SEND THEM TO HEAVEN

“And these signs shall follow those who believe, they shall cast out demons in My name, they shall speak in tongues; they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, no harm shall come to them; if they lay hands upon the sick, they shall be healed.”

Mark 16: 17-18

It wasn’t spoken about. There was no need.

I hitched the trailer to the truck. Fanny wore her jeans and red-black flannel and black cap. She bounded into the seat beside me. I looked at her. There was nothing else in the whole world I could ever want from a woman. It is silly, I know, but being next to her made me forget having been with anyone before. When I turned the key, the truck sputtered then the engine fired, I mashed the accelerator, the truck and trailed buckled then glided along the lane, the pitter-patter of gravel hitting the quarter panels and kicking up dust a dust cloud. I glanced in the rearview, a white cloud, rising and tossed by the wind, crossed into the lower pasture and disappeared.

I turned right onto the old, narrow road that connected the farm to civilization.

It was a seven mile drive to Fanny’s apartment. The road winded through curves , up and down hills, the farms had diary cows and soybeans and wheat, barns weathered grey and tractors rolling in tilled fields. The mountains seem to hold white, puffy clouds in place despite the wind blowing through the pine and oak trees. We finally passed by Mount Pleasant Area High School, when a bunch of memories flooded me all at once. I eased the truck to a stop.

“Daddy, you alright?”

Fanny stared at me, her left hand clutching my right arm.

“Yes, Fanny. I am fine. Just had a swarm of memories. I haven’t seen that building in twenty-five years or more.”

I hit the gas and we rolled into Mount Pleasant.

There is one street that dissects the town, heading out to highway 119. It is lined with hardware stores and McDonald’s Burger King, Wendy’s, the fire station, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, Chik-Filet, the local hospital, Long John Silver’s, Chipotle and the courthouse and some local bars and Domino's, Papa John’s, Godfather’s, Little Caesar’s and Pizza Hut, the police station. When we neared the end of town I turned right and down the hill was Fanny’s apartment. It was a dilapidated four-plex. I parked the trailer in front of the first floor apartment on the right. It was a slightly downgrade which made for easier moving.

Fanny had no idea of the kind of memories I was seeing.

No normally fucked up, dysfunctional abused person could. Maybe the bullied, weak fucks that kill themselves were never going to make it anyways. But, they, at least, spared themselves the agony of perpetual torment. I respected that. What the world called a weakness, a cry for help was bullshit. It was the ultimate manifestation of self-love, coupled with the ultimate commitment. No turning back. Voluntary. Not martyrs, not kamikaze, not suicide bombers. They chose to die for the only cause worthy of such sacrifice, themselves.

Fanny jumped out of the truck. I heard the jingle of keys as she walked to the door. I followed after her, bumping up against her ass. She glanced back with a look we didn’t have time to finish.

She flipped the switch. Above a sputter of blue light, the familiar buzz of a fluorescent light flowed down a narrow hallway to a small living room, a tiny kitchen, the fridge hummed a steady, strange electrical harmony to the light fixture. It smelled like her perfume. She had the place spotless.

In the living room she pulled me down onto the sofa and kissed me hard. Its times like these I think I must have done something right, somewhere along the way, to end up with such a fine woman. Or, maybe, I had suffered long enough for the pendulum to swing the other way.

“Nice couch,” I said.

“I like the big fluffy ones.”

“Big fluffy purple ones.”

“Hey,” she slapped my shoulder, “it's a lot better than what you got.”

“True. I just hope we can get it through the doorway.”

She rolled her eyes then bounded, that’s the only way to describe it, into the kitchen. I had the fridge door open stopping the hum, and then it closed and resumed. She handed me a beer, and sat beside me.

Tops popped and clink, clink.

“To us,” she said.

“To us.”

It took us about two hours to load the furniture: sofa, coffee table, end tables, lamps, bed, dresser, nightstands and the few boxes and her television. It was a nice day, so I sat on the stoop drinking a beer as I waited for Fanny to holler that another suitcase was packed. I’d walk back and wheel it out to the trailer, then two-arm clean -and-jerk them into the back. Gotta be some universal, genetic female programming to double the manufacturer’s recommended weight limits. Four beers and three suitcases in total, plus two of those Do-Haul cardboard coat hanger boxes later we were loaded.

“That wasn’t so bad,” said Fanny.

I closed and bolted the trailer door, went around and opened the door. Fanny was sitting there smiling looking at me.

“Uhm, you gonna get in cowboy?”

That made chuckle and I climbed in beside her.

“What?”

“Nothing, babe, just your beautiful self.”

“Ok.”

She slid over and put her hand between my legs. I stated the truck and we were back on Main Street. We hit two green traffic signals and had a red light near the Doughboy, a WWI monument. In the space near it some people gathered. I saw one head above the rest and whoever it was seemed agitated. As the light changed we rolled on and we heard the shouts, Repent! Sinners, the Day of Judgement is at hand!

Repent and be saved! Then we saw the sign. A black background with three large words, the first was HOMOSEXUALS in pink, the second, LESBIANS in yellow, and the third was FORNICATORS in white. At the bottom repents three times in small green letters.

We looked at each other.

“Slow down,” Fanny said, and she rolled down her window. I stopped the truck and saw the preacher dressed in black, a tall man with a drawn face and thinning grey hair. He pointed in our direction and someone moved through the crown, a short red-headed man approached us.

“Here ma’am,” he said and handed Fanny a flyer. “Y’all come to the revival and be saved by the blood of Christ.”

We looked at each other smiling.

Fanny rolled up the window not looking back. I saw the man vanish in the crowd.

The flyer read:

Blood of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Pentecostal Rival

Come and be saved! Repent of your heathen ways!

Reverend Perceval B. Ralston is hosting a tent rival

This Saturday 1:00 pm next to the Sheffield farm.

Follow the signs.All denominations welcome.

“Can you guess what we are doing this weekend?”

“I reckon we’re going to get saved.”

It was a clear sunny day of the Blood of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Rival.

When we got to Sheffield’s I saw a large white tent with a lot of cars parked in front.

Fanny wanted to get there early, so we could get a good seat in the front. But, to our surprise the place was already nearly full of farm folk sitting on brown folding chairs murmuring. We sat in the second to last row near the end. There was a lone fan blowing across the small stage. The pulpit was made of black plastic with a gold cross spray painted on it. Next to it was a table with no chairs. An old grey bullhorn hung from a pole.

“See anyone you know?” I asked.

“A couple guys from the hospital, but no one else.”

“I don’t know a soul.”

Fanny laughed. “I don’t know a soul,” and drew a few no-fun-allowed-allowed in church looks from a couple of bespectacled grannies. I thought about us, a white man and a black woman in Appalachia. And, that made me laugh. More glares and a lone shush.

I was happy to sitting in the back. That way we could escape if it got boring. I had been forced to go to a few of these when I was a kid and they were exasperating. Besides, it was starting to got hot in there with the sunshine and the body heat of fifty or so hill people.

After a long while the red-headed flyer guy took the stage. He walked over to what looked like an old, black ghetto-blaster, its wires run off back yonder somewheres. He flipped a switch and “Bringing in the Sheaves,” started playing over the bullhorn. He walked to the pulpit and bent to the microphone.

“Please join me in singing Hymn 92 in your misrelate. Bringing in the Sheaves.”

There was a rustle of papers, I hadn’t noticed a placard hanging to the right of the stage that had all the songs to be sung listed in white letters and numbers on cardboard. Sure enough, hymn 92 began with Red leading in a gruff voice that I hoped forever silenced by perpetual laryngitis. As always, these songs sounded more like funeral dirges than aspirational anthems.

I looked at Fanny.

She had her hymnal open and was singing the words very softly, like she had done a thousand times before. I felt a nudge. She motioned with her eyes for me to pick up my book, which I did, opened it and began to mumble like all the rest out of key, off beat, with the tone serenading the obligation we all had forced upon us. If hell was an eternal sentence for having sinned, the length of time I endured this musical torture and to count for something in my favor.

But there was no Jesus. Not here. Not anywhere.

“Please be seated,” said the Red, and he retreated to a chair far off to the left.

The flap of the tent behind raised and fell, and the Reverend Ralston bounded up to the pulpit at such speed he caused the old people sitting in front to recoil in self- preservation, like some projectile had been launched at them.

“The kingdom of heaven is at hand!” He shouted.

“Hallelujah,” chimed Red.

Murmurs filled the tent.

“Can I get an Amen, aha!”

A resounding amen did arise.

He had the Bible in his right hand and he shook it at us as he spoke, and he started stomping his feet and bobbed up and down.

“I feel the Holy Ghost is with us today, aha! Some powerful spirit is here among us, aha!”

“Praise Jesus,” said Red, he too started bouncing his legs and waving his arms, motioning to the people.

“Praise the Lord. Glory be to God,” was heard from the sheep.

“Thank you, Jesus! For you died to save us all. We are not worthy of your sacrifice, and we humbly ask for forgiveness. Please Lord, forgive all these sinners You have gathered here today, aha!” The preacher had both hand on the book and shook it down the middle of the congregation, then left and right, like casting some voodoo spell upon us.

“Lord, we are gathered here today to prove our belief in you, to ask your forgiveness and to be saved by your Bloody Sacred Heart, Aha! Can I get an Amen?”

A loud “Amen” erupted. I saw people were literally being moved by the Spirit. Some raised there hands, some gyrated in there seats and other stood a kind of danced in place.

Fanny and I glanced at each other. Both our eyes saying to the other, these people are crazy.

“Brethren in the Bloody Sacred Heart of Jesus, please rise and join me in singing Amazing Grace, number 12 in your hymnal.” (Of course it was Amazing Grace. The old redemption standard and the finest example of changing-your- ways ever written.)

With that the preacher started to sing. I was impressed. He had a soft baritone voice that had a soothing effect on those gathered, myself included. I much preferred to awful music to the stoking of Pentecostal fires. Fanny sang and I mouthed the words until it was over and the preacher invited us to sit. The commotion of squeaky chairs and mumbling soon abated.

It was story time. Reading scriptures aloud, then the Gospel, then the long sermon about how all of us were born into sin, and, therefore, eternal sinners and only the most Bloody and most Sacred Heart of Jesus was the only way to salvation. This was followed by the warning not to be taken in by a wolf in sheep's clothing, to avoid drunkenness and gluttony, not to cover they neighbors wife or her young daughters, to keep pure thoughts always, and to read the Bible every day.

Then-

“As always, brothers and sisters, we rely on your goodness and generosity to continue to bring the word of the Lord to all corners of this land. Give what you can and God bless you.”

The preacher nodded to Red and he came round with brown wicker baskets, lined with red felt, and handed one to every other row. So the good people of Westmoreland County there assembled took bills and coins and began to fill each basket.

Then the fat bald overall wearing farmer in front of me turned and handed me one. I looked at the wad of bills frozen for just a moment.

“Put in some money, and hand it to me,” Fanny said. She had that, you dumbfuck look on her face.

“Oh, right.”

I looked in my wallet. All I had were twenty dollar bills. Reluctant, I took one out, showed it to Fanny, and looked at her for approval. When she nodded. I tossed it inside, handed her the basket and, watched my twenty dollars disappear down the line to the eager waiting arms of Red. He had all of them stacked on each other, and had to wait for ours. I think that annoyed Fanny, but I who knows. But, from what I saw, it was a nice haul these two bandits-of-the-cloth made. It was just my bad luck not to have had a ten dollar bill.

We all had to stand again and sing How Great Thou Art. Then we sat down again. I never understood the calisthenic nature to these proceedings. At least we hadn’t knelt in the dirt yet.

Red walked over to the boom-box and flipped the cassette tape over and pushed play. An electric guitar played with a bass and drums accompaniment.

The preacher took the microphone and walked offstage up and down the center aisle. “Lord, I was a drug addict and you saved me, ha! When I was near death with pneumonia, my lungs filled with watery goo, and could barely breathe, you sent the Holy Spirit and healed me, ha. I am sick no more, ha. No evil can touch your faithful servant. Amen!” He shouted.

During this rant, Red had brought a large, brown wooden box from out back and set it on the table with no chairs. Then he produced a black Tamborine and started rattling it and running in place.

Between the shouts of the preacher and the commotion of the Tamborine, some in the crowd started rose and chanted hallelujah and amen and praise Jesus. There was some clapping too. Fanny and I were transfixed on the spy, wiry preacher jumping up and down.

“Lord, your servant is not afraid of death. No sir, ha! Though there be death in the box. Death in that box.”

Red handed two ladies sitting on the front, on either end, a black tambourine. Which they promptly started spanking against meaty hips and fat hands. I was a frenzy of shouting and a blitz of tambourines banging.

Red started speaking some gibberish. Sounded like drunken pig latin.

“Praise God,” shouted the preacher, “The Holy Ghost has anointed him with the gift of tongues.”

No sooner had he said that, then the fat lady on my right, her hair scrunched into a tight ball, began to speak in a tongue, similar gibberish as Red’s. The crowd started swaying and nearly every one was on their feet.

“Sweet Jesus! You have blessed our brethren with your presence, ha!”

I felt a pain in my ribs.

Fanny threw me an elbow.

“Damn it don’t you laugh,” she whispered.

“What?!”

I hadn’t realized it but I was grinning at the display of utter ridiculousness in front of me. Was grinning. But her elbow cancelled that.

Then I saw her lips moving like she was speaking but nothing was coming out.

“What’s in the box?”

“Death,” she said.

“And ye shall take up serpents!” Shouted the preacher.

He stood before the box and opened the lid. It swung out towards the congregation. The rolled up his sleeves then raised his hands to the heavens. Both arms plunged into the box.

Everyone gasped.

In both hands he held aloft five a six rattle snakes.

The only thing heard was a the clicking of those snakes, and Red’s Tamborine playing in harmony to them.

“If They drink any deadly thing no harm shall befall them,” said the preacher.

He started down the center aisle.

One of the grannies that had scolded us reached out her hand.

“Sister, you clearly are living a clean life.”

He unraveled a snake and handed it to her.

She held the in the middle of its body, and she moved to the front where there was room to stomp and dance, And she held the snake and spoke in tongues and spun around several time.

Now there was an electricity in the air.

He handed one to old man Jenkins. Short and squat, he waddled forward draping the rattler around her neck. The other two tambourines stared beating again.

The electric guitar played a kind of Chuck Berry riff.

I looked a Fanny, and she at me. We smiled wide-eyed and excited, then turned back to the show.

Red put his Tamborine down and took up a serpent.

Then the overalls man got up and went to the microphone.

“Jesus, help me. I have a problem with whiskey. I can’t stop. Not without you.”

“Amen, brother,” said the preacher. He motioned. “Join us in prayer for our brother.”

He and Red, snake in one hand laid the other on the shoulders of the big farmer.

“Dear, Jesus, we pray in Your name, heal our bother. What is your name, brother?”

“Lucas.”

“Lucas do you believe Jesus can heal you?”

“Yessir, I do. He’s only one can.”

“In Jesus name you are healed!” He shouted.

He struck Lucas with an open palm in the forehead. A loud slap.

The big man fainted and fell to the floor and started convulsing.

I thought, for sure, those snake are gonna bite him as Red and the preacher broke his fall. But, nothing happened. Old man Jenkins and the fat lady kept right on snake-dancing. Didn’t miss a beat.

Lucas was thrashing his big legs while the preacher was saying something to him I couldn’t hear. Red returned to the front running in place holding his snake with two hands, one low, one high. The fat lady turned slow circles and spoke gibberish.

Old man Jenkins, snake around his neck, walked back and forth in front of the stage. Lost in the Holy Ghost, he paid no attention to Lucas kicking his legs. Jenkins went to step and Lucas kicked his foot. The old man lost his balance and nearly tripped.

The snake struck him in the jugular vein on the right side of his neck.

“I’m bit.”

The tambourines went silent. No one said a word. Only the music from the boom-box, and the thrashing Lucas made.

Red rushed and removed the snake from around Jenkins’s neck.

The preacher returned his snakes to the box and went to Jenkins.

“Do you want us to take you to the hospital?”

“No. My faith will heal me. Ain’t that right preacher?”

Old man Jenkins latched on tight to the preacher’s arm.

“Of course, brother. ‘When we lay hands on them they shall be healed.’ Everyone join me in laying hands on brother Jenkins and pray for him that he may be healed.”

Jenkins turned pale. I seen snake bites before. You can live two hours to two days, depends on the bite location. In the jugular, he had maybe an hour. Maybe less. The dumb bastard needed antivenom immediatley.

“I feel dizzy. I need to lay down.”

They lay old man Jenkins down on the matted grass, under the tent in Sheffield’s field. All the faithful gathered around him and laid hands. Fanny and I didn’t move to lay hands but to get a better view.

They prayed and prayed, and banged tambourines until Jenkins died white as a ghost spitting up blood.

“We need to call the Police,” said someone.

“No,” said the preacher. “You heard him. He didn’t want to go to the hospital. No sense getting the police involved. I’ll take care of him. Does he have any next of kin?”

“No, he lived alone on his old farm just up the road,” said the fat tambourine.

“So he was all alone?” asked Red.

Lucas still thrashed away on the ground.

“Show me,” said the preacher.