Once Emma’s home schooling had ended in the early summer, it had become all chores like cooking or sewing or tending to the grounds and floors of the parsonage and church that filled her days. The books Emma used for school were gone from the house after her father had given the state required texts minus the absent science book to the Judith, thinking that when her toddler child grew of age they wouldn’t have to buy books.
Emma missed them, the books, having read them in the evenings while her parents slept over and over gain. But she dared not complain. Besides, she knew them already by heart, word for word, page by page.
Emma wasn’t much interested in reading the Bible. She did not live in fear, and anguish, and therefore, didn’t cling to the Bible for guidance or salvation since she hadn’t been acquainted with sin that she knew of. Sure, her father accused her of disobedience every now and then, especially when she had asked to go along on trips, but she knew she had felt differently in her heart.
She had only asked to go to Henegar because she wanted to go. That had nothing to do with disobedience, from her perspective. And she had always done what her father demanded, without disagreeing. Emma just considered such issues between she and her father as differences in how they saw things rather than swipes by her at following the Devil.
Emma viewed her current predicament as a very different situation, though. She knew now that she had a problem, and a big one at that. She understood that she had everything to do with it. Those gathered around her -- some on knees, some standing and pacing around her -- knew this too, considering that Emma’s vital signs bounced erratically with her state of consciousness, even if they did not know the culprit.
The serpent, her father often preached, can see evil that the human nature cannot.
Kneeling at Emma’s side, her mother pressed a white cloth dampened by her dripping tears with two hands against the fork-like puncture wound on her daughter’s neck. Women wearing faded, pastel-colored smock dresses that fell just below the knees connected to her mother in rope-like fashion -- arms extended with one tethered to another. They muttered words with pleading and flailing tongues that, blended together, sounded like desperate mush.
Emma knew the language well. Listening to her father’s sermons Sunday upon Sunday since she was old enough to remember, she had been taught fate rests in the hands of the deal made with either God, or the Devil, a choice ultimately determining the sinners and saints of the world. If a person, or plight, is to be spared on the Earth, then, that sparing can only come from the hand of God, the Father, Emma had learned.
That’s why her father and members of the Sand Mountain United Pentecostal Church congregation lived as true believers, those who do not turn to medical science in times of physical distress. They prayed for healing from God, instead, as a one-and-only means of treatment instead rather than asking someone trained in medical science to fix them.
Why bother with doctors? God was in control, her father preached.
As Emma lie sprawled across the sanctuary floor, weaving in and out of her semi-conscience state, those gathered and pacing around her did just that – praying for her healing in lieu of dialing 9-1-1.
The row of women tethered to her mother prayed. The three-dozen or so other parishioners who popped nervously about the sanctuary like kernels of corn basking in oil heated over an open flame prayed. And, her father prayed, murmuring aloud in repeated exclamation.
“Dear God!” he cried.
Yes, Emma thought.
“Dear God!”
She never liked handling the snakes in the first place. And she did not like the thought of dying from the venom of one now, with three cartons of eggs worth of people watching her writhe on the floor in a compromised position as serpent poison coerced her veins, making her heart pump harder and faster just to keep the tainted blood flowing.
But neither was she given a choice in the matter, the handling of snakes.
The practice had been a part of the church since it was founded more than 100 years before and her father, who grew up in the church, believed the scripture clear in its command that followers take up with serpents. Emma did so beginning a few months before when she turned 18, the age the church both allowed and encouraged the practice. She did not want to, but her father was the preacher, after all – the commander of the serpents. Besides, she hadn’t been worried before about being bitten.
Not before, anyway.
The handling was just another chore, like mopping the floor.
Now, however, as the rattler’s poison spread and the people prayed around her mother’s bent knees -- her quickening pulse prodding her mother’s worst fears -- Emma had a decision to make in an instant.