We were moving old linens, musty-smelling and yellowed, from a dresser when we found the snake in the bottom of the drawer, coiled there so restfully it might have been a forgotten belt left behind by a long-dead aunt. Maybe one of us even reached for it before instinctively pulling away in horror. That part I don't remember. I just remember both my sister and I screaming bloody murder and running out of the room to get help.
Our panicked cries startled our granny from a nap in her favorite spot, the little brown corduroy rocker in the middle room. That was what we called the room that was too wide for a hall, too small for anything else, from which every other important part of the house stemmed off. It held two rickety bookshelves and a cumbersome piece of make-do furniture cobbled together from an old Victrola case, an organ top, and sundry boards found on the farm by my grandfather long before I was born. My aunt Becky had painted most the furniture in the house the same shade of dark brown back when people wanted all their things to match. My mother hated it, but Becky was the only daughter to stay behind and so she ran the show.
The middle room also housed a forgettable little chair that only tickles the memory because it seemed to be there for stubbing toes; a big metal ring for firewood, perfectly framing a lifetime of nicks and scars in the plasterboard; and a wood stove that stuck out at such a threatening angle you might say the chimney brandished it. It was a room that took all the things that didn't fit anywhere else and led you to where you needed to get. It was a little room with a low ceiling, four doors, and no windows. It was neither pretty nor charming; it was quite simply useful, a clumsy stitch that nonetheless pulled the parts together.
Grandma was closer to eighty than seventy by then, though she hadn't seemed to age to use much, except for getting thinner. Her hair was still the same breezy cloud of white floating up and away from her face. She wore still her typical outfit: a flowered house dress that fit like a sack; off-white compression hose, sagging at the ankles; bulky orthopedic shoes the color of circus peanut candy; and a reliably warm and inevitably moth-eaten cardigan. Tucked in her hand there was always a rumpled hanky for wiping her eyes or her nose, for coughing into, perhaps even just to fill the hollow of her palm. Being empty handed was not natural for women like Grandma.
The day we found the snake in the drawer was humid and overcast, a dim summer day of drab green leaves, curled for rain, and veils of gnats looking for blood and wet eyeballs to float in. This was long after the candy sweet colors of spring have withered and dropped and scattered on the wind. It was a day when, for the first time, Grandma's house felt small and musty and, strangely, lonely. Unlike past visits, when uncles, aunts, and cousins all crowded the rooms, where we would all eventually leave and go home to our own houses, there was nothing like a holiday to this day. No potluck supper, no church gossip, no commiserating about the militant blacks and stupid Democrats, no shrieks of laughter and sometimes torture from cousins tumbling and tossing out in the side yard. For me and maybe for my sister, Bird, it was a sad and frustrating day.
It was the day we were dropped off with a few boxes of clothes and things from our old rooms and told to try to make ourselves comfortable in the little bedroom we'd be sharing at Grandma's house for the next six months. Our old house, the little rancher with the pool, the pond, the pine forest and the other forest where the leaves dropped in autumn and came again in spring - all this was our past. I don't remember how much warning we got before my folks sold the old place, Deer Point, but it was not enough.
It would have taken a year to say a proper good-bye. It would have started with my birthday in October. I would have walked down to the soggy dell near the pond and eaten some of the persimmons after a frost, when the cold had taken the tannins off and left the fruit jammy and sweet. Countless winter good-byes, written in snow, dripped from icicles, nudged into letters from bits of tinsel and Christmas tree needles, would have followed. In the spring, I would have said good-bye to the cradle of branches in the pink mimosa tree where I used to sit and fantasize about another life. As I drowsed on a blanket in the summer heat, I would have mourned the last glimpse of new green apples in the orchard. Floating on a blow up raft on the pool, my fingers skimming the crystal clear water, I hope I would have inhaled deep the smell of chlorine and cocoanut sun tan oil, squeezed my eyes shut, hearing the chatter and laughter of my older girl cousins, and said good-bye to each of these sounds and smells. Deer Point was where I was taught to read and where I lost myself in every wild dream. We were woven together, a part of my soul, and each shaded grove and sunny pasture.
When autumn came and the days grew shorter, my year of good-byes would have drawn to an end. Perhaps I'd have roamed back over the wet, dank grasses near the persimmon tree again and, knowing it was not quite yet time, I might have pulled one down and eaten it early, though it was bitter and dried my mouth out, just to have one last taste of this part of myself.
That was not to be.
My mother and father were set to build their new home on the site of an old family garden, so close to Grandma's and Becky's house that you could walk to it through the woods in less than five minutes. Moving in with Grandma while it was built meant saving money that might have gone to a rental and being close to the project for keeping an eye on things. In the clear-eyed and sane thinking of the grown up world, they made a wise choice.
For them, Deer Point was complicated. It was the site of a business venture that had failed, the campground that went under during the gas crunch of the 70s. It was the house they took a loan out on when the interest rate was about twenty percent. It was never said, but maybe for Mom it was also the site of too many scenes of her painful struggles: long nights of waiting for my father's commute from the city to end with the glint of his headlights in the front window; falling in love with pets that disappeared or were hit by a car; hurled threats, hurled Tupperware, a knife held to her wrist as she waited for her children to beg her not to end it.
It was certainly a painful reminder of how my mom's anxieties were making her world shrink. Her phobia of driving over bridges made getting from town to Deer Point a constant strain and misery. Thankfully my sister Molly was calm and brave enough long before the state of Virginia said she could drive to get behind the wheel at one end of the bridge each day and get us all to the other side. It couldn't have been longer than half a football field, that stretch of concrete that spanned a thin fork of the Shenandoah, but to Mom it was a seamless Red Sea. The bridge was a thing that could not be trusted not to crumble.
But now Molly was married and gone. Neither Bird nor I were old enough to drive us over the bridge and Mom had been getting worse. Moving close to Grandma's meant moving to the same side of the river where our town huddled at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It meant she could come and go with kids or groceries and not be confronted by the fear that crippled her - humiliated her - left her less confident. Darkened the circles under her eyes and robbed the rose from her smile.
At least Molly's wedding left one really joyful memory behind to remind the mossy flagstones, the golden maple, and the flat field just behind the house that there had also been laughter and music, at least at times, and a small bride with red hair and a white dress, hand-stitched by my mother, as perhaps she dreamed about her new house, the road with no river or bridge winding upward into the very hills where she had once been a careless girl.
Maybe fearfulness skips a generation. I never think of Grandma as easily daunted. When we came out of that bedroom like bees flying out of a hive, spinning and buzzing, all aflutter, she shook off her immediate confusion, rose on shaking legs from her rocker, and told us to settle down and tell her what was the matter. Once we'd explained things, she set her mouth and she turned on her heels, watching her feet carefully because she was not always steady on them anymore, and she went out of the funny middle room, through the kitchen, out over the back porch, and found at the edge of the garden the hoe she had laid down earlier that morning.
We followed Grandma's every step, casting looks at one another now and again. I think we knew what she was planning and were wondering if she could pull it off. There had been talk amongst our parents and the aunts and uncles about her health. They whispered about mini-strokes in her sleep, about how her words were a little slurred, her steps slow, her thoughts muddled. She could still make blueberry coddler, weed the garden, get breakfast ready - it was true - but she was not doing well, they said.
We followed along behind her now as she retraced her steps. Only when she left the middle room on the other side, stepping into the back bedroom where we would be sleeping, did we hesitate for a moment. Then we edged forward to watch her. She shuffled past the foot of one of the twin beds, the room so small it was merely a series of narrow pathways between furniture, and she stood over the open drawer and peered down at the snake. Her sweater sagged from her shoulders and now I could see a little of what her children saw. She was not just thinner than before. She was delicate in a way she had never been.
Our grandma for as long as we could remember was like a soft pillow on a hard mattress, softness and strength in even measure. She always walked with head forward, feet falling wider than her shoulders, probably a gait learned when balancing a kid on one hip and a load of firewood under the other arm. Her thick, inelegant fingers, spotted and creased, had until recently never been idle. Perhaps the question of a weakening body as we age is really just a chicken or egg debate about whether or not its good for us to ever really slow down. I find it on my mind as I grow older and just now I vote for falling dead in my traces like a workhorse. Maybe I'll feel differently when I'm as old as Grandma was that day.
Bird and I stood at the doorway, our hands on the trim, and we waited to see what Grandma had in her. If she failed and the snake struck out, it's hard to say if we'd have dashed forward to drag her out of its reach. Something tells me we would have run screaming out into the road. In a world where a bridge in a road could render our mother white as a sheet in our neat-nick Aunt Alice's house, we were perhaps not conditioned for reasonable reactions to small, fearful things.
The thing about raising nine children on a little country farm during the Depression and World war II is that you've already killed your fair share of snakes. It is a knowable enemy. Her shoulder muscles may have softened like butter in a warm kitchen, but there was etched in them the memories of a younger woman, more vigorous, who no one ever taught the art of snake killing, but who mastered it nonetheless. That woman had brought a hoe down on a coiled copperhead just outside her kitchen door, in striking distance of her children, when her hair was still walnut brown and her waist thick from a recent pregnancy. It landed hard and it landed true, cut it in pieces and stopped it in its tracks. She took the head off another and stretched the body over the drive to scare her husband on his way home from work. Stood laughing with the children at her skirts as he edged close and fell back, a hapless coward when it came to legless slithering creatures. These were the ones that stood out, each because they carried venom, but there had been others, killed for just being there. It was not the pacifist or the nature lover's way, not how future vegan grandchildren would do things. For women like Grandma, fear was a side note. The thing that mattered was having the will and having the right tool.
Earlier that same morning, she'd used her sturdy old hoe to nudge weeds away from the tomatoes without ever nicking their tender green stalks. She could be surgical with the wide plate of metal with its thin, strong swan neck and its long wood handle, worn by her palms to an elegant polish over years of use. Now as we watched she brought it up and down again for the last time on a snake.
And she cussed when she killed it, though my mother and my remaining aunt would likely call me a liar than own it. She called it a son of a bitch and she said it with clinched teeth and narrowed eyes. There is a tension to everything in us when at last we get up the courage to do a thing. It makes everything draw up tight, like the muscles that link our backs to our shoulders and our mouths to our jaws and our eyelids to our cheeks. She was staring down an old foe, one that thought it caught her sleeping, and dared to come into her house, shit on her old table clothes, terrify her grandchildren, disturb her nap.
After it was dead, she handed Bird the hoe, and Bird took it out of the house, held out in front of her, knowing it had blood on it, knowing it was a murder weapon. Grandma glanced over her shoulder as she pulled the drawer free from the dresser, but she did not ask me to take the drawer. Maybe she knew it would mortify me to do it, not because the snake could hurt me anymore, but because seeing it dead would not change my fear of it. Perhaps she simply thought of it as her mess to clean up. I watched her walk by me with it and I didn't dare look down at the gore inside. It was bad enough that, once she had it rinsed out, it would wind up being where my school clothes went.
It was funny how the snake turned the day around. At least it gave us all something to talk about at supper. Grandma seemed a little pleased with herself, though she waved off the awe of Aunt Becky and Mom as they laughed and called her fearless. She would never do something quite this bold again. She would grow weaker and more confused and before any time had passed she would be the last person you'd think to run to for help.
Now when I remember her in those moments before she brought the edge of the hoe down on the snake, I remember how soft the light was coming through the window. It made her hair into a white mane, maybe a silver nimbus, and it gave the room a pale blue mournfulness. Nothing could ever shake off my sense of sadness about that room. It could not be forgiven for not being my own room because I could not let go of what I had been asked to leave behind to get there.
Losing Deer Point was too raw, too hurtful, and to some extent I still mourn it. It was the place where my soul met a galaxy of little blue flowers nestled in red pine needles and I found that I belonged to this world even when other people made me feel like an outsider. There I watched flocks of geese come and go with the seasons, my eyes turned up to a friendly blue sky, my legs tickled by the whiskery heads of tall yellow grasses. There were so many places to hide there, when I needed to be soft or tearful or just to dream, the loner in a family that did not understand boys with soft voices and girlish ways.
My grandma was a gardener all her life, planting for her family, and in some ways I think she planted something in me the day she killed that snake. And like the seeds of the garden, lying dormant for a time until the sun is warm enough, the lesson took a while to inch into sight. Sometimes there isn't time to ask oneself what will happen if we miss our mark or if the snake bites. Just know where you last put down your most trusted tool, gather up your muscles tight as a spring, and swing out with all your might. You're bound to hit something.
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