by Amber Foxx
Mae felt weak. Joe tugged open the door, and the snake’s skin twisted, forcing more blood out.
“Yo’ hands smaller.” He pointed to the snake.
Mae realized he was telling her to pull the dead snake out. What if it tore apart? Was that possible? But if it had crawled in, it should come out intact. Snakes were tough. She slid a hand between the panes, but there wasn’t room to make a fist and grab. She didn’t have small hands, only smaller than Joe’s. The only way she could get a grip was between two fingers, not a strong enough hold to pull.
In touching it, she felt a reverence. Respect. She hadn’t expected that.
Joe laid a hand on the railing. “Have to take the door off.” Was he speaking more clearly, or was she finally learning to speak Joe?
“Be careful of the railing,” she said. “Don’t lean it on that, it’s rotten.”
“Whole house is rotten. Wonder it don’t fall in on you.” As Joe began to work the door loose and lift its top out of its frame, Mae came around to help support it. They carried it down and laid it in the grass, smeared with blood and scales. The dead snake fell to the porch.
“All yours.” Joe walked to the hose at the side of the house and turned it on to wash his knife. “What you want with him? Make some potions? Do some charms?”
Did he really believe his own gossip? “You’re the one that does charms and potions, not me.”
“So you know how I got to be a hunnerd years old. Hunh.” Joe shut off the faucet. Drying his knife on his pants, he folded it and stuck it in his pocket. “Yeah, got some good charms.” He looked at the porch and the snake. "But I don’t mess with no snakes. No bats. No cats. No graves. None of that.”
“Neither do I.”
“Hunh.” He shook his head and started back up her yard toward Ronnie’s. “Got charms against people like you.”
“Joe, I’m not a witch or anything. I’m just—unlucky. Honestly.”
“You say so.” Turning to face her from a distance, he spoke more clearly and carefully than she’d ever heard him. “I say, weren’t for me keepin’ folks wary you’d be a whole lot worse. Nobody call you out.”
Mae washed the bloody glass, hosed off the porch, and wrapped the body of the snake in a trash bag. It stunned and angered her to find that Joe wasn’t just being the joker, the gossip, the Local Character, but that he really believed what he said about her. She tried to argue more while he clipped hedges, but all he did was sing under his breath, ignoring her.
When she had finished cleaning up, it felt good to get away from Joe and back into the house, up the stairs to the attic to get the screen door, an easier task to do solo than put the glass door back in. It was time for the screen door anyway. Hubert could help her put the heavy door back on later so the house wouldn’t get cold at night.
When she opened the attic door, the heat surprised her, like that space between the panes. As she walked towards where the screen door lay on its side against a few boxes of summer clothes, she noticed the box with her Granma’s stones. She had put her own crystals in it as well and the crystal book. Had she told Dana she’d try to find Charlie? It would have to be an emergency to make her do that. She had no idea if he'd simply broken off with Dana or if he’d outright police-report-missing-person disappeared. If he was really missing, these might help if she looked for him. Might protect her if she found him. The idea of looking for him made her almost as uneasy as the aftermath of the snake.
If Mae hadn’t answered that call, she would have stepped right out onto the snake. Some folks said copperheads didn’t use much venom on the first bite—they would only cripple you if they didn’t strike twice. But it was hard to say what would have happened. She might have lived, might have died. It was a long drive to the hospital.
That would have been the final stroke of bad luck. Twenty-six years old until three o’clock today. Mama always said she labored the seven-to-three shift to have me. I did almost die on my birthday.
Stunned, Mae sat down and plunged her hands into the box of stones, pulling out a handful of her grandmother’s crystals and staring at them. You’re cursed until you answer your calling.
Was that possible? Confused and cautious, not sure why she did it, she put one small crystal in her pocket, closed the box halfway, and guided the screen door to the stairway. It was awkward keeping it from sliding down ahead of her, but she managed, and got it through the house without knocking anything over. Her thoughts spun. The twins would be home by three. She had to put up the screen to keep the bugs out, had to call Dana back and find out what she meant by “gone.” And of course, get rid of the dead snake.
So far, no wasps had come in. Negotiating the screen out the open back door, Mae looked at the bag with the snake in it. Somehow, she couldn’t bring herself to put that poor creature in her trash can, not after seeing it suffer, not after touching it. It was a wild thing, powerful and beautiful. It should go back into the woods and the earth.
Carrying the bag with the late copperhead, Mae walked along the windbreak, avoiding the soft, mounded furrows of the field. Ronnie drove a tractor towards the back of the field, turning over the winter grass to get ready to plant peanuts. Part of her mind said what she was doing was ridiculous. It wasn’t like she had to give the snake some kind of funeral. But it felt like she did. She stood still, looking for the right spot.
Suddenly, she knew. If Ronnie saw, though, he’d be telling Joe about her witching for sure. Why give those old men something to gossip about?
No—why not? They’d do it anyway. She’d do what felt right to her, even if it scared the pants off a bunch of superstitious blabbermouths. There was no point in trying to seem normal in this town any more. Joe would be talking up a new rumor any minute as it was.
She cut through to other side of the windbreak, watching the leaves and twigs for more snakes, and crossed the next field, stepping between the rows, making a diagonal line towards the next field and the next windbreak.
Behind one of the houses past the back of the post office, a dog on a chain barked and tugged at its confinement, while a woman hung clothes on a clothesline. Behind the next house, guinea fowl squawked. The next stretch of field brought her up behind the church. At the church, there was silence. Deep, shady, cool, moist silence, as if the town couldn’t penetrate the place. Mae entered the graveyard from the side and paused. The sun was past directly overhead, looked like a little after one o’clock. It seemed like it had been a year since she’d answered her phone and seen that snake, that it had happened in another world, to another person, but it had only been a little over an hour.
She walked to Elizabeth Andrews Tyler Ridley’s grave and stood by it, reading the stone again. With the yellow lichen on the damp gray rock, the name softened with years, it looked like it had become part of nature now, as had the long-ago Elizabeth. As Mae would someday. Something connected inside her. She felt inner parts click together like the vertebrae of the snake, coming into a line of action and meaning she couldn’t put words to. Something was happening, shifting into place. The sun felt warm on one side of her face, the shadows cold on the other, and the ground chilly through the soles of her shoes.
Mae opened the bag, knelt, and gently shook the dead copperhead out onto the grave. She couldn’t explain if anyone found out about it, and didn’t care. This was the full circle, it made sense. It was exactly right.
What a beautiful creature, even cut and lifeless. She felt like she was looking at death itself, and yet also at life. Not speaking aloud, but to some spirit, or even to some kind of snake ghost, to something she felt but couldn’t lay a name to, Mae said an inner thanks. For what, she wasn’t sure. But she felt grateful.
As she stood, bunching up the trash bag, she sensed herself lighter, almost empty, like a different person would walk home from the one who’d walked here, like she’d left some part of her on this grave with the snake. Starting home the way she’d come, she glanced back at it. If the crows didn’t pick it
clean before the church league ladies came to groom the graves, there’d be a scream she would hear all the way to her house.
She walked across the greening grass towards the field, looking down at tiny blue flowers with yellow lines in their delicate hearts and the tiny pink-purple flowers that the twins liked to pick.
“Evenin’.” A man’s drawling, gravelly voice from behind the church froze her. She knew that voice. Used to think it was sexy, back when she was foolish. It still was, in a way, but it didn’t melt her any more. Mack Tyler. “Grooming the Ridley graves?”
He sat on the low stone steps at the back of the church, a little satchel beside him along with a book, a bottle of brandy, and a glass tumbler. A notebook lay on the steps, and a cigarette smoldered in a glass ashtray. It was like he’d set himself up a little parlor here. Like in their old house, where he’d drink and imagine he’d be a great writer someday, when he couldn’t even hold down a job at a burger joint.
His misty gray eyes with deep shadows under them warmed a little. He needed a shave, but that made him look the way some movie stars did on purpose, like men on the covers of magazines. With a hint of a smile, he said, “Happy Birthday.”
“You didn’t come here to tell me that. What the heck are you doing here?”
“I’m buried here.” He nodded towards the graves. “I should ask what you’re doing here. After all, I’m a good old whiskeypalian Tyler.”
“How’d you get here? Where’s your truck?”
“Totaled. Lost my license. Come up through the woods. I stay at Uncle John Tyler’s.” Mae knew the place. It was up past the church a little further, an old house with land. “Can’t commit any crimes of intoxication or inhalation there, as a condition of my tenancy.” He took a drag on his cigarette, set it gracefully back into the ashtray. “So I seek the company of a few relations who shared my vices in their day.”
Mae looked at the book and the notebook. “Don’t you have a job?”
“No. I believe someone had me arrested back in December. Would that be your mother-in-law? Our future mayor?” He smiled. “Heard you had a hand in that.”
“What’d you hear?”
He sipped his brandy. “Nothing I believe.” If he’d seen her drop that snake’s body he’d probably think otherwise. Mack smiled a crooked half smile, tilted his head quizzically. “But then I never expected I’d see you at a church, either, even on the outside.”
She tried to think of an explanation, and wondered what Mack would say if she told him the truth. It could hardly matter, could it? Between Joe and Rhoda-Rae and everybody in between, there were enough tongues wagging about her that one more was nothing. Still, she hedged. “I’m buried here, too.”
Mack took another sip and another drag and rose, somehow managing to be elegant in his length and thinness, not yet so drunk that he was clumsy. He had such a tolerance it could take all day to knock him out. “Show me.”
She didn’t want to, and held back as he walked toward Elizabeth’s stone. It was strange to be talking Mack at all. It had been years with nothing between them but a passing polite greeting in a grocery store or on a street. She'd thought he still lived in Cauwetska somewhere. But of course, he was running out of options.
Mack reached the grave, looked at the stone. “Who’s she to you? You’re a Martin.”
Mae caught up with him. “She’s someone who married both a Tyler and a Ridley ... Died at my age.”
Mack eyed the snake, and one corner of his mouth turned up. “Nice flowers.”
Skipping Joe’s accusations and her history of strange connections with this grave, she gave the short version of how the snake had died on her birthday, hours before she was really twenty-seven. That was coincidence enough. “So it seemed right somehow, putting this snake here. That’s the best I can explain it.”
“It’s poetry.”
“What do you mean?”
“God’s a poet, you’re a poet ...” He began to wander toward another stone. “See, I am buried here.” Mae followed. “MacArthur Tyler. And Hubert Ridley’s over there somewhere. And probably someone named Ridley Tyler MacArthur and Tyler MacArthur Ridley. It’s a wonder we don’t all have two heads and five legs like those frogs Miss Sallie runs on about.”
Apparently craving his drink and smoke, Mack ambled back to his improvised parlor on the back steps. “I plan to vote for her, by the way. She’s got more intelligence in her back pocket than Ronnie Farmer has in his entire cerebral cortex.”
“Mack. What’d you mean about poetry?”
“You’re not buried here.” He sat down. “You never will be.”
Mae remained standing, looking down at his head as he bowed it to take a smoke. He had a gray hair or two, like he was getting old fast. “I will be someday,” she said.
He said each word slow and low and emphatic. “No, you will not.” He took a drink. The glass, Mae noticed, was etched with a monogram, a big old English T in the middle, some Tyler heirloom from Uncle John’s. “You no more belong here than a peacock in a chicken house. I’m part of this.” As if to illustrate, he poured a ceremonial drip of brandy from the bottom of his glass onto the ground. “Like the Ridleys. But I can’t see you in twenty years working that farm. Since when did Mae Martin say, I want to be a farmer in Tylerton when I grow up? I fell in love with the best mind—and God’s own ass if I may say so—that I’d ever met.” Mack sighed, knocked his heel in against a stone step. “Nothing wrong with the Ridleys. Like I said, I’d vote for Sallie twice if I could. But you don’t belong. And you know it. You’re not buried here. I am.”
Everything she’d once loved about him, his intelligence, his passion, his voice and his eyes, came back to her, and with it the despair she’d felt over him. The drinking. The meaningless flings with girls he met in bars while Mae worked the night shift as a front desk clerk. The apologies, the charm, the emptiness of it all. “You could have been something. Should have been something.”
“I’m a poet.” He opened the notebook and read, “Five Preludes to Failure, by MacArthur Tyler.” He took a breath, closed his eyes, and recited, “Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, alcohol.”
She used to want to help him, to undo all this damage. But she’d given up, and now he had. He’d adopted the role of the failure, fallen for the romance of the brilliant drunk. Already buried.
“Now—” He opened his eyes, picked up his pen, and accidentally knocked his empty glass over. It rolled noisily along the roughhewn steps and into the flowering grass with a damp thud. “Here’s your poem.”
His hand whipped along the page, ill-formed letters sloping down across the pale blue lines. He tore the paper off and handed it to her. She read:
He died so I could live
Trapped between two doors
Eve at the tree of knowledge
Bites once more.
“Don’t say I never gave you anything.” Mack picked up his glass and refilled it. “Happy Birthday.”
Mae walked home along the street, rather than back through the fields. One of the guinea fowl perched on the top of a streetlight, like a dinosaur bird. She passed under it and turned in at the post office, stopping to stuff the empty black bag into the trash can as she came in the door. End of ceremony.
She walked to the wall of mailboxes and saw there was something inside hers, not just the usual pleas for funds with free address labels, but a white, square envelope, hand addressed. It looked like a birthday card. She knew that writing. Daddy.
Chapter Eighteen
At home in the kitchen, standing at the counter, Mae sipped a glass of sweet tea and turned over the unopened envelope, touching her father’s writing, fearing both the revelations and the possible lack of them. What was she going to do with the sight? What if Daddy’s card still didn’t tell her everything?
In the backyard, Privilege courted one of the black-and-white females, who crouched head low tail high, and yowled her availability. Mae turned away before she could see the c
onsummation. Seemed rude to watch, even if it was cats.
Her cell phone rang and she recognized the number now—Dana.
Dana didn’t even say hello. “Did you get rid of your snake?”
“Yeah, thanks. Neighbor’s gardener killed it.” Mae carried her father’s card into the living room and set it in the middle of the coffee table, like some special book or piece of pottery. It would have to wait for a quiet time, for the attention it deserved. “What’s with looking for Charlie? Is he really missing?”
“He took off. Has Randi and Dr. Hart covering his classes, no explanation. If the dean knows why, she’s not telling me. Paula—Dr. Hart—says it’s only for a few days, but ...” Dana faded out.
“I don’t mean to judge, but ... is this really something you’ve got a right to know? It doesn’t sound like an emergency.”
“You’re as bad as the dean.”
“Ask him when he gets back. I’m not messing with Charlie.”
“Bernadette’s gone, too.”
No. Not together. Mae wanted desperately for that not to be true. “Did Bernadette say where she was going?”
“Some meeting or conference. She’s been gone to a lot of those lately. Charlie asked Randi to take care of Bernadette’s cat, so I don’t think they left together, but ... I don’t know. I don’t like it.”
Mae didn’t either. Bernadette hadn’t expected Charlie to leave town. He was her cat-sitter. Would he have deliberately left later for the same place so they wouldn’t seem to be together? Or would he have followed her uninvited? Mae didn’t like either scenario, and for a second she was tempted, but it had been bad enough to see their past by accident. “I’m sorry. Nobody’s lost or in danger. I can’t morally justify spying on them.”
“I’ll pay you well.” Dana sounded commanding as she offered the money, but when Mae didn’t say anything in response, Dana softened, her voice becoming young and sad. “Please. I have to decide about Charlie. I need to know.”