Free Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington

track lighting. The place was perfect, except for one thing. There weren’t any snakes.
    “I thought you were going to bring them,” said Brother Carl to Brother Charles.
    “I thought Brother Willie was going to bring them,” Charles replied. He was getting his guitar out of the car, an instrument the Lord, he said, had taught him to play.
    “Brother Willie got serpent bit last night,” Carl reminded him.
    “I know, but he said he was going to be here today.”

    “Maybe I need to check on him after the service,” Carl said. “It was a copperhead,” he confided to me. “Over in Georgia. Bit him on the thumb, but it didn’t hurt him bad.”
    “Well, we don’t have to have serpents to worship the Lord,” Charles finally said. He put his boot up on a pine bench that would serve as the altar and began strumming the guitar. When everyone had gathered around, he started to sing. “He’s God in Alabama. He’s God in Tennessee. He’s God in North Carolina. He’s God all over me. Oh, God is God ... and Jesus is his name....”
    The service had begun at five o‘clock to avoid the midafternoon heat. The light was low and golden over the field, and Charles’s voice rose above it like a vapor, unamplified, snatched away by the breeze. Aline was there; Brother Carl and the old prophetess, Aunt Daisy; J.L. and his wife, Dorothea; one of their daughters-in-law and her baby; and Dorothea’s father, Dozier, and her mother, Burma, who had a twin sister named Erma. Both Burma and Erma, sixty-eight, attended snake-handling services, usually in identical dresses, but only Burma actually handled.
    I’d also brought photographers Jim Neel and Melissa Springer with me, and they moved quietly around the edges of the arbor as the service picked up steam. The choice of photographers had been simple. Jim was one of my oldest friends. In addition to being a sculptor and painter, he’d worked with me as a combat photographer in Central America during the
1980s. Melissa, whose work I’d first noticed when it was censored by police at an outdoor exhibit in Birmingham, had been documenting the lives of men and women clinging to the underbelly of the American dream — female impersonators, dancers with AIDS, women inmates in the HIV isolation unit at Alabama’s Julia Tutwiler prison. When I told her about the snake handlers, she said she had to meet them, but unlike most people who say they want to, she kept calling and insisting that we set a time. She and Jim were an interesting study in contrasts: He was moody, private, and intense; Melissa was warm, expansive, and maternal. But both were obsessed with their work, easy to travel with, and open to possibilities.
    Melissa had worn an ankle-length dress this time. At her first service in Scottsboro, she’d gotten the message when Aunt Daisy prophesied against the wearing of pants by women. Outsiders are bound to get preached at a little in Holiness churches. But the same Holiness preachers who draw attention to unorthodox details of behavior or dress inevitably hugged us after the service and invited us back.
    Some preachers didn’t take the Holiness prescriptions about dress quite as seriously as others. Charles McGlocklin’s theory was simple: “You’ve got to catch the fish before you clean them.”
    His wife, Aline, didn’t wear makeup or cut her hair, but she occasionally allowed herself the luxury of a brightly colored hair ornament. “God looks at the heart, anyway. He
doesn’t look on the outside,” she said. She also drove a white Chevy Beretta with an airbrushed tag that read “Aline loves Charles.” Charles’s pickup had a matching tag, with “Charles loves Aline.” Both sentiments were inscribed in the middle of interlocking hearts, like the brightly colored hearts on Aline’s hair clasp.
    Despite the empty chairs and the lack of electric guitars or serpents, the worship at J.L.’s brush arbor followed the same pattern I’d experienced in Scottsboro.