Snakewoman of Little Egypt

  Jackson didn’t keep any brandy or cognac around, no hard liquor in the house. So they drank more wine. Jackson had always enjoyed unbuttoned after-dinner talk, but he was thinking of introducing a system of entertaining in which people came over for a good meal and then left right away. That’s the way his parents had entertained. Before they’d lived in Paris. But it would be hard to explain this to friends and colleagues when you were inviting them to dinner. I’d like you to come for dinner, but I want you to leave as soon as we’re finished eating.

  Jackson made a pot of espresso. He was afraid to drink any more wine because of the Lyme disease, but Claire kept topping off her glass. Ray tried to slow her down without being too obvious about it, offering to clear her plate and glass. But she was not about to let the glass go. Or the second bottle of white Burgundy, which was still half full.

  Later on, in the kitchen, as he was getting some clementines out of the hydrator, he had one of those inevitable refrigerator moments: You stand up and close the refrigerator door, and there she is, someone who wants to know how you really are. Someone you’ve been trying to avoid being alone with. You’ve been trying to avoid this moment. She’s unsteady. Glass in hand, she mouths her words: “You know I still love you, Jackson. Nothing can change that.”

  Claire was handsome at forty, just starting to look matronly. She wasn’t dressing her age, and tonight she’d drunk too much wine and was looking blowsy. Jackson wanted to say that plenty had changed “that.” But he didn’t say anything, because he remembered Claire. The way she used to be. So young, so full of hope. A different Claire. His first real love. His third, actually, after Sibaku in the Forest, and Suzanne Toulon in Paris. Would she have become a different woman, he wondered, if she hadn’t dumped him for Father Ray? And would he have become a different man?

  What had happened was, Claire and Jackson had come to Thomas Ford the same year. Both had been rising stars. Jackson had published a popular account of the four plus years he’d spent with the Mbuti, and Claire had an NEA fellowship under her belt. She also had a manuscript and a New York agent. She and Jackson soon became an item. Three years later they were still an item, but Claire’s novel, The Sins of the World, had been rejected thirty-nine times. Her classmates from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were publishing novels, winning prizes, getting reviewed. Claire’s agent dropped her—there were no more publishers left—and Claire had to start submitting it to contests. She was suicidal. Jackson was afraid she’d throw herself off the roof of her building. He told her not to worry, that nobody read novels anyway, but this was her vocation, her calling. She couldn’t just walk away from it. She started attending the Episcopal Church—Grace Church, on Broad Street—and she stopped going to bed with Jackson. She needed to be chaste for a while. She turned to Father Ray for spiritual advice, and he told her about God’s love and she told Jackson about it. Then the news came. The Sins of the World had won the Donner Prize. It didn’t matter that no one had ever heard of the Donner Prize. The book would be published. Claire sat on this news for quite a while. Jackson wanted to have a party, offered to throw a party. But Claire thought it was a time to be quiet. Thankful. Prayerful. The romance was over. Claire married Father Ray.

  She still came to see him now and then, when Father Ray was out of town or had a vestry meeting, and they’d make love on the big leather sofa in the living room. She thought she was doing him a favor, and he thought he was doing her a favor, and so it was never very satisfactory. But it was better than nothing.

  “You don’t need to say anything,” she mouthed. Putting her finger to her lips. Then out loud: “I’ll go with you to pick up Warren’s niece—what’s her name?”

  “Willa Fern.”

  “You shouldn’t have to face that alone.”

  The clementines were in a mesh sack. Jackson tumbled them into a glass bowl. “Would anyone like an espresso?” he shouted.

  2

  How I Lost My Faith

  Snakewoman” is a nickname I picked up in prison, and I’ve never revealed it to an outsider, though I’ve become attached to it in my own mind and in fact have come to think of myself as “Snakewoman.”

  What happened was that a big rattlesnake got loose in the dining area right after we got moved over from Cell Block A, and there was a general panic. No one ever figured out how it got there because there aren’t many snakes around Colesville, which is six hours north of Naqada, my hometown, and even if there were, how would a nine-foot serpent have gotten into the prison? Well, lots of other things got into the prison too, so maybe you shouldn’t be surprised. It probably came in on the back of a truck and got into the kitchen from the loading dock. However it got in, it came out of the kitchen and curled up in the dining room outside the double swinging doors. It had trouble getting traction on the waxed floor and became agitated and started to sing, and I couldn’t blame it because the cons were all agitated too, standing on chairs and tables and screaming. Though snakes don’t have ears and can’t hear.

  When the warden got there he walked right over to me—I was still sitting in my chair eating my powdered eggs—and asked me would I catch the snake. I could understand that somebody had to do something, and I saw an opportunity.

  “I’ll catch that snake,” I said, “if you’ll knock some time off my sentence.”

  “You know I can’t do that,” he said. It was hard to hear him because of the screaming. “But I could make your tickets disappear.”

  A ticket is when you get written up for breaking some rule, but I didn’t have any tickets.

  “How about if you forget to send my release date to my husband?” I asked. I wasn’t afraid of the snake, but I was afraid of my husband. He nodded.

  “And you could let my uncle pick me up here at the prison instead of sending me on a bus back to Naqada.”

  He nodded again. We had a deal.

  I was one year into a six-year sentence at the Henrietta Hill Correctional Center. It wasn’t too bad. Not the way I’d have chosen to live, but better than the way I’d been living back in Naqada. I needed a time-out from my old life.

  It was either a small canebrake rattler, or else a big timber rattler, but it wasn’t nine feet, which is what everybody was saying. Probably about four feet, which is big enough. It wouldn’t weigh more than three or four pounds. It unwound itself, moving slowly, looking for a hole to crawl into. It didn’t want to be there any more than I did. Finally it crawled—it was still having trouble getting traction—under a pallet of canned corn that had been set outside the doors because there wasn’t enough room in the storage area behind the kitchen. Big industrial-size cans of corn. I can close my eyes and still see the yellow kernels on the labels. Stacked six feet high. The snake started singing again, louder this time—bRRR bRRR bRRRRRRR.

  Everyone was watching me. Black Alice, who’d been giving me a lot of grief. Friends too. Home girls from Little Egypt—that’s southern Illinois. There were only a half a dozen of us.

  It was January. The snake should have been home asleep in its den. I figured it would be a little slow. Timber rattlers are slow to attack anyway.

  I didn’t have a snake hook, or a forked stick, but a hook or a stick wouldn’t have done me any good unless the snake came out from under the pallet. I got down on the floor and peered under the pallet. I didn’t hesitate too long because I didn’t want to freeze up. I grabbed it just above the rattle and pulled it out, just like I was going into the box at church and pulling out a snake. I jumped to my feet while the snake was trying to go into a coil. I swung it around my head a few times till it was too dizzy to coil or strike, and then I held it with two hands, one behind the head, one just above the rattle. I walked over to Black Alice, who was not black—they called her Black Alice as in black market. She was from Chicago and had it in for the hillbillies, but she was standing on a table just like everybody else. I asked her did she want to hold the snake. At least touch it. That was all it took. I had no trouble from Alice after that.
The guards were up on the tables too. They jumped down and started crowding me, but they were afraid to get too close. I had the power of the serpent.

  All my life I’d been taught not to handle a serpent unless it had been prayed over, and unless I was anointed with the Spirit. Well, this serpent hadn’t been prayed over, and I sure as hell hadn’t been anointed with the Spirit. I was done with the Spirit, in fact, and I was pretty sure the Spirit was done with me. But I felt the power anyway.

  Someone started shouting “Praise God.” I looked around, but I couldn’t see who it was. Probably one of the girls from down home.

  I was serving a six-year sentence for shooting my husband, Earl. It was August and hot and Earl and I had been fussing at each other for more than a while. Earl hadn’t had a drink in two years, but he had started drinking again and couldn’t stop. I was drinking too. He was pastor of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following. Everyone looked up to him, came to him for help. But he had backed up on the Lord. Backed up all the way.

  Most of the men in the Church of the Burning Bush backed up on the Lord every now and then, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for three or four years at a time. They’d go on a tear in Paducah or St. Louis, or they might go off and drive a big rig for three of four years, or go out and work in West Virginia where they were still mining coal, or out to the copper mines in Montana, or just disappear. And then they’d repent, get right with God again, and everybody’d welcome them home like prodigal sons.

  Well, Earl got himself backed up on the Lord and had to let his friend DX take over pastoring the church. He accused me of going with other men, said I had some kind of sex demon, and to tell the truth, he didn’t know the half of it. I was hoping, in a way, that he’d beat me up, but not too bad, just bad enough so I could get a divorce from him, like Eleanor Freeman, who was married to one of Earl’s friends from across the river in Kentucky. But it didn’t work for Eleanor, and it didn’t work for me. Instead Earl said he was going to kill me, which he could have done easily. He was big and strong. He’d been a fighter up in Chicago before he moved back to Middlesboro, over in Kentucky. People would hire him to beat up someone they were afraid to beat up themselves. That sort of thing, but that was before he got saved, before we got married.

  We were drinking vodka and orange juice and had worked our way through most of a bottle. Earl held my arm up behind my back. I tried to run away while he was fooling with the lock on the snake shed, but he never let go. He had a gun, a .22 double load. He forced me into the shed, where he kept about seventy snakes. In aquariums. It was temperature controlled. Air-conditioned. Better than the trailer we lived in. Not just rattlesnakes. We had a black mamba that Earl bought in Middlesboro when he was visiting the church there one time—he came to Naqada from Middlesboro—and lots of copperheads. Once he had a cobra that he traded for. Earl and DX were the only ones that handled it—it would spit right at you —and Punkin Bates, the evangelist, from east Tennessee.

  He made me get down on my knees and pray. I was really scared this time. He’d never gone this far before, but it was the liquor talking. He said he was going to see if God would spare me. If I was faithful, I’d be okay, but if I’d been cheating on him again, I’d get serpent bit. I did pray, I prayed hard. And it was the last time I prayed. There was nothing there. Nothing but silence.

  He took the top off an aquarium that had a couple of copperheads and an eastern diamondback. Your diamondback is meaner than the local timber rattlers, and this one hadn’t been prayed over. He got it from a man at the church in Middlesboro. Traded a bunch of copperheads and a massasauga for it. I told him he could just go ahead and shoot me. That’s how down I was. I didn’t care. And I’d a lot rather get shot than serpent bit. But he said if I didn’t put my arm in the box, he’d force my head down in it and I could take the bite in my eye. So I put my arm in. Nothing happened. Then he started banging on the glass with the butt of his pistol, and the snake bit my thumb.

  We went back in the house and Earl put his gun down on the kitchen table and opened the refrigerator to get a glass of milk. I picked up the gun, and when he turned around I waited till he bumped the refrigerator door shut with his butt and then I shot him in the shoulder. I thought about gut-shooting him, letting him bleed out real slow. I was a pretty good shot, but my right arm was starting to swell and I had to shoot left-handed. But he was so close I couldn’t miss, and I knocked him right on his can.

  I called my cousin Sally, who was married to DX, and Sally—who got serpent bit pretty bad later on when I was on the Hill—called 911. The ambulance had to come from Rosiclare. It took about twenty minutes. The paramedics took us both in the same ambulance. Mine must have been a dry bite, because it didn’t swell up too bad and I didn’t get real sick, the way I did when I got bit when I was sixteen, and two shots of antivenin was all I got, and Earl got the bullet removed and got all bandaged up. They kept him in the hospital, but they sent me home that night, wheeled me right down to the front door in a wheel chair. I went to Sally’s instead of back to the trailer.

  Sally was my cousin on my mother’s side and my oldest friend. She took after her dad, who was really handsome and who wore sunglasses because he had weak eyes. She was two years older than me: first to handle, first to get bit, first to go with a man, first to get married. She worked as a secretary in the lumberyard in Naqada, and she still handled. This was about five years after I’d gone with DX, but she’d forgiven me—everybody’d forgiven everybody, that was our way. DX stayed at the hospital with Earl. She made up a bed for DX on the sofa for when he got home, and she made me lie down in the bed upstairs and then she lay down next to me like we used to do when we were children and used to spend the night at each other’s houses, before we knew anything about loving a man and all the sadness that came with it.

  I didn’t get to tell my story at the trial. I don’t think my own lawyer from the public defender’s office believed me, and Earl testified that I’d gotten a snake out of the snake shed and was trying to get it to bite him while he was taking a nap, but it bit me instead, and it wasn’t a bad bite anyway—my arm didn’t swell up too much and turn black—so why not forget about it. My arm was okay by the time of the trial. And I thought Earl’s shoulder was okay too, but he was sitting there with his shoulder all bandaged up.

  Afterwards my uncle Warren hired another lawyer, from Newport, to file an appeal, but Warren died while I was still on the Hill, and the appeal was still pending at my release date. The lawyer must have forgotten about it, because I never got any bills.

  Apart from Sally, Warren was the only one who stood by me. Sally testified at the trial that Earl had turned the church over to DX because of his drinking, but she hadn’t been there when Earl put my arm in the box and when I shot him, so it didn’t count as evidence. Uncle Warren put up bail money and took me to St. Louis, and we went to see An American in Paris in a revival theater.

  Once I got settled on the Hill, the Lord gave me one more chance to come home to him, or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it was me giving the Lord one more chance. Or maybe I was reluctant to let go. Maybe I was still looking for some kind of explanation. Anyway, I joined a Bible study group in prison. We were a sight—a dozen of us in classroom 4D sitting around a long table, clutching our Bibles, bowing our heads.

  I thought I knew my Bible, but what I knew best was what people used to shout in church. Not just the men, the women too. And sometimes I’d be shouting right along with them: “God don’t never change.” “Don’t blame Jesus if you go to hell.” “God is talking to you now.” “I can feel the spirit covering me.”

  The woman who taught the study group was from the Methodist church in Colesville. She was a nice woman, round-faced, serious, gentle. And she knew her Bible. She had lessons on God’s plan for your life and on the apostles and on how God created the Garden of Eden for everyone and how Adam and Eve messed it up by disobeying Him. But there was something about it that didn’t r
ing true, and it finally dawned on me. I used to think that Earl was a lot like God. But after studying the Bible I got to thinking that it was the other way around, that God was a lot like Earl. A kind of a bully. The kind of guy who will lie and steal and cheat, slap you around. Look at the Garden. Look what happened to Adam and Eve. “Disobey me, will you? I’ll whup your tails till they won’t hold shucks.” And what about Jesus himself? What happens to you if you’re not dressed right for a wedding? “Tie him up, throw him into Gehenna.” Gehenna. That’s the town dump, but everybody knows it means Hell, just like the bone pile north of Naqada where they used to dump the slag before the mines closed down. And look at the way God jerks Abraham around. “Go sacrifice your only son.” You’d think old Abe would put up a fuss, but he just does what he’s told. He gets everything ready; he’s got the knife in his hand. “Ha ha,” says God, “I was just kidding.” That’s just the sort of thing Earl would have done if we’d ever had any kids.

  That’s how I lost my faith. From reading the Bible. But it wasn’t so bad, losing my faith. It was a relief, in fact, not having to worry about salvation all the time, not having to worry about every little thing you do because God was watching over your shoulder every second of every day, waiting for you to fuck up. I may have been in prison, but I felt like I was finally free.

  3

  What I Learned in Prison

  What I learned in prison was that I didn’t need a man to look after me. Not Earl, not God. What I learned in prison was how to do my own time, how to stay out of the mix, how to find a routine that minimized conflict, which was not always possible. Black Alice, the biggest stud-broad in the yard, was keen to be my “dad.” But if I was going to family with anyone, it wouldn’t have been with Black Alice, and Alice left me alone after the rattlesnake episode. In fact, nobody messed with me after that. And I learned how to cook with a coffee can and a stinger. A stinger—that’s an immersion heater. With a stinger you can boil water, you can put a piece of tin over the top of the can and fry a piece of meat, but boiling is the easiest. We fixed Chinese on my last night, for my going-away party. Rice, pork, mushrooms. As long as you can boil water you’re okay, but without a stinger you’re fucked.