“Is it?” he asked.

“That’s where I say it is.”

“You know your Bible, don’t you, Sister Adelaide?”

“I do,” I said. “I know it very well.”

“Then you should know Matthew 9:33,” he said. “If you know your Bible, then you should know it says that ‘when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke.’ And I reckon you should probably know Matthew 17 too, about the man who brought his son to Jesus because he was sick with a disease brought on by a demon and the disciples didn’t have the faith enough to heal him.”

“I know both of them stories,” I said. “I’ve read them both many, many times.”

“They ain’t no stories,” he said. “You can believe me when I tell you that.” He looked away from me toward the front wall where all those pictures of Jesus were hanging up. “Jesus took that boy from the book of Matthew,” he said, “and he healed him. He told the disciples they didn’t have the faith enough, and he promised them that if their faith was even as small as a mustard seed, then they could move mountains.” He looked away from the pictures and turned his head back toward me. “That’s all it would’ve taken, Sister Adelaide, just that little bit of faith, but they didn’t have it. They didn’t have faith enough to cast that demon out. Jesus had to do it himself.”

“You ain’t no Jesus,” I said. “And Christopher didn’t have no demon in him. He was born that way; I was there when he came into this world, and I can tell you God makes us how he needs us to be. I’d think about that the next time you go off on some idea about trying to change things you ain’t got any business changing. I might be afraid of tempting that kind of power.”

He smiled at me like he thought what I’d said was funny, but I wanted to tell him that I didn’t mean for it to be no joke. He turned his head back to the front wall and took to rubbing his fingers back and forth across the back of that hand again. Well, I’d had all I could stand of his talk and his little Bible lesson, and I just wasn’t going to sit there and stare at that hand no longer than I had to. I uncrossed my ankles and smoothed out my skirt and got ready to stand up to leave, and when I did that’s when I felt it right there on the back of my neck.

What he did next I can’t even picture quite good enough to tell just how it happened, but when I felt it on my skin I knew right then what it was; it felt just like the hand of a dead man, just as cold and clammy as it could be. He grabbed me by the neck just above my shirt collar and forced me to my knees right there in the front of the church, and when he did I heard the toe of his boot kick open the little trap on that crate. He let go of my neck and got ahold of my arm, and before I even knew he was going to do it he’d already stuck my arm down inside that crate, and he used that hand he’d once set on fire to hold it there. I tried to jerk it out, but he was just too strong, and when I tried to stand up he leaned one of his knees down on the back of my shoulders. My feet scraped at the floor, and I kicked at one of the metal folding chairs behind me in the front row. It fell over and the crash echoed along the floor. Chambliss acted like he hadn’t heard it. I kept kicking my feet, looking for something that would help me stand, but there wasn’t nothing there.

Chambliss stood above me and held on to me tight like I was some kind of hog he was fixing to butcher and he was afraid of me getting away before he’d done it. I tried again to jerk my hand free, but he held it there tight, and I could feel the cold, smooth skin of his fingers where they wrapped around my arm.

“Shhhh,” he whispered. “Don’t fight it now. Don’t fight it.”

I gave up then and quit struggling with him, and I can tell you that’s when I took to praying. I closed my eyes and turned my head away from that crate, and that’s when I heard it inside there; it was real quiet at first, like a light wind rustling dry cornstalks, but then that rattle got louder and louder until I just couldn’t make myself pretend it was nothing else. I squeezed my eyes shut just as tight as I could, and I imagined feeling the prick of its fangs, something like a bad bee sting, and I imagined that venom coursing itself through my veins on the way to my heart. I pictured myself pulling my arm out of that crate after it struck me, the skin on my hand already turning black around the two puncture holes and the blue veins rising up all cloudy with poison. I pictured Miss Molly Jameson, how her face had swelled up, how she’d struggled to breathe, how they’d found her laying out there in her yard without the least idea of how she’d got there. I tell you that I thought I was going to die, and I did my best to get ready for whatever it was that was going to happen after I did.

“You ain’t afraid, are you?” Chambliss whispered. I tried to say something to him, but it was like the words got caught in my throat and I couldn’t cough them up good enough to speak. He gave my neck a hard squeeze and shook me good, and when he did I felt that rattler buck against the roof of its crate and I thought I’d been bit for sure. “Are you afraid!” he hollered at me then.

“No,” I finally said so quiet I almost couldn’t hear myself. “I ain’t afraid.”

“You ain’t got to be afraid if you believe,” he whispered. “If you got your faith, there’s nothing in this world that can hurt you. Not the law, not no man neither. Ain’t nothing you need to fear but the Lord himself.”

Once he said that, I felt that hand let go of my arm, and I pulled it out of the trap on that crate just as fast as I could and tucked it under me with my other hand. I heard him close that trap with his boot, and then I heard him behind me setting that folding chair back upright. I still had my eyes closed because I was too afraid to even open them, and I stayed there on my knees on the floor with my arms pulled up under my chin like I was praying. I heard his footsteps come around in front of me, and he bent over and closed the latch on that crate and picked it up by its handle. I could tell he was standing right there over me because I heard him breathing heavy, but other than that it was quiet again, so quiet it was almost like nothing had happened.

“Hope to see you on Sunday,” he finally said. “If you get a mind to it, come on inside and join us for worship.”

I stayed hunkered down there in the front row of the church and listened to his footsteps as he walked down the center aisle toward the door. I heard him open it up and step outside, and when he did my eyes sensed the explosion of light the door let in even though I had them closed just as tight as I could. He was outside, but I stayed froze just like that until I heard the sound of his car engine revving; I still didn’t move when I heard him pull out onto the road and head out toward the highway. Once I was sure he was gone, I opened my eyes and tried to look around to get my bearings, but the light from the door was gone, and I knew my eyes would have to fix themselves against the blackness that had once again taken over the church.

Jess Hall

T

WO

I FOLLOWED JOE BILL FARTHER DOWN THE RIVERBANK THAN we’d ever gone before. We stopped at the bridge and came up a new path from the river through the bright morning sunlight and crossed the road toward the woods on the other side. We walked along the railroad tracks where you could smell the dusty ties getting baked dry in the heat, and then we went into the trees and crawled through briars and over rotten limbs and didn’t say a word to each other until we stood in the shade on the edge of the woods and stared across the field at the back of the church.

It was so hot that my hair and my shirt were soaked through with sweat, and I figured that if I told somebody I’d just been baptized in the river with all my clothes on, they would’ve believed it. I could feel that sweat running down my legs beneath my blue jeans, and I knew it would start itching me when it dried. I untucked my shirt and wiped my face, and then I tucked it back inside my jeans because Mama had told us over and over that we’d better keep our shirts tucked in while we were at church, especially on Sunday mornings. She always said Joe Bill’s mama didn’t care one bit about what he looked like at church, and I reckon she was right, because he’d untucked his shirt and unbuttoned some of its buttons too. He reached up and grabbed a tree limb and pulled it down and held on to it. I looked around for a limb that I could pull down and hold on to too, but there wasn’t any that I could reach. Joe Bill was eleven and I was nine, and that meant he wasn’t just two years older than me, he was two years taller too.