Word came of a passionate man named Cleon Peters moving through the Piney Woods country carrying in a screen-covered box a white rattlesnake with ruby-colored diamonds on its back. It was the time of the discovery of oil in the fields of East Texas, around 1930.
It was said that this Cleon Peters, a snake preacher and healer, was repeatedly getting an insistent Call to change his profession. He had been a Second Coming preacher who had grown tired of prophesying what continued to embarrass him by never coming and, confounded dead in his tracks in a halt at the fork of his life’s crossroads, waited for his Crossroads Decision on his knees all one night outside Sour Lake. Cleon Peters seemed nailed to the cross of intersection of two roads—fixed there, he said, “where time and eternity intersect.” The question was whether he was going to be led toward Time or Eternity. A crowd stood by waiting to find out with him, to witness the spectacle of him hearing the final decree of his Call. Near early morning he heard it and was led to his decision by the Lord—toward oil. Reborn, Cleon Peters got right up off his knees and took the road leading to East Texas oil country with hundreds following him. “Follow me folks, goin to the Promised Land. Glorious times are ahead for us,” he proclaimed. “You all who have witnessed this red-letter night of my life goin to be the first to get filthy rich from oil on your property.”
In a brief sort of sermon delivered on foot as he walked—and in what was the last breath of Cleon Peters, the end-of-the-world preacher—he said he felt that he could help people whose home in heaven he’d secured for them, blessed assurance, by now giving them some earthly security through finding oil on their property. Where once he had been the Savior of the Piney Woods, a territory which he had combed through for souls to save, he was now going to become the King Of The Oilfields and comb through that same territory for oil. He anointed himself “Oil King,” and moved on fast, leading a good-sized flock. He had the technique for salvation. All he had to do was convert it over. And he had faith. For anything, no matter what it was, you had to have faith. Anybody who believed could do all things—take up serpents, receive deadly poison and not die, cast out devils, speak in tongues—and find oil. God had been Cleon Peters’ friend through physical risk and spiritual tribulation in a world of things not seen: obedience, humility, faith. Now He would help Oil King in a world more substantial—and more visible: oil derricks, oil pumps, drilling tools, cash money.
All that part of Texas was roused up and flocking here and there. The towns were startled because of the sensational rumor that everybody in the counties of East Texas was walking, eating, and sleeping on top of about forty million dollars. It was the time of great flux and change, though it was not the kind of change that Oil King had once foreseen and got people ready for. Because a man who blew in a wildcat well announced that he was positive there was a huge black lake of oil stretching under five counties, such a pandemonium started you’d have thought he had proclaimed the end of the world. Thousands of people ran, whirled, tumbled and collided, dug up rows of turnip greens, ran through the streets with dish-pans full of dirt, yelling oil! oil! and the news slipped into Oil King’s ear as though it were a key to wind up a mechanism in him that sent him prancing like a high strutter into his old snake-haunted territory with his good news of the coming of oil glory.
The fortunes of Oil King began right away with his discovery of well Number One. Number One had been a true O.K. from the Lord on Oil King’s new life’s work. It had not blown in at all, was not a gusher but an oozer—on his knees, nose to the ground, he had sniffed, prayed, envisioned and beseeched: and lo! he had damp knees. Oil! Oil King’s whirlwind success firmly established him overnight in oil country. The big-time oil companies sent their geologists with college educations to try to buy him out, but Oil King turned a deaf ear on them. “Come back next Tuesday, big deal from the university,” he said. “You got your degree, I got my knees. And the Lord’s geology—faith.”
Number One was famous all over the county and people came from miles around to gaze at it. It was in the yard of what had been a poor dirt-farm family, the McCrackens. There it was, pumping away, with zinnias blooming around it and blinking colored lights and strings of bells strung up and down the thrusting pump. Number One was used by Oil King for demonstrations to attract lessors from the neighboring towns, and even far away in farther counties, farms, and pastures. That Number One was so used by Oil King delighted the McCrackens, who sat proudly on the front porch in swing and rocking chair. Eula McCracken and her daughter Murtice dressed up for the demonstration. Eula had on a hat she had bought by telephone from Neiman-Marcus in Dallas after seeing a picture of it in a newspaper; it had come by parcel post in an elegant box. On her dinner-ring finger was a big sapphire the size of a bird’s egg. “We didn’t do a thang,” she told the visitors. “Lord put it in the ground, Oil King took it out. Now we’re rich. Please don’t trod on my zinnias.”
Murtice would wear a variety of chiffon gowns with big bird figures or huge sunflowers or enormous palm trees printed on them—sometimes she would change as many as three times in one afternoon; and she smoked her cigarettes. They said in town that she broke the scale at the drugstore at 229, but that was just a nasty crack, Murtice commented. “Anyways, I’ll buy you ten of those things if that’ll make you happy,” she told the owner of the store. “I own one third of Number One and I’m goin to live in Dallas in a mansion with servants. Get outa this crappy little town.”
But Mack McCracken just drank his good Bourbon, gliding in the porch swing mumbling, “Five thousand barrels a day.” Now the foreman at the mill could go fuck himself.
On the Cadillac parked in the dirt yard sat two Dominick hens. A bird dog lay in the shade under it.
“Hey, Murtice,” Chuck Snyder, the football hero, called. “Lend me five.” Chuck Snyder had let it be known that he got Murtice’s cherry under the high school steps on Halloween. “A simple operation,” he told. “Wasn’t exactly a matter of surgery. Let’s put it thataway. Anyway, I opened the gate for the male population of the whole fuckin high school.”
“Papa, run Chuck Snyder off the place. He’s given me a problem,” Murtice said.
“Five thousand barrels a day,” muttered Mack McCracken.
“Hey, Murtice”—Chuck winked and made a hidden gesture with his big finger that only Murtice could see—“take me for a ride in your Cadillac.”
“Wouldn’t dream of disturbin the Dominickers,” Murtice answered.
Guttering with diamond buttons on his coat, diamond hatband on his ten-gallon hat, diamond cufflinks and diamonds down his fly, Oil King would prance up and down on a platform by the side of Number One, ranting in his Revivalist voice. Sometimes he leapt aboard the oil pump and rode it like a bronco. “Ever time I go down, folks, Number One gushes up hundred dollars out of good ole Texas ground. Get in on it!” People came from all around to spend the day, bringing milk pails, cake pans, mason jars, and well dippers full of dirt from their land for Oil King to smell. They spread dinner on the ground and at night there were Roman Candles shot in the air, and the colored lights twinkled and swayed on Number One, and the bells rang. It was the happiest time a lot of poor folks ever knew or would remember.
Oil King had brought back together the little group who had assisted him in his Revival days, to put on a show of entertainment for prospective investors. “These folks was with me when I used to be going around Texas a-prophesying the end of everything,” Oil King announced. “Now they’ve joined me for the beginning of things, glory hallelujah! Gonna be a new day!”
“You got the word on it, Oil King!” exclaimed rednecked and lanky Elsie Wade, who had traveled with the Show of Faith Revival, playing with her red-speckled hands the portable pump organ that folded up like a suitcase.
“Brethren, listen to Elsie Wade that’s been with me through dark and daylight. We got to oil up this old world or its goan go dry. And I’m the man to find the necessary lubrication.”
“’aaat’s right, Oil King,” chimed in the petite Xylophone Twins, Esther and Hester, as they daintily hammered a rippling sound on the little Xylophone upon which they played “Welcome Sweet Springtime” for the demonstration.
“You got the power, Oil King!” called out Arab. Arab was over seven feet tall and wore ballooning Persian pants and cowboy boots. Most of the time he stood like a statue in all his grandness so that people could gaze in awe at him. Then it came time for him to make his speech to the crowd. “Folks, I measure seven foot three inches from tip of my head to sole of my bare foot. Was borned of normal size, up in Corrigan. ’Twas at the age of twelve that for no reason at all except the will of God begun to shoot up tall as a beanstalk; and by age of fourteen had reached seven foot. The three inches come on me after that. I am in perfeck health. Eat me a chicken a day, a dozen biscuits, and drink me a gallon of sweet milk ever day that I live. Any questions?” The crowd was tongue-tied.
Arab was a good bodyguard and bouncer for Oil King, whose safety and well-being were occasionally threatened by those who felt they’d been cheated or were being addressed by a fraud. Once a man called Oil King a queer and another time he was accused by a woman who called out that he was a kneefucker. She was bounced out of the demonstration meeting by Arab, but he whispered, “Make date,” and she whispered back, “Midnight behind the P.O.”
Using his Evangelist’s gift of the word, Oil King delivered a sermonlike speech, rousing and persuasive, on the possibility of oil in a person’s backyard. It was called his Possibility Of Oil speech.
“Brothers and Sisters, I’m goin to tell you something. I used to be a rattlesnake preacher. Know what that is? That’s right, lady. Probably seen me around state o’ Texas in my Show Of Faith.”
“I remember the rattlesnake preachers when I was just a little bitty thing, remember it clear as day,” the lady sang out. “People come from miles around in their wagons to watch the spectacle and the demonstration of faith in the field across from our house. Preacher said ’twas the end of the world. We sat up half the night, mamma and papa and all of us children, scared and still, but trying to hold our faith. We sat together on the front porch and we waited and waited, not saying one word. Then we heard the tumult at the revival in the fields. And pretty soon across the railroad tracks come somebody a-running, and it was Mr. Bell that lived up back. ‘God help us. God help us, Miz Polk! The preacher of faith is dead! He was bitten by the diamond rattler and dropped down dead in the pulpit! No one would lift a hand to help him. ‘Tis the end of the world as was prophesied!’ The congregation stampeded, the wagons all over the road and ever whichaway in the field and the dust was all over the field and rising up over the town like smoke. It was a heathen sight.”
“Terrible thing.” Ex-brother Cleon Peters suddenly became very sinister-looking and some dark look came over his face. “Preacher had no faith and the snake got him. I seen it happen too. You got to have faith.” Then Oil King’s face lost Cleon Peters’ dark look and lit up. “Well… I was never bit to where I couldn’t throw off the poison of the serpent through my faith—thank you Lord God Jesus; and I pitched my Second Coming tent in the grass and the bitterweeds of many a field all over this blessed state. But that’s all over. Come a time when I rose up out of the fields, out of the grass and the bitterweed, folded my Revival tent where I shouted and proclaimed the end of the world—to announce that this old world ain’t never goan end; just gonna go on and on, gettin richer and sweeter and happier, with all the good things pourin into our laps out of the horn of plenty. What glorious times are ahead for everybody, folks!”
“Take Number One, for example. Wildcat well. Found it on my knees, and with my nose to the ground. Ain’t it the prettiest thing you ever saw? Now these folks the McCrackens going to help themselves to about a half-million dollars. When Number One blew in, whole town was out here to see it. That ole wildcat just showered this town with mud and rock, all drenched in oil. Town had a celebration, everybody rollin on the ground in mud and rocks drenched in oil. A beautiful sight to see—linger forever in my memory. I want you to have that same sight, too. ‘Cause we got to oil up this old world. It’s going to go dry. Cain’t turn much longer without any lubrication, now can it?”
“Cain’t do it!” called out a voice that ran through the crowd like electricity and set on end the short hairs of the men. The magnetic sound came from a woman who had lately become a camp follower of Oil King, a clubfooted woman in a built-up shoe (some said it was a cloven hoof and that she was one of the Devil’s women and a leading member of the visible and invisible evil spirits that the Devil had sent to pervert and satanize Brother Cleon Peters). Her name was Lydia and Lydia spoke with something of a lisp, which it was said was so sexy that men would get a hard-on just hearing her say “Hoddy!” It was rumored that she was a real slut of the oilfields when she joined up with Oil King, but that using his old powers to serve his new life, he had cast out from Lydia a devil—a humping spirit—and drove it into the oil pump of Number One: which was putting a cast-out devil to work where it could do the most good—although some of Lydia’s old friends protested that. This represented a perfect example of Oil King’s amazing converting powers which he so ingeniously put to work—borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, but the money stayed in the family, as he said. “No use wasting cast-out devils like those in the swine that ran over the cliff and into the sea in the Bible. A waste of swine. And the misapplication of a bunch of damn useful devils,” pronounced Oil King. “O Brothers and Sisters!” he called. “I got me a dream! Goin to see the forests of Texas cleaned right out and working with oil pumps—chug chug chug all through the night and all through the daytime. I’m goin to change state of Texas! Where there are shotgun houses and one Poland china pig rootin up acorns under a live oak tree, and white leghorns roostin on the front steps, I’ll bring two-story mansions.”
“Tell it out, Oil King!” shouted Elsie Wade.
“You cain’t let oil wait! It’s waited too long. It wants to come up! I worked too long as a revivalist for something that didn’t come. The end of the world. No more waiting! Things got to materialize.”
“You got the word on it!” called Arab.
“‘aat’s right!’ cooed the Xylophone Twins and hammered their rippling sound on the portable Xylophone.
“Now ladies and gents, for a long time I thought our days was numbered, that we was living at the tail end o’ time; end was just around the corner; any minute you’d hear that trumpet sound and it’d be curtains. Curtains for this old sad world. But now I see different. I got a new Call. Now I want to be right in the middle of it, roll and wallow in it, rub up against it, this sad old beloved sweet world.”
“Speak of it!” Lydia lisped, as if she were sucking something.
“When I preached the end of the world and it didn’t come… I learned that people love this world. You know that? You wouldn’t guess it sometime, but oh, my! people do love this old hard world. I bore a lot of disappointment. The end of the world never come. Prayed and shouted all night, plus endangering my physical welfare to the bite of a rattlesnake—two inches o’ hot fang—converted souls, got ’em all ready—ever kind of good man and bad man; dope fiends, sex maniacs, perverts, sin-ridden people—and it didn’t come. Next day bright as ever, same old situation: people and trouble. Morning, noon and night come, same as usual. Same old everyday situation. People was so relieved world hadn’t ended they gambled and drunk liquor and… everthing else, harder’n ever, they was so glad to have the world all back, to make up for what they almost lost. Just tore up a town, so glad to have the world back for a little longer… and I left town in disgrace and the object of local ridicule. They blamed me! Well no Sir! No more disappointment! No more waitin! is what I say. Work with this world, the one we got here; and that’s what I say now: don’t linger folks. Let Oil King get his hands in your ground and he’ll bring up oil dirt… you watch. Trust in him! Go along with him; pitch in and help, even—like they done right here with Number One. Brothers and Sisters… I ask for your… faith. And may the Good Lord bless you and keep you all the days of your life, and may the peace of understanding come into your hearts. Amen.… you can get in on it for ten dollars. Who’s first and don’t crowd me.”
At the end of the Possibility Of Oil sermon people would line up to come to Oil King just as they had when Cleon Peters preached with Jake the rattlesnake—come forth to make their confession of faith and give their lives to the Lord. Except this time they came forth to bring their what Oil King called “Lease Money”—ten dollars an acre to prophesy oil—and leave their name and the location of their property. In time Oil King would get there and give them what he called his Knee Job. Oil King therefore became one of the first independent oil men in Texas, turing Camp Grounds into Oilfields.
All this was good except that Faithful Jake, the white rattlesnake with ruby-colored diamonds on his back, was now a leftover, an orphan (he was reputed to be twelve years old and he had a magnificent rattler on him). “Although I’ve had me a tremendious success and am known as the Oil King of Texas, goin to make lots of folks filthy rich, must say I got a soft spot in my heart for them old days when I carried Jake around with me in his cage, demonstrating to many a troubled heart the power of faith and preparing ’em for the end of the world,” Oil King mused.
No one from those parts had ever seen another snake like Jake. This deluxe creature was the only one of his kind—a ruby-backed rattler, obviously a mutated diamondback. Jake’s diamonds had changed to rubies. He was a valuable serpent and would have been stolen a hundred times were it not for his deadly dangerousness.
What to do with the main prop of Show Of Faith that had broken up—the very soul of the show? Because although it was Oil King’s daring faith that was the drawing card of the show—which was performed at Revivals, Camp Meetings, even street-preaching demonstrations—it was the unbiting of Jake, the powerful self-control, the amazing restraint, the dramatic power of the faith of Jake that was the very spirit of the act: Jake’s Faith. Jake was truly blessed, truly a divine instrument, an obedient servant of the Lord, the Lord’s true steward. He lived by faith. Oil King was only the medium for Jake to do his work through (flesh to be bitten or not bitten: snakebite material, as he said). Jake was the Lord’s snake. Oil King was only the handler, Jake’s tool, Jake’s agent for salvation by faith: Jake the Christian rattlesnake.
Now poor Jake must live by faith alone, for what had he to do with Cleon Peters’ new profession? Brother Cleon Peters had changed Jake’s nature—from a vicious and hostile viper, striking at anything and squandering without conscience his deadly venom (it had been analyzed by a Cherokee who found it to be of triple strength in poison content and as copious as that of three snakes combined). But through Brother Peters’ teaching and patient prayer Jake had changed into a disciplined creature, a thing of self-control and obedience, triumphant over self. It was Jake’s faith, then, that was the drawing card for the hundreds who came to witness his Show of Faith. “I, Cleon Peters, am just the poor humble servant of a holy snake of faith. Jake is the potter, I am the clay. Give me no credit. Just consider me possible snakebite material, tha’s all!”
What to do with Faithful Jake? Where does an old snake go who, if he had to bite, bit in great faith that he would not poison the bitten to death? God knows he tried hard not to, held back and held back until he thought he’d burst, and when he couldn’t hold back any longer let go a slug, a bolt of poison, praying that it wouldn’t kill Cleon Peters. It was then Peters’ turn—to resist by faith, by prayer—calling on the Lord. And the Lord saved him the times Jake slipped and bit him.
Besides his faith, Jake’s rubies, burning deep-fired on the broad back of his milk-white body, were just about all he had. Yet, vanity of vanities, they were of no lasting value. Each year they fell off his back into lusterless scales and, lying on the ground or on some bush, were no more illustrious than an old piece of skin. Yet Jake was blessed by the knowledge of sacrifice which came from the experience of having to give up regularly his most precious possession, the very skin off his back. His most precious possession was that which he readily gave up. Of course he had his poison, which he gave up in violence, coiling and striking, using his whole ruby-spangled body, the iron coil of himself, to thrust and shoot it out like green bullets. But he gave up his rich, deadly, and plenteous venom only in extremes, only in moments of radical necessity. Then Cleon Peters, stricken and poisoned, would cry, “Praise the Lord! I have faith! In faith there is no death! I will not die!”
But where does an old snake go? Someone had to look after him, for he was very old and almost all his poison had been used up—and without his threat what, then, could be the true uses of faith that was dependent upon danger? Without a challenge, what was faith? It had to be tested. It was almost a theological problem or perhaps a metaphysical hypothesis, one that churchmen like Augustine or Origen or Luther or Calvin might have held long disputations on, had it been another era. But this was in the 1930s in the ratty oil-towns of the boom fields and among people who grew up on pea and pepper farms and saw the Devil walking in the river bottom or sitting on the roof of an outhouse and lived by indisputable faith and walked with sweet Jesus their comforter and companion in poverty and sickness and were guided by preachers of faith and sin and redemption. But this gives you an idea of the fundamental and historical significance of Jake, whose rubies were a bit blurred, for age was beginning to tarnish them.
It was Oil King’s thought to let Jake loose in the Thicket. But how could he ever survive, a snake so old and sentimentalized by memory, gentled by constant use of fidelity, so dreaming and priestly an old creature? Poor Jake. Nevertheless, it seemed that the white ruby-backed rattlesnake was going to be put in the refuge of the Thicket—a sweet haven for an old tired ancestor of the wilds to die in, this ancient creature of the dust of the ground, of creation’s very beginnings.
While Oil King was torn and tormented by what was the right thing to do, it was suggested by Hester and Esther, the sweet Xylophone Twins who had loved Jake for years, that Oil King find a good home for the serpent where he would be loved and given proper care by an adoring companion. Oil King ought to advertise, leaving word and signs and ads in churches, Revival tents, in post offices, etc.
About this time a very significant event in the life of Addis Adair was happening. Just when he was so lonesome that he thought he would die, walking on a road of dust that led, it seemed, to nowhere, he saw a sign nailed to a tree which announced a special Tent Meeting in the town ahead. It was here that Addis saw what he thought was surely one of the most beautiful things in the world—Jake the white rattlesnake. Jake was lying upon the breast of a big warm man who called himself Oil King, ex-preacher, confessor to sinners and healer. It was then that Addis learned of the special powers of Jake and of the bleak future ahead of him unless someone befriended him.
And then Addis heard Oil King make his famous speech that he used to make when he was traveling around as a faith preacher with Jake. “Folks this is old Jake, and he’s stung me I bet a hundred times and never laid me low. But that was when he got to where he couldn’t help it; and it never laid me low. I rose up refreshed out of it every time, renewed by the power and strength of my own faith. I’ve seen old Jake lie up against me soft and calm as a kitten asleeping. But I know the thunder and lightning in him. Jake can strike like scissored lightning. And in him is the poisoning that can lay a man down and blow him up purple till he busts with the gall of Satan. See how he writhes! See his green eye! And all that cottony soft white mouth. You ole slippery codger. Sin lover! Coo coo coo coo coo coo!”
Addis was so drawn to the beautiful Jake that he knew he had to have him. As he started down the aisle of the crowded tent, the people turned and stared at him in his frazzled Switchman’s cap, dust-covered and weatherbeaten, his old cowboy boots with the rusted stars on them, and his clothesline coiled around his shoulder. The congregation was hushed and Oil King stopped talking and fastened his eyes on the curious figure coming up the aisle to him, walking on the sawdust, holding a ten-dollar bill in his hand.
When Addis came before Oil King’s face and showed him his own forlorn and visionary face, Oil King said, “Boy, you look blue. You got somethin on your soul that’s making you blue. You got some pain on you.”
Addis held out the ten dollars. The tent was hushed. Oil King stared and seemed to be filling with some deep filling. And then it brimmed out of him.
“Great good God, all of a sudden seems like my youth come on me again, looking upon you. I remember my youth suddenly crawling all over me like a thousand hot tongues all over my body. I walked, I bet, a thousand miles over Texas, trying to get the crawling hot tongues of my youth off me. I’ll never forget my thousand miles. I got it out on Texas. I worked out my youth on Texas, rubbed it off on a thousand miles of Texas. I got a deep feelin’ you the same as I was. Like me, son, like I was.”
Addis’ eyes were filled with tears, and his face was covered with darkness and had a look of confusion and strife. The hand that held out the ten-dollar bill shook.
“Son, I bet you got no parents. Where’s your parents? I bet you’re a boy of the road. Wearin that cap. Tell me boy, where you come from, where you goin?” Oil King waited. The congregation hardly breathed, and then Oil King saw Addis’ lips struggle and tremble and Addis’ whole mouth strained to make words and only blew gasping breath.
“Oh God help you blue boy of the road, you caint talk. You got no words, God help you. Somebody’s got to cut loose the cord that ties your tongue, like the boy in the Bible. Vow to God if I was back on the road with my old Show Of Faith I’d take you with me. Cause you belong to the Lord, in His capture some way, caint tell how; but I see the hand of the Lord on you, and His sorrow and rejection’s in your eyes. I’d ask you to come with me and help me in my new profession, cause God knows you could help me, you got the power, ’s all over you, beaming outa you, the power; and God knows everbody in Texas got boom on their minds, anybody in Texas owns one inch of ground out smellin and rootin to see if they got oil in it; whole state’s on its haunches with its nose to the ground. You could make your fortune, become a big man in Texas. But you’re a Saint, a blue Saint, and I cain’t claim you—although my personal opinion is that all Saints ought to be rich. They deserve it. But I swear to God above Almighty that the Devil would strike me down if I took you from the Lord that has seized your lonesome soul and is savin it for some purpose I caint prophesy. Some destiny He’s put on you. I just know you’re the Lord’s own possession. Couldn’t take you. Lord has sent you here to claim old Jake. He’s yours, saint boy, the viper’s yours.” And when Oil King saw a flicker of light spread over the boy’s face, he said quietly, almost like a prayer, and in a sobbed voice watery with tears, “He don’t eat much. He just dozes away most of the day. He’s old, he needs love.”
And then Oil King placed the cage in Addis’ hand and asked him to kneel and take off his cap, and then Oil King took a pitcher of drinking water and baptized Addis. The congregation fell on its knees, and this was a still and holy moment and meant more to everybody than anybody knew, and Addis wept and realized how he had been shut off from love, from the love of God, in his darkness, and he thought he heard a voice cry out from inside him words that he could never have understood: “O that Thou shouldst give dust a tongue to cry to Thee!”: and suddenly he felt almost blinded by a blazing light and out of the dazzling light walked toward him two beautiful people all in white, a young man and a young woman, and he believed it was a vision of his parents. And then a startling thing happened to Addis. Some wild spirit entered into him and his tongue loosened and trilled like a bird’s. Addis Adair found tongue and spoke. “We are all one family. There are no fathers and there are no sons.”
When Addis rose from his baptism he seemed like a young saint or a young holy knight. And when he turned and went up the aisle with the cage in his hand, his face shone and his eyes were radiant and the people were sure that he was going on some quest of beauty and magic and wonder, and many followed him—as if they were laying down everything to follow him. And Oil King’s voice intoned out, as if in some Emperor’s benediction, “Go on now, holy boy. Nobody can keep you. You’re meant for the road. You go on now.”
Now, in the towns Addis drew greater crowds, walking his wire with Jake coiled around his neck and lying upon his breast. And he took Jake closer and closer to him, as his very own.
But what disaster—earthquake, explosion, flood, volcano of flame and mud, what lake of fire—had struck and changed the towns of East Texas? What had so crazed the people? What had brought these thousands into towns where they were knotting together and bursting apart like swarming bees? What was their cry? What were they tearing at the earth for? What was the smell in the air, this machinery, this sound of pounding iron? “Oil, podnah,” a man told him. “Where you been?”
Was it the coming of the end of the world as prophesied, when flames would rise out of the ground and men would corrupt the face of the earth and turn brother against brother for money and power, and the poor would be corrupted by money and sell their farms and ruin their crops of cotton and cane and corn, turning them into sloughs of mud and burning gas; and country women would wear lipstick and the daughters of the little towns would walk out of the towns on high heels and go into the oilfields and whore in the toolhouses and under the reservoirs, fornicating bold as sheep right in the oilfields, lying in the ditches of the oil reservoirs, spreading to the roughnecks for oil money?
Had he said these things suddenly being given tongue? Whose words were these? Did he speak them or hear them disturbing the boom times, shaking the times of plenty, railing out like John the Baptist? Many said that he was the Second Coming, the Messiah walking through the exploding fields. Others said he was a secret agent, a spy, a tool of the big companies trying to get control of the fields from the independent operators. But some of the big oil companies were after him and sent men out to try to waylay him and beat him up and run him out of town. They got nowhere, for fear of the rattlesnake. They had no success except to push Addis and Jake down into the mud with a pole.
They were ridiculed. Roughnecks wagged their sex at them and called out foul words. Snake jokes were everywhere. Whores from cheap cabarets in Mexico yelled to Addis that they performed a Snake Act he wasn’t equipped for. “With the rattler. Rrrrrrr,” one added. “Ssssss, honey. Forked tongue,” another said, darting a lewd member from her large mouth. The two pilgrims, Addis and Jake, were stoned, hosed with streams of crude oil. Addis’ face was black. The whites of his huge eyes glowered upon his persecutors, and some were afraid and some fell down in amazement at his mysterious look. Was he of another world? Men came after Jake with clubs and shotguns, shouting, “Kill the snake!” But Addis kept him close upon his breast and fled in the darkness. He sat on the edge of a town at night, aching and bleeding, seeing the fires of the burning oilwells in the distance, and the taste of oil was bitter in his mouth and the fumes of gasoline scalded his nostrils. He wept, and had no home.
But the two of them went on through Texas together, Addis mute and mysterious and enigmatic on the wire, Jake dozing serenely upon his breast. What was he? What did he mean? They went on through the mudlands and saltlands and burning holes of the oil lands. Sometimes they were joined and followed for a while by those whose lives had been unbalanced by oil and who vowed for a time—a night, a day, a few hours—to renounce overpowering riches and follow what seemed to be something simply new and unheard of, fleeting, but something of unanswerable and drawing beauty, it could have been no more than the colored flash of a butterfly or a bird or a darting fish—a glimmer, a twinkle, a vision—nothing you could do anything with: a woman broken away from something grand, in a pearl ballgown said to have pure pearls sewn over it, barefooted and befouled with oil, drinking from a quart of Bourbon and falling into the mud; a young man driving a Packard touring car, dressed in a rumpled tuxedo which he said he had been wearing for three days and nights at an orgy and was screwed out of his mind.
Others, mostly the poor in times of affluence, joined the group around Addis as though they had moved to a new town with only a few possessions and bore the air of arriving settlers: dispossessed old people cheated of their land, young rawboned parents with half a dozen dirty children; or other kinds of wanderers: sullen, and dazed, raped girls; lost children who had fled explosions in the night; repentant or bored prostitutes—one, lying in a wagon, with a crated goat and a coop of chickens, said she had made no decision about anything, she was just resting. There was an odd peacefulness and quietness over the curious mobile community—why, nobody knew. Moving by day and settling by night, they formed a sort of outlaw town. Since the towns of Rose County were as disabled as if tornadoes had torn them up and had no peace, the only towns that held together were these odd moving ones. Were they escaping a Gulf hurricane? An advancing enemy? A dust storm? A plague of grasshoppers? And who was this figure, leading such a flock through the flaming orange nights and over the dark, moonless wastes? A revolutionary? A fanatic? A messenger of the Devil? Or just a silent boy named Addis Adair with a rattlesnake around his neck.
Magical events occurred. At Raccoon Bend a fantastic young man named Firedevil Prescott went into the holocaust of a well that had caught fire and put it out like a miracle. In another town a gusher came in where a man was working and rose solid into the air like a black pillar with the man sitting on top of it as if he were a statue. And in another town a blade of gas like a sword thrust up from the ground and sliced a shotgun house in two. Debris flew through the air as furious as shrapnel and fell over Addis and Jake. Was it a war, was it the end of the world? Yet these two figures, redemptive and prophetic, moved through the stricken Texas towns astonishing and provoking them. And hearing of the boy on the wire with the white rattlesnake, those who were afflicted now sought him. When they came upon him, dragging themselves, or sprawled on cots or riding the backs of others, they were amazed by the figure in the Switchman’s cap who never said a word, floating upon the wire with a beautiful ruby-spangled serpent upon his shoulder.
Now, moving behind Addis, like a flight, an exodus, a migration, there was a caravan of wagons and horses and old slow used cars, Willys Knights and Ford roadsters and Chevrolet coupés pulling homemade trailers loaded with bedding, a cookstove, children, chickens and ducks. A procession straggled along on foot—moving in solemnity as if led by the hand of Providence, of Destiny, of God toward a promised land?—carrying a few possessions, like refugees in a war-torn country. Were they the Chosen People, Gypsies, migrants, a holy army of the poor, the displaced? Had a great tidal wave rolled out of the deeps of the land and ruined their cotton lands and farmland and green gardens, fouled their silage and choked their animals to death? Were they fleeing poisonous gases that had broken loose from boiling underground wells and had suffocated their cows and asphyxiated their blessed mule teams? What did they have to say if spoken to? What was their message, their meaning, their hope? No one in the history of Rose County had ever seen or heard reported or read in the Courthouse documents such an unusual phenomenon. Where were they going? Wherever Addis Adair was going, they did not care.
It was surprising how many joined. Sometimes a whole field was full of them, and they moved like a flock through the grasses. Sometimes half a hill and the top of it was covered with them settled there like a flight that had ht there. This floating band of nomads and exiles and outcasts was becoming notorious. It was feared, too. It gathered power. Did it stand for something? Oppose something? Were they pilgrims? Now the bored, restless young (there was a group of adolescents and youths that numbered around fifteen or twenty) joined up. Some of them carried snakes wound around their arms or coiled around their waists. And some carried coils of wire, hoping to imitate Addis.
They gathered under groves of trees when night came, or rested by rivers, in the bottomlands, in dry washes when it had cooled. They pitched tents and made camp. They slept on the ground or in trees. They sang and provided for each other.
It must be admitted that Oil King needed a Number Two. For some months now, while Number One pumped richly on and showed no signs of weakening, none of Oil King’s other hunches had materialized. His lessors were getting restless, and a few had become openly suspicious of the independent oil man. People were losing faith in the very man who had taught them faith in the early days. Frankly, Oil King needed something of a miracle. Even his company showed signs of weariness and needed a fresh success. Arab was close to being fed up and Lydia told Oil King that she was getting tired of hustling money out of mullets—the Oilfield term for investors. Only Hester and Esther Lane, who seemed never to weary of playing “Welcome Sweet Springtime,” remained unchanged. They were their same sweet, cheerful selves.
On the Fourth of July, Oil King threw a gala as an all-day celebration at Number One. This was a more or less desperate attempt to revive flagging excitement. By noon, excitement was still flagging and Oil King was down-at-heart and pretty blue. Toward midafternoon, in the blazing heat, Oil King did not see down the distant road what could have been, in the heat wave, a mirage of (a) the Heavenly Host come to relieve him of a life of unrelenting anxiety and abuse from his fellow man or (b) a posse of the law or of citizens taking the law in their own hands and ambushing him; but he had the very odd visual sensation of beholding the hallowed figure of a young man in a cap, holding a cage in his hand and walking before a large assortment of people in cars, wagons, on horseback and afoot. This could be some wandering biblical tribe, some scattering of holy people out of captivity, some Exodus, something of the Old Testament, except for the autos. In his recent sadness, in his heartsickness that had befallen him since his business had begun to smell of failure, he thought he had been seeing things, having dreams and visions of old Bible things.
Closer on, Oil King saw that the young man was who he had thought it was, the mute blue boy who that day—a long time ago, it seemed to him—had walked away down the aisle of the Revival tent with Jake in his cage, bought for a ten-dollar bill—a sad red-letter day for Oil King. Now, sure enough, there in the hands of the boy coming down the road was the cage of Jake. Overjoyed at the prospect of reunion with his old friend the white rattlesnake, and wondering who the crowd was that now followed the boy as once a mob of adorers had followed him—O sweet days now gone by and lost!—Oil King ran with open arms to meet Addis Adair and Jake, as if they were his saviors come to rescue him from despondency and increasing bad news.
Oil King ran to Addis Adair and Jake with more than one special emotion in his breast. High-ranking in the order of feelings in his heart was that of being scared that he might be run out of town by doubters unless a change came about pretty soon. Oil King’s old followers of him as Cleon Peters—now investors in his drilling operations—who had followed him at the crossroads the day he got the O.K. message from the Lord to go ahead in his new calling, plus those who’d later joined his enterprise, were seriously close to souring on him and on the verge of being ready for an uprising to get their land or money back. The shows and harangues at Number One were petering out. The people were beginning to fail to see the attraction of the McCrackens getting richer by the minute while the return on their own investments was zero, and Oil King could take the Xylophone and shove it up Arab’s ass, as one indignant person suggested. They wanted fresh oil, their own oil on their land. In such times many a man waited for another man to fall, and one of them was named Wylie Prescott, who was primed to take advantage of this incendiary situation and turn it to his own benefit as the most promising young wildcatter waiting in the wings to emerge when the right moment came. In this world of quick fortunes one man went down and another rose up before you could tell what had happened.
“People been voicing their unhappiness with the failure of oil to make an appearance on their property,” Arab had informed Oil King. “To ‘manifest itself’—to use your words—which, I’m beginning to believe, is a lot of shit.”
“Now, now, Long Boy, don’t fall back!” Oil King said. “Don’t fall prey to doubts and, especially, your old foul sinful language that you was using in profusion—every other word was fuckin—when I pulled you like a molar tooth outa your seat and up my aisle that night in Toluca, Texas; saved your soul and changed your life.”
“You through?” asked Arab. He waited a moment. “Add to what I’ve just told you, may I continue, people bitching because nobody showed up to test for oil at their place after they paid their fu… paid their money.”
“People never satisfied. What’d they expect for ten dollars?”
“Oil,” advised Arab.
“Hell, I caint put oil in the ground,” Oil King answered.
“Think about that,” said Arab.
“The Lord put it in, Oil King takes it out. You know that.”
“Lord’s only one here puttin it in,” growled Arab, “and nobody’s takin anything out, as far as I can tell.”
“You gettin downhearted, old friend?”
“I’m not so much downhearted as I’m smelling instead of oil—hot tar. And chickenfeathers.”
“Well, everbody got to have them some patience. I caint get around to everbody over night. Only got two knees. And they got callouses from kneeing my way over half this territory. Livin my life dog-fashion, if you get right down to it.”
“Well, if you get right down to it, lots of them are getting tired of waiting, just like they did before, when you had ’em all toeing the line and ready to run for the gates to Heaven when the end-of-the-world trumpet blasted. Humans get tired of waiting, Oil King. They need signs. And they need them some results. Material results.” In trying to reason with his master, Arab seemed to be talking about himself as well, seeing that he was working on a commission.
“Wasn’t like this when we was doin Christian work,” Arab whined.
Oil King let himself fall into a sudden revery. “Blessed ole Jake. Sure need him now.”
“You need somethin, or you ain’t goin to have fuckin nothin.” Arab scowled. “At all.”
Suddenly it was apparent to Oil King how mean and low Arab really could get if he had to. But just when he had been feeling so blue and rebuked, what he had seen was no dream but the boy bringing Jake to him, as if wishing for him had made it come true.
On the little platform by the side of Number One where Oil King’s show was performed, stood Addis Adair holding the cage with Jake in it. There was such a throng surrounding the stage, such a mass gathering made up of the mixture of Oil King*s people and Addis Adair’s followers, that no one could remember any spectacle that had ever brought so many together in one place—no circus or Chautauqua or Revival—nor such a variety and mixture of ages and sizes and human conditions. As far, almost, as the eye could see, there was a field filled with people as soundless as the ghosts of the dead, as rapt and as austere as the shades of the dead called up before Judgment. It seemed that time and all the world had hushed and stopped. It could have been a great multitude of people witnessing an event of history, of the saints such as was painted on the domes of early churches. Was it Pentecost, was it Doomsday? Then there was a sound and was it a bed creaking, a rusty door cracking open? And what was the soft gushing sound, the stifled drumbeat rhythmic and steady? It was Number One suddenly audible; had it, too, stood still for a time?
Against the voluptuous sqush of Number One and over the countless heads of the immobile multitude, Oil King hurled like a splash of water a cry: “Brothers and Sisters! Lord God A-mighty!”
The crowd was brought to life and something mysterious circulated through it, something temporarily dead but now revived, causing a low hum and whisper to rise dimly up from within it, as if it were one body. This was the biggest congregation ex-Cleon Peters had ever in his life had or dreamed of. He was going to give the sermon of his life, the Show for which destiny had molded him.
“The holy serpent! Old Jake’s cage!” He moved toward the cage with hands outstretched, and it seemed that he might be going to take up Jake in his own hands again. This astonished the crowd and clenched them tighter together, as if it had made them breathless. Oil King had them in his grasp again.
“I know a lot of you fainthearted ones won’t believe me when I state that tears still well up in my eyes and a throb beats in this old heart of mine to see this cage and remember them old days when I was carrying it around. You all remember them too! The days when you had faith. I don’t know who you new people are this boy brought here, but I say to you, Join up with me. Come in to my wildcat operations! Faith without works is dead!” Now the crowd was certain that Oil King was moving to open the cage and take the snake to his breast as he had done in the old days.
But Oil King did not open the cage. He cried out in mock drama, acting as if the serpent had struck him in his breast. He wailed, “I feel his sting, running all through me, up and down and around through my body. I’m shudderin with his sting, and I’m steeling myself against his purple poisonin running through my veins, but I will not fall! I’ll keep my faith! He will not strike me down!”
Oil King had got so divided and it was so clear that he had lost a lot of his old faith that, if he had picked up Jake, Jake would have been equally confounded and therefore not sure where he himself stood or where faith lay. Under these clouded conditions the snake might have struck Oil King; and Oil King, separated within himself, weakened at his center, might have died from Jake’s poison. However, what you’d think would have happened did not occur—that is, Jake did not get a chance even to check the state of his faith, much less to bite Oil King and kill him. Besides, Oil King had more sense than to impair his life at such a time as this. Add to this that, before much of anything could happen, a horrible event took place.
Some men, servants of Wylie Prescott, ran up on the platform and seized Oil King and right before the eyes of everybody—and with Number One pumping heartily away—stripped his clothes off him and tarred and feathered him in full view of the horrified crowd which fell into panic. The men called, “Swindler!” and the crowd broke apart as if it had burst asunder and the lame were shambling and the dumb were howling in terror and the hale were mixed with the halt. Oil King’s crowd mixed in with Addis Adair’s as if they had been sifted together. They might have formed a kind of army and advanced upon the tarrers and featherers had not three men held loaded shotguns against them.
But arms were not necessary. The smell of tar-cooked flesh, the odor of burnt chicken and duck feathers were enough to turn people away—worse than tear gas—from poor howling Oil King.
“Blue Boy with the snake, holy saint of the road, save me from this humiliation and pain! Faithful Jake! Turn the curse of the ages upon this generation of vipers that so persecutes me!”
And was Oil King going to deliver a sermon in his old style, rolling out of his throat of the old days, as if he had a tape deck in there? No, for he could not shout over the tumult before him, the collision of wagons and autos, the whinnying of horses and the shrieks of humans. Was this pandemonium before him the Day of Judgment he had so often visualized as he preached the end of the world? Had Addis brought the end of the world upon him—was he, oh my God, the Second Coming? Who would have thought that it would end like this, him, Rev. Cleon Peters, befeathered and stalking on chicken legs like some big evil fowl of Satan and not rising winged in light, beatific and angelic as he had dreamt. It was Damnation, this Second Coming. Satan had won. Satan was victorious. Hell was the Eternity he had misguessed. What a surprise! There was no Heaven! He had been led into the hands of thugs by this young Judas-boy; and Jake had been the abominable Serpent condemned to the dust of the ground and biting out of the mud at the heels of humanity. Everything was turned over and corrupted unto Eternity. In this hallucination of horror and damnation he passed out.
Addis and Jake fled, but the men got Arab and pulled his pants down and threw him to the floor and shouted, “Pervert!” and that they were going to do a terrible thing to him, but evidently decided against it since he was later seen running bare-naked through the town, intact.
The oilfields were in an uproar. Was it a massacre? A revolution? A great fowlish figure of feathers that seemed to change into a shape made of boiling black smoke and howling as if it were human, fled through the bogs and mires of the oilwastes at twilight, dreadful.
Knowing they were after him and Jake, Addis hid under a reservoir and huddled over Jake’s cage to protect him. Sometime in the dreadful night he opened the cage to comfort Jake, and it was then that he saw that Jake was not there. Lost! Where in the hellwash of that violent night was the gentle and defenseless white rattlesnake? He wept and he lay upon the cold earth and did not want to live.
All night he could hear the shouts and curses of the men sent by the powerful Wylie Prescott to catch Addis and Jake. “Snake Freak!” they called.
How they despised a low-bellied snake. They’d tarred the old snake-handling fourflusher; now they’d get the snake and the boy. Fuckin snake. If you see a snake, kill ’im; and if you find a radical damned Communist of the unions, like the boy causing labor riots and unrest in the oilfields, catch him and take care of him. That was what Wylie Prescott’s men thought.
Their boss, Wylie Prescott, was coming up fast now. Within twenty-four hours after the routing of Oil King, he had bought out Number One and he had bought up Oil King’s leases, cheap, from his disgruntled clients, and had started one of the big oil companies of the oilfields. It was in this way that the poor leases in Oil King’s simple possession, held by cheap liens of five and ten dollars, and most of which, lying drenched in oil, he had not had time to get around to, turned out to be the most fabulous oilfield in East Texas—the Prescott Field of Rose County. But more of this directly, for lonesome and hunted Addis is still on our mind.
Early in the morning before sunrise it became quiet, his pursuers had gone in another direction, and then was when Addis put a heavy stone in Jake’s cage and sank it in a water-well on a ruined farm. Then Addis began his last journey, bereaved and without home or companion. He doubled back toward where he started, having made this curve like the flight of an insect. He had moved, it seemed—and was probably true—a thousand miles, over half Texas, an unexplainable flight that had taken the shape of a half-circle. As he returned he went by night past his old town of Rose, walking the railroad tracks past Jewel’s house that seemed unreal now and a place of which he had only a dim memory, like a piece of a dream remembered. He went on, toward the ruined Roundhouse.
Ace’s tomb in the ruins was no longer troubled. Now it was a green mound mossy with fern and garlanded with blooming Trumpet and Morning-glory and Honeysuckle vines. In this moist place teeming with blooms unsucked and heavy, hanging untouched fruits oozing musk in the humid early morning twilight, Addis saw that Ace’s place of violent death had been overtaken by another kind of passion: and now what he felt was not sorrow for the loss of Ace, not grief, but such an overwhelming vitality, such a surge and rush of male power that he could use it to procreate a generation, to populate a town. If he clasped a fruit, cleft open by fullness or stretched by ripeness, it burst out warm juice. If he touched the opening of a blossom it gave way, warm and sliding, to his press and it seemed to softly clutch and draw his fingertip. There were arching stems that could barely support heavy-crested heads of buds which, when he held them on his palm, seemed fleshly. What was this fruit of such softness and warmth, human in its heat and softness, that hung so tight and heavy and full? He eased its load—a kind of milk flushed out. Surely there was a resurrection out of this once accursed place, a resurrection of Ace’s soul—Addis knew this already; but now he felt the passionate redemption of Ace’s flesh. The vitality of Ace, revived and empowered, went into Addis.
Suddenly a man, virile and ripe, he turned and went on away toward the hidden wilderness, and by clear dawn he had vanished into the Big Thicket.