Snakes

Cherry Lake

I am five years old. My brothers, Jimbo and Teddy, are three and one. We are driving with our parents to Cherry Lake to swim. It is summer, so Daddy doesn’t have to be Pinetta School principal every single minute, some afternoons he is free to be our father.

We are all dressed in swimsuits. In the back seat my brothers hold inner tubes blown into the shapes of animals, but mine is a pink doughnut shape. The back seat full of inner tubes makes it seem like more than three children—like a birthday party with balloons. It is as hot as blazes and twice as hot in the car. It is hot the way only Florida knows how to be, the sun’s rays like long, sharp needles pricking us with heat, the car fender gleaming hot, steam rising from the pavement. Our hair is wet and plastered to our heads making small, black curls around our ears. The car windows are down, but the breeze is hot breeze. We are happy. Our towels and flip-flops are scattered about the back seat. Jimbo, Teddy and I take turns hanging our heads out the window, or leaning over the front seat to look at our parents’ faces. Are they happy too?

Cherry Lake is not far from Pinetta. The family that lives next door to us goes to Cherry Lake every weekend to fish and swim. My brothers and I stand in the yard and wave goodbye to them on Saturday mornings as they drive off with their picnic basket, pulling their fishing boat on a trailer behind them. But today they stood in the yard and waved to us. They looked surprised as we drove away. It is a Wednesday.

Daddy turns off the highway onto a red dirt road. A sign says Cherry Lake 5 Miles. We are nearly there. Palmetto leaves look like green fans on the sides of the road. Daddy is singing. He wants this to be a happy day for us. It cannot be a happy day for Daddy unless it’s a happy day for Mother. It cannot be a happy day for Mother unless it’s a happy day for us. This is how our family works. So Daddy is trying hard, singing, “The sun so hot I froze to death, Suzanna don’t you cry.” He wants Mother to sing too, and we look at her, hopeful.

“Oh, my God!” she shrieks.

Daddy slams on the brakes slinging Jimbo, Teddy and me hard against the front seat. Teddy cries. Across the road, stretched nearly from side to side, are two huge, fat snakes sunning themselves. Mother reaches into the back seat for Teddy. “Shhhhh,” she says to him, putting her finger to her lips, but looking straight ahead. “Do they have rattlers?” she whispers, her eyes squinted, her voice aimed at Daddy. “Listen. See if you hear rattlers.”

Pinetta is famous for rattlesnakes. Every year they have a rattlesnake round-up, lots of men pouring kerosene down snake holes and smoking the snakes out, catching them in croaker sacks, weighing and measuring them, sending the best snakes to Ross Allen’s Snake-Atorium at Silver Springs where they have the glass bottom boats. Pinetta takes pride in the size and number of rattlesnakes they have provided Ross Allen. The unremarkable snakes they sell to make hat bands and boots —and some of them they eat. The man who lives next door has been to the rattlesnake round-up. He says rattlesnake meat tastes like frog legs. But we haven’t been. Mother doesn’t believe in eating snakes. She hates them.

“Don’t worry,” Daddy says. “I’ll run over them.”

Mother gasps. Her bare feet spring from the floorboard to the seat. She wraps her arms around her knees. “Okay,” she says. “I’m ready. Hurry, hurry.”

Jimbo, Teddy and I lean over the front seat, watching. Daddy steps on the gas and the car moves. We all scream as we drive over the snakes. We imagine them thumping against the underside of the car. We think we feel a bump as we go.

Afterwards Daddy stops the car and we all stare out the rearview window. There lie the snakes, exactly as they were. One snake lifts his head, the other begins to slowly curve himself into a z. “They ’re not dead,” Mother says.

“I’ll back up,” Daddy says.

My brothers and I shriek. We begin jumping up and down in the back seat, slapping each other with our inner tubes. Daddy puts the car in reverse and backs over the snakes. Mother closes her eyes. Daddy stops the car again to view the damage. The snakes rearrange themselves lazily, still claiming the center of the road.

“Those snakes must be seven feet long,” Daddy says. “I’ ve never seen such big snakes. They don’t even feel these tires.”

Mother looks at the snakes. They don’t seem to understand that we are running over them with a two-ton car. So Daddy tries again. Shifts into drive, then into reverse, running over the snakes without stopping. Jimbo and Teddy and I squeal as we are slung back and forth between the front seat and back seat. Again and again. Now Mother’s face is on her knees, her hands covering her head.

“Damn,” Daddy says, stopping at last. His hair is drenched. “Can you believe this? Look at that. They won’t die.”

On the road in front of us are the two snakes, one now belly up and writhing, having been flipped upside down by our car wheels, the other easing its way toward a clump of palmetto leaves on the side of the road.

“Maybe you have to run over their heads,” Daddy says.

“They’re getting away,” I say.

“I hate snakes,” Mother says, lifting her head to peer at them.

“Run over them again,” Jimbo says.

There is a rule in Pinetta. If you come across a poisonous snake you should kill it. Snakes are everywhere. Under the house, in our flower beds, in the weed patch where we play, circled around the leg of a lawn chair in the yard. Jimbo and I have already learned to look for snakes when we walk through the weeds or even when we sit in the shade of the Chinaberry tree and draw in the dirt with sticks. We look for snakes every step we take, every game we play, and maybe Teddy does too. Mother has taught us this.

When people in Pinetta kill snakes in their yard they carry them out to the edge of the road and sling them their mailboxes—for the neighbors to see. It’s a common sight. Not black snakes and garter snakes. Only rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, and coral snakes. The poisonous ones. Mother says she would not be a mailman in Pinetta for all the money in the world. Many a time a neighbor has hung a dead snake over the mailbox only to find out later that it had slithered away as soon as he turned his back. There is no way to count on a snake being dead. Even with their heads chopped off they can still bite you and kill you.

“I’m going to have to get out and kill them,” Daddy says, opening his car door.

“No,” I say.

“Don’t,” Jimbo shouts. But Mother was the one. “Don’t you dare,” she screams, grabbing Daddy’s arm, pulling him back in the car.

“I’ll get a stick,” he says. “A stick?” Mother looks at him like he’s crazy.

“I’ll hold their heads down with a stick and grab their necks so they can’t bite.” “You’re out of your mind,” Mother says, still holding Daddy by the arm.

“Then I’ll kill them with this.” Daddy pushes the car door open and stands on one foot, reaching into the pocket of his swim trunks for his pocket knife. It is the size of a finger nail clipper.

“Jimmy Thorton, get in this car,” Mother says. “Please.”

Daddy smiles. He begins to open the knife blade.

“Jimmy,” Mother says. “Please don’t.” She grabs his shirt and tries to pull him back into the car. Daddy loves this. He is all smiles. Jimbo and I grab him too, yanking his arm as hard as we can. “Stay in this car where you belong,” Mother says. “You’re scaring the children.” And she won’t let go of Daddy’s shirt, even when he tries to unpeel the fingers of her fist.

“I’ll get the tire jack out of the trunk,” he says. “I’ll chop them to bits with the jack.”

“NO!” we all shout, frenzied.

“You’re bare legged,” Mother says. “If they bit you...”

Daddy laughs at Mother. But she will not let go of him. She has stretched his tee-shirt completely out of shape trying to pull him into the car. Jimbo and I are pulling too, begging him not to go. And we don’t let go until he gets in the car and slams the door closed.

He pretends a few more times that he will get out and kill those two rattlesnakes once and for all, but each time Mother grabs him and refuses to let him go until he promises not to get out. This makes Daddy happy. He is smiling and laughing.

Meanwhile, the one snake rights itself and then both of them slide off the edge of the road through the sand spurs and into the palmetto thicket.

“Now,” Mother says, “we can go.” Daddy grins at her and presses the accelerator. The car moves slowly. “I wish you’d let me kill them,” Daddy says.

“Don’t be silly,” Mother answers. She puts her hand around Daddy’s leg as he drives. It is like she is getting a good grip on him in case he should suddenly try to jump from the car and kill something else on the road. He swerves all over the place as he drives.

 

That trip to Cherry Lake I knew my mother really did love my father. He knew it too, which was why he could barely keep the car on the road.

I don’t remember another thing about that day. Not whether we ever got to Cherry Lake. Not whether we enjoyed the buoyancy of our inner tubes, the luxury of staying afloat effortlessly, without having to struggle and kick, without worrying about sinking and drowning. I don’t even remember whether we enjoyed the hot dogs we roasted on unraveled coat hangers over an open fire Daddy built of sticks and dry wood.

 

The Window

I am ten. We live in Tallahassee now. Daddy has a job with the State Department of Education. He makes more money. We have just moved into our new house. Mother designed it herself and we barely got moved before the babies were born. Mother was expecting, but she didn’t know it was twins until thirty minutes before Paula and Pamela were born. Daddy was in Miami. He travels a lot now. So our neighbors drove Mother. She leaked bloody pregnancy juice all over Mr. Covington’s car seat. He said, “Don’t worry about it,” and picked her up and carried her into the emergency room when they got to the hospital. His wife, Ann, carried Mother’s overnight bag. They were so nice they made Mother cry. I stayed home and kept Jimbo and Teddy.

We thought we would name the baby Pamela Ann if it was a girl or Wayne Henry ifit was a boy. Mother didn’t have a name ready when the second baby girl was born. This bothered Mother because she likes to be prepared for everything that happens. Paula Lynn didn’t get named for three days.

The babies are six months old. Mother doesn’t cry as much now. We have a maid, Paris, who comes every day. Before Daddy goes out of town he takes Jimbo, Teddy and me aside and says, “Now, while I’m gone, the best way to help your Mother is to stay out of her way.”

Today Teddy is running a fever. He is sleeping in the pine-paneled study, but he wakes up and goes crazy slapping at the dark knots in the pine. He is shrieking and we all run to check on him. Mother feels his forehead. “You are hot as a firecracker,” she says. She hollers for Paris to bring the baby aspirin and a cool rag.

“What’s wrong with Teddy?” Jimbo says.

“He has a fever,” Mother says. Teddy continues slapping at the pine knots and crying. He thinks the knots are roaches crawling up the wall. He’s trying to kill them. He’s beating the wall with his fist. “Teddy, Teddy,” Mother says. “It’s okay.” She picks him up and kisses him while he struggles in her arms. Then Paris comes with the aspirin and they make Jimbo and me leave the room.

When Teddy falls asleep Mother comes out of the study and walks in to check on the babies in the playpen in the living room. Jimbo and I are watching Popeye on TV. Mother bends over and checks the babies’ diapers. When she looks up she sees the snake.

“Good heavens!” she says.

Then Jimbo and I notice it too. A snake has crawled up the side of the house and out onto the roll-out window. It is draped half on, half off the glass, sunning itself. Daddy is not home to kill it.

“I’m not studying no snake,” Paris says, when Mother tries to talk her into flipping it off the window with the broom handle and killing it with the hoe.

We stand in the living room watching the lazy snake, discussing what to do about him. There was nothing but the window screen between him and us. Mother walks over to the window yelling, “Stay back,” to Jimbo and me who want to get a closer look at the snake. She hurriedly winds the squeaky handle, and the window rolls down. The snake doesn’t have time to think what to do. It is clamped almost in half by the closed window. Paris walks over and turns the window handle as hard as she can too, to make sure. It is closed so tight that the snake is pinched in half and dangling. He is caught right in the center of the living room window.

“Now,” Mother says. She looks at Jimbo and me. “Don’t you touch this window until we’re sure he’s dead.”

 

The snake hangs in the window for four days. Every time Mother or Paris walks by they try to close the window even tighter. The snake has not moved at all in three days. “His circulation is cut off,” Paris says. He was beginning to look dry. The end of his tail was stiff. Jimbo and his friends like to stand outside and throw pine cones at the snake to see if it moves, but it doesn’t. We check on him first thing every morning. “Still there,” we say.

On the fifth day, Mother is sure he is dead. We watch through the window while she goes outside and pokes at him with the rake. He flops back and forth, lifeless. “Okay,” she yells to Paris, “you can open the window now.” Paris begins the unwinding. “Go slow,” Mother shouts.

Pamela and Paula sit in their playpen chewing on rubber clothespins. Jimbo and I watch Mother with admiration. When Paris unwinds the window completely, nothing happens. It is Mother’s idea to flip the snake onto the rake somehow and carry it to a little hole Jimbo and his friends dug for the snake to be buried in. It isn’t an easy thing. Mother fools with the snake until she gets afraid she will crack the glass in the window with the rake. The dead snake doesn’t want to come loose. One last try, and she manages to hook it on the rake prongs and sling it to the ground. Inside the house we all cheer.

But as Mother walks nearer, jabbing lightly at the dead snake, it raises its head. “Lord, God,” Paris shrieks. “It ain’t dead yet.”

“Run, Mother,” Jimbo and I scream. She takes a few flimsy whacks at the groggy snake, missing it each time, then she backs up and stares. That snake contracts into a long S and begins to move through the grass. Mother throws the rake at it and runs for the house. We watch the snake slide through the yard, cross the paved road, and go into the woods across the street.

“Good riddance,” Paris says.

Mother is afraid to let us play outside until the following day when Daddy comes home from his trip to Atlanta. He brings everybody presents in his briefcase. Mine is a piggy bank in the shape of a peach. Paula and Pamela get rattles that say Welcome to Georgia. Mother gets a Whitman’s Sampler. And Teddy and Jimbo get rubber snakes. Daddy holds the fake snakes by the necks and slings them out at Jimbo and Teddy, trying to be funny, saying, “Look out.”

I laugh, but Jimbo doesn’t. He throws his in the kitchen trash can which hurts Daddy’s feelings. “Hey buddy,” Daddy says to Jimbo. “What’s wrong?”

“If you don’t want yours can I have it?” Teddy asks. He digs through the trash can and gets it out. He holds the two rubber snakes up and puts their heads together like they are kissing at first, then he slaps them together making them fight.

Daddy looks at Mother and winks.

But all Mother says is, “You are never here when we need you, Jimmy.”

 

The Flower Bed

I am fourteen. We live in Richmond, Virginia now. Daddy is manager of a textbook publishing company here and has a fancy office in a tall building on Main Street. He has two secretaries and six sales representatives who work for him. His hair is getting gray.

Mother left six months ago taking Teddy and Pamela and Paula with her. They went back to Tallahassee, where Mother got a job working in a doctor’s office. She fills out insurance forms. I think she will miss the Virginia snow. Last year we had a white Christmas for the first time in our lives. Mother went outside and laid in the snow she liked so much. We taught her how to make angels. And Daddy gave everybody ice skates for Christmas. I don’t know what good ice skates will do in Tallahassee.

Jimbo and I want to go to live with Mother too, but we never said so when she left and we don’t say so now. The two weeks before she left Mother never got dressed. Every day when we came home from school she had on her nightgown. The day she left, yelling for Teddy and the twins to get what they needed and throw it in the car, she was wearing her nightgown and bathrobe and had not combed her hair all day.

“Where are you going?” Jimbo and I asked Mother when we got home from school and saw her loading the station wagon with a mattress and Pamela and Paula’s pink Barbie doll suitcases. “Where are you going?” we screamed.

“You can come if you want to,” she said. “Get whatever you want to take with you. But hurry.” Jimbo and I stood watching Mother. Her bedroom slippers flapped as she walked. “Hurry,” she told Teddy and the girls, “hurry.” It was like somebody had nailed me to the floor where I stood. Teddy and Pamela and Paula ran back and forth from their rooms slinging their things into the car, G.I. Joe and all his equipment, Barbie’s Fashion Runway and a pillowcase full of her outfits, the report on Zeus that Teddy was working on for school, a box of markers with lost lids, two female gerbils in a cage, no socks, no pajamas, no underpants. “I claim the front by the window,” Teddy yelled. It was the only thing he said. He sat in the front yard and stared straight ahead waiting for Mother.

“Where are you going? Tell us,” Jimbo begged.

“Come with me,” Mother said, “both of you.”

“We can’t,” I told her. Daddy will kill himself, I thought, when he comes home and sees this. He will jump off a bridge in the James River. He will die without us—without Mother.

“I love you,” she shouted as she backed out of the driveway. We tried to believe her. “I wish you would come with me.” into the James River. He will die without us —without Mother.

“I’ll call you,” Mother said, hugging us, crushing us, jabbing her fingernails into our skin. She got in the car and Teddy didn’t look at her. He looked straight ahead.

“I love you,” she shouted as she backed out of the driveway. We tried to believe her. “I wish you would come with me.” Her face was ugly, stretched too tight across her bones, and her hair was wild, she slapped at it, then moved her hand to her mouth and bit it, hard. “I have to go,” she said. “I have to.”

Pamela and Paula sat in the back of the station wagon on the mattress. They made their Barbie dolls wave goodbye to Jimbo and me in the rearview mirror.

Jimbo and I ran behind the car all the way down the driveway. “It’s okay,” we said. “Don’t cry.” The car tag says Virginia is for Lovers. Our number is LH-4687. I memorized it.

 

Now some nights Daddy puts a hundred-dollar bill down on the kitchen table. “This is yours,” he says to Jimbo and me, “if you will just call your Mother and ask her to come back.”

But we won’t do it.

Daddy sits in his chair and smokes cigarettes all night long. He wants Jimbo and me to tell him what went wrong. He wants us to explain things to him. We try to keep the house neat. It is neater than it ever was when Mother lived here. Nothing is messed up. But Daddy still sits in his chair and says to Jimbo and me, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life.”

Daddy hires Mrs. Foster to stay with us whenever he goes out of town. We hate her.

Daddy spends three nights a week in Washington, D.C. He is publishing something for the government. Mrs. Foster says she bets he has got a woman there. She says, “Your Daddy is not the kind to suffer long.”

But she never sees him sleeping in his chair. She doesn’t see him sit up all night trying to write Mother a letter. He doesn’t come into her room in the middle of the night and wake her up saying, “I just had a dream about your Mother. Wake up, Bethie. Listen. What do you think this means?”

I tell Daddy that if he doesn’t fire Mrs. Foster I will run away. This scares him because he cannot afford to lose anybody else. He says he will think about it. He says maybe Jimbo and I are responsible enough to stay alone.

 

It is Tuesday. Daddy goes to Washington on Tuesdays. After school Jimbo and I come home and fix bacon sandwiches and watch TV. We sit in the den downstairs with no lights on. We don’t talk. We just eat. Mrs. Foster has gone someplace. We ’re alone. The doorbell rings.

It’s the paperboy. He wants his money so I pay him. Then he tells me, “There’s a snake in your flower bed.” I look where he points. In the pine straw is a long black snake. I yell for Jimbo to come look.

“It’s harmless,” the paperboy says.

“I know,” I tell him.

Jimbo comes out and looks at the snake too. This attention makes the snake decide to climb up the side of the house to get away from us. We watch it crawl up the bricks. “How can he do that?” Jimbo says.

“Don’t let him climb up there and get in your attic,” the paperboy says. “They like to nest in attics.” I run to get the broom. When I come back the snake is climbing up over the doorway. I swing the broom at him gently, trying to brush him down.

“Give me that,” Jimbo says. He swipes at the snake and it falls back into the flower bed.

“He’s harmless,” the paperboy says, “but where there’s one snake, there’s two.” The snake begins to wriggle out of the shrubbery and into the clearing in the yard.

“Do you want me to kill it?” Jimbo asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Get the hoe,” he tells me. I run to the garage to get it, but can’t find it, so I get the shovel.

‘That won’t do,” Jimbo says. “We need the hoe.” He goes to the garage to look for it.

I stand watching the snake. It moves slowly. Without thinking what I’m doing I raise the shovel over my head and strike the snake as hard as I can. It bounces. I cannot believe myself. So I deliver another blow. And another one. What amazes me most is that I’m not afraid. It feels good to hit the snake.

“What are you doing?” Jimbo yells.

“It’s going to get away,” I say, “if you don’t hurry.”

Jimbo runs over with the hoe and chops at the snake with all his strength. The snake twists and jerks. The impact of the hoe makes marks on the snake’s skin, but doesn’t cut him open.

“Kill it,” I say.

Jimbo beats the snake with the hoe until it is limp and flopping like a piece of soft rope. “Is he dead?” he asks.

We aren’t sure. You can never tell about snakes.

“It seems so hateful to only half-way kill him and leave him to die slow,” I say. “It’s better to kill him completely, all at once.”

“Okay,” Jimbo says, whacking the snake with the hoe again. I lift the shovel and hit him too, to be sure. We beat him and beat him and beat him. It makes a terrible sound when Jimbo’s hoe strikes my shovel. The noise vibrates all the way up our arms and seems to shake our brains.

We keep at it until we are rubber-armed and can’t lift our hoe or shovel anymore. “He’s dead,” I say. “He has to be.”

Jimbo reaches down and picks up the dead snake with his bare hands. I can’t believe it. He drapes the snake over the hoe and carries it across the street and throws it into the wooded lot over there, shouting as he slings it, making a noise like a Tarzan yell, only worse. I stand in the yard and wait for him. When he turns to walk back home I look at his boy face. I love Jimbo.

 

When we get inside the house the phone is ringing. It’s Mother. She knows Daddy goes to Washington on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

“Hello,” I say. “We’re fine,” I say. “How are you?”

She says she and the little children miss us. She says she loves us.

“Jimbo just killed his first snake,” I say. “He beat him to death with a hoe.”

Mother gets quiet. “Let me talk to him,” she says.

But Jimbo won’t. He turns on the TV and listens while Douglas Edwards reads the world news. “He can’t come right now,” I say.

“I’m proud of him,” Mother says. “Tell him that.”

“I will,” I say. And we hang up.

I walk outside and sit on the front steps. The shovel and hoe lay slung across the walk. We should put them away before Daddy comes home. I like to sit outside in the late afternoon and breathe cool air. I like to watch the cars drive by our house, sometimes with their headlights on, fathers heading home from work, sleeping as they drive, and shorthaired mothers with backseats full of neighborhood children, delivering them home from baseball practice and piano lessons, stopping to let them out, their goodbyes echoing up and down the street, like the saddest music in the world.