A Land More Kind Than Home Read online

  “I can feel it down in there now,” I said. “It seems like it ain’t going to come out.”

  Mama grabbed hold of it again, and this time she broke off the long part of it where it was sticking out of my hand.

  “Shoot,” she said. I looked and saw that there wasn’t no more of the wood to grab on to. The rest of it was still stuck down in there, and it looked like a long, skinny freckle spread out just beneath my skin.

  “How you going to get it out now?” I asked her.

  “We’re going to have to dig it out,” she said. She picked up that needle again and dug around and tried to pop that splinter up through my skin. It was hurting so bad that it made my eyes water.

  “That really hurts,” I said.

  “Well, we need to get it,” she said. “It ain’t good for you just to leave it in there.”

  “There ain’t that much of it left,” I said. “I can’t even feel it in there anymore.”

  Daddy opened the screen door from the front porch, and him and Stump walked into the house and came into the kitchen. Daddy leaned up against the counter and crossed his arms and looked at me and Mama where we sat at the table. Stump walked through the kitchen, and I heard him go down the hall to our bedroom.

  “What are y’all doing?” Daddy asked.

  “I’m trying to get this splinter out of your son’s hand,” Mama said. “I already got most of it, but there’s still a little bit down in there that I can’t get ahold of.”

  Daddy walked to the table and looked over Mama’s shoulder at my hand. He squinted his eyes like he was looking at something way far off in the distance.

  “There ain’t hardly nothing there, Julie,” he said. “He’ll be all right.” Mama stopped picking at me with the needle and sighed.

  “That’s fine to say, Ben,” she said. “But it needs to come out. There ain’t no use in leaving it in there if I can get it now.”

  “Is it going to hurt you to leave it in there, Jess?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “He’s fine, Julie,” Daddy said. I lifted my hand out of Mama’s and looked at my palm up close. A little bit of wood still hid down in there, but it wasn’t sticking out like it was before. “Hey, Jess,” Daddy said, “I need you and your brother to bury that snake for me. I don’t want that thing laying out there and rotting. No telling what kind of animals it’ll bring up out of the woods if it just sits there.” Mama turned around in her chair and looked up at Daddy where he stood behind her. Daddy looked at her. “I went ahead and lopped its head off,” he said. “It ain’t going to hurt them.” He looked at me. “But you remember, Jess,” he said, “even a dead snake will strike until the sun goes down.”

  “That ain’t true,” I said.

  “All right,” he said, smiling. “If you don’t believe me, that’s fine.”

  “He’s already got one splinter today,” Mama said. “He doesn’t need to be shoveling nothing with that hand.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Daddy told her.

  “Where should we bury him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Somewhere out there behind the barn will be fine. Y’all don’t have to dig it too deep—maybe just a couple feet.”

  I stood up from my chair and walked down the hall to our bedroom to get Stump.

  “Hold on,” Mama said. She got up too and followed me down the hall, but she walked past me and went into the bathroom and I heard her open the medicine cabinet and move stuff around on the shelves. I walked into me and Stump’s room and found him sitting on the bed with his quiet box in his lap. He looked up at me, and then he picked up the top where it sat on the bed beside him and put it back on. He stood up from the bed and carried it toward the closet and stood on his tiptoes and slid it back onto the top shelf. Then he just stood there looking into the closet like there was something else he wanted to find.

  “Daddy wants us to bury that snake,” I said. He didn’t turn around. “He wants us to go out there and do it before something carries it off.” I heard Mama leave the bathroom and walk toward our room.

  “Hold on, y’all,” she said. She walked into the bedroom with some gauze pads and some tape and some first-aid ointment in her hands. “Sit down on the bed here, and let’s see what we can do,” she said. “After that y’all need to get changed out of them church clothes.” She looked at my shirt where that blood had dried all over the front of it. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about that,” she said.

  I SCOOPED THE RATTLER’S HEAD INTO THE SHOVEL, AND THEN I scooped up its body. I carried the snake out in front of me real slow so I wouldn’t drop it, and I walked behind the barn down toward the creek, where the shade kept the ground damp and soft. The snake’s body was so long that it almost drug along the ground, and I had to raise the shovel to keep it from catching on something and getting pulled off.

  “It’ll be easier to dig down here,” I told Stump. He walked along beside me and stared at the snake. At the bottom of the hill I stopped and dumped it out into the grass a little ways away from the creek. It was quiet down there, and I thought about how if I had to be buried I’d want it to be in a place just like this. All the graveyards around here are up on the tops of mountains or set right into the hillsides. Daddy said they put them up high because of the rain. He said if you put a graveyard in the bottomland then you’d better be all right with seeing coffins float down the road after a big storm. I figured it didn’t really matter what happens to you after you die, and, if I had my way, I’d rather be down here by the creek where it was shady and nice and cool instead of up on top of some hill where there ain’t even any trees to block out the sun. Nobody’s going to want to visit you up there in the summertime when it’s hot.

  I dug the shovel’s blade into the ground, and then I turned the handle up toward the sky and jumped on the top of the blade with both feet to force it down as far as it would go. The dirt was soft and loose, and the blade sunk in easy. I raised the first shovelful of thick, dark dirt and saw a couple of earthworms wiggling around in it.

  “Look here, Stump,” I said, and I moved the shovel over to where he could see it. He’d squatted down by the rattler and was poking at it with a stick like he was afraid it might just come alive and snap at him. He raised his head and looked at the worms where they wiggled around in the shovel, and then he went back to poking at the rattler again. I dropped the dirt right beside the snake’s head and scooped up another shovelful.

  I kept digging up and dumping out the dirt until I’d made me a hole about knee-deep and big enough around to hold two snakes without them even touching each other. I stopped and put one foot up on the top of the blade and looked at my hand where Mama had put a gauze pad on my palm and wrapped tape around it. The tape had started to come loose, and the pad was just about soaked through with dirt and sweat. I undid the rest of the tape and tossed it into the hole, and then I lifted up the gauze and looked underneath it at my hand. The skin around the splinter was white and wrinkled like I’d kept my hand in the bathtub for too long, and I took the gauze pad all the way off and tossed it down into the hole beside the tape so my hand could get some air and dry out. I switched hands so I could hold the shovel with my left, and I put my right hand on top of the handle so it wouldn’t rub against the wood. I scooped up the snake’s head and dropped it down inside the hole. It rolled down the side and stopped right in the center. Stump stood up and looked down at it.

  I looked over at the rattler’s body where it lay on the ground by Stump’s leg, and I walked over to it and stared down at the little rattle on the end of its tail. I bent down and touched it, and then I picked it up and stood up straight. I shook it and listened to the sound it made.

  “Look here, Stump,” I said. He turned around and watched me hold the snake. I rattled its tail. “Listen to it,” I said. “This would be the last thing you’d hear if one of these boys snuck up on you.” I made a hissing sound and rattled the snake’s tail again. I laughed an
d walked toward the hole to drop it in down inside with the head, but just when I reached out my arm and got ready to let it go, the bloody stump where the head used to be reared back and struck me on the inside of my arm. It made a soft, squishy noise when the snake’s guts smacked up against my skin, and for a minute I thought the blood it had left behind was mine. I screamed and dropped the snake into the hole and fell back onto my butt and covered up the inside of my arm with my hand. I looked up and saw Stump standing over the hole and staring down into it. “Leave it alone,” I said. “Don’t touch it.”

  I stood up and wiped the snake’s blood off my arm and onto the back of my blue jeans. Then I walked over to the hole and stood beside Stump and looked down inside. The snake’s body was crawling around down inside there, and I could just barely hear that rattle going on the end of its tail. It looked like the head had come alive too, and its mouth was opening and closing and its tongue was sticking out. We stood there and watched it for a minute, but then I started wondering if there was any way it could climb up out of there, and I picked up the shovel and started covering the hole over with dirt.

  ONCE I HAD THE SNAKE BURIED, ME AND STUMP WALKED DOWN TO the creek. I kneeled down in the soft mud and washed the snake’s blood off the inside of my arm. Stump walked a little piece down the bank and squatted down and started turning over rocks and looking for salamanders. I could hear his hands splashing around in the water and cleaning the dirt off them. I looked down at my own hands, and then I looked up at Stump where I could just barely see his back through all the ferns that grew along the water.

  “Do you think we should’ve said a prayer or something?” I hollered at him. I waited for a second, and then I heard a splash and I knew he’d done turned over another rock. “I don’t think we should’ve either,” I said to myself.

  I wiped my wet hands off on my jeans, and then I stood and walked through the ferns to where Stump had squatted down by the creek. I sat down on my butt beside him. He had both his hands in the water, and he was digging into the mud and pulling it up by the fistful and looking at it up close to see if it had anything in it. You could find you some awfully good rocks doing it like that. I knew his pockets would be full of them if he found any.

  “Mama thinks you talked in church today,” I said. Stump rocked backward onto his behind too and crossed his legs and sat Indian-style. He wiped the water off his hands and onto his knees, and then he looked up into the trees like there was something up there he expected to see. “Hey,” I said, trying to get him to look at me. “Hey,” I said again. I reached out and touched his arm, and he looked at me for just a second, and then he raised his head back toward the trees. “It was me,” I said. “It was me she heard. Me and Joe Bill were outside, and we saw what they did. I was too scared to say anything because I knew how mad Mama would be at me for watching when I wasn’t supposed to.” He turned his head and looked up the hill back toward the barn. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I should’ve said something to Mama on the way home, and I should’ve tried to stop them from doing what they did. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

  Stump looked at me like he just might’ve been listening to what I was telling him, and then he stood up and walked away from the creek and up toward the hill. I didn’t watch him as he went, but I could hear the ferns swishing against his legs when he walked through them. I sat there alone for a little bit, and I thought about how it was this time, two days before, that me and Stump had been coming up the hill from the creek when we stopped underneath Mama and Daddy’s open window. I pictured Stump climbing up on top of the rain barrel to see in, and I remembered the feeling I had when I saw Pastor Chambliss come around the corner of the house and reach down and touch Stump. I still felt his fingers on my hand where he’d held it tight to get a good look at where that splinter had gone right in. I imagined Chambliss laying his hand on Stump, and then I imagined the weight of all those men pushing down on top of him. I knew that me and Stump had both seen things we would have been better off knowing nothing about.

  I HEARD MAMA HOLLERING FOR US TO COME IN AND I KNEW THAT meant she had our lunch ready. The ferns were all mashed down from where Stump had walked through them, and I followed the trail he made up to where I’d buried the rattler. The dirt was still soft, and I walked around on top of it to get it good and packed down, and then I picked up the shovel and set off up the hill to the barn.

  I leaned the shovel against the wall behind the barn door, and I looked up at the rafters where I knew my daddy was going to be hanging the tobacco once he’d finished sticking it and bringing it all in. When I left the barn and stepped out into the sunlight, I saw Stump up beside the house. He was on his knees in front of the rain barrel turning the spigot back and forth. There wasn’t no water coming out because there wasn’t any in there.

  “Nothing’s going to come out,” I told him. “It’s still broke, and if I was you I wouldn’t be messing with it because sooner or later Daddy’s going to find out.” We were standing under their window again. It was open, and I could hear them talking all the way from the kitchen. It sounded like they were arguing about something. I looked up at the gutter spout where it was supposed to run down inside the barrel, but it was all bent up and torn loose. “You’d better use the hose,” I said. He gave the spigot another couple of turns, and I walked over to the hose pipe and turned it on. I washed off my hands one at a time, and I left it running and sat it down in the grass. “Here,” I said. “Here, use this.” Stump shimmied over on his knees and picked up the hose and took a sip of the water, and then he rinsed his hands. I went around to the back of the house and opened the back door and walked down the hallway to the kitchen.

  “Well, he’s the one that called me,” I heard Daddy say. “It ain’t like I called him, Julie. He’s been back for a while, and I didn’t even know about it.”

  “Why’d he even come back? It sounds like he ain’t but a couple of miles away, so it’s not like he’s been dying to see you. It ain’t like he’s made any effort at all to meet your family.”

  “Maybe that’s what he’s doing now,” Daddy said.

  “Yeah, right,” Mama said. “He probably needs money.”

  “He did mention that he’s thinking about selling the old place,” Daddy said.

  “What a surprise,” Mama said. “Well, if he asks you for any money, then you’d better tell him to get in line behind me.” I heard her sigh.

  “Who are y’all talking about?” I asked. Daddy stood with his hands on the back of one of the chairs and leaned out over the table and stared down at it where Mama had already started setting out the food. He looked at me, and then he looked at Mama where she was rinsing off a head of cabbage in the sink. He smiled at her just a little bit like he was in trouble for something that he wasn’t going to take very seriously. Mama just looked away from him and picked up a big knife and sat that head of cabbage down on the counter and started chopping away at it.

  “Nunya,” Daddy said. I knew what joke he was playing, but I went along with it anyway.

  “Nunya who?” I said.

  “Nunya Business,” Daddy said. I walked to the sink and poured a little water into my cup, and then I turned around and leaned against the counter and took a long drink. Mama rolled her eyes and walked past Daddy down the hallway to the bathroom. I heard the door shut, and then I heard it lock. Daddy looked over at me.

  “Where’s your brother at?” he asked.

  “He’s with Nunya,” I said. Daddy smiled and reached out and floated a soft, fake punch onto my jaw and wiggled his fist against my face. I felt his wedding ring on my cheek when he did it.

  “That’s a good one,” Daddy said. He smiled. “With Nunya.”

  MAMA SAT A PLATE FULL OF SLICES OF COLD HAM IN THE CENTER OF the table, and she’d made pintos and coleslaw with corn bread. I took my fork and picked up a slice of ham and dropped it on my plate, and then I mixed my beans and my coleslaw together and crumbled my corn bread over it, just like
Daddy did. It was quiet except for the sound of the silverware hitting on the plates while we ate.

  “Where’d you find that snake?” I asked Daddy. He cut himself a piece of ham and stabbed it with his fork.

  “I just found him inside the barn door,” he said. “It’s like he was sitting there waiting on me.” He put the ham in his mouth and chewed on it. “Mmm!” he said. “This is just about the best ham I’ve ever had.” Mama looked up and stared across the table at Daddy like she was a little bit mad at him, but when I looked back at him I saw he was crumbling his corn bread over his beans like he didn’t even know she was thinking about him.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if I looked down and saw a big old snake waiting on me,” I said. “It makes me think I probably should have a BB gun.”

  “What do you think a BB gun’s going to do against a snake like that?” Daddy asked me.

  “I’d shoot it,” I said. “I’d shoot it before it bit me.”

  “There ain’t no way you’re getting a gun,” Mama said.

  “That thing would’ve had you by the thigh before you could even give that gun a pump,” Daddy said. He reached under the table and grabbed my leg, and I jumped when he did it because it surprised me.

  “I just think I need a BB gun,” I said.

  “There ain’t no way,” Mama said. “One gun’s one too many in this house.” She stood up and walked over to the refrigerator and opened it and leaned inside and took the butter out of the door. When she did, Daddy dropped his fork and acted like he was pumping a shotgun and he aimed it at her backside. I laughed, and when she turned around we both went back to eating our lunch. Mama came back to the table and sat down and sat the butter by the corn bread.

  “Jess,” she said, “me and your brother are going to the prayer meeting tonight after supper, and you’re going to have to come with us.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because your daddy’s got plans this evening,” she said. “He’s having company over.” She looked at Daddy, and then she took her knife and carved out a slice of butter and dropped it on Stump’s corn bread. Stump picked it up and took a bite, and the butter ran down off his chin. He picked up his napkin and wiped it off.