“I’ll tell you what,” I said, as much to appease him as anything else. “I’ll call the lady who probably has the key to the house. They’re having her sister’s funeral today and I don’t think we could get up the mountain anyway in the ice. But we can go day after tomorrow and you can look around. Maybe we’ll find something that’ll tell us where your mama is.”

I didn’t believe it for a minute, but it seemed to make Richard feel better.

“Maybe Daddy will feel like going with us,” he said.

A concussed, seeing-double Pukey Lukey going around those mountain curves in Mary Alice’s Jag? Or my Chevy?

“What kind of rental car do you have?” I asked.

After Richard left, and after I had folded the clothes, grateful to have everything clean, I decided to go to the library. Cars were passing by the house every few minutes. The roads should be no problem.

What I was looking for was a book by Dennis Covington, a Birmingham native. Entitled Salvation on Sand Mountain, it was about snake handling and had been one of the top three finalists for the National Book Award several years earlier. Everyone had said how wonderful it was, but the subject hadn’t appealed to me. Now it did. I wanted to know how people like Holden Crawford, his son Ethan, and his daughter-in-law Susan could be drawn into what seemed to me such a bizarre religious practice.

The book was checked out.

“You haven’t read that book yet?” Edna Thomas, the librarian asked me. “You don’t know what you’ve missed. You need to go buy it, Patricia Anne.”

Which I did. I stopped by Alabama Booksmith and got the same reaction.

“You haven’t read that book yet? You don’t know what you’ve missed.”

Several hours later, I did. I had missed an incredible insight into a world I had known nothing about. I had also learned how one could be drawn into this strange world where one celebrated and tested his faith by handling snakes and drinking strychnine. I was so mesmerized that the phone had rung a couple of times and I had let it ring. The answering machine would pick it up.

Handling the snakes and not being bitten proved that you were powerful. That you were in God’s favor.

Scary.

When I finally put the book down, I knew one thing. What I had thought impossible, that Virginia Nelson from the Lutheran Church and the country club could be drawn into such a group, wasn’t impossible. Like Betsy’s Aunt Pearl, she could have been carried away in religious fervor, believed this was the way to touch God, the way to redemption.

Night had fallen, and it was very cold. I walked into the kitchen and turned the back light on. The outside thermometer was sitting on thirty-two.