Cottonmouth Gospel

Snakes kept their distance. The real trouble sat at Mama's kitchen table.

Every East Texan has a story about snakes, but not all of them involve the Holy Spirit. This one does. It’s about the day my sister, Doodle Bug, volunteered me for salvation—in a pond that already had its own congregation.

If you’ve never been baptized in a pond full of snakes, you can’t know the peculiar comfort of wondering whether Jesus or venom will get you first. The preacher was one of Mama and Daddy’s drinking buddies, an old-fashioned Pentecostal holy roller on Sundays, but he liked to sprinkle in a bit of sin the other six days. He claimed that was God’s way and—anyway— Jesus was born to forgive us our sins.

I was about twelve when the Holy Spirit—and a shove from Mama—took me to one of Brother Gene’s (he was only “Brother” on Sunday) tent revivals in a place we called “No Man’s Land.” We crossed a rickety wooden bridge on a red dirt road that led to who knows where. Folks didn’t trust the bridge with the weight of their pickups, so they parked along the road and climbed the hill on foot, webbed aluminum lawn chairs banging their knees.

This wasn’t my first brush with the Pentecostals. Back in fourth grade, my best friend Carol Sue (I was called Carol Lou) heard that a Pentecostal church in Seven Points was serving the world’s biggest banana split after service. They’d even send a bus if you called and gave them your address. We wanted that giant banana split so badly we could taste it. I mean, it was the world’s biggest, so sure, we called. We donned our best Sunday dresses for the bus ride. Now, we had grown up firmly planted in the Baptist church, where it was stale and still, and the hymns were at least two hundred years old. No one needed a hymnal because the song lineup never changed. But that day, we convinced Carol Sue’s mom and dad that church was church, by goodness, and we needed to see that banana split or we would just die. Right there, we would fall over dead if they didn’t let us see it.

We got to the church and it was like nothing we’d ever known. People were speaking in languages we didn’t know, hands thrown in the air, swaying to songs we’d never heard. The woman behind us made a clicking noise with her tongue the whole time. We looked at each other and slid from the pew and hid in the bathroom. We were both giggling in one bathroom stall when the door was pushed open and the lady with the clicking tongue told us to get back out there this instant or she would take her shoe to our behinds.

Well!

We slunk back into the sanctuary and prayed harder for that banana split than we did for our own souls. Turned out it was NOT the biggest in the world; it was sliced bananas and melted hand-scooped ice cream in styrofoam bowls lined on folding tables.

It was a scam, and we fell for it—hook, line, and sinker.

So, here I was again, a few years later, at a Pentecostal tent revival. One could say it was less a tent than blankets thrown across poles and clothesline cord someone had thrown together last minute. Carol Sue wasn’t with me, but my sister Doodle Bug was. She was four-and-a-half years older than me and was there out of pure curiosity.

Brother Gene and his red-headed wife, Clemmie, were standing in front of the lawn chair congregation, between us and a green, slimy pond. Brother Gene preached with a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. Clemmie, with her low-cut blouse, smiled like she’d been taking lessons straight of a Tammy Faye Bakker playbook. I looked around and saw that everyone had their hands in the air, swaying to and fro. I stood there stiff as a tombstone like all the other kids. Back then, grown-ups got the lawn chairs, we got the dirt.

Brother Gene lit one cigarette off another while Clemmie held the pack. I shielded my eyes and squinted toward the sun. What time was it? I felt like a human sundial. I could hear Doodle Bug laughing behind me. Doodle never believed in anything back then, except McMillan and Wife, which started at eight. At the rate Brother Gene was going, we were in danger of missing it.

Then came the call for sinners to be baptized—in that pond! The one with green scum and snake eyes watching from the edges. My head whipped around to look at Doodle Bug. She smiled the way she did when someone was about to get in trouble and it wasn’t her. And just like that she shoved me forward and didn’t stop until Clemmie had a death grip on my arm.

I grew up around snakes—grass snakes were like pets, copperheads were mostly harmless unless you stepped too close, but cottonmouths owned any stretch of still water. I could feel their eyes on us. Saw the familiar lazy S-shapes cut the green scum, arrow-shaped heads sliding like sin through prayer. I stepped into chest-deep water. Brother Gene stood waist-deep, a Bible in one hand, my skinny arm in the other. I knew which hand could save me, and it wasn’t the one holding Scripture.

“God’s creatures won’t harm God’s children,” he told me. Easy for him to say, standing in waders with a look like he’d been through this a thousand times. I wasn’t sure if it was faith or the smell of cigarette smoke that kept cottonmouths at bay. He pinched my nose, spoke in tongues, and dunked me far too long. I came up spitting pond water and a few choice words. No holier than I went in, just wetter and smelling like swamp. The cottonmouths kept their distance, which meant one of two things: either I was, in fact, God’s child…or even the snakes didn’t want me.

I walked out of that water marked by something no one else could see—not the Holy Spirit, not even the snakes, but the knowing that danger and salvation often came dressed the same. I’ve been trying to tell them apart ever since.

That Sunday night, I sprawled on my belly watching McMillan and Wife while Gene—no “Brother” now—and Clemmie sat at our Formica table with Mama and Daddy, playing Rook, smoking and knocking back Royal Crown whiskey and RC Cola. They drank enough to give themselves cottonmouth by morning. Clemmie leaned forward just enough for her low-cut blouse to speak directly to Daddy. Mama noticed. I could feel the pressure of her silence. Her teeth were clenched so tightly I thought I could hear them scrape together across the room.

Doodle Bug sat cross-legged in Daddy’s overstuffed chair, watching the kitchen scene like a front-row play, her eyes catching what no one else would admit—that Clemmie was coiling herself right there in the open. And it wouldn’t be the last time; some women pray in church, others preach with their blouses half-open.

Years later, that night would wind its way into my novel-in-progress, Psalm of Lies—a story where the snakes don’t always live in the water, and some sermons are preached without a single word of Scripture.

—Carol

© 2025 Carol Countryman. All rights reserved.
This piece is part of Psalm of Lies and the ongoing series Tales from East Texas.
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