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to church and since Miss Birdie can't drive at night she asked me to bring her.”
    Ignoring her outstretched hand, he asked, “Do you read your Bible? Do you know what it says in First Peter?”
    She hesitated, tempted to compose some answer along the lines of
Yes, I have read the Bible; no, I have no idea what it says in First Peter, and why are you asking me anyway?
Without waiting for her response, however, he shook his Bible under her nose and continued, “. . . ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold.” The snakeskin binding brushed near her left ear, lightly touching her little gold hoop earring, and she had to repress a second backward movement.
    “I can tell you ain't no Holiness woman.” He laughed briefly, then his dark eyes bored into hers. He seemed to consider for a moment. Then, as if the words were forced from him, he said, “You read your Bible and come back another time. You might could get hit with the Holiness gun.” Sticking the snakeskin-covered Bible back under his arm, he picked up the serpent boxes. “Too bad didn't no one get an anointin' to handle tonight. You'd'a seen what this is really all about, Elizabeth Goodweather.”
    He raised one of the flat brown boxes up to Elizabeth's face and held it there, swinging slightly from its hinged handle. A thick, musky smell oozed toward her, filling her nostrils with some perilous message. She could see a slight movement through the air holes and hear a dry rustle as the big snake shifted defensively against the tilt of the box. Willing herself not to draw back again, Elizabeth tried to hide the chill that was lifting the hairs on her arms. “I'd like to see that,” she told the tall preacher, realizing with some surprise that she really would.
     
    As they drove back to North Carolina, over the mountains, through Hot Springs and back toward Ridley Branch, Miss Birdie was full of ideas about what Aunt Belvy's words might have meant. “She said to look to the hills for help and that the wicked was hidin' in the dens and the rocks of the mountains. We got to look for the answer there, not in the river like Sheriff said. I reckon that sanctuary in the wilderness that's red with blood is where Cletus got killed, so that's what we got to find.”
    “Miss Birdie,” Elizabeth interposed gently, “you know, I don't think the sheriff's going to pay much attention to what Aunt Belvy said tonight.”
    Miss Birdie looked at her in amazement. “Law, Lizzie Beth, I know that. That's why you're a-goin' to have to help me search in them hollers where Cletus used to go wanderin'. Like Belvy done said, ‘The righteous will seek and the truth will be known.'”
    L ITTLE S YLVIE ' S S TORY
    I-A PRIL 1901
    I weren't but thirteen years of age when Daddy sold me to a stranger man for a shotgun and five hundred dollars. I didn't know that was what he done, but he done it all the same. Mister Tomlin was a rich man from over to Tennessee. He rode a handsome bay single-footin geldin named Nebuchadnezzar for some king in the Bible and he was travelin through our country buyin up standin timber. They said he was lookin out for a place by the river where he could build him a sawmill and float the lumber down to Newport. Mister Tomlin was an old man, something over fifty. They said he'd buried two wives and had grown children livin over to Greeneville, but he was most as stout as a young man and his hair was still as black as a crow's wing.
    Me and Clytie was up on the hillside lookin for guinea nestes when we seen that fine horse a-comin up our road. Hit was nigh dinnertime and Clytie looked at me and said Lo and behold, here comes a stranger man and what do we have in the house to give him to eat? She knowed as well as I did that there weren't nothing but some cold biscuits from breakfast. We hadn't laid out to cook no dinner for Daddy had gone off to Ransom early that morning and we didn't look to see him back till dark. Maybe not till morning