Birdie Num-Num Land

Vernon Hale introduced me to the snake people. It wasn’t the introduction I planned. They lived by the salt mines, his followers, along the rocks of the Black River that slips through Grasshopper Hill, a row of houses leaning from a hundred years of Kansas wind. Vernon said the day the tornado hit, his village sat beneath a water-blue and cloudless sky like a town at the bottom of a reservoir, neatly preserved and protected beneath the glassy water, untouched as the tornado spun its black cloak over our town of Netherwood to the west.

I heard the rumors about Vernon-gossip he raised the Brennan girl after she smothered in a silo of corn. I was a man of thirty-two working on my PhD in cultural anthropology. I accepted the position of assistant professor at Bridgeton University. I planned my thesis on the Pentecostals and there were sects in Kansas, which tied in nicely, and so we made the trek from Long Island, a place my wife Emma and I loved, to an unknown land of open plains, witches and boogey men.

Even before I met Vernon I’d heard the myths, revelations, mysteries that Kirby Sullivan from a few houses down relayed. He told me Vernon swallowed strychnine at a meeting a few months earlier when the angel of death flew in the window covered in a blue veil. She tapped Vernon on the shoulder, lifted her veil above his head as if to gather him in, then changed her mind, dropped the veil and disappeared in a whirl of blue out the window.

‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ Kirby said.

‘Were you drinking that day?’ I asked.

‘Not that I can recall,’ he said.

‘You mean an actual angel with wings?’

‘Well, she was wearing a long blue dress beneath the long blue veil and when she lifted her hands the skirt rose with her arms and fluttered like wings that spread wide when she flew. You could hear them flap and my hat blew off with the wind they created.’

I wondered if the angel appeared to Robbie, gathering him in her arms beneath her veil, comforting him in the last blue seconds and I wondered why she didn’t change her mind. Not that I believed that sort of thing. Still, my imagination found solace if only for a moment. In reality I figured the blue angel was some sort of elaborate hoax involving invisible wires or delirium tremens.

I began stuffing photographs of Robbie between mattresses and cushions. Robbie on the beach squinting at the camera, a shining blue sea in the background, the horizon a black wire in the distance, hems of foam lapping his ankles, seaweed curled on his red bucket. Robbie standing tall as he did each and every morning asking,

‘Am I bigger than yesterday, Daddy?’

I was staring at Robbie’s beautiful face, trying not to think of what happened.

We were the walking dead, zombies moving in and out of rooms, Emma and I. Robbie loved to watch Looney Tunes, especially the one where Bugs, chased by Daffy ran into a tree, his body suddenly flat as an ironing board, yellow stars circling his head, and Robbie said,

‘Look, Daddy! Birdie Num-Num Land’.

That’s where Emma and I were-Birdie Num-Num Land-alternating between overwhelming pain and the stupor of denial and Vernon was an intrusion into both. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was an ordinary Wednesday morning, or so I thought.

Emma was baking a chocolate cake, wearing that ruffled apron she wears, pink with red zig-zag trim around the pockets, each with a matching rooster head, the two heads facing one another with open yellow beaks as if surprised at the other’s presence. She’d put Robbie down for his nap, unaware he’d figured out how to jack the window, wrestle down the tree and leap onto the tin roof.

I was grading a stack of blue books, my freshman 101 cultural anthropology essays on Colin Turnbull’s, ‘The Forest People.’ It was raining and I opened the window a crack to listen to it, and then set out on the task at hand.

I began with Ryan Brady’s.

Normally everything goes well in the world. But sometimes when we are sleeping things go wrong. Leopards may come and steal a child. The Pygmies believed that in order for things to go right, you must keep the forest singing …

I made a note in the margin.

You need to expand on this by explaining that the nightly singing to the forest was an intimate and magical communication between a people the forest, and the spirits there in. Also, you haven’t explained the importance of the molimo in the nightly rituals.

Next in the stack was Zoe Harris.

The Forest People believed that deceased loved ones lived as spirits in the forest and they communicated back and forth through song and by playing the molimo a long hollow wooden reed.

Wind shifted through the crack in the window and scattered my papers across the room. The weather was crazy, sun early on, then hail giving way to battering rain; the sky growing darker by degrees, second to second, wind gathering, clouds organizing, thrashing the shutters and rafters, blowing trees horizontal. We were used to storms on Long Island. The tin roof of the chicken shed, lashed by the gale, echoed and reverberated like a giant xylophone.

Later I’d think of the incredible irony, the trickery life hands out on a daily basis mostly undetected until something happens. I happened to be reading the words: ‘But the recognition of the completeness of a loss …’ when the roar of a train barreled over the house. I dropped the stack of blue books on the floor. From the kitchen I heard a clamor of imploding glass crash in smithereens. Emma ran up the stairs screaming with me close behind. I noticed she was still holding the wooden spoon in her hand as if to beat an intruder, caramel icing dripping fat droplets on the floor, funny how you notice these things as if to slow down the reel in the grip of hysteria.

Robbie’s bed was empty, the window open, and one red sock waved on the tree branch like a small flag. Emma’s screams flooded the windows, doorways, rushed up the chimney then down again, across the field of crushed ironweed, the purple heads blown into blue filament.

They discovered him two miles away; his featureless face a red hole, his body splayed on a sheet of twisted metal. Dead or alive we’ll never see him whole again. It was a closed coffin.

I considered sealing the garage, sucking car exhaust in like smoke from a giant bong but what about Emma? I’d need to convince her to die with me but caught in her dream world she expected Robbie to be found alive somehow wandering through the woods unharmed, clutching his black dog. It was a denial of epic proportion, stunning in design. She’d created several outcomes, all of them ending with Robbie’s safe return. Not seeing the physical remains allowed you this. The funeral director said no, he could not show us the body. It was too disturbing. Vernon said Robbie would be restored to perfection by the angels in heaven. I envied his absolute belief in the unbelievable.

It was impossible to look at anything and not see Robbie. Robbie with his wagon in the backyard, the dinosaur as it nose-dived into the dirt, setting the switch, its jaws opening and closing, the thick tail clicking back and forth, Robbie laughing in that crazy way of his, brown puffs of hair framing his small face. I forced myself to navigate away from this path of thought. It was treacherous. Do Not Enter. Road Blocked. Dead End. Wrong Lane. Oncoming Traffic.

I held the photo of Robbie playing his tiny drum and imagined him that day standing on his bed determined to pry open the sash and shimmy down the tree that butted a branch in a perfect wishbone against the window pane, leaping to the roof, discovering the sound of metal, delighting in it, beating it with his drumsticks, scattering the chickens in panicked circles. Freeze the thought. Do Not Enter.

I hid the photo in a thick volume of poetry and was reminded of a line from a poem:

This is the hour of lead.

It was the poem that brought Emma and me together in graduate school. Emily Dickinson. We read it out loud, sitting beneath the autumn trees, the moon, Emma in her cashmere sweater, the one with the pearl buttons. We were drawn to the poem somehow. I can still see Emma holding a candle on a late October night, a chill in the air, reading the words:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes— The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs— The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, Mechanical, go round— Of Ground, or Air, or Ought— A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone— This is the Hour of Lead-

It was here Emma always paused, savoring the words a bit before she read on:

Remembered, if outlived.
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow— First-Chill-then Stupor-then the letting go-

Afterwards we’d sit clasping hands, not speaking, sensing something dark, never speaking it out loud, Emily Dickinson dressed in a death gown, a small bone moon in her hand, standing a great distance away yet steadily gliding toward us. It became manifest the first time on a canvas. Emma rose one night from a deep sleep and painted in a dream. When I saw the painting, a woman, her brown hair gathered in a bun at the nape of her neck, floating over a hill wearing a black gown, a small skull or moon in her open palms, I was speechless. In the ten years we’ve been together I’ve never mentioned the image and the sick feeling that accompanied it to Emma.

I’ve studied death all my life, its bones, the open jaws and empty sockets, the imprints, the peeling away of a life once lived, an artifact, a beautiful ghost in the sand and shale. I’ve studied the living too; the tribes, the superstitions, the magic rituals and rites of passage, ancient ways, burials, but it didn’t prepare me for this grief; the unexpected, unfathomable event of freaky nature.

 

Vernon asked me to attend a meeting the day I met him. He knew nothing about my plans to study his religious sect, that’s what made it so odd. I’d already accumulated a lot of research on the subject, I’d wanted to take it further and see the group up close but I hadn’t had the chance to contact him yet.

I met him in the hardware store a month after the storm. It was a period of stupor. Emma was pumped up with a constant dose of drugs to keep her calm. She stayed with her mother. We were unable to look one another in the face. Like the portent of Emily, it was simply too painful.

I needed to do something ordinary, put a new faucet in the bathroom, fix the leaky pipe. I downed a shot of Jameson’s with my coffee. Fire in the belly was my only comfort. I thought if I began fixing broken things maybe I could drill a hole and drop into it, climb through a pipe back to the bones of the world before this one.

On the way to the store everything appeared surreal as if I were tripping out. Through the windshield the storefronts seemed ablaze, reflecting blue squares of sky and children flying like kites held by harried women. At the stoplight pedestrians and cars merged then soared in and out of the rearview mirror. I felt the salesman wait behind counters for doors to open, registers to ring. Death is good for business. Grieving people need to shop and the salesmen wait. I thought I heard their fingers tap against wood and glass and metal.

I parked. A woman crossed the street, a blur of brown carrying a baby that on closer inspection was a loaf of Italian bread. When had I eaten? It seemed like weeks and a pang of hunger sliced through me and I braced myself against the urge to snatch the bread-baby from the woman’s arms, lurching like an animal, gnawing the brown crust, the soft heavenly center of white. But she disappeared.

I ran into Vernon Hale as I shifted through a bin of copper fittings, rolling them in my palms, trying to remember why I was there-trying not to think when I noticed a dark pool on the linoleum, a shadow lumbering toward me like a ship plowing through waves. I glanced up at the large man wearing a rumpled suit.

‘Vernon Hale’s my name,’ he said, extending his giant hand.

I stepped back, copper pipes clamoring behind me, this big-boned man with a full jaw of teeth and a booming voice planted in front of me. I’d seen his photo but he was much larger in person, his hand a mass of misshapen fingers, knobs of knuckles, square-shaped fingertips.

‘You must be Bill Curran,’ he said. ‘Glad to meet you. I saw you on the local news. Just wanted to give my condolences. I’m sorry about your son. It’s a terrible thing.’

The pain entered my ribs from the left side. I braced myself from the flood of forbidden images, Robbie’s soft brown eyes, the thick black lashes, and the tiny nose and pink mouth. My knees folded like wooden chairs.

I can’t see. I’m bawling in front of a stranger. Vernon’s arm holds me up. He is walking me out of the store like a living scarecrow, a man without bones. I’m in a strange car; it smells of whiskey and battery acid. Perhaps a lunatic beside me, I can only hope. Maybe Vernon is an axe murderer. Good. He is holding a book. I see him through water, floating in and out before the calm returns and I break the surface.

‘I’d like to help you, son. Have a swig of this.’ He pulled out a flask.

I held my breath and chugged — maybe poison.

‘Call me Brother Vernon, Bill. The good Lord sent me here to help you. The Lord is trying to tell you something.’

My head pounded. This wasn’t the introduction I had in mind.

Vernon opened his black book and began to read:

They shall take up serpents; and if
They drink any deadly thing, it shall not
Hurt them; they shall lay hands on the
Sick, and they shall recover.

I had no choice but to listen, I knew my legs wouldn’t work and so I slugged down the whiskey till the flask was empty.

‘How about it, Bill?’ Vernon said.

I nodded, not knowing what I was agreeing to and not caring, thinking only of the bread.

Vernon drove along Moccasin Road, thick with trees and shrubs, and stopped at an old shuttered gas station, the pumps flaking rust, the Texaco star faded, barely visible, the concrete island lined with a row of battered oilcans. What looked like an old grocery store leaned toward a clump of trees and bushes, weeds nibbling the foundation. Over the green washed-out door a metal sign dangled on groaning hinges. Painted in crude black letters were the words: The Church of Jesus With Signs Following.

‘That’s it! That’s our tabernacle.’

What the hell, I thought. Baptismal waters in the gas meters maybe — stick your head under the pump and you’re saved. I put my head back and closed my eyes.

‘Everything passes except the holy spirit of Jesus Christ Lord God and he can take away your pain.’

Yes, please do that, I thought.

Vernon shifted gears and we chugged up a hill spotted with a few ramshackle dwellings then made a sharp right onto Divine and descended a steep slope dotted with barns and small but colorful houses. At the bottom of the hill a low green building emerged, a weathered warehouse sprawling the horizon like a gargantuan lizard, its skin flaked and dry and peeling.

‘There she is,’ Vernon said. ‘Sister Darla, my wife. She’s feeding the cottonmouths.’ He pulled into the dirt driveway abruptly and the car lurched forward when he stepped on the brakes.

She was gorgeous, Grace Kelly cast as the crazy preacher’s wife, tall and blonde, holding a basket of white mice, their eyes glowing red beads. She walked toward us, her skirt swishing around the knees of her long white legs.

‘Hello,’ she said and extended her hand. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met.’

‘This is Bill Curran. We met in the hardware store.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said knowingly. ‘Please join us for a cup of tea or wine.’

She led me into a sunny kitchen filled with the scent of cinnamon, clove, apple and the yeasty aroma of baking bread. Flour dust hung in the air. Mismatched cups and saucers lined a jam cupboard. Without asking she brought me a cup of warm red wine and a wedge of fresh bread and butter.

A curtain of awkward pleasantries followed before the real talk began. She said incredible things as if she was discussing the weather or the price of milk.

‘I’ve seen the power of Jesus slam my mother to the floor, Bill. She got the Holy Ghost in the kitchen, her hands covered with cornmeal, her head hanging out the back window. Vernon has the Holy Ghost when he preaches. Brought Juney Lamb back from the dead,’ Darla said. Her hair hung past her shoulders in silky corn-colored coils.

I noticed a wooden crate on the floor and caught movement out of the side of my eye and jumped a bit in my chair. It was a snake, the spade-shaped head swaying side to side.

Darla turned to me. I probably looked aghast, and she said: ‘We’re sign followers, Bill. Handling a snake is a victory. You have to trust in Jesus. When I was a child my Daddy made me sleep with the snake box under my bed. At first it gave me nightmares, but after about a month, the anointing came and I gained victory over the serpent. It was up to Jesus. I prayed the snakes down and they never harmed me.’

‘The Lord gives us power to tread on serpents,’ Vernon said. ‘That’s Scripture.’

‘And nothing shall by any means hurt you, ‘ Darla finished.

Vernon opened the Bible and spoke again about serpents and faith and Jesus. I watched as Darla bent over the cast iron stove feeding it wood through the black door, the flames rose in tongues and lit Darla’s face, lovely as an angel or some unearthly thing, the ashes soaring like fireflies around her hair. Vernon kept reading Scripture in his thunderous voice but I heard or saw nothing, only Sister Darla as she turned from one stove to the other pouring wine into a copper pot. I watched her place star-shaped cloves and anise and wands of cinnamon in a circle of gauze, delicately tying it with white string then surrendering it to the kettle.

‘I’ve never had mulled wine before,’ I said.

Darla turned to me, ‘It’s a Swedish custom. My parents were born in Denmark. Do you like?’

‘Yes, very much.’

‘I thought Pentecostals swore off alcohol.’

‘Oh, some do,’ she said. ‘And some need to but we drink in the confines of our own home, not in public. Jesus drank wine and it’s him we follow. We don’t call ourselves Pentecostals, Bill. We’re sign followers.’

With the wine, the fire, Sister Darla, I started to feel I was melting like molasses into the wooden table.

‘Well, here’s another,’ she said, setting down a yellow cup on a blue saucer. ‘My mother always said it was good for the soul.’

Yes, I thought. Yes.

I woke the next morning still wearing my clothes and a killer headache. In the first seconds of waking Robbie’s death had not occurred. But in a few more moments it slammed me down like a sledgehammer. Robbie. Dead. Robbie. Dead. Robbie. Dead. If only I’d died in my sleep never to think of it again. I couldn’t remember the ride back but I found a folded note in my pocket:

Bill,

You passed out last night. Told Joe your car will be parked in front of the store until you are able to pick it up. He will tell Mike so you won’t be ticketed. Sister Darla and I will pick you up for the meeting at 1 o’clock this afternoon. The Lord Jesus Heals All Wounds,

Brother Vernon

 

I swallowed a handful of codeine and jumped in the shower. Over a Jameson and coffee I shoved the last photograph of Robbie beneath the sofa when Vernon beat on the front door. I looked out the window. Sister Darla was seated in the front of the rusted Ford like Grace Kelly in a Rolls Royce. I opened the door and surrendered myself to Brother Vernon.

‘Get a good night’s sleep?’ Darla asked.

‘It’s a miracle,’ I answered. ‘Yes.’

She wore a purple dress and silver bracelets on her ankles and wrists. I sat in the back seat listening to the music of her voice as we drove. Her window was open and the wind tossed her hair and it brushed my fingers.

‘My Daddy was a great preacher and handler, Bill. He played guitar and sang in front of the movie theatre, the courthouse, the post office, and the bus station. We only knew one song but we sang it a hundred different ways. We sang to the living and dead outside the funeral parlor. If they made us leave we went somewhere else. There was no stopping my father from spreading the word.’

I thought of the Forest People, how they too sang to the dead, the way they bathed and scented the bodies, wrapping them in white. The body was placed on a bier and lowered sideways into the earth; the opening covered with sticks and leaves so that no dirt would fall directly on it. Before the grave was covered they guided the spirit toward the forest. To the pygmies no death was natural but rather a curse from an evil spirit. On that I could concur.

‘I started preaching myself when I was nine,’ Darla continued. ‘My playmates and I set up a church in an old shed and passed around buckets of frogs instead of snakes. Danny Giles squeezed one too tight.’

We pulled into the abandoned gas station as a stream of followers, dressed in a rainbow of skirts and dresses and suits, turned to wave. Vernon strode across the parking lot and over the grass like a man whose suits alone could stride across water and he rose his arms in the air as if to say, come to me, gathering his congregants into his embrace like a school of fish.

‘Jesus be with you!’ he said, to a chorus amen.

I see a small boy, his back to me, he wears a red tee shirt and denim trousers. Robbie wore a red tee shirt and denims. His hair is brown and stands in puffs like dandelion fuzz at the crown just like Robbie’s but he fades behind a woman in a flowered skirt and doesn’t reappear. I sink back into the lonely dark ground.

Vernon showed me to a seat at the back of the room and told me I need only listen. No more was expected of me.

A plywood stage stood at one end of the room, a crude pulpit at the other. On stage a small band jammed drums and guitar and tambourine. A battered black piano sat at one end and a tall redheaded woman sat down at it and began to play as a young girl with pigtails picked up a flute. There was a wooden sign on the wall that read:

No Backbiting
No Tale Bearing
No Smoking of Dope Stinking Cigarettes
No Beards

Sister Darla stepped up to the stage, threw back her head and strummed her guitar. She closed her eyes and swayed in a trance rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet and she began to twirl, her purple shirt waving above bare feet, the bracelets on her ankles jangling. She was radiant, a woman dancing on a cloud at the center of a storm and she began to sing:

Jesus, oh Jesus
I’ll dance in your fire
I’ll take up the serpent
And follow all the signs.

I noticed the crates along one wall packed with snakes, on the other a table was heaped with plates of sandwiches and salads covered in wrap. A bottle with a cross bones label sat on the pulpit. In the center of the room a pot-bellied stove burned. The congregation stood with lifted arms and closed eyes chanting:

Amen.
Praise The Lord.
Sweet, sweet Jesus.
Hallelujah!

Sister Darla danced the circumference of the room drunk with religion. Many seemed in a trance. A few men skipped behind Darla as if playing in their sleep, dancing the room by heart, smiling in a dream like children skipping rope. Small girls and boys clapped hands and a few women jumped in the air with joy, their ponytails whipping like wild ponies in heaven. I thought of the Forest People and the emotion that seized them. An emotion so powerful the dancers swirled through the molimo fire as if the red-hot coals held no heat.

A girl with bare feet and a string of clothes pin dolls around her neck stood by my chair and stared up at me with huge brown eyes and said:

‘Mister, what’s the matter with you?’

Then she skipped away.

I eyed the wooden crates. The rivets on the lid ran vertical and horizontal forming a cross below the iron grip. I considered lifting the unbolted lid and allowing the snake to curl up the length of my arm and bite me.

Sister Darla bounded across the floor to a crate at the front of the room and snapped open the lid. I held my breath as she lifted the snake in the air with her right hand and offered it her left arm. The snake crept and curled its way up to her shoulder when she lowered her head, allowing it to slither up the back of her neck when she righted herself and the snake coiled around her head like a jeweled turban, the center of its pupils like blades of grass. A woman in a yellow dress danced up behind Sister Darla and took Darla’s hair in her fingers, pulling it like skeins of yarn, then teased the snake from her head and wrapped it around her own. Sister Darla was humming with closed eyes, tambourine ringing, blonde hair curling past her shoulders, as men and women and children chanted. It surprised me the way the room shook and the windows swallowed the beat of the drum and rattled the wooden frames.

A thin man dumped a pot of water over his head and fell to his knees: ‘Praise the waters of Jesus! Praise the sea he walks on! The healing waters of The Lord!’

The room was boiling over and the floorboards groaned with the weight. A white-haired woman floated through a doorway as a brown woman in a red skirt held a burning coal in her hand. Boys and girls lanky and awkward leaped from the rim into the drowning waters.

A man in patched overalls handed Darla another snake and it wrapped its olive and black body around her arm and slithered to her shoulder extending its thick neck. The flat head pivoted and gaped at her, the open jaw exposing the light cotton of its mouth. I was reminded of the snake emblem on the side of the red ambulance as it drove past our house, silently.

Vernon’s voice thundered through the room, his fist pounded the pulpit, a copperhead hung like a necklace across his chest. Outside the window trees swayed; fingers of branches shaking wrists of green leaves. I felt sleepy and drunk. My eyes closed and my nose and ears betrayed me.

I can smell the brine of the ocean, a bad dream dissolving like salt in water and I hear the roar of waves; Robbie skimming over the sand in his blue shorts, his arms outstretched like wings, his white tee-shirt billowing out with the breeze, sandpipers skittering, seagulls diving, Robbie’s red and yellow pail filled with rubber reptiles and twisted seaweed, his toes delighting in the sand, a gull rises and cries out to the sea. At twilight we’ll watch the purple sunset, the neon Ferris wheel flashing pink and yellow, the boats bobbing on streams of moonlight. I hold Robbie tightly, study his beautiful face, our reflection drifts on the water, turquoise in the sun, our shadows in wet sand like a giant bird melting, Robbie laughing, the onrushing wave crashes over us spraying sea foam and grit, the undertow rushing out, I’m clasping Robbie so tight, tiny pellets of sand and shell and salt sting as we wait for the next miraculous wave, but then I see Vernon walking on the water, barging toward me, a snake wound around his arm, The Bible in one hand, the other held high and I turn away, gather Robbie in my arms and run toward the ocean when Robbie turns, places his tiny hands around my face and says:

‘Daddy, Daddy, I’m here! I’m here! I’m bigger now.’