The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [57]
He was tired, and he felt himself drifting into sleep. Insects hummed in the sunlight, and he felt faintly anxious about bees. The stones in his pockets pressed against his leg. Nights in his childhood, he sometimes found his father in the porch rocker, the poplar trees glinting, alive with fireflies. On one such night his father handed him a smooth stone, an axhead he’d found while digging a trench. Over two thousand years old, he said. Imagine that, David. It sat in other hands once, that eternally long ago, but beneath this very same moon.
That was one time. There were other days when they went out to catch rattlesnakes. Dusk to dawn, they’d walked through the woods, carrying forked sticks, cloth bags over their shoulders and a metal box swinging from David’s hand.
It always seemed to David that time paused on those days, the sun forever in the sky and the dry leaves moving under his feet. The world was reduced to just himself and his father and the snakes, but it was expanded, too, the sky opening vastly around him, higher and bluer with every step, and everything slowing down to the moment when he spotted a movement amid the colors of dirt and dry leaves, the diamondback pattern visible only when the snake began to move. His father had taught him how to go still, watching the yellow eyes, the flickering tongue. Each time a snake shed its skin the rattle grew longer, so you could tell by the loudness of the rattle in the forest silence how old the snake was, how big, and how much money it would bring. For the largest ones, coveted by zoos and scientists and sometimes by snake handlers, they might receive five dollars apiece.
Light fell through the trees and made patterns on the forest floor, and there was the sound of wind. Then there was the rattling, and the rearing head of the snake, and his father’s arm, strong and solid, plunging a forked stick down to pin the snake by its neck. The fangs extended, striking hard into damp earth, the rattling wild and furious. With two strong fingers his father gripped the snake tightly behind its open jaw and picked it up: cool, dry, writhing like a whip. He slung the snake into a cloth bag and jerked it shut, and then the bag was a live thing, quivering on the ground. His father flipped it into a metal box and closed the lid. Without speaking they walked on, counting the snake money in their minds. There were weeks, in the summer and late fall, when they could make $25 this way. The money paid for food; when they went to the doctor in Morgantown, it paid for that too.
David!
Norah’s voice came to him faintly, urgently, through the distant past and the forest and into the day. He rose up on his elbows and saw her standing on the far edge of the field of ripening strawberries, transfixed by something on the ground. He felt a rush of adrenaline and fear. Rattlesnakes liked sunny logs like the one by which she’d stopped; they laid their eggs in the fertile rotting wood. He glanced at Paul, still sleeping quietly in the shade, and then he was up and running, thistles scratching his ankles and strawberries bursting softly beneath his feet, already reaching into the pocket of his jeans and closing his fist around the largest stone. When he got close enough to glimpse the dark line of the snake, he threw it as hard as he could. The dull stone arched slowly through the air, turning. It fell six inches short of the snake and burst open, its purple heart alive and glittering.
“What in the world are you doing?” Norah asked.
He’d reached her by then. Panting, he looked down. It was not a snake at all but a dark stick resting against the dry skin of the log.
“I thought you called me,” he said, confused.
“I did.” She pointed to a cluster of pale flowers