Serpent's Tooth

by Michael R Collings

  “Then suddenly, without raising the shovel blade, as if he had been ready for action the entire time, he thrust.

  “Just once.

  “That was enough.”

  Another pause.

  All right, I suppose that Victoria did it for the dramatic effect; who could blame her? She had a rapt audience hanging on her every breath, and even if we already had an inkling—judging from the evidence in the pickup bed in front of us—of what was going to happen, we were caught up in her words.

  I had to break the silence.

  “What was it, Victoria? What did he kill?”

  She smiled at me, almost as if thanking me for coming in with the proper question at the proper time. But she didn’t answer directly.

  “He leaned over and scooped something up with the blade, then, carrying the shovel as far up the handle as he could manage, he returned.

  “On the blade was the head of a rattlesnake, its skull sliced nearly in half, with perhaps five or six inches of body extending behind the jaws. The severed end was crusted over with dirt and small bits of hay it had picked up as it had made its way through the field.

  “Granddad didn’t apologize for showing such a grisly thing to his little granddaughter. Quite the opposite.

  “‘Sweetie, I want you to remember this, that’s why it’s important that you understand what I just did.’

  “He rested the shovel—its curved blade still cradling the rattler’s head—on the nearby stump of a tree that had fallen across the creek some years ago, and helped me down and away from the rock.

  “He pointed a few feet away. There, still coiled as if ready to strike, was the body of the rattlesnake. It later measured over five feet long...without the head.”

  “A big’un,” one of the men broke into the story to say. “Though I’ve seen ’em six, seven feet long in good years.”

  “Yes,” Victoria said, “It was a big-un. It was rattling its warning to me but because of the sounds from the crick, and probably because of my excitement over the mouse-burial, I hadn’t heard. Granddad saw it just seconds before it would have struck. He severed the neck just far enough beyond the head that the rattler was still able to maneuver into the undergrowth. He knew what that meant.”

  “What?” I was a novice to rattlesnake-lore and had no idea what it meant.

  “It meant, ma’am,” Tom Neilson said, receiving a nodded permission from Victoria to continue the story, even though he had not been present back then, “it meant that there was an angry, hurting rogue rattlesnake out there, one that still had enough of its vitals to keep on going for some time, for hours, maybe days, and that it no longer had the capability of warning anything or anyone that it was nearby. It meant that it was a real danger to any living thing in the area, pet, cattle, human.”

  “You see, Lynn dear,” Victoria picked up the story without a hitch in the rhythm, “Granddad’s initial strike had left enough of the snake’s body still attached to the head that the snake could live for quite a while. He knew that he was responsible for that—later, he apologized for missing the vital spots with his shovel, didn’t know what had come over him, easy shot like that, he said. So he knew that he had to hunt the thing down, right then, and make sure it was dead. You don’t leave an injured rattler free to strike again.

  “I didn’t realize at the time, or for years after, what an incredibly brave thing he had just done, scouring that wheat field for the rattler’s head, depending on his eyes alone to find it.”

  “I heard a story like that when I was a kid,” Neilson said. “Man was changing a flat tire a few miles out of whatever town he lived in—this was back in the days of inner tubes rather than steel-belted radials. He wanted to be sure that whatever had punctured the tube wasn’t still embedded in the tire, so he was feeling around on the inside of the tire for anything sharp.

  “He found it. Pulled his hand right out of there and saw that what he thought must have been a long, sharp thorn had sliced into the meat of his thumb. He didn’t think much of it. He finished putting the spare on the car, stowed the flat in the trunk, and headed on home.

  “Halfway there, just as he got to the edge of town, he started feeling distinctly un-good, dizzy and sick to his stomach. Luckily for him, he was only a few blocks from his doctor’s office. The doc took a look at his thumb, listened to his story, and called the state agent to request an immediate and emergency shipment of anti-venin.

  “Man nearly died. Just because of a flat tire.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I had the feeling that, while Victoria’s story might have been intended for all of us as an elliptical explanation for why she had been so adamant about being careful in moving the bales, Tom Neilson had told his story to me. I was sure his men had heard it before, and from the way Victoria was nodding, I was just as sure that she had heard it, also. Even Carver looked anything but surprised.

  I was the only outsider.

  In an odd way, I felt that through Tom’s story, I had become a little bit less of an outsider and more of what might someday become a local.

  “So this is what you wanted us to find, Miz Sears,” Deputy Wroten said.

  “Yes. I had to be certain that it was here before I told you. And I had to be certain as well that no one touched the bales until we had a chance to examine them. The snake may be dead—I think that twitch was more a reflex than a living movement—but it could still have been deadly.”

  “And if I had stacked it with the other bales and then broken it apart for the stock someday soon...,” Neilson said.

  “It’s possible it might have killed one of your cows as well. Or worse. The snake is dead, but the poison is not.”

  Neilson removed his hat and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “That was quite a story, ma’am.”

  “And one my granddad would be pleased to know that I never forgot. That was why, as soon as I saw poor Eric Johansson’s body and heard Carver’s explanation of what had happened yesterday, I began to wonder if perhaps snake-bite rather than the consequences of a savage beating might have been what killed him.”

  “But...,” I began.

  “There’ll be plenty of time for questions later, ma’am,” Wroten said, somehow just avoiding sounding brusque. “Right now, I’ve got to get this bale and its...uh...contents back to town. Doc Anderson will want to see it when he gets home. All right with you if we leave it where it is for now, Tom? Can one of your boys drive it on into town. I’ll radio ahead and let the boys at the station know it’s coming and what they should do with it. And how very carefully they should handle it.”

  “I’ll drive it on in myself,” Neilson said.

  “And maybe the rest of the men could check out the field. It would be helpful if we could find the remains of the snake. It must have been caught up in the blades of the combine and cut into pieces. I’d be grateful for as many of those pieces as you might be able to locate.”

  The men nodded. They could do that.

  “Then perhaps we should get going as well,” Victoria said, to Carver and me as well as to Wroten. “I think that we still have several very important stops to make, and we might as well get on with it.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The first stop was the Ellis place.

  Deputy Wroten led the way again. He had checked in by radio with Deputy Allen to make sure that Eric Johansson’s body had been picked up and safely delivered to the morgue in Fox Creek. It didn’t seem like there was much reason to keep a watch on the Johansson place with the body gone and everyone who might be interested in poking around Eric’s room safely in jail at the moment, so Wroten requested Allen to meet us at the Ellis farm.

  He was standing outside the kitchen door as we made our way down the long driveway. He looked more than a little uncomfortable as the two cars pulled up side by side—the patrol car closest to the house, mine right up next to it. Perhaps Wroten had spoken to him at some point about the way he had behaved toward Carver that morning. At
any rate, he had his service hat off and was working the brim with both hands as if he was particularly nervous about something.

  Wroten didn’t speak to him when he got out of the patrol car. He just sidled up next to the other deputy and waited, his face solid and solemn, looking rather like it had been recently carved out of a chunk of marble and had not yet been softened by wind or rain or erosion. His eyes were bright and hard.

  This was Deputy Wroten in his true ‘official’ mode, not that John Wayne parody we had seen earlier.

  I got out of my car first and went around to help Victoria, whose hip was, I think, giving her more trouble than she cared to let on, but before I could open the passenger door, Carver had slid across the back seat, exited the rear, and pulled her door open for her.

  “Let me get this, Lynn,” he said. I was pleased that he had used neither “Miz Hanson” nor the ubiquitous “ma’am.”

  He extended one hand and helped Victoria, although she did most of the work herself. She seemed stiffer than usual, though.

  I leaned over and whispered to her, “Remind me to ask you how long you had planned on suckering Snake into decking you.”

  She merely grinned at me and then addressed her attention to Carver.

  “Lynn and I are going to wait here a moment, Carver. I do believe I shall need some help in getting to the house, so she is going to put her arm through mine and we are going to progress rather slowly from here over to where the two officers are standing.”

  Carver looked confused, obviously wondering why she was saying this, particularly when it was readily apparent that she actually didn’t need any help.

  “You can go on ahead, dear, and wait for us at the house. I believe that Deputy Allen has something that he would like to say to you, and I think it would be better that he did so in relative privacy.”

  Understanding flooded Carver’s eyes, and he took off.

  Victoria and I stood by the car door, pretending not to watch as Allen took a step forward and spoke a few words to the younger man as soon as Carver was within earshot. I suppose that if we had listened intently we could have overheard the deputy’s apology for manhandling Carver so atrociously earlier, but neither of us cared to do so.

  To all appearances, we were examining a particularly lovely rose bush nearby.

  When Allen extended his right hand and Carver unhesitatingly gripped it and shook it, Victoria and I made our way over to the house.

  Wroten seemed satisfied with whatever Allen had said. His face was not quite so angular and stiff as it had been, although he was still solemn and unsmiling.

  “Now comes the really hard part,” he said.

  We knew what he was talking about.

  We found Janet Ellis and Greta Johansson at the kitchen table. The room was bright and colorful, with a row of commemorative plates of varying sorts flashing highlights from a narrow shelf a foot or so below the ceiling. The window was open, its vivid curtains drawn fully open to let the sun stream in. The walls were a welcoming yellow, and the cabinets white, so the total effect was of openness and lightness and cheeriness.

  The only mote of darkness in the room was Mrs. Johansson. She was still dressed in the worn chenille robe and formless scuffs. Her hair was still wispy and uncombed. But her eyes were more focused now and her cheeks held a little more color.

  She and Janet were sharing a pot of tea. Her hand was wrapped around the china cup as if she treasured the warmth of the liquid inside, but it was steady and firm.

  She looked up as we entered.

  “Well, did you get them? Did you arrest those hooligans who murdered my grandson?” It was unsettling hearing the harsh words coming from such a fragile-looking woman. There was an undercurrent of hatred that seemed at odds with everything I had been told about her.

  Wroten walked over to the table and settled himself into one of the chairs. Victoria took the other one. Allen went on into the living room, apparently following instructions from Wroten, and Carver leaned against the sink not far away.

  Wroten leaned across the table and placed his hand over Mrs. Johansson’s.

  “Well, ma’am. We arrested the men who beat your grandson. The ring leader made the mistake of taking a poke at Miz Sears here, in front of me and half a dozen other witnesses, so even though we don’t have any direct evidence...yet”—he held up his other hand to forestall her obvious intention to interrupt—“that he beat up your grandson, we will be able to hold him on an assault and battery charge until the coroner can complete the autopsy. Doc will know just what to look for. So I don’t think the man will be seeing the free light of day for some time to come.”

  Greta Johansson nodded her approval, but her forehead was still knitted and furrowed, and her eyes glinted with repressed anger.

  “But they killed him, didn’t they? They talked him into doing whatever things they do out at that god-forsaken bar and then they killed him.”

  Wroten glanced at Victoria as if asking for help.

  Victoria responded, as I knew she would.

  “Greta, dear, I know this is all very difficult for you. And I know that you think it might be easier if there is someone to blame. But the fact is that those men, however evil they might be, whatever evil things they persuaded Eric to do..., they didn’t kill him.”

  “But....” Greta was no longer angry. She simply needed Victoria to comfort her, to tell her the truth, whatever that might be.

  “Eric was...well, he wasn’t behaving the way that you would have wanted. He made some mistakes, serious mistakes, and because of one of them, those men beat him up, beat him badly. But he would have healed. And I would like to think that he would have learned from those mistakes and healed inside as well as outside, spiritually as well as physically.”

  I wasn’t so certain of that. From what little I had learned about Eric Johansson, I think that he would have remained a thorn in his grandmother’s side for a long while yet. Some of my old friends from school had made the same mistakes, had begun the long, tortuous, and all too frequently one-way trip along that same road, and precious few of them had managed to turn their lives around.

  I was by no means convinced that Eric would have been one of the few.

  Truth to be told, part of me was glad that he was dead, for his grandmother’s sake and for the sake of her memories of him. She would be able to construct—or maybe reconstruct—an idealized grandson in her mind and treasure him in ways she might not have been able to do with a living, breathing, wayward one. The one she would create would make no more mistakes. He would remain her darling grandson to the end of her days.

  “Then how...? What...?” She needed to know more.

  So Victoria, now holding both of her old friend’s hands in her own very capable ones, told the true story, leaving out nothing.

  Greta’s eyes filled with tears.

  “That was it? Snake-bite? From a dead snake?” From the sound of her voice, she was blaming, not her grandson, but someone or something larger, more all-encompassing, something cosmic. I doubted that she would come right out and blame God—she didn’t seem like the type—but she needed some way to keep Eric’s death from seeming merely trivial, accidental.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “But I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Greta said. I could hear her pleading for more.

  “I have,” Victoria said. I wondered if she would re-tell the story she had shared with us earlier, but she didn’t. “And in a way, poor Eric was at least partially responsible.”

  “Eric? How? How could he have known...?”

  “Of course he couldn’t have known. That’s not what I meant, dear.” She patted Greta’s hands lightly. It made no difference, whether on the shoulder or on the folded hands, her “There, there” gesture worked. Greta calmed noticeably.

  “You see, Eric brought a number of...bits of baggage, should we say?...with him when he came up here to live with you. Partly, it was his attitude. Now don’t try to explain it awa
y, dear. You and I have talked often enough over the years that I could hear the pain in your voice when he...well, when he didn’t behave quite like the boy you had known and loved as he was growing up.

  “Some of it was no doubt his grief at losing his parents so suddenly. Some of it was his desperate need to find himself, to build an identity that would protect him against any further loss. Some of it was a need to be independent, a need that struggled constantly with his need to have someone to comfort him and guide him.

  “He had you, of course. But he chose to ignore you—don’t deny it, dear, he did. And he chose instead to follow others, men who did not love him and did not care for him the way you did but who did not—in his eyes at least—threaten to smother him with love.”

  “I never...I always....”

  “I know. But he didn’t. So he continued to play the role he had carved out for himself long before. There was his spiky hair, his piercings. Nothing wrong with them, of course, but they set him apart from others up here, made him more definitively a loner, an outsider.

  “And there was his clothing.

  “His spiky hair couldn’t hurt him, other than perhaps to make him the object of attention. But his torn jeans could, and ultimately they helped to kill him.”

  Greta had given up trying to interject or explain. She just sat there, listening to Victoria’s calm, warm voice.

  “You see, someone like Carver might be tempted to wear fashionably distressed jeans, say, if he were courting a certain kind of girl.”

  Carver actually blushed at this.

  “But he would know that when he was hiring himself out for field work, he would need to wear jeans designed, not for show, but for hard wear. He wouldn’t wear jeans ripped across the knees, because he would know that he might have to get down on his knees to fix something underneath the frame of a truck, or boost something with his knee to get it to a needed height...for example, a bale of hay. He would know that the jeans were primarily for his protection.