“No,” said Billy, “no more.”
He could feel it coming though I avoided it. I steered away from the burning welts, the scissors, pinched nerves, the dead eye, the strap, the belt, the spike-heeled shoe, the razor, the boiling hot spilled tapioca, the shards of glass, the knives, the chinked armor, the sister, the sister, the basement, anything underground.
“Show me, show me.” Billy was half asleep. He didn’t know what he wanted to see, and of course I don’t mean to imply that he would see the whole of my picture anyway. He would walk the edge of it, get the crumbs, the drops of water that flew off when a bird shook its feathers. That’s how much I got across, but that was all it took. When you share like that, the rest of the earth shuts. You are locked in, twisted close, braided, born. And I could do it, just that much, and he needed it. Escape.
“Show me.”
So I showed him, and I showed him. Another year passed and the discipline grew tighter and more intense as the spirit ripped into Billy and wouldn’t spare us, either.
ONE JANUARY NIGHT he came into the room and talked to the children and me all night, squeezing our faces in his thick, hot palms, slapping us to stay awake, urging us to stay aware.
“Listen up! Last things are on us!”
I wept and the children wept, but he would not let us sleep.
“There’s something incongruent, something in you, something blocking the channel, something blacking out the peephole, narrowing the frequency.”
“No, there isn’t. These are your children.”
“You are mine. Your lives are mine. I will do with you as spirit wills. Get down! Get down! Get down on the floor!”
He looked at us with a skeptical loathing, and the black hours passed. Finally, he nodded off. The children fell across my lap. By then I was all nerved up and wide awake, so I went to my glass boxes. I took out my serpents to pray with. They curled around me, in and out of my clothing, comforting. The serpents were listening, and I heard it, too. The chinook blew in. Just like that.
The temperature shifted radically. The warm wind could melt the deep snow packs in hours. I heard the rafters groan, the snow already dripping. I smelled dirt and rain. It was blowing through, and soon the winter grass, deep gray, blond, would poke through the drifts, The air was flowing, moving, warm currents of dark air heaving fresh out of the southwest across wet roads, slick roads. And then the wolf dogs came out, raising long muzzles to the air.
I started up in a moment of fear, and as I did, my copperhead struck me full on, in the shadow of my wing, too close to my heart not to kill me. In the Lord, I said, as I was taught, and I gathered up my red-back beauty. She wore time itself in those hourglasses and I felt the sand rush through them as I let her flow back into her case. Then I lay down. I let the poison bloom into me. Let the sickness boil up, and the questions, and the fruit of the tree of power. I let the knowing take hold of me. The understanding of serpents. My heart went black and rock hard. It stopped once, then started again. When the life flooded back in I knew that I was stronger. I knew that I’d absorbed the poison. As it worked in me, I knew that I was the poison and I was the power.
Get away from him and take the children, the serpent said to me from her glass box, as she curled back to sleep in her nest of grass.
LONG TRAIN RIDES, the slow repetitive suspense of travel. I had persuaded Billy to let me go all the way out to Seattle in order to raise money for the kindred. I took my snakes along, well fed in their pouches, curled to my body’s warmth. If they became too active I’d set them back inside their leather cases on the cold floor by my feet. I’d made him let me go, although in some way I knew I would not return all the way, not after I was bit.
All the whole trip, I let it gather. On the way back, I let it come. Curled double among the sighs and groans of other passengers, I dozed and woke, cramped and sore, stiff in the bounds of my two-seater. In the dark Cascades I understood I was a darkness blacker than these mountains. The knowledge sank into my joints like something viral, and I sat from then on in quiet pain. That changed to fear somewhere in the Kootenai.
Outside the window, black and motionless, without limit, deep forest bowed in fresh snow. I considered what came next and hit a wall packed white. My children were behind it. My love for them was brute love. I would never let them go. Light broke just outside of Whitefish, Montana. Breakfast was announced. I made up my mind and secured myself within my decision. Once I had done this, my thoughts cleared. I sat down in the dining car and ordered eggs. They came with piles of browned cottage potatoes, buttered toast, grape jam in little cartons. I ate a few bites and drank milky coffee from a plastic cup. I watched the dark lodge pole, the yellow larch go by, more trees than some people see their whole lives. They turned like spokes, reached like arms, sifted snow like powder through their needles. Great spumes of whiteness puffed, crashing from their boughs.
Where a big derailment and grain spill had occurred two years before, a fat bear stood, a blackie stirred from hibernation, probably drawn by the lye-soaked and fermented wheat that the railroad workers had buried underground, behind an electric fence, out of reach. Everyone else in the car was deep in conversation or concentrating on burnt pancakes, mild tea. I was the only one who saw the bear and I said nothing. It swung its head, smelling diesel, harsh metal, maybe steam of boiling oatmeal. Perhaps it was used to the eastbound number 28 because it didn’t lope off, didn’t move away, just waited in its own shadow while we passed. My future seemed impenetrable, a cloud pack, fog socked in. And freedom seemed unreachable, like all that sweet grain bulldozed into the hill. My life was a trap that had closed on me with soft teeth, from under snow. Up here seems endless and free, so wide it hurts. It does hurt. For we are narrow, bound tight, hobbled, caught in sorrow out of mind.
Grass, water, summer fireweed and thistle, come save me now, I thought. I didn’t call on god, though. He was on my husband’s side.
When Frenchie picked me up at the station, I was gone already. Evidently, I looked and acted the same though, because Frenchie helped put my things into the back of the truck and got in front without comment. Billy didn’t do things like pick passengers up at the depot, because that might have meant waiting around and he never sat still. Every moment of his time was now dedicated. Valuable.
“I’ll buy you a meal,” I said to Frenchie, “I raised a good ten thou.” And I had.
Besides the waitressing job, which I used to pick up money when it was needed for some kind of equipment or spiritual campaign, I raised money for Billy by speaking at the big tent meetings and writing pamphlets and handling my snakes in the spirit-trance. All in all, I preferred waitressing. Just that the money at the stadium and tent revivals was so good. I knew that once I entered the compound it would be a long time before I saw much of the outside world again. That was why I got Frenchie to walk through the door of the 4-B’s, home of the all-day breakfast, where I had worked a year and left with no hard feelings, even offers of a raise. It was as though I was a normal person there, any woman, and I needed to feel that now. Maybe I’d show a picture of my daughter, son, and nobody would comment on their gunnysack clothes, know their meaning, nobody would ask whether they had yet processed spirit.