When the snakes came out, it seemed like Delta’s arms lengthened. Seemed like her body grew beyond itself into a part-venomous knot of undulating extremities. This was the attraction of Delta’s one-woman reptile show in the lobby of the inn at the base of the Appalachian Trail. These shows weren’t religious, but for Delta they were church. Especially since she didn’t show up for Sunday services with the family anymore. When she handled snakes at the inn, the lobby crowd fell silent, exhibiting a different kind of reverence than the thick noise of backwoods worship but a reverence all the same. When she grasped the snakes’ slick muscled bodies, Delta heard phantom tambourines and faint cries of holy ecstasy. These memory-sounds excited her till she was pert-near laughing or crying or shouting. But during the show, it was important for her to conceal the inner sensations—that almost-erotic eagerness—that flooded her mind and body when she reverently slipped her palms under the snakes’ scaled forms. It was important to appear professional, and to ease fears.
The hikers and slack-jawed local kids watched her handle with a mix of awe and repulsion. The snakes didn’t make her nervous. The audience did. In church growing up, nobody was that interested in Delta when she handled. Her abilities were a testament to her church’s faithfulness, but its members only shot her occasional sidelong glances when she draped cottonmouths and copperheads over her young, leathered palms and forearms. Everyone was too caught up in their own worship to pay her much mind. Now, at the inn on weekdays and Saturdays at 3 p.m., Delta was the main attraction. She began the shows with the turtles and the lizards. She saved the best for last. When she finally unhooked the door of the slipshod chicken-wire cage she fashioned for her snakes and removed the first serpent, she relished the sharp shared inhale of the audience, the way they audibly froze their breathing in anticipation of the dance that was to commence between her and her fellow performers.
While handling, she spoke to herself in the divine tongue she’d learnt as a young’n. She prayed in strange, silent syllables as she let each snake slither over her arms on the plywood platform in front of the crowd. She’d never speak these incantations aloud lest she frighten her audience, but the still small voice in her mind settled her. It was important that her bodily systems be calm and regular when she lifted the snakes. A calm handler let the snake know it was safe and, thus, avoided scaring the snake, which would cause it to emit an acidic funk, the noticeable stink of an unnerved serpent. Delta’s snakes rarely released putrid odors. The mesmeric rhythm of handling was muscle memory for Delta by this point. She had learnt how to properly touch serpents over decades of practice, beginning as a child with the garter snakes she found curled in the warm wet bottom of the kindling bucket. The first time she picked up one of the creatures in front of the family, her Daddy had swelled with pride. I tell you what, she ain’t fall far from the tree!
Before she even started kindergarten, Daddy taught her the correct way to take up a serpent: First, focus on getting calm, on slowing and stabilizing the arrhythmic heart flutter that Delta and her Daddy and everybody else in the family was born with. Bend down in one motion so you’re closer to the snake’s level. Get as close as you can. Wait until you know you won’t chicken out and scare the snake, and slide your two hands slowly and firmly under its mid-body. Support the snake as you stand; make sure it knows you’ll not let it fall. You have to respect this creature, and that means you don’t grab it around its head. Let the snake’s head move freely about, so it can see where it is and where it’s headed. (Would you like it if I grabbed you that way? Daddy had fumed when Delta had once gripped a snake in a headlock.) And don’t pick it up by the tail because then the snake will twist and turn like it’s got possessed, and this might cause it to break some of those thousand tiny bones in its body. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, let the snake crawl as it will between your palms and forearms; it needs to know it can explore you. This relationship is one of mutual curiosity and mutual blessing, Daddy always said. If the snake bites you, that means something inside you needs correction.
The first time Delta was bitten, she bled freely onto the kitchen linoleum, which was a good sign. A river of blood, Daddy told her, was how she could know for sure that a set of fangs wasn’t laced with poison. Venomous snake bites, on the other hand, rankle inside the body. The skin around the bite swells like a balloon, gets real hot. The bleeding happens internally. If not treated quickly, the kidneys or other organs may shut down. Delta had sustained enough venomous bites in her lifetime to immediately recognize that catatonic feeling, the lulling tingle that the poison induced. She took it as a great comfort that Daddy had not died as the result of one of his bites, which would’ve made her doubt his faith and goodness. Instead, he’d died of a heart attack the year after Delta started performing at the Inn’s snake shows.
She was thankful he’d been able to see her handle snakes for money and for an audience bigger than the one at their old country church, even if he had grumbled about it. Daddy was worried that Delta was performing a sort of freak show for the cosmopolitan hikers in her audience. But Delta knew that she was actually giving her audiences spiritual and physical rest. Watching her handle her snakes, the hikers would shrug off their packs, unlace their boots and rub their sore feet through mottled wool socks. Her show at check-in time was a welcome to the first real bed they’d had in quite a while, sometimes after weeks of hiking the trail down from Maine. The snakes in the lobby seemed at first glance like an offering of local color upon the occasion of the hikers’ arrival in the Southern mountains, but Delta suspected it went beyond folksy performance to prompt the hikers’ venturing into arcane thought-worlds. The hikers’ bleary eyes seemed hungry for her body to twine with the serpents. The gravity of their gaze gave a weight to her handling that daunted Delta. So she took the shows seriously. Delta and her snakes felt the privilege of their needful performance, and Delta thought of it as their shared ministry.
In Genesis, Satan had taken the form of a serpent to tempt Eve to pursue worldly knowledge and abandon Adam and the Lord. Delta’s childhood preacher shouted every Sunday that this was the reason children of Christ must take up serpents: To show that they had mastered, through faith in the Savior, these fearsome creatures. But God had imparted a secret knowledge to Delta’s Daddy and then to Delta, when they were both young children. Delta knew that the snake was just like any other old body, not inherently sinful but simply caught up through its flesh for one fateful instance in Satan’s machinations. The Devil might have occupied the form of any other beast. He could have possessed the body of a leopard or a weasel. The central problem of the Eden story wasn’t that Satan was a snake, but that Satan was. That he was a skilled liar, that he was a-walking among men, and that he was slick and slimy enough for Eve to believe the tales he spun.
In the end, it was necessary for God to curse the serpent as a species, just as he had cursed Eve and her daughters. God commanded that man and snake would sit forever at odds with one another. Delta could still recite the verse from memory: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Overcoming that enmity; now, that was the stuff of miracles. The objective of handling was not mastery but achieving a shared understanding, daring to break with the rest of one’s kin to get along. This was the mystical act of tangling with serpents in front of a crowd; overcoming an olden feud publicly. Daddy had known this to be true, and Delta knew it. And somewhere in the recesses of their souls where ancient kernels of belief were deep embedded if long covered-over, the hikers who watched Delta and the snakes knew it, too. They understood that they were viewing a rare truce. This hard-won peace was what took the audience’s collective breath away. And this was the reason that Delta thought of herself as some sort of preacher, a serpent-servant who extended the Great Commission beyond the four walls of the backwoods church at 3 p.m. on weekdays and Saturdays.
