Snakewoman of Little Egypt

  I picked up a French book—Paroles—to look at while I ate my bacon and eggs. I knew I had to study a foreign language, and I thought it might as well be French. I tried to imagine myself speaking French. I remembered a French song my mother used to sing at New Year’s—“La Gui-Année.” There had been French people in Little Egypt way back. Whole towns full of French people: Paget, La Chapelle, Beauvais, De Lisle. According to my history teacher, Mr. Broughton, they’d come up the Mississippi or else they’d followed the present route of the Illinois Central. Cahokia and Kaskaskia were French missions. The big bell at Kaskaskia had been a present from the King of France, Louis something-or-other, way before the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. And Fort de Chartres in Prairie du Rocher was built by the French before the United States was the United States.

  The book wasn’t really a French book. It was a book about how to learn French. I paged through it, looking at the little conversations and the lists of verbs and parts of speech, till I came to a list of phrases that everyone ought to know. I picked out one that I liked for a kind of motto: joie de vivre. I thought that joie de vivre was what I was experiencing, even if it was a little scary. I repeated the phrase over and over, out loud, though I wasn’t sure how to pronounce it: joey de viver, joey de viver, joey de viver. Paroles was all marked up, and so were all the other books. And they had other people’s names in them. Lots of them were introductions to this, introductions to that. Like my high school books.

  I sat down at the computer and felt around the back for the switch. It was new, but it still took a while to boot up. The picture on the screen took me by surprise. It was a picture of Warren. Back in the woods. Holding a chainsaw in one hand, waving with the other. I didn’t recognize him at first. Jackson must have taken it.

  I went to bed thinking about Warren, my father’s brother. I lay down, but I couldn’t sleep. Warren must have been about sixty when I shot Earl. He’d joined the Navy when he was about twenty, to get out of Naqada and see the world. There’d been some trouble in the church, but no one talked about it. I had almost no childhood memories of him. I hadn’t seen him in years. I hardly knew him at all. He came to my daddy’s funeral. Then to my wedding. And then he showed up and bailed me out of jail in Naqada.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out he wasn’t a professor. Why would a professor be living in a one-room garage apartment? And the books. They were mostly textbooks, like the kind students would leave behind in their dorms when the school year was over. Names in them. All marked up. Physics, calculus, French, German, Spanish, chemistry, biology, Western Civilization. And the stacks of old New Yorker magazines had Jackson’s name on the mailing labels.

  I heard a car pull in the drive, going really slow, as if whoever it was didn’t want to make any noise. A car door closed softly. I was tempted to get up and look out, but I didn’t. Then the dog started barking. And the owls started hooting. And a baby mouse scurried across the floor on tiny feet. And then I did get up to look out the window. There was no light but the moon and the big yard light by the end of the drive, and the lights sparkling in Jackson’s window in the big house down below. There was only one window on the front of the house, except for the window in the door.

  Somebody opened the door and let the dog in, and she stopped barking, but the owls kept on calling to each other. Hoo hoo hoo huoaugh, hoo hoo hoo huoaugh. It was strange to be so alone. My first night away from the Hill. I’d wanted to be alone. To be lonely, and I was.

  I tried to read one of Warren’s books, a western, but I couldn’t interest myself in the lives of the people in the book. I wanted to live my own life. I got up and looked out the window again. The lights were still sparkling.

  I felt like barking, or hooting, but instead I started to sing. I sang the first verse of “La Gui-Année,” which was all I could remember.

  Bon soir le maître et la maîtresse,

  Et tout le monde du logis:

  Pour le dernier jour de l’année,

  La Gui-Année vous nous devais.

  Good evening master and mistress,

  And all your household;

  On the first day of the year,

  You owe us La Gui-Année.

  It was the only French I knew. Except joey de viver.

  4

  Joey de Viver

  I woke up in the morning to the sound of the dog barking. Four loud barks, then quiet for a while. Then four more loud barks. Then quiet. I looked out the window. Jackson was throwing a Frisbee to the dog. He was standing down below me on the gravel in front of the garage, throwing the Frisbee down the hill. It went a long way, but the dog managed to catch it every time. She’d bring it back to Jackson, drop it in front of him, and start barking. It took him four barks to pick it up and throw it again. Joey de viver, I thought. Joey de viver. Whenever the dog stopped to pee, he’d shout, “Big pi-pi girl,” and then later, “Big poopy girl.” Jackson wore out before the dog did. I could see that his shoulder was hurting him, because he sort of crouched when he threw the Frisbee and didn’t let his arm swing out too far. On the way back to the house he turned and looked up at my window. I didn’t have any clothes on and I wondered if he could see me through the screen. I didn’t think so.

  I hadn’t bothered to wash Warren’s cast-iron frying pan—the big one—the night before, and I didn’t wash it in the morning. I just scraped out some of the grease into the garbage and fried up more bacon and eggs, and then a took a shower, all by myself, thinking: I can do whatever I want to do. I’m free. Joey de viver.

  While I was eating I looked through the mail from TF, which had been coming to me at Warren’s address. Jackson had stacked it up on the table. Most of the stuff I threw away without even opening, but I kept the orientation schedule and the information about clubs and intramural athletics—I thought I might sign up for volleyball, which I’d played on the Hill, or maybe badminton. And there was a letter from my roommate—Tiffany, from Winnetka. It began, “Dear Willa Fern …” Warren was the only one who called me Willa Fern. I’d always been Fern, and now I was Sunny. Tiffany was planning on bringing a lot of stuffed animals, a TV, stereo, and twenty pairs of shoes. She had a boyfriend who was going to be a junior. Pre-med. She was going to be an entrepreneur. She didn’t know what kind of entrepreneur yet, but she knew she wanted to run her own business. Her hobbies were dancing, playing the French horn, and cheerleading. She was looking forward to hearing from me.

  What could I say to her?

  After I finished eating I turned on the computer and opened a new file. The hard drive was almost empty. Warren had deleted everything except the letters he’d written to me.

  Dear Tiffany [I wrote],

  I just got out of the prison here—the Henrietta Hill Correctional Institution—and am looking forward to starting at TF. I was in for shooting my husband, but don’t worry, he deserved it. When I was your age I’d been married for two years and was working in my husband’s bait shop in the Naqada Marina on the Ohio River, selling grubs and night crawlers and stink bait and vacuum-sealed packages of frozen skipjacks. My husband was also the pastor of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following, and that’s where we lived our real life, going to church three times a week, handling serpents, going to other serpent-handling churches over in Kentucky and West Virginia and East Tennessee. Building brush arbors for homecomings, and going out in Earl’s johnboat, and waiting for children. Waiting and waiting. Earl would nudge me with his elbow and say, “Roll over.” And we’d do it, and that would be that. My daddy was killed in an explosion in Number 5, and my mama left right after I got married, and I never saw her again. When we were first married my husband kept rattlesnakes in a box under the bed, and they’d sing (rattle) whenever he was poking me, and then later he built a snake shed. He put a lot of money in that snake shed, and on Friday and Sunday nights we’d cart three or four serpent boxes up to the church, which was in an old DX gas station that used to belong to my cousin Sally’s husband, which is how
he got his name—DX—after he gave it to the church when the old church on Tomkins Road burned down. And every once in a while someone at the church would get serpent bit. Big news. Everyone would gather around to pray. They’d even pray back the dead sometimes. And someone was always getting taken over by a demon, or backing up on the Lord, and that was exciting too. Folks would support family. Help them through the hard times. Evangelists were always coming through. Punkin Bates, Liston Arnold, Rolly Franklin. You’ve got to be in the same room with these men to know what they’re like. They’ve got a kind of power over you, especially when they get themselves anointed, and they start talking about Heaven and about how everybody’s looking forward to getting there, and singing about it:

  Well, I wonder what they’re doing in heaven today.

  Sin and sorrow all gone away.

  Sweet music it flows like a river they say.

  Well, I wonder what they’re doing there now.

  But, Tiffany, what if you get there and there’s nothing at all? What if? How do you make sense of a man’s life? When that man was your own uncle Warren, who’s the only one who stood by you when you were in trouble? And it’s the same for everybody. Dead is dead. That’s it. I saw my own grave yesterday, right next to my uncle’s. They’ll put me in a box and throw me in the ground, just like they did my uncle. And there’s nothing I can do about it. And there’s nothing you can do about it either.

  I stopped writing. I knew I couldn’t send this letter, but it felt good to write it, and I spent some time imagining Tiffany showing it to her mother. I erased the file without printing it.

  There are two main streets in Colesville that run parallel to each other, like railroad tracks—a town main street that’s called Main Street, and a university main street, which is called State Street. Coming from the north, the town looks like any town, like Paducah or Evansville. I rounded the circle by the public library on Main Street and went east on Broadway. If you went west on Broadway you came out near the prison.

  My first stop was the Farmers & Mechanics Bank, where the bank manager told me I had over eighty thousand dollars in a special account that I didn’t have to list on my financial aid application. No wonder he was so polite. I was flabbergasted. I knew Warren had left me some money, but I had no idea it would be anything like this. I was too overwhelmed to think. I’d never even had a checking account before! Just my commissary account on the Hill, where I kept some spending money from Warren. The manager helped me set up a credit card account too.

  I walked up and down Main Street letting the fact of all that money sink in. I’d always been poor, but everybody had been poor, especially after the mines closed down. Not dirt poor. Everybody had TVs and cars and boats, but we didn’t wear fancy clothes to church. It was a different feeling knowing I could buy anything I saw. At Penny’s I bought underwear, a new bra, three pair of jeans, and three men’s white shirts. That would do for now. I wasn’t sure what I’d need in the dorm, but I did buy one extravagant thing, a beautiful leather briefcase that I saw in the window of the Lafayette Stationery store. I kept walking back and forth trying not to stare. I was carrying my papers in a plastic grocery bag—my TF catalog, my dorm assignment letter, and a campus map. The leather of the briefcase was like a pool of dark water. You could look right down into it, like saddle leather sometimes gets up by the pommel, but soft. It looked old and new at the same time, and it cost a ton of money. I never told anyone how much I paid for it.

  I didn’t really look at it closely in the store because I didn’t want the sales clerk to think I didn’t know what I was doing, though if I’d known what I was doing, I’d have looked it over more carefully. But I didn’t need to. I just bought it with my new credit card. I wasn’t sure what to do with the card. I handed it to the clerk; he put it in a machine; then he had to wait for a phone call saying it was okay, and then I had to sign a piece of paper that came out of a little machine on the counter. As soon as I was out on the street I jammed my plastic grocery sack in the briefcase and walked on down Main Street, past Penny’s, back to the bank, and I then turned around and walked back to Warren’s truck, admiring myself in the store windows. At a fancy liquor store I bought a fancy bottle of French wine for Jackson, as a thank-you gift for all his trouble. I put the wine in the bottom of my briefcase.

  My first glimpse of the campus took my breath away. It was like looking at another country, another world. I didn’t belong here, didn’t have a passport. The buildings were big as churches, with towers and spires. I’d been to St. Louis with Warren. I’d been to Paducah and Evansville on school trips, but I’d never seen anything like this. I recognized the Ford Gate from the cover of the catalog, and Coles Circle—half circle, really. It was sort of like the front door of the campus. Straight ahead was Old Main, which housed the administration, and to the left of Old Main was a historical marker marking the site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. I got a cup of coffee at the student union and sat at a table out on Seymour Terrace, which is right on the Lakota River, which runs through the campus, and examined my new briefcase, which had been made using a process that had been used in Italy for several thousand years. It was fashioned out of true Italian skins that had been tanned with vegetable dyes that didn’t have anything in them that would harm man or the ecosystem. There was a strap on the outside for an umbrella, and a place to stick your newspaper, and a padded compartment for a laptop computer. Inside there were places for pencils and pens, and a file that opened up like an accordion for different papers, and there was plenty of room for notebooks and books. And a detachable shoulder strap, which I hooked up. I put my papers in the accordion files.

  It was like the beginning of any school year. You had your new box of crayons, your pencils, your little tiny pencil sharpener with a blade in it. And you put everything in a satchel. Just like the other kids. But of course we hadn’t been just like the other kids. We weren’t allowed to go to movies at the Bijou on Phillips Street, and we couldn’t watch The Brady Bunch and The Cosby Show and Laverne and Shirley and Mork and Mindy unless we went to someone else’s house, which didn’t happen very often. The other kids were a little bit afraid of us. As if one of us might bring a rattlesnake to school. And one day Timmy Johnson did, because some of the other boys were teasing him because he was afraid of spiders. He threw the snake down on the floor and everybody scattered. They had to wait till Timmy’s dad came and caught the snake and took Timmy home and tanned him good.

  The table had an umbrella over it, like one of the pictures in the French book, and I pretended for a minute that I was in France. I kept my briefcase on my lap with the strap wound around my wrist. I got out my catalog and flipped through the pages.

  I looked around. School wouldn’t start for two weeks, but there were people sitting at the tables, under the red umbrellas, enjoying the sun. I studied the women my age. There were a few. They weren’t exactly dressed up, but they looked like professors, not students, and their briefcases, lying flat on the pavement next to their chairs, were old and soft.

  I located the dorm on the campus map—Sarah Stevenson Hall, where I’d be sharing a room with Tiffany. All the dorms—which were called residence halls—were on the other side of the river, on North Campus, along with the football stadium and the physical plant. There were three bridges across the river, all named after important Illinois politicians: two governors—Thomas Ford and Edward Coles—and Abraham Lincoln. I crossed the river on Coles Bridge, which is a footbridge, carrying my briefcase in one hand, the sack with my new clothes in the other. It felt good to walk after six years on the Hill, where the only place you could walk around was the exercise yard. I stopped on the bridge. The river was flowing so slow it was hard to tell which way it was going. But when I caught sight of the dorm, my heart sank. My joey de viver evaporated. Sarah Stevenson Hall looked like a prison, but bigger. It was huge. I counted six rows of windows. Six stories. The big front doors were locked, but a side door was propped open, though th
ere was a sign saying not to leave the door propped open. The big stand-up ashtray by the door was full of clean sand. I went in. No one was around.

  The different floors were called “houses.” Tiffany and I were in Adams House on the fourth floor. I climbed a back stairway. The hallway was like a prison too—a long corridor of locked doors. But the lounge was open and the big TV was on. One of the janitors was watching a soap opera. I asked him if he knew my uncle, Warren Rigsby. And he did. He said Warren had looked after Davis Hall before he became head of custodial services for South Campus.

  We talked for a while.

  “This is like a prison,” I said.

  “You were out on the Hill, weren’t you?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Your uncle told me about you. He was real proud of you.”

  “For shooting my husband?”

  “Yup.”

  On the fifth floor a crew of upperclassmen was cleaning out the rooms.

  The men, or boys—the males—wore jeans and T-shirts with the sleeves rolled up. The females wore T-shirts that said PROPERTY OF THE TF ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT on the front and shorts that said, on the butt, DON’T YOU WISH.

  My own room—5A—at the end of the hall had already been cleaned but the door was still open, and it still smelled of Lysol. I sat down on the bare mattress and stared at the lavatory-gray walls and the tiny closets that didn’t have any doors on them. Where was Tiffany going to put all her stuffed animals? and her TV? her stereo? and her twenty pairs of shoes. I started to panic. I could feel my blood getting thick. Like when I’d got serpent bit when I was sixteen. Something squeezed me real hard and I had to get out of there.