Blood: Serpent

27

The Copperhead According to Mother Ruth

Get him with a hoe
but don’t step on the head
He’ll bite you
even dead.
Look in brushpiles
circle them wide
he’s their color
and he’ll hide.
He’s God’s creature
but it’s also true
you must do unto him
before he does unto you.

James A. Autry, Nights Under a Tin Roof

1951

My grandmother was a small, tough lady. She was a Brinkley, a name that didn’t seem to mean anything in the town and wasn’t in the graveyard. I came to understand her people migrated from somewhere in the Carolinas after the war and settled farmland along the Arkansas River bottom. Her family claimed some kin to Stonewall Jackson, the soldier beloved of Lee who was killed by his own men.

She kept a garden behind the house on the hill and by the time I arrived for my summers it was well established. She grew a little bit of everything there. Bush beans and pole beans, sweet corn, okra, radishes, field peas, spinach, squash, cucumbers, a couple of watermelon vines, onions, lima beans, black pendulous eggplants, and others. She worked in the garden almost every day, wearing an old-fashioned bonnet to keep the sun from her skin and wielding a hoe she sharpened with a file.

That’s how I knew she was leaving the house to work in the garden. I’d hear the screen door screek and slam and then the rasp of the file across the edge of the hoe.

I helped some of the time, but the too long handle of the hoe was difficult for me and I could easily end up doing as much harm as good. She didn’t seem to want me to help. Perhaps it was her own personal time that she didn’t like to share as she bent over along the rows, chopping out the weeds, testing for ripeness.

The garden was a great place to find a beetle to torment; or to watch an ant lion in the bottom of its small pit waiting for an unwary ant to trip and slide down the slippery side of the trap; or to watch a spider craft a web from one leaf of a corn stalk to another. It was in the garden that I found the most beautiful creature of all basking in the sun at the end of a row of corn. It was just resting there with its slit eyes watching from within its wedge-shaped skull, its patterned skin a dusky orange and black, its tongue flickering out to taste the world.

“Git back!” Mamaw said, loudly, forcefully.

With her sharpened hoe she diced the copperhead as if it were a carrot on her chopping board. In just moments with a chop, chop, chop, the same motion she used for a recalcitrant patch of weeds, the snake was dismembered before me.

“You stay away from them. They’re pizen, you hear?”

What could I say, but “Yes, ma’am?”

But the twitching remnants of the serpent fascinated me. They kept on moving long afterwards. Juanita told me some folks believed that, if the moon was right, the pieces could join back together. That was why, when she heard about the killing, Juanita came out with a shovel and buried the pieces in different places around the garden.