“I’m sorry to trouble you,” I said, “but I’m stuck just down the road. And I would guess that I am lost as well.”
“These here be tangly roads,” said the man, “for one who ain’t used to them. They wind about a lot and some of them end up going nowhere. Where might you be headed, stranger?”
“Pilot Knob,” I said.
He nodded sagely. “You took the wrong turning just down the road a piece.”
“I was wondering,” I said, “if you could hitch up a horse and pull me back onto the road. The car skidded and the back wheels went into the ditch. I’ll be more than willing to pay you for your trouble.”
“Here, stranger, sit,” he said, pulling a chair out from the table. “We’re just about to eat and there’s enough for three and we’d be proud to have you join us.”
“But the car,” I reminded him. “I’m in something of a hurry.”
He shook his head. “Can’t be done. Not tonight, at least. The horses aren’t in the barn. They’re out in the pasture somewhere, probably up atop the hill. Couldn’t pay me enough, no one could, to go out hunting them with it about to rain and the rattlesnakes.”
“But rattlesnakes,” I said, somewhat foolishly and to no great point, “aren’t out at night.”
“Let me tell you, son,” he said, “no one ever rightly knows about a rattlesnake.”
“I forgot myself,” I said. “My name is Horton Smith.” I was getting tired of his calling me “son” and “stranger.”
The woman turned from the stove, a big fork held in her hand.
“Smith,” she said, excited. “Why, that is our name, too! Could it be that you are kin?”
“No, Maw,” said the man. “There is a passel of Smiths. Just because a man’s named Smith don’t signify that he’d be related to us. But,” he said, “it seems to me that this fortunate similarity of names might call for a snort.”
He reached down under the table and brought up a gallon jug. From a shelf behind him he picked up a couple of glasses.
“You look to me like a city feller,” he said, “but I hear that some of them are fairly good at drinking. Now this stuff ain’t what you’d rightly call first class likker, but it is top grade corn squeezings and it is guaranteed not to poison you. Don’t take too big a slug to start with or it might strangle you. But along about the third gulp that you take you don’t need to worry none, because by that time you will be acclimated to it. I tell you there ain’t nothing cozier on a night like this than to cuddle up alongside a jug of moonshine. I got it off Old Joe Hopkins. He makes it on an island in the river …”
He had hoisted the jug to pour, but now a startled look ran across his face and he looked sharply at me. “Say, you ain’t a revenooer, are you?”
“No,” I said, “I’m not a revenuer.”
He resumed the pouring operation. “You never can be sure,” he said. “They come pussyfooting around and there ain’t no way to know them. Used to be a man could spot them a country mile, but now they’re getting tricky. They fix themselves up to look like almost anybody.”
He shoved one of the glasses across the table at me.
“Mr. Smith,” he said, “I am downright sorry about not being able to oblige you. Not right away, at least. Not tonight, not with this storm coming up. Come morning, I’ll be purely tickled to hitch up a horse and drag your car out of there.”
“But the car is across the road. It is blocking traffic.”
“Mister,” said the woman standing at the stove, “that needn’t bother you. That road don’t go nowhere. Just up the hill a piece to an old abandoned house and then it peters out.”
“They do say,” said the man, “that the house is haunted.”
“Perhaps you have a phone. I could call …”
“We ain’t got a phone,” the woman said.
“What a man wants with a phone,” said the man, “is more than I can cipher. Jingling all the time. People calling up just to jaw at you. Never gives a person a purely peaceful moment.”
“Phones cost money,” said the woman.
“I suppose I could walk down the road,” I said. “There was a farm down there. They might be able …”
The man wagged his head. “Go ahead and grab that glass,” he said, “and put a snort inside you. Worth your life to go walking down that road. I ain’t one to say much against a neighbor, but no one should be allowed to keep a pack of vicious dogs. They guard the place, of course, and they keep the varmints off, but a man’s life ain’t worth a hoot should he stumble on them in the dark.”
I picked up the glass and sampled the liquor and it was pretty bad. But it did light a little fire down inside of me.
“You don’t want to go nowhere,” said the woman. “It is about to rain.”
I took another drink and it didn’t taste half bad. It tasted better than the first one had and it stoked up the fire.
“You’d best sit down, Mr. Smith,” the woman said. “I’m about to take up the victuals. Paw, you hand him down a plate and cup …”
“But I …”
“Shucks,” said the man, “you won’t refuse to eat with us, now will you? The old woman has cooked up a mess of hog jowls with some greens and they’ll be licking good. There ain’t no one in the world can cook up better hog jowls. I been sitting here fair drooling for them to be done.” He looked at me speculatively. “I’ll bet you never yet have sunk a tooth into real hog jowls. They ain’t city food.”
“You’d be wrong,” I told him. “I have eaten them, many years ago.” To tell the truth, I was hungry and hog jowls sounded fine.
“Go ahead,” he said, “and finish up the glass. It will curl your toes.”
I finished up the drink and he reached up on the shelf and took down a cup and plate and got a knife and fork and spoon out of a drawer in the table and set a place for me. The woman brought the food and put it on the table.
“Now, mister,” she said, “you just draw up a chair to the place that’s set for you. And, Paw, you take that pipe out of your mouth.” She said to me, “It’s bad enough he wears that hat all the time—he even sleeps in it—but I will not stand him sitting at the table and trying to fork his victuals in around that pipe.”
She settled down into her chair. “You just pitch in and help yourself,” she told me. “It ain’t no fancy eating, but it’s clean and there is plenty of it and I hope you like it.”
It was very tasty and satisfactorily filling and there did seem plenty of it; almost as if, I thought, they had expected, all along, that an extra person would drop in for supper.
Halfway through the meal the rain started coming down, solid sheets of rain that hammered at the shaky house, making such an uproar that we had to raise our voices to be heard above it.
“There ain’t nothing,” said the man, once he had begun to slow his shoveling in of food, “that is better than hog jowls, barring mayhaps a possum. Now, you take a possum and you fixed him up with sweet pertaters and there ain’t a thing that goes down as smooth. Used to have a lot of possum, but we ain’t had one of them for a coon’s age now. To collect a possum a man must have a dog and after old Preacher up and died, I didn’t have the heart to get another dog. I purely loved that pup and I couldn’t bring myself to get another dog to take his place.”
The woman wiped a tear away. “He was the finest dog we ever had,” she said. “Just like family. He slept underneath the stove and it got so hot at times that his fur would sort of sizzle, but he never seemed to mind. I guess he liked it hot. Maybe you think Preacher is a funny name to call a dog, but he looked just like a preacher. Acted like one, too, solemn, and sort of dignified and sad …”
“Except when he was hunting possum,” Paw said. “He was a ring-tailed terror when he was after possum.”
“We never did mean to be irreligious,” said the woman. “You just couldn’t call him by any other name even if you tried. He looked just like a preacher.”
We finished eating and Paw p
ut the pipe back into his mouth and reached for the jug.
“Thanks,” I said, “but no more for me. I must be getting on. If you’d let me take a few sticks from the woodpile, I might be able to wedge them underneath the wheels …”
“I wouldn’t think on it,” said Paw. “Not in this storm, I wouldn’t. It’d be a scandal to the jaybirds to let you go out in it. You stay here snug and dry and we’ll do some drinking and you can start tomorrow. We ain’t got a second bed, but we have a couch you can stretch out on. It’s real comfortable and you won’t have no trouble sleeping. The horses will come down early in the morning and we can catch them up and drag you out of there.”
“I couldn’t think of it,” I said. “I’ve imposed on you enough.”
“It’s a plumb pleasure to have you,” he said. “A new face to talk with ain’t something that comes along too often. Me and Maw, we just sit and look at one another. We ain’t got a thing to say. We’ve jawed at one another so long we have said it all.”
He filled my glass and shoved it across the table. “Wrap yourself around that,” he told me, “and be thankful you got shelter on a night like this and I don’t want to hear no more about leaving here until morning comes.”
I picked up the glass and had a good long drink and I must admit that the idea of not going out into the storm had some attraction for me.
“There is some advantage, after all,” said Paw, “to not having a dog to go out after possum, although I must admit I sorrily miss old Preacher. But not having any dog gives you a lot more sitting time and I don’t suppose a young sprout like you appreciates it, but sitting time is the most valuable there is. You do a lot of thinking and you do a lot of dreaming and you’re a better man for it. Most of the skonks you run across get that way because they don’t take no sitting time. They’re everlastingly on the push and they are running all the time and they think they’re running after something, but mostly they are running from themselves.”
“I think you’re right,” I said, thinking of myself. “I think you’re entirely right.”
I had another drink and it felt so good I had another one.
“Here, young fellow,” said Paw, “hold out that glass of yours. You’re running kind of low.”
I held out the glass and the jug gurgled and the glass was full again.
“Here we sit,” said Paw, “as snug as bugs and ain’t a tarnation thing to do except to sit here and do some friendly drinking and a little talking and pay time no heed. Time,” he said, “is a man’s best friend if he makes good use of it and a man’s worst enemy if he lets it run him. Most people who live by the clock are miserable sorts of critters. But living by the sun, that is something different.”
There was something wrong, I knew. I could feel the edge of wrongness. Something about these two, as if I should have known them, as if I’d met them somewhere many years ago and suddenly would know them and remember who they were and where I’d met them and what kind of folks they were. But reach for the memory of them as best I could, it all eluded me.
The man was talking again and I realized I was only hearing part of what he said. I knew he was talking about coon hunting and the best bait to use for catfish and a lot of other very friendly things, but I had missed, I knew, a great amount of detail.
I finished off the glass and held it out again without any invitation from him and he filled it up again and it all was comfortable and fine—the wood fire murmuring in the stove and the clock upon the mantle shelf beside the pantry door ticking loudly and companionably in the close confines of the room. In the morning life would take up again and I’d drive to Pilot Knob, taking the fork I’d missed. But this, I told myself, was a piece of sitting time, a piece of resting time, a time to sit and let the clock tick on and not think of anything, or not much of anything. I was building up quite a glow from the moonshine I was drinking and I knew I was, but I didn’t seem to mind. I went right on drinking and listening and not thinking of tomorrow.
“By the way,” I asked, “how are the dinosaurs this year?”
“Why, there are a few of them about,” he said, unconcernedly, “but it seems to me they’re a mite smaller than they used to be.”
And then he went on telling about a bee tree he had cut and about the year when the rabbits, eating loco weed, got so pugnacious packs of them were hazing grizzly bear all about the landscape. But that must have happened somewhere else, for here in this country, I knew, there were no loco weeds and no grizzlies, either.
And, finally, I remember going off to bed on the couch in the living room while Paw stood by with the lantern in his hand. I took off my jacket and hung it on a chair back and then took off my shoes and put them on the floor, squared and neatly placed. Then, loosening my tie, I lay down upon the couch and, as he’d said, it was comfortable.
“You’ll get a good night’s sleep,” said Paw. “Barney always slept here when he came to visit us. Barney in here and Sparky out there in the kitchen.”
And suddenly, as those names soaked into my mind, I had it! I struggled to arise and I did get part way up. “I know who you are now,” I shouted at him. “You are Snuffy Smith, the one that was with Barney Google and Sparkplug and Sunshine and all the rest of them in the comic strip.”
I tried to say more, but I couldn’t and it didn’t seem too important really, nor too remarkable.
I collapsed back on the couch and lay there and Snuffy went away, taking the lantern with him and on the roof above me I heard the pattering of rain.
I went to sleep with the patter of the rain.
And woke up with rattlesnakes.…
2
Fear saved me—a brutal, numbing fear that froze me for that few seconds which allowed my brain to take in the situation and assess it and decide on a course of action.
The deadly, ugly head reared above my chest, pointing down into my face and in a fraction of a second, in so short a time that only a high-speed camera could have caught the action, it could have struck, with the curved and vicious fangs erected for the strike.
If I had moved, it would have struck.
But I did not move because I could not move, because the fear, instead of triggering my body into instant reflex action, stiffened me and froze me, the muscles knotted, the tendons rigid, and gooseflesh popping on my skin.
The head that hung above me seemed chiseled out of bone, sparse and cruel, the little eyes shining with the dull luster of a newly-broken, but unpolished stone, and between the eyes and nostrils the pits that served as radiation-sensing organs. The forked tongue flicked in and out, with a motion not unlike the play of lightning in the sky, testing and sensing, supplying the tiny brain that lay inside the skull with the facts of this creature upon which the snake had found itself. The body was a dull yellow, marked by darker stripes that ran around the body, flaring out into lopsided diamond patterns. And it was big—perhaps not so big as it seemed in that fear-laden moment, while I stared up into its eyes—but big enough so that I could feel the weight of its body on my chest.
Crotalus horridus horridus—a timber rattlesnake!
It knew that I was there. Its eyesight, poor as it might be, still would provide some information. Its forked tongue gave it more. And those radiation pits would be measuring my body temperature. It was dimly puzzled, more than likely—as much as a reptile could be puzzled. Undecided and unsure. Friend or foe? Too big for food and yet perhaps a threat. And at the first sign of threat, I knew, those deadly fangs would strike.
My body was stiff and rigid, frozen into immobility by fear, but in another moment, I realized, even through the haze of fear, that immobility would pass and I would try to get away, try in desperation to get beyond the creature’s reach. But my brain, still befogged by fear, but working with the cold logic of desperation, said I must make no move, that I must remain the frozen chunk of flesh I was. It was my one chance to survive. A single motion would be interpreted as a threat and the snake would defend itself.
&nbs
p; I let my eyelids slide down, as slowly as I could, so that I needn’t even blink, and lay in darkness while bile-tinged gorge rose in my throat and my stomach churned in panic.
I must not move, I told myself. No stirring, not a single finger twitched, not a tremor in the body.
The hardest part of it was to keep my eyes closed, but I knew I must. Even so much as the sudden flicking of an eyelid might cause the snake to strike.
My body screamed at me—every muscle fiber, every nerve, all my prickling skin screamed to get away. But I held the body still—I, the mind, the brain, the thinking. And the thought crept in unbidden that this was the first time in my life that the brain and body had been so utterly at odds.
My skin seemed to crawl beneath the mincing impact of a million unclean feet. My digestive tract revolted, knotting and twisting. My heart was beating so hard that the pressure of the blood running in my veins made me feel choked and bloated.
And still the weight hung there upon my chest.
I tried to calculate the attitude of the snake by the pattern of its weight upon my chest. Had it changed position? Had something triggered that snakish brain into aggressive action, was it even now pulling its body up and back into the S-curve that was preliminary to a strike? Or was it lowering its raised head, preparatory to moving on, satisfied that I was no threat?
If only I could open my eyes and know! It seemed more than flesh could bear not to see the danger (if there should be danger) and, recognizing it, brace one’s self against it.
But I kept my eyes closed—not tight shut, not squeezed tight, but closed as naturally as I could, for there was no way to know whether the movement of the facial muscles involved in the squeezing of the eyes tight shut might be enough to alarm the snake.
I found myself trying to breathe as shallowly as I could, for breathing was movement—although I told myself that by now the snake must have become accustomed to the rhythm of my breathing.