by Laura Furman
Mr. Forrester chuckled and said, “Mind your language,” as he took a pinch from his tin of chew.
“We do not speak of damnation idly here, Mr. Brown,” Papa said.
I took the second water tin over to Mr. Pattinson, and he thanked me. His sweat made a glossy layer on his face and neck, and his glasses slipped up his nose as he lifted his head to drink. I could see the muscles of his throat move as he took big swallows. He had a coppery, warm smell after all of his work with the engine in the sun. When he lowered his head and handed back the tin, he nodded at me.
“Won’t you eat, then?” I said, trying to speak low so Papa wouldn’t get angry with me.
“Will you bring me a plate?”
By the time I brought him a bowl of the creamed corn with a piece of corn bread, the only one still there besides Mr. Pattinson was Mr. Brown, lying across the seat of the Ford, his heels resting on the base of the passenger window. Mr. Pattinson was sitting on the running board.
“Chris is taking a little sleep,” he said. “Tuckered out from rolling that cigarette, poor darling. Mr. Forrester went to get some supper, and your father went to count how much money he has to pay the mechanic with.” I handed him his bowl and his bread and began to go away, but he took hold of my wrist and steered me back. “Wait a minute.” He gently pulled until I was sitting beside him on the running board. “Have you eaten?”
“Yes,” I said.
He mixed his creamed corn with his spoon, blew on it, and finally took a bite. “It’s burnt,” he said.
“I know,” I said, smiling. “Mrs. Malcolm made it.”
“And who made the corn bread?” he asked.
“I did.”
He took a bite of the bread and pretended to choke. I buried my face in my upraised knees. “It’s delicious,” I heard him say.
“You always make fun of me,” I said into my knees. “Your mother should have raised you better.”
“My mother raised me Catholic, remember?” he said.
I straightened myself up. “Are you Irish?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I suppose your people dislike Irish as well as Catholics?”
“Irish are Catholics, aren’t they?”
He laughed. “I was born in Chicago. Would you like to see a picture?” He put his bowl on the ground and went off with his corn bread toward the Stanley Steam. It was very dark now, and we were sitting on the side of the Ford facing away from the supper fire and the torches. Mr. Brown hadn’t made a sound. Mr. Pattinson returned—I heard him before I saw him. He sat down again and put something light and thin into my hands.
“Just a moment,” he said, and he struck a match and brought it close, shielding it with a cupped palm. In my hands was a photograph of three people, a man, a woman, and a child, in a cardboard frame.
“Oh, you were photographed!” I said.
“Dozens of times,” he said. From the clothes, it looked like it was taken about twenty-five years before. The man had immense whiskers, and the woman was fingering a long white dress. Her other hand was lightly touching the shoulder of the young child, maybe three years old, who was smiling with a wide-open mouth, riding an ornate rocking horse. The child had a light tuft of hair and tiny eyeglasses.
“Even then you had eyeglasses,” I said, resting my cheek in my hand.
“Yes. I’m very helpless.” The match went out, and he lit another one. “My father,” he said, pointing to the whiskered man, “is a newspaperman. He’s getting quite old now, and I think soon he’ll ask me to take over the paper. So I figured I’d have one last hurrah, drive down to New Orleans, before I have to take up the family mantle. We were on our way down when we came across you.”
“Are you going to go to New Orleans once you’re—finished with us?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. The match went out again, and this time he didn’t light another.
“New Orleans is a sinful city,” I said.
“Have you ever been there?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know?”
“I don’t need to taste the ocean to know its water is bad.”
He leaned forward, and the air he moved brought with it a milder smell of sweat and engine oil. “Where you come from, your home, is it just—full of good people?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Is it just you in your town, just the Church?”
“Just the Church. My father owns all the land.”
“He owns all the land?”
“Yes. He’s landlord to everyone.”
“So he’s the police, the law and order.”
I did not like the way he said it. “Papa upholds God’s law.”
“And no one breaks it. Rachel, what if you married a man who beat you?”
I put my hands over my heart. “What?”
“Would you break your marriage vow to leave him? What if you had children, and he beat them too?”
“I would—pray for God’s help.”
Mr. Pattinson put his head in his hands and said, “Jesus.”
I dropped my hands to my sides, pressing my palms down against the bumps on the running board. “Don’t swear,” I said.
Mr. Pattinson abruptly raised his head and said, “Let me tell you what you will do if someone hurts you. You will run away from them, no matter who they are.” I had never heard him angry before. I got up and went away toward the supper fire, and I looked back only once, but all I could see were Mr. Brown’s feet in their burnished leather shoes. Smoke was now sleepily drifting out of the window.
When I woke up in the morning, everyone was waiting for Mr. Pattinson to return from Aurora with the mechanic. At noon, he did return, and all the men clustered around the Ford again. I stayed in the wagon, watching from the window. In an hour, we were moving.
After another week, Mr. Brown lost his smile. He seemed to grow increasingly agitated, and his politeness suffered. The worst was when he swore at Mrs. Malcolm after she stepped on one of his shoes, and Mr. Pattinson had to drag him away by the shirt collar with both hands and have words with him. That is what Jessica told me—I stayed in the wagon most of the week, because it was my delicate time. Sometimes in the morning, I would lie on the green love seat after everyone had gone to breakfast, and I was afraid that Mr. Pattinson would knock. I didn’t like anybody to look at me when it was my time, but the thought of him seeing me made my stomach clench.
The night came when we were camped outside Webb City, just shy of Kansas, and it was my turn again to worship. My delicate time was over by then, so I was fit and pure. I got my rattler from the reptile wagon, and I took him someplace quiet so I could look at him for a little while before it was time to begin. He was awake and lively, trying to slide up out of the box. I smelled cigarette smoke, so I closed the lid and looked up at Mr. Brown. He had no hat, and his dark hair was in his eyes. One hand was up by his mouth holding his cigarette, the other hanging limp at his side.
“What’s his name?” Mr. Brown gestured to the box with his cigarette.
“He doesn’t have a name,” I said.
“No name?” he almost shouted. I could see then that he was drunk.
“No, Mr. Brown,” I said. “No name.”
“All of your crazy show, and the snake has no name? Why not?”
“Because,” I said, standing up, “he is not a pet.”
When the worship started, I sat with my hands on my lap, looking only at Papa. He said the old words from Luke, “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.” When it was time, I stood up and went over to Mr. Forrester, and he opened up my rattler’s box like a sacred gift, like he’d done every time before. I lifted my rattler, and as I stood with him wrapped around me, his firm, dry body sliding over my skin, I looked into the crowd. Mr. Brown was not there, but Mr. Pattinson was. He was near the back, but I could see him clear as day, and it was the same as the first time.
The fear on his face jumped across the people between us like a lightning bolt, and struck me. I froze, praying that God would have mercy, because I was handling this snake without faith.
The rattler’s hatchet head was pointed toward my shoulder, and his white mouth nudged me as he lifted himself up toward my face. I turned my head as he came nearer to my neck, but he did not bite me. I took him up in my hands and put him back in his box, like always, like it hadn’t mattered.
And as everyone was taking down the tent and the townspeople meandered away into the night, I went to the Stanley Steam, which was off by itself in the darkness at the back of the wagon line. I sat in its backseat, running my palms up and down over the leather. After only a short time, I could hear someone coming, and I knew it was Mr. Pattinson. I did not look up, but I heard and felt him lean against the outside of the car, one hand on the roof and one on the top of the backseat door.
“Chris is angry with me because he wants to stop following you and your people around,” he said. “He wants to go home.”
“Why doesn’t he just go?” I said, still without looking up.
“Well, for one thing, the car is mine. But even if I did drop him off someplace with a train station, he says he won’t leave without me.”
I didn’t say anything. He abruptly rounded the car, opening the other backseat door, and he sat beside me. “I have a daughter,” he said, “and I’m not married to her mother.” I looked up into his face, which was covered in wide swipes of shadow so that I couldn’t properly see it. “I was very young, and I thought I wanted to marry her. She died in childbirth. I wanted—”
I opened the car door and was about to get out when he raised his voice. “Do you think I’m going to hell, Rachel?”
I looked back at him. “Yes.”
“You do?”
“Yes, I do.”
“You want me to go to hell?”
“It is—a pleasure to think that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked.”
“You are happy that I’m going to hell?”
“I am happy in all of God’s works.”
“You’re smiling.”
I was, involuntarily, without knowing why. “I’m smiling because you’re making me uncomfortable.”
“I’m sorry. But maybe you’re uncomfortable because—”
I laughed, shaking my head. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Why do you laugh? Because you don’t actually believe I’m going to hell?”
“I laugh because I know you. You are a blasphemer and a fornicator. You have scoffed at all of us.” He leaned toward me. I looked up at the car ceiling. “And I rejoice to think that God will punish you,” I said.
“I never scoffed at you,” he said softly. We sat for a little while. There was moonlight on the top of his legs and over his stomach. His right shoulder was beside my left, not touching, and his face was bent downward, his eyeglasses shadowing the sharp outline of his nose. All of these things were painful to me. “Rachel,” he said at last, “can you look at me, please?” I did, even though it put a stone in my throat. “You’re twenty years old,” he said. “You can have a say in your own life. I can see the conflict in you.”
“There is no conflict,” I said.
“I can see it. This—please listen to me, all the way through, because this will sound … intensely forward to you. I am leaving with Chris tomorrow, driving to Springfield. Once we arrive in Springfield, I will wait there for three days.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, then put it into my hand. I stared at it. I had never seen one before. “I’ll wait in Springfield for three days, at the train station, from six in the morning until midnight. After three days, I’ll go on to St. Louis. But before that, I’ll wait for you. You know I have money. There will be people to help you. You won’t be alone.” He put his hands on my shoulders and squared me up so I was completely turned to him. “This comes from a place of good faith, Rachel,” he said. “I don’t mean anything more by it than I say.” I looked at his face, at the thin bags beneath his eyes, magnified by his eyeglasses, and the faint freckles along the bridge of his nose. He let go of my shoulders and got out of the car.
In the morning, I watched out the window of our wagon as Mr. Pattinson and Mr. Brown shook hands with the Church men, then turned the Stanley Steam around and drove away, tossing up dust behind them. I hadn’t even let myself think about it. Even when I lay awake in my bunk while Jessica and Mother and Daniel slept quietly, I had not weighed my options. I did not have any. Perhaps for a small moment in the night before he left, I thought about Chicago and New Orleans and having my photograph taken, but if that moment had happened, it was struck down by Daniel sighing in his sleep.
As the Stanley Steam grew obscure in the distance, I leaned back into the shadows and sat beside Mother on the love seat, putting Daniel’s feet in my lap while he laid his head in Mother’s.
“Shame,” Mother said. “I thought perhaps Mr. Pattinson at least …”
I figured the trip to Springfield would take them about a day. I didn’t know how fast his car went, but a day was a little less than it would take a fast, light wagon. I kept the twenty-dollar bill inside my shoe, beneath my heel, and I could feel it slide when I walked. It stayed there for two years before I put it in between the pages of my Bible, in the book of Ruth, once I stopped going on the summer tours.
Four days after Mr. Pattinson left us, we were outside Pittsburg, Kansas, and while everyone was setting up the tent, I took my rattler’s box out of the reach of the torchlights, and I sat on the ground with it in my lap. I lifted the lid and looked down at him, fearing that he would kill me dead if I so much as put one finger against his diamond-patterned scales. My tears dropping on him made him twitch.
In three weeks, we were in Coldwater, Kansas, and it was my turn again. I did not tell Papa or Mother or Jessica anything about it. My hands were steady as I took up the snake, my rattler, and I put his middle around my neck, but he only wound himself down my arm. I had been so sure that I would never feel the touch of the Holy Spirit again, but the whiteness began to descend, and the silence came down around me, but my rattler didn’t turn to fire. As I watched him move lazily, refusing to be truthful and bite me, I was full of fear, and I began to gasp. Then he bit me.
He bit me on the forearm, on the soft, hairless underside. The women in the crowd screamed, people crowded the stage, and I fell to the floor, my rattler still wrapped around me. The crowd pushed backward and away, like an undertow. Mr. Forrester’s wide brown hands clamped down behind my rattler’s head, and I passed out.
Mother told me that Mr. Forrester yanked the rattler off of me, Papa sucked all the venom out—spitting it onto the dirt like it was chewing tobacco—and everyone in the crowd applauded as soon as they’d gotten the bite wrapped up and loaded me into the Ford to take me to the Coldwater hospital. That night they got the largest contribution to the collection plate they’d ever had. I had to stay in the wagon the rest of the summer. Jessica brought me my meals.
I went on the summer tours twice more, but I couldn’t handle my rattler anymore. I was afraid of him. Papa was angry with me at first, saying that I must have sinned very gravely, maybe I had shamed myself with one of those faithless men, and I should pray and humble myself before God. He did not ask me to pick up a snake again. After two years, I asked Papa if I could stay behind with the very old people and the mothers with very young babies during the summer, and he did not pause before saying that I could.
He gave my rattler to Daniel when he turned ten. He’s never been bit, not even once. Mother died of influenza in 1923, so now I am the first woman in my father’s house. I keep Papa’s shaving kit lined up along the kitchen windowsill, but nothing in this house is mine. I continue to faithfully worship the God of Abraham, of Isaac, the God of my fathers. I lead a blameless life, far from the sins of adultery and fornication. I have no husband, but I am a mother to my sister and brother.
Samuel Pattinson, what is your daughter’s name?
Robert Anthony Siegel
The Right Imaginary Person
WE WERE PART OF a large group of people at a yakitoriya in Shinjuku, celebrating somebody or other’s birthday, but we’d both gotten stuck at the wrong end of the long table, cut off from the main conversation, which was drunken and flirty.
“I bet everyone tells you how great your Japanese is,” she said, lighting a cigarette.
“They do,” I acknowledged.
“Then let’s talk about something else.”
It was 1985, almost the end of summer. Sumiko told me she was nearing the end of a long, boring adolescent period in which she was trying to become the opposite of her mother. She didn’t want to become a good cook, or keep the house clean, or be loved by children—or be nice to anyone, for that matter—or cultivate any of the traditional arts expected of a young lady of marriageable age from a good family. “Calligraphy?” she said. “Can you think of anything more boring? And flower arranging? It makes me want to throw up.” Instead she drank a sort of white lightning called shōchū and smoked Golden Bat cigarettes and wrote science fiction stories in which androids took on unplanned human emotions, slept with each other, had imaginary pregnancies, and gave birth to children that were strings of computer code.
“But what about you?” she asked. “It’s not fair if you don’t tell me anything.”
I looked at her hand, the delicate fingers smudged with ink. There were nights when I rode the Yamanote Line in a circle, jammed against the other passengers, just to feel someone else’s pressure on my skin.
But what I told her about was my trip to Shikoku, how I went alone with a backpack over the vacation, taking old buses from village to village, and how in one of those villages a group of kids had formed a circle around me and asked to touch my hair. I had kneeled down on the grass beside the road, closed my eyes, and felt their hands running over my head. Small, gentle hands reading my otherness like braille.
