The Christmas Eve conversation is rather uncomfortable, however, since despite Emma’s contempt, her mother and father focus talk on her engagement.
“We have wedding plans to make,” her mother says at the dinner table. “First, we have to pick the date. What are you thinking, Emma?”
“I’m not thinking, mother,” she says.
“Well you are engaged now. It’s time to think of that.”
“You always say mother one never knows what God has in store for them. Spring is a long time away. A lot can happen. I don’t want to talk about a date now.”
“God has called you to marry David,” Emma’s father says. “I suggest you get excited about it.”
“If God really has called me to it, God will get me excited about it, right?”
“Only because it is Christmas Eve,” her father says, explaining why he will spare the rod.
Emma’s appetite is robust, despite the conversation. She devours a plate, and second helpings, and after she and her mother put the dishes away and clean the kitchen amid the lingering smell of pumpkin pie, Emma goes quietly to bed early.
Despite her fill, however, her heart is racing with hunger at the thought of what lies ahead.
As before when Emma planned to go out into the night, she rests still in her bed with her eyelids wide open until she hears her parents go to bed. She then counts off another couple of hours, making sure they are sound asleep, not to be disturbed. When Emma looks through her window for the moon and sees that it appears to be in about the one a.m. position, she’s ready -- ready to bound into the night.
Emma puts on her shoes, reaches for a jacket, puts it on, and walks softly to the hallway closet where she looks for a roll of black material she had used before for dressmaking, storing the remnants away. Only a few feet of garment remains, which is all she needs.
Emma drapes the material around her body, over her jacket, and clutches it around her neck with her hands, like a cape. She flees the house, without disturbing her sleeping parents, dashes across the parsonage lawn under the dim moonlight, through the pasture, over the fence, and crosses the road as a dark, fleeting shadow. Emma hurries down the dirt road heading for Josh’s truck under a slight silver sky giving just enough light to see by.
Emma squeezes through the brush into the driver side door, finds the key to the ignition, starts the truck, put it into the R position, backs out onto the dirt road, straightens up, and heads toward the highway with the radio, still on the same station Josh had playing at the same pitch, blaring a Christmas song she’s heard in a female voice she has never heard.
Angel we have heard on high
Sweetly singing o'er the plain
And the mountains in reply
Echoing their joyous strain
Gloria
In excellsis deo
Gloria
In excellsis deo
Emma finds the volume knob and turns off the radio. Driving slowly up the highway with a constant left-to-right slur, Emma winds toward the church. Approaching, she is slowly humming the words of another song she knows, “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling…calling, O Sinner, come home!”
“Come home,” she hums, “Come home…”
Emma pulls into the church parking lot, and turns the truck lights off. She leaves the engine running. Emma gets out of the truck and scampers to the shed door of the building where the rattlesnakes are kept. The door is latched only with a knob – her father’s design.
“The serpent is too powerful to lock in,” he has said.
Emma lets herself into the shed, finds a string hanging from the ceiling light and pulls it, illuminating the room.
The serpents are sleeping.
Emma takes the black material draped around her neck and ties it into a sack. She opens the lid to the snake box and peers in. The rattlers are curled around one another like kittens on a couch. Emma reaches her right hand in, taking one on top from just behind its head.
She slowly pulls it out.
The snake is limp.
Emma holds its head even with hers, looking into its eyes as its awakened tongue slithers in and out. The snake hangs to her knees, but its rattle is calm. She takes the black bag with her left hand and drops the snake in.
“There,” she says.
Emma reaches back into the box and takes out another, slowly. She opens the bag, and places it in.
“There,” she says.
Emma takes the bag of snakes, pulls the string to turn out the light, shuts the door and gently tosses the bag onto the front seat of the truck. She gets in and starts making her way back on the road on a path toward David’s house. She notices Christmas lights decorating the night outside houses along the way, and softly sings words to her favorite seasonal hymn in the spirit of the Eve.