The Handlers

After Moses and the Brazen Serpent, by Peter Paul Rubens (Belgium, b. Germany) 1609

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 be made well. —Mark 16:18

She was expecting the sweltering heat of the afternoon and the wide empty skies, even the loneliness, the way the distance between the little towns grew with every winding turn. But she didn't know the storybook clouds would float so close to the windshield, vast fluffy things like spun sugar mountains just ambling about against the perfect blue. The very air smelled like candy.

The humidity was wreaking havoc on her joints, and her legs and hands were painfully swollen. Vivian pulled over at a One Stop for a cold bottle of water and gas and a restroom. The glossy, generic insides of the sundry store felt incongruous out here, where miles of ramshackle barns and other ruins grew covered in vines, and choirs of black-eyed-susans and bluebells waved across the fields.

"It's them bluebonnets what smell like that," the attendant told her when she asked about the heady sweet perfume pervading everything. "Some say it's like fruit punch. We like to say it's the smell of purple."

Vivian paid and thanked him, surprised when he left his perch behind the counter to get the door for her on her way out. "Take your time, ma'am," he said kindly, "and mind the holes in the asphalt."

In her long sickness, Vivian never got used to the helpfulness of others. She wished she could keep her pain private, but it was written on her body, already starting to twist up, and in her gait. There were a few years to go before she would be a grandmother, but she already used a cane and there was a walker on standby in the trunk for the occasions when things got worse. She smiled a vague thanks at the young man and went on her way.

The journey so far had been much longer than these twisting miles witnessed by wide-eyed cows and marigolds. Her DNA testing service and private investigator had brought her here, to the hardscrabble lineage of the Scots in Appalachia. Her story was not much different than that of other adoptees: a teenage mother who had simply been too young to keep her baby. The search had been anticlimactic in a sense. Her birth mother had died young, ten years or so after giving her up, of breast cancer.

Vivian was compelled to come to the hills and hollows of West Virginia, whose tiny towns were all but emptied of coal. Each dot on the map held the odd boarded-up cluster of houses and shops and a few forgotten folks, chalk-pale people with skinny legs and Pop-Tart bellies. Narrow faces and wary eyes. It was a strange feeling to think any of them could be a sister or nephew.

Vivian had spent a good part of her desk time the past few months, back in Pittsburgh at the pain clinic where she worked, snooping social media for clues. In her line of work, the phone was always ringing and there was a constant onslaught of emails needing answering, but she came in early and stayed when the door locked for lunch. There weren't many Mirror Creek or nearby Dunns on Facebook. The detective she'd hired said plainly that the kind of people she was from didn't have Instagram pages or LinkedIn accounts. Some of them wouldn't even have birth certificates.

Her adoptive family was stable and middle-class and nominally Catholic, giving her a past safe and centered. But her origin story was as old as the hills: people who worked their fingers to the bone, had nothing, and lived and died in anonymity.

The only possible relative Dunns she had found had been in the news because of a wacky church into snake handling. A fringe minority of Pentecostal Americans were infamous for their bizarre handling rituals, something condemned by mainstream believers. These practices were relegated mostly to the uneducated and the destitute, a legacy of coal mining and isolation.

Vivian had watched a few recordings of their services on YouTube with morbid fascination and disgust. It was just a handful in the congregation, a few men and women clanging on cymbals and spoons and an old washboard, stomping their feet. A few rugged, snaggle-toothed people held up the writhing and venomous things high in their hands, passing them one to another.

It was grainy footage, but even so, she found one face compelling. His eyes were beady black holes that glazed over when he took up the serpent and held it high in the air. A glow came over him then, his natural features, sharp as broken glass, softened by his ecstasy. His hands were in motion to the rhythms of their strange gospel, but when she zoomed in, she could see one middle finger was just a stub. He had been bitten and survived.

She also saw his ears, how the lower part of them was delicate like a shell, almost fused to the tender part of the neck behind them. This caught her attention. David, her husband, had given her the tiniest diamond studs when they were first dating, saying her earlobes were too small for other earrings.

When all of this had started, David asked what it was Vivian was looking for. She didn't really have a good answer. Others in her position often said they wanted to know who they really were. But Vivian wasn't so sure how much of one's identity was in the mitochondria and muscle, rather than in experiences and surroundings they shared and the people they shared them with. She loved and was loved by the family she had been placed with, and inside the family she had made. Her parents had never concealed her adoption from her like some families chose to. In fact, she grew up knowing she had been an answer to prayer. She didn't believe she was someone else, someone unknown, because of people she had never met. If DNA didn't lie, maybe it wasn't the whole truth, either. Wasn't the body the most transient part of ourselves?

She also understood few people welcomed finding out they had a relative previously unknown. While such a connection could be meaningful to an individual puzzling together their history, it was irrelevant and intrusive for most on the other side of the story. Learning a cousin had a secret pregnancy, and half a century later, that offspring wanted to snoop around and get chummy, was more often than not disruptive to people's lives.

Perhaps the simplest answer was pure curiosity. Who wouldn't want to know?

Research and digging was Vivian's way. She had spent years looking for answers to help explain or manage her battle with inflammatory arthritis. She suspected her doctors, even the specialists, knew nothing about it. They doled out useless pills and smug platitudes. The disease began its assault on her body when she was barely thirty. It was likely she'd be in a wheelchair in another ten years. The treatments and medications they paid thousands for barely slowed its progress. Most scientists and doctors weren't interested in root causes of autoimmune diseases. Almost no progress had been made on the subject in decades, even as the rarest disorders became commonplace.

Vivian had grown tired of this futile research. It wouldn't change anything for her. She started putting her investigative energies into other questions. One day she joined an adoptee group online and began searching for answers. She had been learning about Native American medicine and felt an uncanny connection there, feeling quite certain for a while that the clues to her secret history were close by. She was surprised to find Scottish roots, assuming they were mostly blue-eyed and red-haired, where she had near black hair and carefully cut cheekbones. As it turned out, the family name itself, Dunn, meant "dark one."

It dawned on her somewhere along the way that she could just go there, to Mirror Creek, where the detective had traced her birth mother. West Virginia was just a few hours away by car from Pittsburgh, not far at all. She booked a few days off from the clinic. And David booked a room for her in a random little town near Mirror Creek, somewhere along the Big Coal River.

"Who knew I married a hillbilly?" David said as he scrolled Expedia for lodging options. His tone was playful, but even so, it rankled down deep in Vivian. Pure luck of the draw, but she was from the most detested lineage on the map. She had in her life made redneck jokes of her own, of course, just like everyone did, but now she felt something protective and defensive growing internally.

The river was beautiful. It meandered at times slowly along, sparkling deep blue under the sky, and grew full and ferocious at various bends. Occasionally Vivian saw bright yellow or red kayaks in the rapids. Ancient shale peered through heavy boscages of ferns. Grand aspens and sycamores and sweet birches swept both sides of the road, and rolling palisades of black pines and loblollies beckoned her deeper into the mountains. Only rarely now did another car pass Vivian's.

The GPS led her to a tiny town in a clearing, nothing more than a few rusty gas pumps and a deserted old schoolhouse. A rickety shack in the gravel parking lot boasted bait and pouches of tobacco. Vivian made her way gingerly over the lot and yanked the door open. The air was swampy inside, and on the dirt-floor were big white buckets of wriggling worms.

When her eyes adjusted from the bright sunlight, she saw a solitary man around her age, hollow eyes, hollow jaw, sitting and staring straight ahead, unblinking, unperturbed by the flies buzzing around his face. For a moment, she panicked, wondering if he were dead. She startled when he spoke.

"Help you?"

"Oh, sure, thank you very much," Vivian said. "I'm hoping you can help me find my accommodations." She fumbled in her purse for the paper from David. "Here it is. The Finnlaigh." She smiled and handed it to him. "I wasn't expecting a ghost town!"

The man eyed her coldly. "We are not ghosts," he said.

Vivian wasn't so sure. The stranger had still not blinked and had barely moved. When he handed back the paper, she saw from the gnarled ropes of veins on his fingers that he was much older than she had first suspected.

It was unsettling to wonder whether he could be her kin, and she did not yet have the courage to start asking questions.

But then he directed her a mile up the way, not unkindly. "You're almost there," he said with a tone of reassurance. Vivian looked around under the counter for something she could buy, but the earthy smell of worms and the few jars of stale and sticky candies did not appeal. Finally she chose a packet of Halls cough lozenges, for which she had no need.

There were few buildings, just a rundown tire shop and then a pie stand at the side of the road. Vivian backed up the vehicle. A home-baked pawpaw pie or perhaps the legendary local shoofly would make a nice treat later. A dusty tin can had a slot for bills and coins. Vivian picked out a delicious looking peach cobbler, then hesitated, seeing the vinegar pie. In her research, she had learned that the enterprising women of Appalachia had made pie from vinegar when citrus was in short supply. The writer referred to them as "innovation pies."

Vivian decided on both pastries. Then she would have plenty to share. She pushed twice the price asked into the tin and drove on.

At first she drove right past the Finnlaigh. It wasn't a motel at all but a residential home. Only the standing mailbox, stuffed full of crumpled, faded flyers, showed the name in tiny letters. The yard was strewn with hubcaps and blocks of cement. There was a big beech tree, too, with what seemed like hundreds of blue glass bottles tied to its branches, dangling in the breeze and catching the late afternoon light.

It wasn't the first time she'd seen a bottle tree. Further south, they were quite common, a tradition from those Americans stolen from Africa, meant as a way of capturing evil spirits and keeping them out of your house. It took root widely among people who spent many hours on their porches or in their gardens, who saw the custom as quaint and ornamental.

Vivian also knew from her research that the style of dwelling was called a dog-trot house, or deeper into the mountain history, the possum-trot. These homes were built in two sections, sharing a roof, separated with a breezeway at ground level.

This had been the closest room to Mirror Creek David could find. The snake church was there, but not much else. She'd asked him to look in the vicinity. Not that she was expecting luxury accommodations, but this was someone's house.

In her mind, she had imagined humble lodging with a little tavern downstairs. She could indulge in a few sips of bourbon and get friendly with the locals. There would be some rootsy folk music playing, something curious and ominous, maybe Johnny Cash, maybe Woody Guthrie's "Go Tell Aunt Rhodie." She'd order another, mull over a leftover newspaper, pick the bartender's brain after some liquid courage.

Standing in the sweltering driveway now among sparkling wheels and colored glass, juggling both pies and her cane, she wished she'd been smarter and booked something generic and private, in Beckley maybe, or Charleston. Driving 30 minutes or more to Mirror Creek wouldn't have been a big deal.

Vivian gathered her guts and rapped on the door. It opened so fast she almost dropped the cobbler. "We've been expecting you!" a booming voice said, and there was a smile just as wide to go with it. The lady of the house, Christine. She was a brassy bottle blonde with a confetti of freckles across her face and arms. "Oh, love, let me take those for you. Oh, looks like you got some of Helen's pies. You're going to love these, love." She talked a mile a minute. "Vivian, was it? Heavens, you must be tired. We can make iced tea or a fresh pot of coffee for refreshments. Meanwhile, I'll show you to your room so you can get comfortable."

She led Vivian across the possum runway to the other side's cabin. To Vivian's relief, the room was tidy and homey enough. "Thanks so much, Christine. I was admiring your beautiful bottle tree outside. So lovely." Just to make conversation. Of course she didn't mention the hubcaps.

Something flickered over Christine's face. "Those have a purpose you know," she said. "There are a lot of evil spirits in these parts. Well, they're everywhere, really."

She patted a small stack of towels on a dresser and pointed to a door. "Shower's yonder. You'll feel mighty nice if you cool off before dinner." Christine smiled broadly again. "What brings you out this way? We don't get many visitors."

Vivian looked forward to the cool water and resting her limbs awhile to calm the pain. She studied Christine's face, wondering whether there was a connection. She didn't see any familiar features. She wasn't sure what to say or how to ask, and wondered again whether it had been foolish to make the trip. David's question flashed through her mind. What was she hoping to find?

But she was here now. So she plunged in. "Well, I was hoping to attend church service tomorrow morning, at the House of Holiness, in Mirror Creek."

Another ripple of darkness crossed Christine's sunny face. Her tone grew harsh. "Are you a believer? Or one of those misery tourists from the city, come to mock the country folk?"

Vivian was caught off guard. After a long hesitation, she said, "Neither. Well, I'm a Christian. We are Catholics. Not as devout as we should be."

Christine nodded. "Catholic's better than nothing," she said, and laughed a little to show she meant it lightly. But she waited for Vivian to go on and tell her what her business was there.

It seemed like the best tactic would be to tell it like it was.

"So, I recently learned that my birth mother was a woman named Charlotte Dunn, from Mirror Creek. I understand she died a long time ago. There may be relatives remaining. I hoped to come and find out more about my biological family."

Christine's eyes widened then and softened, too. "Oh, love, that's really something," she said. "Of course I knew Charlotte. Everyone knows everyone around here. So you're the one! Wow! I was still a girl when it all happened. Now, you probably want to rest for a spell, but I'll bring your sweets and some drinks and leave them right here on the dresser. We can talk more about this at dinner." She impulsively threw her arms around Vivian and squeezed.

Christine paused then. "Not everyone is friendly with outsiders, here, understand that. People come nosing around with bad intentions. Mountain people have never welcomed interference. We keep to ourselves and ask the same of the world. But also, strangers are often surprised by our kindness. When Charlotte got knocked up, the village supported her. They would have helped her with her child. I remember her saying it broke her apart to lose her baby girl, but that she wanted to make sure you had the best possible circumstances."

Vivian felt the wind being knocked out of her. To hear, so casually, confirmation of her existence and connection with her mother, felt surreal. She hadn't dared dream that her mother, or any others, had felt love for that baby. Hearing that there was, in some small way, gave her something she couldn't explain, something she didn't know she needed.

Vivian smiled in gratitude. "I'd better sit down," she said.

"I know about the stereotypes out there about the people in these mountains and hollers," Christine continued. "And some of these folks are a little rough around the edges. But personally, for me, I don't believe in shaming Charlotte or anyone else in her situation. The Bible I believe in says the truth will set you free."

Vivian smiled with gratitude. But then Christine said, to her surprise, "How long you been sick, love? Maybe God was calling you home to House of Holiness in more ways than one."

With that she turned and left the room.

Vivian stripped down to her drawers and put her sore legs up on the bed. That's when she noticed a plaque on the wall, showing a snake made from a mosaic of colored glass bits. In elaborate calligraphy, it spelled out the verse Vivian knew from her research, Luke 10:19.

Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.

She slept for a couple of hours. Christine knocked to let her know it would soon be time for dinner. Vivian quickly showered, showing up at the table refreshed. "I didn't want to wake you, so we saved your pies for dessert," Christine said. She introduced her husband, Dale, and he pumped Vivian's hand so vigorously, she winced from the shock of it. "Careful, love," Christine said, tapping him gently on the upper arm. "I told you about her arthritis."

"No worries," Vivian said. "This looks amazing." There was stew and biscuits and green beans and potato salad. "Thank you so much."

When she pronounced the stew delicious, Dale said, "It's got a mess of squirrels in it. I shot them myself." He threw back his head and laughed heartily. Christine slapped him playfully. "Cut that out," she said, reassuring her guest that it was beef.

"What do y'all think we do with all those rattlesnakes?" Dale continued. Vivian chuckled, too. The fact that the husband was a bit of a joker took some of the weight out of the air.

"The wife told me you're Charlotte Dunn's girl," he said later, after Vivian had scarfed down two heaps of "rattler stew" and her weight in potato salad. "I reckon you come full of questions."

Vivian nodded. "Yes. But I understand most adoptees find out what I have found out already: the reason is almost always a young mother. I have loving parents. I don't need anything. Still, maybe it is only natural we feel compelled to find out more about our ancestors."

"Did you take one of them gene kit tests?" Dale asked.

"Oh, yes. I am mostly Scottish, with flecks of Irish, English, and German. The test didn't name any specific relatives. They explained that said relatives would have to have registered themselves. My paperwork told me the name and place of my birth mother."

Vivian paused. "I am not expecting any grand reunions. I just hoped to spend a few days here to experience the place I came from. I don't have any information on paternity—I don't know who my father was."

Dale laughed loudly again, actually slapping his legs with both hands. "Everyone around here knows your Daddy was the Skelton boy. Matthew. Charlotte was head over heels in love with him."

The whole matter felt, again, anticlimactic and strange. So Vivian was an open secret. Of course, the Finnlaighs could be mistaken. But they weren't the type to make something up.

Dale grew more serious then. "She wouldn't marry him, though. He was already by then hard into the booze, just like his daddy had been. He's long passed now, too. His liver got him young."

So they were both gone, then. Vivian felt a pang of grief.

Even so, it was already much more than she was expecting to know.

"The wife tells me you might be interested in handling, too," Dale said next, then started laughing again.

"Well, no. I do want to attend the service in the morning, but I'll worship in my own way and watch and learn from the others."

"We can all go together," Christine said. "That way, it will be easier for you to meet the community."

It was that weird feeling again, unfamiliar and intangible, the emotions there, that she would be among relatives. She was grateful for the Finnlaighs' offer, to buffer that transition.

"I understand that there are just a few... Holiness churches... left," Vivian said. "And the tradition was born right here in these mountains and valleys in the early 1900s?"

"So they say," Christine said.

"Oh, no, it's much older than that," Dale said. He gestured to a painting in the other room, then got up to turn on the lights and beckon Vivian over for a closer look.

The print was of a 17th century artwork, depicting a Biblical scene. There was a viper wrapped around a pillar and a prostrate crowd before it. "This is something that took place 5,000 years ago," Dale told her. "Do you know the story of the snakes in the wilderness? God sent thousands of snakes because he was angry at the Israelites for their idolatry and blasphemy. Many of them were bitten. God then told Moses to make a bronze snake on a tree. Anyone who saw it would be healed from the venom by the Lord. God was mocking the concept of an idol, reminding them that He had all the power. And the tree foreshadowed the crucifixion."

Vivian hadn't thought much about these old Sunday School stories in years. Of course she recalled the snake as the Devil's face in the story of the fall of man. Yet, as the story went, God ultimately had the power over evil and death.

"You must be familiar with John 3," Dale said. Vivian nodded.

"Of course. The most famous verse of all. 'For God so loved the world...'"

"And the verse before it?"

She shook her head, ashamed. "I don't recall."

"And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up," Dale recited from heart.

"Handling is not for everyone," Christine said. "But it's not something crazy, either. It's the oldest story in the book. If we believe Christ is the Great Physician, then we shall fear no evil. And the snake was the God-given symbol of evil from the beginning."

"We welcome death," Dale went on. "If God wills it. It's not about being reckless. It's about accepting the absolute reality of the inevitable, in full trust that there is more here than our bodies. Everything you see anywhere in the world, it's about people trying to cheat death. And it simply can't be done. We have chosen to accept that the author of life and death is not under our control or command. If that author extends our life, so be it. If He heals us, the glory belongs to Him. No sense in trying to outrun the truth about death. No one can. No one ever has. It's really very simple."

That night, Vivian dreamed about Eve, and Eden, and all the caverns of coal underneath these hills, those deserted and those still blooming alike. In her dream, these pits were hell, black and molten, and the mines were filled with snakes.

She dreamed of a young couple, the young girl with raven tresses just like hers had been. The lovers couldn't keep their hands off of each other, and in their frenzy, she watched herself forming from the dust of the coal mines. The same dust God had made into Adam in the mists of time.

In the morning her ankles were burning badly, and her loosest sneakers barely fit. Vivian popped a few pills and downed a hearty breakfast from her generous hosts. Then, she stepped with them over the threshold of the House of Holiness.

The church wasn't much to look at. It had been converted from an old garage. Four concrete walls, a concrete floor, small windows. A simple cross made out of beams at the front. There was a heap of discarded crutches and other medical paraphernalia underneath it. There were glass and wooden boxes, large as old ocean trunks, of wriggly copperheads and other venomous snakes. There were more vipers than congregants, who numbered barely two dozen.

Vivian knew without a doubt that some of them were her relatives. But now there was another feeling, the sense that their bond ran still deeper than genes and chromosomes.

When the sermon finished, some of the faithful picked up a tambourine or a banjo. They started to sway and stomp their feet. The mountain versions of the old hymns seemed somehow familiar to Vivian. She felt them deep down. She watched with fascination as the serpents were taken out of the boxes, and the handlers passed them around.

With their hands in the air—with these people, her people—Vivian felt God in the midst. For He is high and lifted up...

She made eye contact with the one with the small earlobes. There was a jolt of recognition, as if she was staring through time. The man was bathed in that same fever she had seen before, confident as he handled the mysterious creature, wrapping it around his shoulders.

No words were exchanged, but as if Vivian were somewhere else, or someone else, she saw her cane fall and her hands reaching up to take the snake. And then she surrendered, falling or flying, into the place beyond the pain.