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handled, like the pouches they kept their poison in. Her granddaddy sometimes said that meanness was a corruption and a disease. She thought about how under the preacher’s terrible face the flesh and muscle must be all infected and maggoty inside like something run over and dead for days.
    One of the preacher’s scars — a crooked thing about four inches long that split his cheek from just below the left eye all the way to the jaw-line — looked like a living thing in the morning light, as if something awful had started growing in that crack in the rock face. But it was a tricky thing. Sadie had seen it fade back into his dusky skin when he must have not wanted folks to see it, like maybe when he was talking to some of the pretty young women around town, or somebody else he needed to charm.
    His real name was Jake, but nobody ever called him that, not even the family. The preacher didn’t like the name.
    Where you going, child? It was like a whisper, or words you might think you heard in the wind but weren’t really there. She hadn’t even seen him move his lips. But you never did when he was angry or up to some meanness or other. She’d heard that only when he was preaching and singing at the snake-handling meetings did those lips become living things, terrible, scary alive things that could latch on to you if you weren’t watching, chew you down right to the nub.
    “Just going home,” she cried, a little too loud, and he grabbed her arm so hard she thought he’d squeeze it in two.
    Over the years that followed she would think a lot about what happened next — if her uncle caused what happened, or if she did, or if it had all happened by coincidence. Or if she’d just imagined parts of it. But not the slowing down part; she knew the slowing down part was for real. It happened to her all the time. Things just stopped, or slowed down considerable, and suddenly she was seeing things she ordinarily didn’t see. Or want to.
    The preacher pushed her face around so that she had to look at the livery. Didn’t grab her exactly, at least not with his hands. But he wanted her to look that way, and suddenly she was just looking that way, without a word spoken or a finger lifted.
    She looked, and what she saw made her cold. FredShaney, Will Shaney’s eldest, was helping run some corn through that old steam-powered corn sheller. It was huffing and puffing and its rusted parts shaking side to side like it was about to explode.
    Fred Shaney had had more than one run-in with the preacher. There was Fred’s drinking and smoking, and his smart remarks about the whole snake-handling business.
    Thepreacher was watching Fred in such a way it brought winter down on Sadie’s shoulders. She could almost see the ice crystals in the air. Something was going to happen.
    Fred was feeding the corn into the machine faster and faster. His hands a blur.
    Her eyes were paining her. Spots burned in the air in front of her face. It startedin her lower belly, and she squeezed her eyes shut trying to ignore it, but the soft ache was making her sick. She looked down; a thin line of blood had run down her leg. Sadie’s hands were burning, burning.
    His hands a blur.
    Red spots. His hands a red blur.
    Bright red over everything.
    She watched as the world slowed down around her, as Fred Shaney’s grin slowly widened and deepened as Fred Shaney’s arms were lifted slowly into the air, bright red crepe streamers tied to his wrists.
    “You have to decide soon, Sister,” the preacher whispered. “You’ve reached your maturity now.”
    She watched as Fred Shaney dropped into prayer, wondering if this could be her punishment for stealing.
    And the other men came to hug Fred Shaney, embrace him down to ground.

 
    Chapter Three
     
     
    F OUR TIMES ALREADY that morning Michael had had to carry Grandma into the toilet and set her on the stool. Each time she was weaker, until her feet dragged the floor, her high-top black boots bunching the rug as