Read Online Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington - Free Book Online

in the grass behind the house on Barbee Lane, near the shed where Glenn Summerford had kept the rattlesnakes that he had tried to murder Darlene with. Some of the pews would be stacked up and left to rot in a nearby hollow under the trees. On a Sunday after this final split, Vicki and I drove up from Birmingham. I had wanted her to experience firsthand what went on there during worship services, but we found the walls of the church bare, no portraits of Jesus, no Last Supper. There were no amplifiers, no set of drums, no microphone, cymbals, or tambourines. There were no bottles of oil, no jars of strychnine, no propane torches, no snakes. Glenn’s mother, Aunt Annie, was there with Cecil and Carolyn Esslinder, loyal to the end. Also present was a Brother Tony with his family. New to the area, they’d just been driving around looking for a place where they could worship when they spotted the converted service station with its hand-painted sign.
    “Brother Carl’s not coming back no more,” Aunt Annie said. “He wanted us to give our tithes to J.L., but I didn’t want to give mine to anybody but a preacher, and J.L.’s no preacher.” Her eyes were still giving her trouble from recent cataract surgery, and when she took off her tinted glasses to
clean them, she had to squint against the light. “Glenn needs some spending money at the jail, and I’d like to see some tithes go to him, but Brother Carl said no, if we didn’t give the tithes to J.L., he wouldn’t be back, and he hasn’t been.”
    Brother Tony had brought along his brother, a stooped, walleyed man who struck up a chorus of “Jesus on My Mind” on his battered acoustic guitar. His strumming hand appeared palsied, but the music came out strong and sure.
    “I told Glenn about all this,” Aunt Annie said in a louder voice. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, Mama, they’ll be a preacher there this evening.’ And sure enough, when I got here, here was Brother Tony.”
    The meeting started to sound like an actual service. Having come to the front of the church, Brother Tony sang with gusto. He’d seen now that he’d been led by the Lord to this place and this time. “I believe in snake handling!” he shouted when the song had ended. “I’ve been bit myself! I don’t shake the box down or look for the heads! I just reach in and take one out!” He made a dramatic, downward sweeping gesture with his hand, as though there were a real box in front of him, with a real live rattlesnake buzzing angrily inside.
    “If you have to shake the box or look to see where its head is at,” he continued, “you ought’n be trying to get that snake out of that box in the first place!”

    Cecil and Aunt Annie gave him a few amens, but it was clear their hearts weren’t totally into it. They knew they had come to the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. Without real serpents present, what was the point of talking about them?
    In time, regular worship services would recommence in the converted service station on Woods Cove Road. It’d be known by a different name though: Woods Cove Holiness Church. And no snakes would be handled there. Aunt Annie’s health would deteriorate to the point where she would rarely get to church, anyway. And her boy, Glenn, would continue to spend his days and nights spreading the gospel to fellow prisoners at a state penitentiary west of Birmingham.
    Offerings at the church had routinely been twelve to fifteen dollars a service, and it was over amounts like these that the remnant of church members who believed in Glenn’s innocence split. The issue was one of church authority, which in the free Holiness tradition resides entirely with the pastor. A further principle had been at stake, though. Would the church be run from prison or not? J.L. and his family had spoken with their feet.
    The eventual outcome was that snake handling ceased at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following in Scottsboro, but started up, as soon as