East Texas

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

30 TODD DILLARD East Texas  My grandfather chopped the head off a rattlesnake with a garden hoe. “Don’t step on it,” he said, meaning the head. It bucked on the packed earth like a toppled windup toy. Open. Shut. Pink inside, brown out. Spring to fall as fast as a boy can gasp. He nailed the body to a dogwood outside the trailer. Soon as the screen door slammed shut behind him, bees trickled out of its neck. White bees, fat as bumbles, bobbing like fishing sinkers in a boat’s wake. It was the summer Mom’s shadow refused to stay attached to her, and nights my father prowled the house searching for it, calling: Soma, Soma, as Mom plucked beams of light from the bedlamp and sucked on them like sugarcane. When the snake head stopped moving I scooped it up with a shovel, deposited it below its body. I want to stop here and say something about heat. I want to stop here and say something about a dark back bedroom, how even as a boy I knew marriage was a steamer trunk filled with dry soil. I want to say these things because I want you to believe me through the details to beyond the details. I want you to nod when I say I spent most of my summer beneath that tree, the snake at first shriveling, but then, day by day, swelling, a whole hive of bees filling its belly, a sleeve of hum blooming, inflating, an aberrant moon. When I say the bees would land on my face I want you to know I wasn’t afraid. I wanted them there. I wanted them to take something from me and make of it something sweet. I would wait, mouth open, beneath the snake’s neck, desperate for a drop of honey to slide down my lips, down my throat. I am telling you this because I want you to know what it was like, waking one night, tiptoeing outside and watching my mother’s shadow wrench the snake off the tree. Gripping the severed neck, the shadow 31 rose into the air, the snake’s body now an impossible balloon. My balloon, I thought. But it wasn’t. Only the absence in the summer-stunned dark I could call my own. Though I couldn’t share it. Though I didn’t know that then. Though I would fail over and over at giving it away. Like a flower growing out of a snake head. How easy it is to pull it from the earth. But then the snake’s head closes. And no amount of pulling opens it again. So you bury it, but the next morning you can’t remember where. ...