Besides, he enjoyed snakes.
Liked them better than birds, you wanted to know. All birds did was make an infernal racket in the morning when a man was trying to sleep. Messed up the front porch, too. Snakes were clean and polite, and even the poisonous ones wouldn’t strike at you less you stepped on them by accident or poked at them with a stick. The way he looked at it, snakes were the most misunderstood creatures on all God’s earth. Person saw a snake on the ground, whap, he’d hit him with a rake sure enough. Poor thing was just slithering along, trying to make a living same as anybody else. But whap came the rake, woman standing on the porch screaming with her skirts up around her knees. Afraid that old snake was going to crawl up there and get between her legs, that was the thing of it. Wasn’t no man on earth had to be fearful of reptiles, though, less his own pecker was tiny as a worm and could be put to shame by the littlest garden snake.
The bell in the rotting church steeple was tolling as the Chisholms rode into town that Sunday morning. Hadley stopped the mules in front of the open doors to let Minerva and the girls out of the cart. By the time he’d taken mules and cart around back to hitch them to the rail there, his sons had dismounted and were coming across the field, raising a cloud of dust behind them. It had not rained hereabouts for more than two weeks, but the Clinch was running swiftly nonetheless; Hadley could hear the water below, out of sight beyond the knoll. The moment his sons disappeared around the corner of the church, he lifted the gunnysack from inside the toolbox.
Three rows ahead of where Hadley took a seat inside the church, he could see his son Gideon looking across the aisle to where Rachel Lowery was sitting. Benjamin Lowery had come to Hadley one time last year and asked him what his son’s intentions were. Hadley had said, “Which son?”
“Why, Gideon,” Lowery said.
“His intentions toward what?” Hadley said.
“Toward my daughter Rachel,” Lowery said.
Hadley was no fool, he knew what had been transpiring between his son and Rachel for the longest time. But it was rumored at the livery stable — where admittedly the talk was sometimes inaccurate — that Rachel had been fornicating with half the young men in town since she’d turned fourteen, the wonder being she hadn’t borne a bastard before now and been publicly whipped for it.
“I know of no intentions he has toward your daughter,” Hadley said, and that had been that.
Yet there was Gideon staring across the aisle at her now, his intentions plain as the nose on his face. Though here in church he surely was, it was another temple he longed to enter. God forgive me, Hadley thought, and turned his attention to what the fool preacher was saying. It took him only a moment to realize young Harlow Cooper was reading from the epistle of James.
“ ‘... is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that makes peace.’ ” Cooper cleared his throat. “ ‘From whence comes wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts. Ye adulterers and adulteresses’!” Cooper said, and closed the Bible as though he were slamming a door on an intruder. “That was from the epistle of James,” he said, as though he were riding into town with fresh news. His eyes were roaming the church. Hadley remembered those eyes watering on the wind-swept ridge two days ago, when they’d buried his mother. He was surprised to find them coming to rest on him now.
“I chose this passage,” Cooper said, “because Friday morning I commended to God a woman who lived her whole life through in peace with her neighbors. I chose this passage because there has been strife in this town, neighbor against neighbor, Christians behaving toward each other in ways that are neither peaceable, gentle, easy to be entreated, nor full of good fruits. I chose this passage—”
Hadley rose.
“Your Worship,” he said, using a term the congregation supposed was common currency among Papists, and causing them to snicker at once, “I wonder why you pick your Scriptures the way you do. Is it cause you’re ignorant of the word?”
“Sir,” Cooper said, “I—”
“Your Worship,” Hadley said, “I’m thinkin of what you said over my mother’s grave this Friday past. Now those words weren’t fit for the burial of a woman who—”
“Mr. Chisholm,” Cooper said, “I’m sorry if my choice of—”
“Those were words of celebration,” Hadley said, “and here in these mountains we don’t celebrate at graveside. We mourn those who’ve passed on, sir, and we were there last Friday to mourn a fine and decent—”
“I assure you, Mr. Chisholm—”
“A fine and decent woman,” Hadley said. “You should have quoted not from Psalms, but instead from Proverbs 31, where it’s written, ‘Her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her,’ and so on down to ‘She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness....’ ”
“Yes, yes,” Cooper said, and smiled out at the congregation for approval. “ ‘Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her....’ ”
“You know it well enough now,” Hadley said, “but where was it last Friday? Does it take a poor farmer to poke and prod you into recollection?”
“I assure you, sir,” Cooper said, and saw that Hadley was reaching into his gunnysack. He could not imagine what was in the sack. He had seen a rattler only once, and that one a pygmy he’d almost tripped over in the woods. But yes, Hadley Chisholm was pulling a rattlesnake out of that sack, his right hand clutched behind the head, his left arm cradling the hidden body of the snake, his thumb on one side of the jaws, the forefinger on the opposite side, the remaining fingers tight around the... neck? Did snakes have necks or did their heads suddenly become their bodies? Cooper saw the snake’s mouth opening and the fangs springing down from the upper jaw into striking position. He heard what he thought to be the sound of ominous rattling coming from inside the sack and realized in the next instant that it was only Hadley Chisholm chuckling.
“ ‘Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made,’ ” Hadley quoted. “Where in the Bible is it written?”
“Genesis 3,” Cooper said.
Hadley was standing just before the pulpit now, his eyes on the preacher, whose eyes were on the snake. “That’s very good, Your Worship,” he said. “Let’s see what else you can remember with a little poking and prodding.” As he said the word “poking,” he thrust the head of the snake toward Cooper, who backed away. “ ‘Their poison is like the poison of a serpent,’ ” Hadley quoted; “ ‘they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth...’ ”
“That’s — from...”
“Yes, Your Worship? ‘That stoppeth her ear; which will not harken to the voice of charmers...’ ”
“Psalms 58,” Cooper said.
“Psalms is correct; you know your Psalms well. It was Psalms you quoted Friday; are you nothing but a psalm singer?” Hadley said, and climbed up onto the small raised platform to stand directly alongside Cooper. The snake was rattling ferociously from within the gunnysack; Hadley’s hand still clutched firmly behind the open jaws. “Fear not the reptile,” he said, and laughed. “He’ll bite only a man who cannot tell his Scriptures. So then... ‘There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air...’ ”