old man whitley and the snake handlers pt.2

Pt 1: I was five when I knew him. When I helped him hunt snakes in the mountains of West Virginia for Preacher Slaughter and the serpent handlers.

The snake handlers were a Pentecostal-Holiness offshoot, whispered about in dark corners of other Appalachian churches. A few hundred in number, a majority practiced their brand of ecstatic religion in one or three holler churches in southern West Virginia.

Most of the congregation of biblical literalists had never left the state, but Preacher Slaughter once went all the way to Alberta to see a Frenchman handle a cottonmouth.

By the time I came along, Whitley was seventy years past his own bout with serpents and salvation. Past his youth in Grasshopper Valley where he exercised the only real religious intentions he ever had – and got a wrist full of venom for the trouble.

His mother remained with the church, with the anointed, and reminded him that “God never said you wont get bit.” Whitley listened and then lit out for hell and high water as soon as his arm healed. But the sign followers followed him to Kentucky and then, somehow, on to the mountain state where he settled down with a wife and kids and forgot about all them, until they set up camp right down the river.

That’s when he knew that just like the Devil, if God wants to find a man, a whole heap of mountains can’t keep him hid.

Continued…