told her that she had always had it inside of her, dormant and waiting. They spoke for a long while and MAggie’s eyes were opened to the ways of her mother’s instincts for the first time, though deep down she had always been able to feel it.
Her mother told her of a wagon that she had seen parked on the side of the dirt road that they followed into the town center proper. There was one man who was asleep at the reigns when she saw him, and another, leaning against the wagon was snarling and had scars on his cheeks. Mama told her that he was Jerry King, and he was a moonshiner who ran corn liquor all throughout the county and had gotten away with it for decades. He was only pleasant when he was making money off of someone, and that someone had never been her. She told her that she saw the darkness in his eyes that day, but Maggie was the one who brought him full circle from her subconscious.
A few days later when the missing person’s posters got posted on the general store’s door, again her mother was proven right when she told her that the sight never lies. Little Mary Pippin was displayed in a pencil sketch along with a paragraph about the conditions surrounding her disappearance. She had been missing for 2 weeks. After telling her mother about the correlation to her visions, Mama asked her to take her to the spot where the spring bubbled in the confines of a wooded forest where she saw the images in her mind. It took them several hours to get there, but when they did, her mother began sniffing the air and prodding the collection of rotting leaves and vegetation that littered the forest floor. It wasn’t until Maggie heard her sobbing that she had an indication of what was going on. Stepping to her mother’s side, she saw the decomposing body of a girl about her age, partially covered in leaves and limbs. he will never forget the red dress with white polka dots that she was wearing when they found her. They were only 15 paces from the spring of visions that Maggie had seen on harvest day. There was a beacon of white bone gleaming up at them from what once was her chin.
After telling the local sheriff about what they had found, it turns out that a few days later the girl’s penny loafers and a ripped fragment of the same red dress were found in Jerry King’s cabin, and he was arrested and they never saw or heard from him again. They heard through the grapevine of town gossip later on that she wasn’t the first and surely wouldn’t have been the last.
From that moment onward, Maggie Jenkins had trusted the sight. That’s why when she had seen the visions of the snake coiling around Cane Creek, she became leery and vigilant for the coming storm that she felt in her bones. That is why when little Nelly Smith told her her tale of serpents in sanctuaries and talking snakes in the detritus, she knew even before Nelly did that she had The Sight, too. Her mother had always said that there would be another that would come to her, not necessarily seeking her wisdom, but needing it. She didn’t expect it in a scarecrow slip of a girl that was always polite if not a little shy.
She knew that she had work to do, and Nelly did too. It would take both of them to pull the veil back from the eyes of their friends and neighbors, and that was something she feared she didn’t have time to teach. When her mama died, and she became the town’s granny (a title that some twenty-somethings would admonish), it was a natural succession since Maggie had been her apprentice, never leaving her side for years before Mama had gone through the veil. She was well-trained and well-sharpened. Nelly wasn’t going to have that luxury.
Suddenly she felt overwhelmed with the prospect of so much to do in the near future, and she took a deep breath as Nelly was watching her intently, searching her face for a reply after having spilled her guts and told her the tale of the Serpent church and the wayward pastor. She closed her eyes and inhaled the smell of moss and dirt and calmed her mind. She saw a path there in front of her, however slight, and they had no choice but to follow it.
“Nelly, I want you to listen to me, and listen to me good, okay?”
Nelly nodded timidly at her, her eyebrows tattling on the uncertainty that she was feeling inside of her.
“I’m sure you have heard…things about me and my mama. People around town talk, I’m not ignorant.”
Nelly cut her eyes to the side, uncertain as to how to reply to her. Maggie gripped her hand softly and then patted it in assurance. “It’s okay, I’m aware. No need for parsing words. Some people call me a witch, and some even say that I worship the devil to give me the…gifts that I have. The truth is, I am just different.
And so are you.”
Nelly jerked her eyes back in her direction and started opening her mouth to form what Maggie could only assume was a protest. She held up her hand, effectively stopping the reply that she was getting ready to say in haste. “Now listen. I know things about you because I know them about myself. Such as: you can only quiet your mind when you’re out on god’s green earth, surrounded by by the trees and the birds, the bees and the critters that skitter around without much care. I also know that you talk to God when you’re out there in the same environment because that’s the only place that you’ve ever really felt his presence. I know that you dream a lot, and sometimes those dreams come true. There’s nothing wrong with you, you’re just…different, like me.”
Nelly wrung her hands in her lap, taking in Maggie’s words. She crinkled her brown eyes and meekly asked her “How…how do you know all of that? I haven’t ever told anybody about talking to God in the woods, and I certainly haven’t shared any of my dreams with anybody ever since Mom scolded me about tangling with things that I didn’t understand. You say I’m like you, does that make me a witch too? Aren’t witches from the devil?”
Her tone and amplitude increased as she became more nervous at the prospects of what Maggie was suggesting to her, her grasp and understanding lacking in context considering the new information.
“You told me that you saw darkness in the reverend’s eyes. Right?”
“Yes ma’am, they’re like…coals. I can’t see the whites of them like I can yours or mine.”
“You can see the darkness in people and sense it around you. It’s fate, not a curse, child. It’s a blessing, and the only curse about it is when you ignore it. We call it The Sight. I can tell you this as I’m sure you’ve realized already though: you can’t ignore it. It’s persistent and won’t be quieted. That’s because we were given the ability to use the sight as a tool. When you ignore fate, you suffer.”
She now had Nelly’s full attention. She was leaning forward, absorbing her words like a sponge.
“There’s no easy way to tell you this, so I’ll say it cut and dry. I’ve known something was amiss in town around us for a few weeks now, I just didn’t know what. I don’t like to get out and about too much unless I’m needed, and I haven’t been in a while. Hearing your story of the Reverend with his snakes on his pulpit, it all makes sense now. There’s a darkness in him, and I’m afraid listening to your story of the communion and the procession that followed today, it’s spreading. That’s what darkness does. It isn’t happy until it has consumed everything in its path. What I’m saying is that we have a lot of work to do if we are going to remedy this one. I’m not one hundred percent sure where to start, sure as I’m speaking to you. But we have to. I need to know I can count on you. Can I?”
Nelly sat and thought for a few seconds, looking off into nothing while she pondered.
“Miss Maggie, my mama, she’s…infatuated with his words. I saw her pick up a snake and carry it around a church today. I saw it strike her on the arm and she just kept smiling and marching with the congregation that did the same before her. I ran, I was scared, but if there’s anything I can do to help stop this, I’m willing. I just don’t know anything about any of this stuff. This isn’t…this isn’t what I expected…”
Maggie chuckled and grinned at Nelly. She looked momentarily offended and was about to protest when Maggie said before she had a chance to respond: “Oh Nelly, it never is what we expect. In fact, I’ve learned that the unexpected is usually more likely than the things that you figure are set in stone. Now, let’s go back to the cabin and you can help me tie these reeds into a few brooms. We are going to need them!”
They walked out of the forest and back onto the dirt road that wound away from the heart of the town. They talked about The Sight and the things that Maggie did, and Nelly’s fears seemed to have been washed away and replaced with the insatiable curiosity that only children seem to possess. She was perched on Maggie’s every word and was asking 10 questions to Maggie for every one statement that she made. Good, Maggie thought, that curiosity will serve her well. She could tell that she was a fast learner already, and that warmed Maggie’s heart. They turned the bend in the road that had been on their horizon for at least 20 curious questions and as they rounded the bend, the air stilled and began to chill. Nelly stopped her questioning mid-sentence, and Maggie put a hand on her chest reflexively to stop her forward momentum and as a silent gesture of protection when they saw a woman standing in the middle of the road. Her shoulders were hunched, and she exuded an unheard sense of dread to Maggie’s keen senses.
She was surrounded by a void of black, and the birdsong and the sounds of nature had no want of having anything to do with her umbrageous nature and her periphery. Maggie could feel Nelly trembling underneath her protective palm when she felt her step forward a half step bravely. Nelly was craning her neck forward as if she was trying to forcefully will her vision not to be deceiving her. The words she said were as much a question as it was a statement. When she said it, Maggie knew that who she supposed the darkened figure to be was in fact true when Nelly meekly asked:
“Mama? Is that…is that you?”
Part 3
To Maggie, it felt as if the world stopped moving and was standing still. It was as if it was taking a slow and languid breath. Her hand was still on Nelly’s chest in a protective stance intending to shield her from whatever was about to happen next. She could feel her small heartbeat pulsing rapidly under her breastbone, but the look on her face had changed from an initial surprise to one of defiance in the time that it had taken her to realize that her mother was standing in the middle of the road in front of them.
Maggie’s thoughts trailed to her own mother. She had never wavered in her commitment to the gifts that she possessed, and the duty to use them for the good of the people around her. She had in fact professed this sentiment as a personal charter many times when she was teaching her ancient ways to her from when she was a little girl around Nelly’s age on up. All of the way up until the day that it was her turn to cross the veil. On her deathbed, in the creeping hours before her last breath was exhaled, she had committed Maggie to promise to always care for those who couldn’t always care for themselves. So she had, and as she looked at the lanky young girl at the end of her outstretched arm, face full of resilience, she couldn’t help but wonder how much of her help this girl beyond her years actually needed.
She could feel it emanating from Nelly’s core. It was the same creeping shadow that smothered out any hint of doubt in her mind when she was fighting to keep the town’s ailments and woes under control. Her heartbeat was there, yes, but between the thumping beats against her hand, there was something…more. To Maggie’s perception, it felt like the tug of a strong undercurrent that you weren’t expecting when you waded into a rushing creek, or the electricity in the air that made the hairs on your arms stand up when a storm was brewing just over the horizon.
In the middle of the road, surrounded by a shadow that looked like a swarm of out-of-focus bees stood a woman, with erratic black eyes and tussled hair smiling. “Have you heard the good word?!” She hissed at them, sounding not quite human, not quite natural. The hem of her dress was dusted and soiled with the dirt from the road that it had been dragging on in her journey from the church toward her home. Nellie and Maggie had intersected her path, and Maggie had the distinct feeling that this event wasn’t simply the result of chance. Maggie didn’t say a word, but the silence after the woman-who-should-be-Nelly’s-mother-but-somehow-isn’t wasn’t left languid for long. Nelly spoke up, forcing her voice to sound as stern as she could while inhabiting a skinny 9-year-old’s body. “Mama, I know you’re in there. You can hear me!”
The woman who took the form of Eugena Lee Smith crooked her neck and exhaled a sigh that sounded more like a hiss than a human breath, but still reeked of exasperation. “Have you heard the good word? The…LORD…is with usssssss!”
It was only now that Maggie mustered the nerve to intervene in this conversation that was seemingly going nowhere. She had been taken aback by what she was seeing. She had seen the shadows creeping under the skin of a man on his deathbed who had been losing the battle with tuberculosis. She had seen it in shades as it swirled around the head of a rabid dog, insane with its own interpretations of reality as it snapped at its owner. She had seen it in the cornfields when the blight had stricken them 3 summers ago. But never like this. This was different. This seemed like the woman was the shadow itself, and she was merely a puppet to the puppet master who wielded the shadows in the shape of a mother like a toy.
“In nomine lucis arguo te!” She took a step forward, keeping one hand on Nelly’s breast and holding another in front of her as if she were holding back the wind. “In nomine lucis arguo te! Hic non-receperint!”
She reached into the folds of her apron and pulled out a hook-shaped knife, glinting brightly against the subdued shadows emanating from the shape of Nelly’s mother. Maggie kneeled down to the red dirt road, still slightly damp from the descending dew that the cooler evening temperature was using to herald the night time, though the sun was still peeking through the trees. Nelly couldn’t overcome the curiosity and worry of the two events that were transpiring in front of her. The shadowed visage of her hysterical mother, or the curious actions of the granny witch who suddenly felt like family. Maggie began to scrawl in the dirt at her feet, between her and Nelly and Eugena Lee. The hissing trailed off as it seemed that Maggie had gotten her attention.
Obscure symbols and shapes began to appear in the dirt in the wake of the blade that Maggie was using as a tool. Nelly could swear that the air felt lighter and the birdsong, only momentarily, cut through the shadow-induced silence that had descended like a shade in the presence of Nelly’s mother. The shadows around Eugena Lee, at least to Nelly’s eyes, looked to be…concentrating? Getting more dense? Her neck twitched unnaturally sideways as if she were a curious dog trying to understand something that didn’t make sense. She began to growl.
Maggie was still scrawling, and she put an understood punctuation mark on her obscure writing in the dirt while saying “Ita FIAT!!!” As she planted the blade into the dirt. Tendrils of shadow crept from Eugena’s fingers, looking sickeningly like snakes crawling out of her fingernails and slithering drunkenly in the direction of Maggie and Nelly. The shadows of serpents reached the edges of Maggie’s scrawled symbols in the red dirt and suddenly…stopped as if they had touched cold water and couldn’t move. At that, Eugena screamed and she ran. Directly toward them both, black eyes full of rage, hell-bent on reaching the young girl and Maggie as if they had become the source of a recently identified enemy.
Nelly felt a calm wash over her. She imagined floating underwater in a pond, the world moving more fluidly and slowly as the motion around her turned to a thick syrup. When she looked up at Maggie, her face had gone placid. Her eyes were closed and there was a serene look on her face, nose slightly upturned in defiance. Nelly could swear that the light that was peeking through the trees in the early stages of dusk had teamed up, joined hands, and was now starting to pool around Maggie as moths would around a candle. It was beautiful. The look on Maggie’s face, one of serenity and certainty, gave Nelly a sense of calm that she was missing in her state of anger just moments before. Her mother was drowning in the shadow of the serpents that Reverend Hensley had tempted her with. She had a feeling of certainty that this all emanated from him, and she was angry. That anger was instantly placated by Maggie’s calm.
Chancing a glance back toward her mother, fearing that her newfound sense of calm would be instantly replaced by anger again, she wasn’t prepared for what she would see. The shadow was still there, swirling around her like a typhoon, but there was something else. She could see for the first time since the events in the sanctuary of Cane Creek Baptist, she could see her mother. The beautiful parts of her that sang as she cooked or the pride of a woman admiring the gardens that she cultivated. Amidst the swirling shadows she was still there inside of it all, her face contorted as if it were trying to keep an illness at bay. She was moving toward them. There was determination in her movement, and Nelly felt a pang of worry as she moved slowly through the molasses of Maggie’s calm, still making strides toward reaching them. The light that was pooling around Maggie slithered out, chasing the shadowed snakes back that had crept from Eugena Lee’s fingers. The light never touched her shadows, and it was as if the serpentine shadows were allergic to the light’s touch. There was a sense of knowing inside of Nelly. She knew without asking that whatever Maggie had scrawled into the dirt, along with her drawing of the light toward her, was slowing the progress of a determined haint that was inhabiting her mother’s flesh.
Mere seconds had passed, though this was all playing out in a delayed sense of time. Nelly took a step forward. Her skin was covered in goosebumps, and it felt alive with the prickling pins and needles feeling you get when you are inspired. As her mother reached the threshold of Maggie’s dirt-born symbology, she suddenly stopped. Her forward momentum deflated instantly as she reached Maggie’s writing just as the slithering shadow snakes had done when they proceeded her moments before. The look on Eugena Lee’s face, black eyes included snapped from one of rage to confusion. She tried to step toward them once more, but she acted as if her feet were stuck in a tar pit, unable to provide the action that the woman was willing them to do.
There, in the center of her mother’s chest, Nelly wasn’t sure she had seen it, but there was a flicker of light, like a distant star twinkling momentarily among the void of a dark night sky. She would look back on this with an air of confusion and uncertainty, but at this moment, as time moved at the speed of honey dripping from a comb, she knew what she needed to do. She needed to coax out the light from its timid place of residence in her mother’s chest.
She took another step forward, no reluctance in her motion, right toward her mother. Then another, then another until she was standing toe to toe with a woman shaped like the mother who raised her, but one that was also emanating a feeling of simultaneous despair and acrid anger. Eugena Lee hissed at her, the sounds coming from her lungs being slowed as if they were underwater, and her hands furiously clawed in slow motion at an unseen barrier. Unseen except for the light of the wick that was Maggie Jenkins.
Nelly raised her hand, trailing that light toward the shape of her mother, who was empty of anything resembling illumination. There it was again, the starshine flicker at the breast bone of her mother. Like a cautious cat, she placed her hand on her mother’s chest, right where the sparkle had reluctantly given away its presence. Her mother at first felt as cold as a stone by a creek in winter, and if just for one moment, the faintest hint of a heartbeat puddled underneath the blanket of Nelly’s fingers. “There you are…”
Nelly closed her eyes and smiled. No fear or worry on her face, just a look of contentment. Everything inside of Maggie’s instincts told her to pluck Nelly away from the shade of the haint that she was doing everything she could do to keep at bay, but she forced herself to watch as the shadows were reeling away from the form of Eugena Lee, flickering away as if they were yarn in a swift breeze, still clinging to the form of a mother who was held back, thankfully, by the vigils that she had carved in haste into the dirt of the earth. As she watched Nelly’s hand gently find a purchase on the surface of the woman’s chest, the shadows that had encompassed her fled as if they were water from a flame. Eugena Lee screamed, and Nelly remained still and stoic. What happened next was all that Maggie needed to see to know that her mother had been right when she warned her of the coming of a student to learn at her lap the way that Maggie had once done with her. This girl was special and didn’t even know it. Her instincts guiding her, she drove the shadows out of the heart of a mother who she loved.
That was when Maggie knew what they were dealing with. As the shadows trailed away from the body of Eugena Lee, they began to…collect themselves into a shape. It was a shape that she recognized from oral tales passed down to her as a warning. The dark figure of a man, clad in a wide-brimmed hat, no facial features to be found started to collect into a more solid shape. That’s when she heard the laugh. As easily as the shadows took his form, the laughter chased him into the breeze as the flood of birdsong once again filled the air around them and Eugena Lee collapsed into Nelly’s now outstretched arms. It was all her slight stature could do to hold up her larger mother without them both collapsing into the dirt, but she managed as Maggie ran to her side.
Her skin was less the shade of under-ripe honeydew now and had gained a bit of pink at the edges now, hinting that there was some life to be found inside of her yet. Nelly attributed this to whatever concoction that Maggie had been brewing on the stove, filling the air around them with scents of sage, pine, and lemon grass. Eugena Lee, wasn’t awake enough to talk to them despite Nelly’s Papa, John Smith, goading her to speak every 10 minutes in impatience. She had been, however, lucid enough to get several good swallows of Maggie’s tea into her belly.
From what Maggie had gathered from Mr. Smith, it would seem that he used his daughter as an excuse to flee the congregation and had no real information about what had transpired aside from corroborating what Nelly had already told her. He hadn’t gone off in search of Nelly, he had come back to the house. They caught him cradling a shotgun and walking with intent toward the wood line when they came around the bend pushing Eugena Lee on a makeshift cart made of a wheelbarrow from the Jenkin’s produce stand. They were both huffing and puffing and John gave them two distinct looks as he tickled the trigger of the old beat-up shotgun before realizing who was approaching. One was a look of distinct relief at the sight of his daughter, and there was an equal look of wariness in seeing her accompanied by Maggie Jenkins. He had always been willing to rely on her medications that she made up to quell a fever or to soothe the raw udders of the milk cows, but he had also always held a bit of distrust in knowing that she could very well be tampering with the likes of the Devil himself to be as good as what she did as she was. Much like the rest of the town around Maggie, a wide berth and a healthy helping of respect were given in her presence. Her mother Stella “Mamaw” Jenkins had been the same way, though she had a coarser grit personality than her daughter seemed to.
As they explained what had happened, John’s brow folded into a furrow and stayed that way, the worry evident on the corners of his eyes and the way that his bushy beard seemed to take on a life of its own as it literally chewed on the information that he was being given. Nelly told him with fervor and excitement about Mama’s black eyes, and shadowy snakes Coming from her fingers, and it only served to brew more worry inside of the cauldron of his gut. John was a simple man, and none of this stood to make any sense to his established sensibilities about the world around him and the way that it was supposed to work. The hairs on his arms still stood up every time he started recollecting the events that had transpired at the insistence of Reverend Hensley, the black-eyed preacher who had roosted on the town of Cane Creek like a vulture several weeks ago. Imagining again his wife and the mother of his daughter holding a snake aloft above her head as she paraded around the pine wood sanctuary, the snake striking her repeatedly to seemingly no effect…
John jumped up and started pacing the room. It was his and Eugena Lee’s bedchambers, and his worry was palpable, hanging thick in the room’s air like an unwelcome fog.
“Mr Smith?” Maggie asked, pouring the sweetness into her statement so that it would drip like honey. “Would you mind doing me a favor?”
John stopped his pacing and began to weave his thumbs together in a nonsensical pattern. Maggie knew that worry, it had to come out somehow, and she would take twiddled thumbs over an inconsolable person wailing into the dark as she had seen so many times. “Well…Yes’m, I reckon so. Whaddaya need Miss Maggie?”
Maggie smiled, still pouring the honey over her actions and her words. It wasn’t magic in treating a person with an abundance of care and kindness when they were clearly as fragile as a piece of porcelain, but the way that she lulled her words at him, Nelly saw him physically relax as his shoulders slumped downward from their previously tense perch atop his broad chest. Nelly sensed that there was more to how Maggie was talking than she cared for Papa to know about, so she kept quiet, dabbing her mother’s forehead with a moistened dishcloth. “Well, when Nelly and I were coming home, I noticed that there was an elderberry bush just around the bend before we turned into your driveway. Do you think that you could fetch me as many of the ripe berries from that bush as you can muster?” Maggie smiled gently at John, a hopeful look on her face. She blinked slowly in his direction, Nelly noticing her papa falling gently under her spell of kindness. John shifted on his feet and stuck his hands in his pocket and looked at the floor bashfully. “It really could be useful to bring Mrs. Smith back around to good health.”
“Well, of course, Miss Maggie, anything to help!” He perked up, grabbed his hat from the corner post of the chair that he had been sitting in, and walked out of the back screen door.
They both watched him go, and Maggie turned back to Nelly, her demeanor changing back to one of seriousness and intent. “Now listen Nelly, we don’t have much time, so I’m going to say my peace. Your mama…well she’s going to be just fine. And your papa will be having a task to complete in the form of “helping” nurse her back to health. I’m afraid the work we have to do is more dire, but I need to know now if you’re willing to help me with it. I’m afraid it may be too much for me to do alone. And, well, I’ll be blunt. I felt it before, but I’ve seen it now. You’ve been touched. You have the gift. Now it will need nurtured and nourished with lots of lessons and practice over time but right now we don’t have time for that. Your instincts are strong. You faced down the shadows in your mother without concern for yourself and you drew it out of her. You were the vessel of light. Can you keep being that while we try to right the wrongs that have descended over Cane Creek?”
Nelly stood still, dish rag still resting in her hand on top of her mother’s brow, and a rivulet of water evacuating itself from the cloth and running down the side of Eugena Lee’s cheek and onto the white linen pillowcase that her head was resting on. Nelly wasn’t scared, she realized, she was angry. She was angry that a Reverend had brought along such a blight upon the town and the people that she loved in it, and she was angry that the people had been so willing to listen to his pleas for faith and reverence. On top of being angry, though, she was sure. She was sure that she was more than willing to help Maggie get rid of whatever this curse was, whatever it took. She had to admit, the feeling of serenity and surety that settled into her stomach was much more preferable than the gut-chilling fear that she had endured since the first time she saw the Reverend and his serpents. “Miss Maggie, I’ll do anything you need. Just ask and I’ll follow whatever lead you give me.”
Maggie nodded once in agreement. “Okay. Good. But it’s not going to be easy, because to be honest, I don’t even know where to start.” Maggie’s brow furrowed now as she mulled over unheard things inside of her head and Nelly waited with anticipation but was bubbling over at wanting to say something that she felt in her core. Finally, as many nine-year-old girls are, she couldn’t contain her speech any longer and she spoke up. “I don’t know one end of The Sight or being Touched from another, but I do know that I saw…a light coming from you that chased away the shadowy snakes from Mama. I saw a twinkle in her, and I knew that I needed to let it out, so I followed your light and just pulled hers into it. I don’t know what that means, but I know how it felt, and I knew that those shadows would have no choice but to leave when those things fell into place like puzzle pieces.”
Maggie’s brow relaxed and then shot up into an arc as if she had just remembered a thing that she had thought she had forgotten. “Nelly, that’s it. Thats it! I think you’re going to need to come and stay with me for a few days.” Nelly’s brow crinkled into the beginnings of a protest and Maggie interjected before she had the time to vocally do so: “Don’t worry about your papa, he won’t mind. He will be getting a little of this mixed with the elderberries he went off to fetch, and come morning when he and your mama wake up, they will be right as rain!” With that, she pulled a glass bottle full of clear liquid from one of the myriad of hidden compartments that must line the entirety of Maggie’s apron and dress folds. She shook it with a smile on her face. “Don’t worry they will be fine. Right now the town needs you…I need you more than they do. Your mama is fine because of you!”
Nelly contemplated for a few moments, and the promise of an adventure was more than she was able to ignore. Before she knew it she was smiling and nodding to Maggie in agreement.
The screen door creaked again and Papa came back through the door clutching one of the pressed tin milk pans from the barn. Nelly had milked many a bucket full of milk into the very same pan. His fingertips had a purple tint to them, and the basin was filled with the midnight black elderberries from around the corner. Maggie smiled at him. “That will do just fine Mr. Smith!” She set to work by first taking the berries, then folding them between a dish towel, and smashing them into a pulp. She wrung the towel out into a mason jar and a beautiful purple liquid began to slowly fill it. Then she poured in the contents of her curvy glass bottle, lidded the jar, and shook it until the two liquids were combined into a crystalline purple liquid.
“Now, you make sure that you and Miss Eugena Lee both take all of this until it’s empty all of the way to the bottom of the jar. Half each. It should serve to wring out the rest of the clutter from her head. It has been a long day for us all, but especially your family. I mean to make this right, but I’m going to need something from you John…if I may call you John.”
“Er, um, yessum, you may. What is it that you need?” He was holding the bottle up to the light of an oil lamp as if he was trying to divine some information from it that it was reluctant to offer.
“Well, I’m gonna need Nelly. I’d like for her to stay with me for a few days over in the holler across the way. Now it’s just temporary, but I could really use her help. She is a special girl as I’m sure you know already.”
John’s brow arced in a slight worry as he sat the purple-filled bottle back on the table. He had always known that there was something different about his daughter. Like the way that she barely cried as an infant. They thought something was wrong with her, but she could easily be contented simply by laying her down in a puddle of sunlight or within earshot of naturally running water. She preferred the trees to any four walls, and she seldom saw the need for wearing shoes, even when the temperatures started to drop. But it wasn’t just that. He knew that she saw things that other people didn’t. He had heard her talking to herself many times, but she would ask questions to an empty room and act as if she had received a reply. If the reply wasn’t to her liking, she would argue with…no one at all. He had never taken his concerns over her “differences” from the other kids any further than speaking them to life to his wife, and she was resigned and dismissive any time he pointed out one of her…quirks.
It would make sense that perhaps she shared some similarities with Miss Maggie Jenkins. He didn’t understand her, and he didn’t understand his daughter. The only difference is one of them was his blood, and despite her peculiarities, he loved her with all of the love that a father should have for a daughter. He settled his hands into his lap and leaned forward, locking eyes with Maggie to express the seriousness of his words’ intent.
“Now Miss Maggie, I don’t reckon I understand much of this at all, but I do understand a few things. I understand that you and your maw have always been overly giving of your wisdom and…services to us and all the neighbors. I know that when my wife left today, hysteria in her eyes and tongue as she sprung from the church steps and ran down the road I felt like a piece of myself was slipping away. First Nelly and then Eugena Lee all within the span of an hour. I know seeing you round the bend in the drive with Eugena in that cart, my daughter smiling by your side, I allowed myself a little relief, and I trust that feeling right now when I tell you this. Nelly is my daughter, and the moon was hung for her as far as I’m concerned. I know I’m at my wits end with understanding how to break this…spell…that seems to have befallen Cane Creek, so my gut says to trust the kind aproned woman from the woods that she knows what she’s doing. You have to understand what I’m agreeing to when I tell you that Nelly can go with you. Just promise me that you won’t let hide nor hair come to harm on her Miss Maggie. Please.”
Maggie’s softened gaze, still locked eye to eye with John Smith, was accompanied by a gentle touch by her hand in an act of reassurance.
“Sure as the sun rises in the East, you have my word, John. The truth is, I expect she can protect me and her better than I can, though. There’s much to tell you that I suspect you already know a piece of, but that will have to wait until we have more time. Time which I mean to purchase for us with Nelly’s help. The moon is full in two nights’ time, and there’s more to do than I can count on two hands full of fingers and two feet full of toes, but I promise to talk to you and Eugena Lee both about this more when things are less dire. I reckon things are building up pressure, and we need to relieve it before it bursts.”
She patted his hand and nodded to him reassuringly. All that it took was a glance in the direction of Nelly Smith, still dotting her mother’s forehead with her damp cloth, anticipation being worn like a haphazard mask when she ran to her daddy’s side at Miss Maggie’s invitation and hugged him tightly. Big John Smith hugged her back with all of the gentleness of a man handling a delicate flower.
“I love you, Papa. And Mama too. Thank you for letting me do my part, though I don’t rightly know what that might be yet.”
“You take care of Miss Maggie now, and I’ll be looking for you in 3 days at the latest. If anything happens, you know the way. Come and find me. I’ll be here with Mama.”
Nelly released the embrace from her father and walked to her mother’s bedside once more. Her eyes were still closed, but her breathing was steady and the color was almost completely back in her facial features. Nelly bent over and kissed her mother on the forehead and whispered “I love you, mama”.
Maggie stood, brushing her hands on the front of her apron as a person would do after completing a task, and turned to Nelly.
“Now wait for me outside, I’m gonna make sure Mama and Papa are good for a little while. I’ll be with you shortly.”
Nelly smiled, hugged her father one more time, walked through the same screen door that had been inviting her home for her entire life, and stood under the stars in a now darkened night sky. She looked up and inhaled deeply, the crisp night air singing a song in her lungs in relief and excitement. As she looked into the stars, admiring their winking and twinkling gaze, she followed the skyline toward the direction of the town where the stars disappeared and were replaced with a red glow, hovering over the tree line like a cloak. Nelly didn’t know why, but the foreboding was instant. She felt it in her bones, and she knew that the light not being where it should be, and being replaced with such an ominous hue was a sign of something terrible and frightening. As if on cue, Maggie walked out of the door of the house and stood beside her looking in the same direction.
“Come on now Nelly, time is short and we don’t have a backup supply, and we have still got to figure out what to do with all of this mess. There’s blood on the moon, and it’s going to take more than we know to bring back the white of its light I’m afraid.”
As if on cue, the top semi-circle sliver of blood-red moonlight crept above the tree line, warning of the grim tidings it was surely heralding