Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  He drove into town. The dog, Maya, riding shotgun.

  He stopped at Farm King on the way into town and bought a Have-a-Heart trap. The clerk, who recognized Jackson and called him “professor,” suggested pouring antifreeze down the groundhog holes.

  “What about the dog?”

  “You want to keep the dog away from there for a few days.”

  “Any other ideas?”

  “Get yourself a hose and pour ammonia down the hole. Wait a couple of minutes,” she said, “to let the ammonia settle. Then you add a bottle of bleach and get the hell out of there. You don’t want to breath that stuff. You know, a lot of housewives get sick that way, mixing ammonia and bleach. They think …”

  Jackson paid for the Have-a-Heart trap.

  “You put some canned peaches in there, you’ll get something.”

  “Thanks.”

  He put the trap in the back of the truck and stayed on the highway instead of turning on Farm King Road to avoid the smell from the meat processing plant when the wind was from the north; past the prison, then east on Broadway to the Circle at the center of town. It was the most attractive way to approach the town, Colesville, named after Edward Coles, an abolitionist governor who eventually got disgusted with Illinois politics and went back to Philadelphia. Broadway, once you got past Lindon Road, was lined with big houses and big trees, oaks and maples and an occasional elm that had survived the blight. The houses were eccentric, but lovely in new coats of paint. Like the houses in San Francisco, except they weren’t all jammed together.

  At Cornucopia on East Main Street he bought gorgonzola instead of one of the more expensive French blue cheeses, fresh pasta, French bread. He’d spent a year in France with his parents, when he was twelve, and then he’d gone back on his own for a year of doing nothing in Paris. After a week at the international youth hostel on the rue Trousseau, he and a French girl from Toulouse who was looking for a roommate moved into a little apartment on the rue Stanislas, across from a tanning salon (Centre de Bronzage). They shopped every day at a fruiterie on the boulevard du Montparnasse and at the same charcuterie that his mother had patronized across from the Métro station. He still shopped every day, at the Hy-Vee in Colesville, and at Cornucopia. It was a way of getting out, giving a shape to the day, being around people, seeing what looked good. He hadn’t had much appetite for a while, but it was coming back, and he was able to drink a little beer or wine now without any ill effects.

  And there were always good-looking women. Wherever you went. Even in the Hy-Vee. Amazing. So much beauty. Though not like Paris, where the women dressed up even to go to the butcher. His mother had dressed up. His father too. And Suzanne, the woman he’d lived with for almost a year, had dressed up just to look out the window, though she didn’t always bother to put on a skirt or pants. She was married now and lived in a big apartment in the ninth arrondissement, across the street from the house where Chopin lived during his love affair with Georges Sand, who had her own house on the same street. Every year Suzanne sent a Christmas letter inviting Jackson to spend the holidays with her and her family in their country place in the Dordogne. And Jackson sent her a Christmas letter inviting her and her family to spend the holidays with him in the woods.

  He changed the menu when he saw fresh mussels at the fish counter at the back of the store. Remarkable changes had taken place at the supermarket in the last few years. You could be surprised by fresh mussels, or sea scallops, or wild shrimp, and sometimes even wild salmon. Hoisin sauce was on the shelves, along with Chinese soy sauce, next to the Kikkoman; balsamic vinegar; six or seven kinds of olive oil … You could count on radicchio and fennel and arugula in the produce section. He ate well.

  He’d eaten well in the Ituri Forest too. His father had warned him that he’d never make it as an anthropologist—because he didn’t like yams. And it was true, in a way. Oceania and large chunks of Asia and Africa would have been off-limits. Yams morning noon and night. He couldn’t have faced it. The Mbuti ate yams, but theirs was not a yam culture. They lived on mushrooms and wild honey and plants that had no name in English, and roasted duiker, a kind of antelope, and vicious little mouse deer that lived on the river banks. And termites, and sometimes boiled monkey. Occasionally elephant.

  When the guests arrived in Claire’s new four-door BMW, the dog ran up the ramp to greet them. The house was halfway down a slope. The garage was at the top of the slope. At the bottom of the hill Johnson Creek separated the house from the woods beyond. The ramp was very romantic, but inconvenient. It would have been better to have built the drive right down to the front of the house. Jackson had nailed little pieces of wood on the ramp, which was treacherous when it was icy and you were carrying bottles of wine in paper sacks. The guests stepped on the little pieces of wood even though it wasn’t icy.

  People spoke of Claude’s cabin, but it was really a house—very rustic, but very comfortable. There was a Lopi wood-burning stove in the large living room, which took up most of the first floor and was full of books, but there was a furnace too, and air-conditioning.

  Claire gave Jackson a couple of air kisses and introduced him to Pam. “You didn’t call her, did you? I mean, just to hear the answering machine?”

  “The cry of the loons,” Jackson said.

  “Why don’t you call now?”

  “Why would I call her now?” Jackson asked. “She’s right here.”

  Claire invited Pam to admire the kitchen, which Claude had designed himself, turning it into a sort of French farmhouse kitchen, with a large Lacanche stove set back into the wall, old blue and white pottery on the shelves, and terra-cotta tiles on the floor. Copper pots hung from the ceiling, some with tin linings, which Jackson had retired, and some with stainless steel, which he used regularly and which needed polishing.

  Pam was wearing a summer dress with a low scooped neckline. Claire was her usual classy self in a pastel sheath dress that would have been suitable for entertaining at the rectory, which she and her priest husband sometimes called the Vicarage—which was beautiful in its own way, with leaded windows on the first two floors and eyebrow windows in the attic. Father Ray, Claire’s husband, was independently wealthy. So was Claire. At least her parents were.

  “Jackson, if you’d listen to me you’d be able to afford decent wine.” She handed Jackson a paper sack with two bottles of wine. Claire had been putting money into dotcom stocks and was trying to get others to join her. Jackson was too stubborn. “Doesn’t it bother you to see everybody around you getting rich? It’s not too late, you know.” And apparently this was the case, because shares kept going up and up and up. Jackson didn’t follow the market, but did listen to NPR.

  “Get out while you can, Claire,” he said. “You’ll thank me later. This whole country’s gone crazy. It’s the South Sea Bubble all over again.”

  Father Ray came to his wife’s defense. “It’s different this time.”

  “It’s always ‘different,’ ” Jackson said. He deliberately didn’t take the wine out of the sacks until he was in the kitchen. Claire had spent a fortune on two bottles of white Burgundy. “Did you hear about that guy in Atlanta,” he said, “who killed nine people and wounded I don’t remember how many? He was a day trader.”

  “He went crazy,” Claire said, “because he lost money, not because he made money.”

  “I don’t want to be around when you lose all your money.”

  “Jackson won’t listen to anyone,” Claire explained to Pam. “If he’d listened to me, he’d be a millionaire right now. Or at least a hundred-thousandaire.”

  She turned to Jackson: “Pam’s just taken a course in day trading. She’s going to help us all get rich. We’re going to form an investment club. Pam will be our guru.”

  Pam was a poet. She’d taken up day trading to supplement her income, because there’s not a lot of money in poetry. She’d gone to a seminar on day trading in Chicago that lasted a full week.

  Claire said, “You paid fi
fteen hundred dollars. Right?”

  Pam nodded.

  “What did you learn?” Jackson asked.

  “Don’t hang on to stocks overnight.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Extra risk. You don’t need it. Especially when you’re starting out.”

  “What kind of risk?”

  “Well, if you go to bed holding on to your shares and they devalue the currency in Brazil, you’re in trouble up to here.” She indicated her chin. “That’s what happened last August. The Dow dropped five hundred points.”

  “But it came right back up,” Father Ray said.

  “How do you know what to buy and sell?” Jackson asked.

  “You get up in the morning and watch CNBC. You see who the guests are. If they’re on CNBC they’re not going to be bringing bad news, so you buy those companies.

  “You want to get in and out and make a lot of small profits. Everything is liquid, so you can buy at sixty and sell at fifty-nine and an eighth.”

  “Why would you do that? I mean, why would you sell at a loss?”

  “Sorry. You could buy at sixty and sell at sixty and an eighth. Better?”

  “If the market goes up …” Pam said. “If you make two hundred dollars a day, that’s an extra fifty thousand a year.”

  “Don’t be such a stick in the mud,” Claire said to Jackson. “Pam says we should invest in ShoppingKart.com. Start with five thousand apiece. You can come up with five thousand, can’t you Jackson? You’ve got nothing to spend your salary on. Unless it’s your Save-the-Pygmies fund. Tell them about ShoppingKart.com, Pam.”

  “ShoppingKart.com’s going to be huge. It’s going to target the entire American retail grocery market. It’s a ten-billion-dollar company.”

  “What does ShoppingKart.com do?”

  “They’re reengineering the entire grocery industry. They’ve got a three-hundred-thirty-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Oakland, and they’ve signed a deal with Bechtel to build twenty-six more, all over the country. You go on line and make a list. You’ve got three hundred different vegetables to choose from, three hundred fifty kinds of cheese; seven hundred wine labels. They assemble your order, send it to a docking station, and then it’s delivered right to your door. Profit margins of twelve percent. Do you know what the average is for supermarkets?”

  No one knew. “Three percent. Three percent!”

  “I like to do my own shopping,” Jackson said.

  Claire was anxious for Jackson to open the wine. He put it off, just to let the anxiety build a little. As if he might not open it until they sat down to eat. Which was the sensible way to do things. Claire headed them toward the kitchen, and a corkscrew.

  “This is what anthropologists call magical thinking,” Jackson said. “If you wish hard enough for something to happen, it will happen. Like the cargo cults. People think these dotcom guys are some kind of spiritual beings possessing divine powers. Like John Frum.”

  “I’m wishing that you’d open the wine,” Claire said.

  Jackson opened Claire’s wine. “Is this supposed to breathe, or can we drink it now?”

  “Both,” Claire said. “Do you have any Campari?”

  “No, I don’t have any Campari.”

  Claire laughed. She always asked for a Campari and soda, reminding Jackson of a time when they used to drink Campari and soda all the time.

  Pam stooped to admire the view through the kitchen window. “Do we have time for a walk before supper?”

  She was looking at eighty acres of timber. Woodlots. Mostly second growth, but a lot of the old trees still standing. White oaks, red oaks. Horse chestnut. Hickories. Kentucky coffee trees, two or three elms that had survived the Dutch elm disease that devastated the campus and the town. There were two cottonwoods at the far end of the property, where the stream ducked under Route 64, and plenty of wild cherry, Osage orange, walnut, hackberry, mulberry.

  “You wouldn’t want to walk now,” Jackson said. “I didn’t get the paths cleared this summer. Warren—Warren used to live over the garage—always cleared the paths in the spring with a trimmer mower, but Warren got sick, and then he died. Too much poison ivy, you’ve got to be careful. Too late to do it now. You’ve got to watch out for ticks, too.”

  “Jackson had this marvelous hired man who did everything for him. Plowed the drive, fixed the roof, cleared the paths … He inherited him from Claude Michaut. Mr. Pygmy.”

  Jackson poured olive oil into a large copper saucepan and added some minced garlic. Just before the garlic had started to turn golden, he added a generous splash of white wine.

  “He’s got a niece,” Claire said. “Warren does. In the prison here. Henrietta Hill Correctional Facility—the Hill. He helped her apply to Thomas Ford. Got her a tuition scholarship and left her enough money to pay for everything else. Jackson’s supposed to look after her.”

  Jackson crumbled some gorgonzola onto the salad.

  “Have you figured out what to do with her? I mean, is she going to live in a dorm? How old is she? She’s about thirty-five, right? Hard to imagine she’d want to live in a dorm with nineteen- to twenty-two-year olds. Of course, after Henrietta Hill, who knows? She could probably teach them a thing or two about group living. What about the church, Ray?” Ray seemed startled. “Can you think of anyone in the congregation who might be willing to take her in?”

  “Not off hand, but I suppose we could put a notice in the bulletin.”

  “She’ll need some friends, that’s for sure. We can help out there.”

  “What’s she in prison for?”

  “She shot her husband, isn’t that it?”

  “I didn’t know that was a crime.”

  “Very funny, Pamela. But it was more complicated than that, wasn’t it Jackson?”

  “Much more complicated.”

  “Her husband forced her to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes, isn’t that right? Forced her at gunpoint.”

  Pam expressed the appropriate horror. “So she had a good reason to shoot him. Did she get bit?”

  Jackson was sorry now that he’d ever told the story to Claire. Like a lot of stories, this one had gotten loose, like a snake, and was probably going to start biting people. Claire had no doubt spread it around the university. Mea culpa. “I guess it was too good a story to keep to myself,” he said aloud. (Though he’d kept quiet about the Garden of Eden, and about his daughter.)

  “She got bit, but I think it wasn’t real bad. They got her to the hospital right away.”

  “Why didn’t they put him in jail?”

  “I don’t know. I guess the bite didn’t swell up much. Her husband said it might have been their pet raccoon that bit her.”

  “A box of rattlesnakes? Who’s got a box of rattlesnakes?”

  Jackson dumped the mussels into the pan, put the top on, and looked at his watch. Soup bowls were stacked on the counter. The loaf of French bread, from the Cornucopia, was on the table.

  “Willa Fern’s husband, that’s who. He’s a holiness preacher down in Little Egypt. Southern tip of Illinois, across the Ohio River from Kentucky.

  “Is that around here?” Pam asked. Pam was from California.

  “Four hundred miles.”

  “Why does he have a box of rattlesnakes?”

  “They handle them during their services.”

  “Is that legal?”

  “Probably not.”

  Claire poured herself some more wine. “Jackson, I’m going to go with you when you pick that poor woman up at the Henrietta Hill. She’s going to need a female friend.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “There’s no ‘we’ll see’ about it. She’s going to need some looking after. Imagine, your husband forcing you to put your arm in a box of rattlesnakes. And when you try to defend yourself you get thrown in jail. This country is unbelievable.”

  Jackson specialized in simple French or French-type dishes. He had both volumes of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking
and a copy of Larousse Gastronomique in French, but the only cookbook he used regularly was his first, which he’d bought at Kroch’s and Brentano’s in Chicago. The Flavor of France. A picture on every page (of France, not the food), and no recipe was longer than a half a page. He hadn’t given a little intimate dinner in two years, and he was looking forward to the buzz—from the wine, and from the possibility of a strange woman spending the night.

  Claire asked Ray to say grace and insisted that they all hold hands. Jackson, sitting across from Father Ray, held hands with Claire and with Pam, ready to disengage his hand before Claire gave it a special little squeeze. Pam’s holding strategy was neutral. She had no special message to communicate. No invitation.

  He put a side of salmon on the grill so it would cook while they ate their first course, moules marinières. One thing he’d learned from Claude was how to give a nice rhythm to a meal by serving two courses of more or less equal weight. The salmon was done by the time he’d cleared the mussel plates, so they picked up the thread of the earlier conversation—ShoppingKart.com—and then Father Ray pointed out that today was not only Jackson’s birthday, and not only the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, but also the Feast of the Transfiguration. There was a connection in Father Ray’s mind because his grandfather had been killed at Okinawa in 1945.

  “Some churches have started to celebrate the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent. It’s not a bad idea, actually. It makes a nice transition between Epiphany and Lent. But I don’t know. It’s always been on August sixth, as long as I can remember.”

  By the time the conversation turned back to the heat and the humidity, the salmon was flaking nicely. It was beautiful. Jackson served it on large white plates that had room for the salad. A wonderful salad. Spring mix. All kinds of herbs and lettuces in special bags.

  “You know what I’m thankful for?” he said. “I’m thankful for the salads in these little bags. It took them a long time to figure out how to get the bags right. Each bag is a miniature biosphere. You have to have a different kind of atmosphere for every kind of salad. You get the wrong kind of ink on the package, bang, your salad is suffocated.