“I see,” Emma says, standing outside with David and her mother.
They are waiting to greet her father after the service in the church parking lot once he is through shaking the parishioner’s hands.
“Are you joining us for lunch?” Emma’s mother asks David.
Emma had risen early, and with the help of her mother they made a lunch larger than usual for after the service, expecting David to join them. Her father typically had a big appetite after a sermon, anyway, and expected a big spread. On this day, he expected an even bigger spread for David.
So they had made potato salad moistened and seasoned with Duke Famous Sauce. They had picked fresh chard from the garden to sauté. They had thawed and cooked black-eyed peas from the freezer, to serve it with homemade chow-chow. They had made a fresh loaf of bread. And, they had cut up a whole chicken and brined it in salt water so they could fry when they got back home after church.
And Emma’s father has prepared for the lunch as well, it seems, though in different ways. He has two sermons prepared for the day – one for the sanctuary and the other for David at lunch. Emma's father plans to convert to a snake handler, it seems. Any true believing Pentecostal must handle serpents in the house of God, Jeremiah believes.
At the house, Jeremiah and David sit in the parlor sipping ice tea sweetened with homemade corn syrup while Emma and her mother roll chicken pieces in flour and drop them into a searing hot frying pan filled with an inch-and-a-half of oil. The kitchen windows are open to alleviate the smoke seeping from the pan as they fry the chicken to a crispy brownish-black on the outside. They can’t hear the conversation in the other room amid the sizzling, but it doesn’t matter.
They have a good idea what Jeremiah is up to.
“David, I know you have been called to serve the Lord by following in your father’s footsteps,” Jeremiah says. “He has served well. And you shall do the same. But as a Pentecost, you must embrace the entire Bible, and God clearly calls us to take the serpent in hand.”
“My father has taught me that we should keep evil out of the church,” David says.
“You cannot keep evil out of the church, David. Evil walks in with the people. Taking the serpent by hand is confronting that evil. If it is wrong, why is our mountain one of the purest places on Earth? The sale of alcohol is forbidden. Murderers don’t live here like in the big cities of sin. Look around. We are mostly all one of the same.”
“I’m listening.”
“Don’t listen to me. Listen to the word of God, David. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
“I know the scripture,” David says. “Mark sixteen, verses seventeen and eighteen. But, not all recover. Some die, who don’t seem to be sinners. Maybe it is just snake poison that kills them, not evil.”
“Do you question the Bible, David?”
“But you recall, Sir, that not too many years back we lost one of our own, when brethren John “Punkin” Brown died when the timber rattler bit him at the Rock House Holiness Church. Now that man didn’t seem to have any evil in him. People said he was one of the Godliest men they knew.
“And your Emma, she…” David says, before Jeremiah interrupts him.
“Emma did not die, now did she?” Jeremiah says.
“No.”
“So let’s stick to the facts. And you don’t know what Punkin Brown was in to when the lights went out, now do you?”
“No sir, I…”
“God works in mysterious ways,” Jeremiah says, interrupting David again. “We don’t know all the ways. Save that blemish on Emma’s neck, she is as pure as white gold. An angel. She’s just waiting for matrimony, for a man to have her, and take her, and use her according to God’s will.”
“I understand, sir. But there’s also this: snake handling is illegal in the state of Alabama. We teach our people that we must follow the law of the land,” David says.
“Do you now?” Jeremiah says. “That’s what you teach your people? Well it’s the law of the state of Alabama that every young person be schooled properly according to the demands of the Department of Education, too, but your Daddy tells me you got very little book learning beyond the Bible.”
“Yes, sir. That’s right.”
“So maybe you don’t always follow the law exactly as it is.”
“Son, look me into the eyes,” says Jeremiah, leaning toward David, and sharpening his emphasis. “There is but one law. Romans ten, verse four tells us, ‘For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.’ It’s time you try to connect with God according to His word, not yours.