The Bad Book by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-07-16T04:00:00+00:00

Mark 16:18

I’d heard the rumors that trickled down from Dowdy Ridge. I was almost invisible when I needed to be, and they never heard me talking about it. How they postulated these folks from Dowdy Ridge got up to things that weren’t considered godly. Snake handling, for instance. I had a handle early on what was good and what was bad, not even the grey line that blurred in between fooled me. One thing for sure was when the ones I recognized came off their ridge to do town business, everyone gave them a wide berth. That included the sheriff and his deputies. I had a notion if I was ever to meet the Dowdys, well, I might just have more in common with them than my own neighbors.

I dreamed one time I was someone special, and when the time came, I would know what it was that made me so. After that dream, I shook all over for an entire day like someone with the fever. Beulah cared for me gently that day and used her special herbs to prepare hot tea for sipping. That day, she let go of a couple things I imagined to be secrets, like the fact that the Dowdy’s snake handling was medicinal, not religious. And her root work combined with their medicine was the cause for no deaths due to poisonous snake bites on the mountain for over a century. Evidently it was a passed down gift.

You wouldn’t think she was the sharp-edged woman who sat next to me.

The night went just the way I thought it would, until a couple men I’d never seen, yet felt familiar, toted a wooden box to the front of the room. As they passed, I caught a glimpse of their eyes, piercing ice-blue, pretty near the same as when I looked at my own in the mirror. They were in the back row the entire time, but their heads were down, or I’d have noticed those eyes.

The crowd fell silent like dead air, and no one dared to move even an inch in their seat. It was like that game called Statue we played in school. The teacher would let us run a bit, then she’d yell, “Statue!” Whoever she saw stop first was the winner. Tonight, I believed it to be one helluva tie.

These gatherings were rare events, they weren’t normal church meetings by any means. I knew there to be special people on account of what Beulah’d told me. You could mark your calendar there’d be a gathering first sign of spring and at harvest time when root work was done. Word of any travelers would make its way to the mountain folk, and gatherings were arranged soon after.

Sweat soaked hairs on the back of my neck suddenly stood on end as though my thin cotton dress had brushed against electric fencing, causing a chill to inch its way up my spine. I sat up straight and strained my neck to get a better look at the men and the box.

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