The adder in the churchyard wall

It should not have been there, but it was. A swag of belly and flank in silver and sable black. Memory makes it swell gently with breath, but it was in truth stone still, neither living nor dead. A jewel in the rotten stacked slate, a miracle, glimpsed in its private underworld. Another order of being. Seraphs, says scripture, are like this, coursing with holy venom. Somewhere deep in the wall was its length, zagging up to a head buried in cool repose. The red copper eyes, cupped full of vole and lizard blood slept awaiting the vespers hunt. It dreamt. But the keeled scales, split like feathers along the quill, filled the aperture, as if the whole wall could have been one great serpent quietly encircling the church. This I believe is the dream the adder dreamt. It was not like the children, and not like the sun on the playground, and not like the visiting bishops. The adder was all of its own. A mystery. We dared one another to touch it, it was a sacred thing.

The churchyard wall buttressed up the dead so that they did not collapse onto the school, which sunk in the shadow of the holy earth. We knew that if you put a penny on a gravestone and walked around it backwards at midnight reciting the Lord’s Prayer then the spirit, or the devil, would reach up to take the coin. But we hadn’t seen it happen. It was just something we knew, one of a chain of charms, barely hanging on like thumb-split daisy stems at day’s end. The adder belonged to that world, the mythic world that coexisted with the prattle from the pulpit and the stranger Jesus in whom no-one, not even the adults, believed. Its was a world at belly level with the pennywort and creeping toadflax, flowing over the plantains and tasting out with secret senses the quivering heartbeat and heatmap of prey. It shared a world with the silent dead.

The hymns blurred into drones, the roof leaked, the raspy kneelers hid us to whisper and giggle below the pews when we were summoned up to partake in the boredom of service. The adder spoke insistent from the wall, shared its sibilant dream. I knew that voice from my book of magic verse, from the older world before the church came. If I placed my coin on the gravestone it would be the adder that emerged, the copper penny smell pricking it into appearance, the words unwinding the spell of the church, the ground suddenly coursing with adders, the sea silver with pilchards, the cliffs stamping with red-legged choughs.

The adults heard, or likely someone told, because the wall was soon patched with concrete, all the apertures trowelled up overnight. It had to be kept out. A danger, pronounced our headmaster in a special assembly, that rapist in a dress whom the diocese hid away when they found out what he had done to the special needs kids with his accomplice the gay potter. The potter closed his shop of little animals priced in pennies for the children, and thrown pots in rustic glaze, priced in pounds for the adults, to go elsewhere and doubtless do the same again. The mother of one victim rode her great red horse shameless through the lanes of the village, we all knew she was in on it too. Yet the adder was the threat even when it slept and dreamt.

The adder had a sister, because the local evangelists brought her in a week later, gushing with pride. She was killed with a stone, dropped from deliberate height to crush the head into an unrecognisable pulp of poison and eye and quick split tongue. A brown broken flex in a misty jar of alcohol provided what they saw as a lesson, as the lesson of their faith. But of course it was. Let us turn to Genesis 3:15 where God insists ‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’ That was the doctrine that saw to her death. A basking adder was who they demonstrated their senseless faith upon, in a hot jolt of savagery. Thus the the world was divided into good and evil. They murdered this beauty in absolute moral certainty and brought it to their paedophile priest to parade before the children.

I do not deny that they are wont to sting. Teasy, the Cornish say, teasy as an adder. But you just have to leave them alone to be safe. I have skinned a few I found punctured and twisted like bike inner tubes. Snipped into the fishy meat and stripped them back to a necklace of bones that the ants scissored clean, smoothed out the skin to pin and tan, kept them living some more. The pellars put the speckled braggaty worm into a circle lined out in the dirt by a springy hazel switch, which is better than nailing them up to the barn door to writhe out their poison by sundown. I have not seen it done, nor heard tell of it in living memory, as people and adders don’t cross like they did when the mines marched along the coast and up onto the moors. People are just not so cunning anymore either, but they remain as cruel. Nor have I seen a Milpreve stone – the milky gem said to be produced by the boiling mass of adders in their great sexual knots – that is, outside of the case in our local museum. But I know that the great worms are still out there, the king and queen snakes thick as a strong man’s arm, long as a man is tall, able to wrap a church a dozen times and squeeze up all the bones from their coffins, able to dance on their tails as high as the bell tower and to pull the jangling bells away with them on their bell ropes to throne rooms in abandoned shafts that go right down to hell.

Pretty things they are, quiet, older than us all, wiser. So I say that there is no churchyard without an adder, but that there are adders without the church. I have cast my lot with them, and accept the emnity of those who know better, having supped on poison from their religion of false love.