Sweet-natured, Chapter 1
One day while measuring the north side property line of his daddy's ranch, placing each foot heel to toe, the boy came across an injured hognose snake. Someone had stomped its lower end and left it to die. He suspected one of the Armen brothers, who treated the small prairie animals as moving targets. He made a litter out of his neckerchief for the immobile snake and rushed back to the house. Upstairs in his room, he placed it in a corner of his desk drawer on a nest of wadded-up underpants.
By now, he could clip the wings of a chicken and even disinfect an open wound under his daddy's direction, but he had no idea how to nurse a snake. Although it did not move, he knew it was still alive. It watched him from eyes that reflected the light from his bedroom window. He knew that all living creatures needed two things; food and water. eHe HrhrAfter days of dangling grasshoppers and well-doused baby earthworms near the hognose's snout, and carefully unwinding its coils for a sunbath on his windowsill, the light finally went out of its eyes.
The boy searched basement and barn for a suitable receptacle in which to bear the snake to its final rest. ( And he wanted to unbury it sometime in the future, because he was a boy, after all.) He was thrilled to find a domed lunch pail under a pile of blackened work clothes from when his daddy had tried to work in the mines and still maintain the ranch. Patches of bright aluminum shined on the few inches of metal that had escaped numerous dings and scratches.
He lined the lunch pail with a tea towel and carefully arranged the snake on top. He was surprised that his eyes welled up, and looked in wonder at a wet spot on the back of his hand left by a cascading tear. He hadn't really been feeling sad about the snake. He was a third generation rancher's son and harbored no illusions about the souls of animals, warm-blooded and otherwise. He hoped that he had made the snake's last moments on earth comforting and somewhat less lonely, but nevertheless, it was just a snake. He was only eight years old but he knew that.
The boy tried to make sense of the dull ache of sympathy he felt for the hognose. There was something there for him to know, he was sure of it. It wasn't that he was lonely. The casual brutality of the Armen brothers offended him, and the Laney clan, a small village of a family with grandchildren, cousins and in-laws who all lived together in sprawling decay on the other side of the roadway, didn't mesh well with the secretiveness of his only-child personality. Being alone was his choice.
So it wasn't the sight of the coiled body lying still at the bottom of the lunch pail, a motherless reptile, alone as lone could be, that made him feel so blue.
He intended to bury the snake when the opportune time came. He kept it hidden in his closet, in a cubby behind a pile of extra blankets. Every night, when all the lights in the house were out, he would carefully open the lunchbox, mindful of the creaky hinges, awed that day after day the snake never changed its appearance. Paying homage to the snake, he would present it with a small gift, placed reverently around its body.
What was it that it wanted him to know? He was aware that life had its cycles, and all the tender mercies in the world would not prevent one, nor one's mother and father, nor one's favorite horse, from dying.
The chores took on more significance as the days grew shorter. There was rarely a moment to perform the ritual; by bed-time he was exhausted. Eventually, he stopped. By then, the snake in the lunch pail was buried under layers of dried leaves, clumps of bruised clover, daisy chains, a snowdrift of milkweed seeds, aromatic Lipton teabags, kitchen matches tied into crosses with yarn, the cellophane wrappers from penny candies, paint chips from the barn, fossilized sharks teeth, all weighted down with a rusted horseshoe shrinking daily from deterioration.
He knew that in a matter of days the ground would be too hard to dig, and days after that, it would all be covered in snow, each day more so.
Every morning, 7 days a week, his daddy read to him a list of chores written in the order in which they were to be done. Daddy made the boy so nervous that sometimes he would freeze in the middle of a task, even one that he'd done a hundred times, unable to continue until his daddy kicked him back into gear with a sharp word. Now he had the added burden of trying to sneak a furtive moment to get a hole dug that was wide and deep enough for the lunch pail.
Even when his daddy was inside, the boy felt subject to his repetitive nitpicking. He considered returning the lunch pail and dropping the snake into one of the stands of sagebrush that hadn't yet blown across the prairie to join its kin in the lowlands to the northeast. But he hadn't gone to all that trouble, spent all that time in the snake's company, to not allow for some kind of ceremonial good-bye. The thought of seeing Thad Armen with the unlucky hognose wrapped around the brim of his hat made him shudder.
He wanted to ask his mother's help, but nothing good ever came from inviting her confidence. She didn't bear well under pressure. She would have helped him if he asked. But she would have also betrayed him.
A bit of unexpected luck gave the boy a little more time to accomplish a proper burial for the hognose snake. His daddy suffered a huge deep bruise on his side when the hand-crank on his John Deere slipped off the flywheel, hitting him with a powerful smack. It might even have cracked a rib. He was laid up in bed for time undetermined, assuaging his pain with whiskey tea and overdoses of Robitusson.
Now the boy would not have to restrict his search for a gravesite to the parts of the property that lay beyond the view of his house. He needed a place that was memorable without having to be land-marked, so he could come back later without fear of his daddy or the Armen brothers excavating it. And he needed it to have at least a square foot patch of ground that was still pliable. In a matter of days the ground would be too hard to dig, and days after that, it would be covered in snow, each day more so.
end, chapter 1