That was her religion: a faith, unshakeable despite all evidence to the contrary, in the ties that bind.
*
The day the Church of the Lord with Signs Following got busted up, there were thirteen congregants in a meetinghouse that had chairs enough for seventy. Simon preached as he always did, lifting his arms as the gift of tongues came down upon him, and, as always, his son recounted ecstatic holy visions of the future. Yet the faces before him remained closed and unmoving: what could they be thinking as they listened? Were they planning even now to leave his congregation, to leave his town? Were they doubting? Had the otherworldly allure that first drew them into the Church of the Lord with Signs Following begun at last to fade? And as Simon’s voice rose, the congregants were slow to rise with it, and as the music played, the women who would once have tilted their faces to heaven and wept now rocked listlessly back and forth, and on this day there was no one among his flock who accepted the call to test their faith with strychnine.
Simon was suddenly aware of the smell of his own sweat, of the tinny and insubstantial sound his words seemed to take on as they rang out in the empty air. How clear everything had been when he had founded the Church of the Lord with Signs Following, how simple he had thought it would be to follow the words written with lightning across his mind. How surely he had once believed that his actions bent toward goodness, toward godliness. Simon looked down at Daniel with his close-cropped lamb curls, with his strange, solemn demeanor like a child half in this world, half still in the womb. And when the snakes were being taken out for the sermon’s climax––the gape-jawed water moccasins and the stout copperheads and the rattlesnakes that had already begun to shake their tails balefully––the preacher signaled for Daniel not to return to his seat but to stay where he was, and one by one Simon lifted the snakes out of their boxes and draped them over his own shoulders and over the small, yielding shoulders of his prophet son, until the boy’s chest was almost entirely obscured by the writhing mass of serpents’ bodies, until he was flesh and scale in equal measure.
Among Pentecostal serpent-handlers of Central Appalachia it is the custom never to seek medical attention for a snakebite; it is the custom, further, to actively refuse all help that is offered and to turn away any doctor who should come. It is the custom even unto death, even unto the death of another, even under penalty of law, to abide whatever comes to pass as the right and solemn judgment of the Lord.
*
After the Church of the Lord with Signs Following got busted up, after they had taken the boy’s body to the morgue and hauled Simon off to the county jail, Lee went down to the snake hutch where she had read aloud so many passages of Great Expectations and Nicholas Nickleby. The snakes that had not been brought out that day greeted their strange friend with forked tongues, shakes of their rattles, slow blinks of their three-lidded eyes. She bundled as many cages as she could into her arms and waded out among the hackmatack trees. And as she unlatched the cage doors and let the serpents slither out and return to the woods from which they’d been taken, Lee thought back to the one time Daniel had come upon her in the snake hutch as she read from her secret books, and she remembered how, as he stood in the doorway, gazing at her with those pale, moony eyes, she could register no shock on her brother’s face, no surprise at all, as though it were a thing that he had already seen, not only that image but all that came before and all that came after, once and again and a thousand times over.