Read Online Kinfolks by Lisa Alther - Free Book Online Page B

hanger. Their indifference to convention is refreshing.
    But relics from my past keep surfacing like the bloated corpses of drowned swimmers. For instance, I always sit with my back to a wall because my mother used to tell us that Wild Bill Hickock was shot dead on the one day he played poker with his back to an open door. You can flee the forces that have formed you and join the Witness Protection Program in a foreign land. But like Mafia hit men, they just keep on coming, tracking you down despite your cleverest disguises.
    As I drive up Watauga Street past the manor houses of the Yankee factory executives, I reflect that at least my parents still live in the house my grandparents built. Yet they’ve moved on, too. My father’s nearing retirement. He’s built a tennis court in the backyard and bought a ski chalet in North Carolina. After a lifetime of fourteen-hour workdays he takes time off now to ski, golf, and play tennis. He and my mother make annual ski trips to Colorado with my sister Jane.
    Jane has turned into a striking young woman with her olive skin, dark auburn hair, and pale gray eyes that shift to blue or green depending on what she’s wearing. She skis on the ski patrol and plays number 1 on the D-B tennis team. She’s also first in her class academically, and she has a wacky sense of humor. On weekends she works as a dancing mushroom at the Land of Oz theme park on nearby Beech Mountain. It’s as though she’s an only child and the rest of us are Joseph’s wicked older siblings in
The Coat of Many Colors
. I warn her never to sit with her back to a doorway.
    Leaving Sara with my mother, I drive down to a building sided with asphalt shingles that sits in a forest clearing outside Newport, Tennessee. A sign over the door reads “Holiness Church of God in Jesus Name.” Men in green or khaki work clothes and women in housedresses are climbing out of battered pickup trucks. A few men carry small cages such as travelers use for their cats. One carries a guitar case.
    The preacher, Listón, who drives a truck for a canning factory, has a pocked face, gelled hair, and long sideburns. He greets me warmly and ushers me inside to a seat on a wooden bench. The church members glance at me with shy smiles.
    Once the service starts, Listón asks me to say a few words. I stand up and mumble something lame about appreciating their letting me share in their worship service.
    A dozen women and girls in long dresses come forward. The guitarist starts playing, and they begin to sing, shaking tambourines and clashing cymbals —
    Its God here on the platform.
Its God back by the door.
Its God in the amen corner,
And it’s God all over the floor…
.
    Liston’s sermon is quiet at first, with lots of Bible quotes, including the one from Mark 16:17-18 on which snake handling is based: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up Serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”
    Gradually his voice grows louder and louder, faster and faster, until he’s in the full harangue mode that resembles tobacco auctioneering. I’ve heard this style of preaching all my life — on the country radio station where John used to be a disc jockey and at the preaching missions every winter in the civic auditorium. But this is the first time I’ve understood that the actual words are irrelevant. The power comes from the pounding rhythm, every line punctuated by a loud HAH!
    And it
is
powerful. It’s the origin of the phrase “preaching up a storm.” Possibly the driving beat synchronizes the audience’s brain waves so that they cease to be individuals and become a mob. But snake handlers call the state of grace they believe they achieve from it an “anointing.” One has described feeling as though warm oil were being poured over