Tom Piccirilli - November Mourns

Jesus, they couldn’t all be indigenous to this patch of woods, could they? Were these church folks bringing them in and breeding them? Penning them up and letting them loose again for their children to chase.

Could you train rattlers? Would they go only so far, then turn around and come on back home again?

Clouds drifted over the sun. The threat of rain grew stronger. The wind rose, carrying the flames higher until smoke and the smell of burning scrub wafted into Shad’s face. Trees swooned and the heady clack of thick oak limbs battering together resounded through the clearing. The oncoming storm seemed to make the folks even more excited. Their Plexiglas bins were filling.

Jerilyn reappeared. One last shaft of sun angled down toward her feet as she approached, then snuffed out as she reached him. Her bangs swept back and forth in the breeze, and he watched her bare shoulders and tried hard not to be entranced by the glimmer of raindrops on her skin. He couldn’t help it. The way the scene had been set, it appeared to have been directed especially for him. She very nearly managed to draw his attention away from the snakes boiling over in her path.

So maybe some of the hollow folks would’ve called her a witch.

“You ever see a roundup before?” she asked.

“Christ, no.”

“You said you wanted to learn about our church.”

“Yes,” he told her. “I did say that.”

Listening to the hisses coming from off to the left, the right, mothers calling their kids to them because they had to get out of the rain. They’d finish catching the rattlers tomorrow, if it was nice out.

There was a different kind of friction working in the air now. A new energy coming toward him, a presence quickly homing in on him. He spun and lifted his hands in case he had to fight. Jerilyn’s face closed up. Her lips pressed together and the fine, soft chin scrunched into wrinkles of annoyance.

“Mr. Shad Jenkins,” she said, “I’d like to introduce you to my sister, Rebi.”

He watched the grasses part, and the storm was on him.

You couldn’t look at her without a list of all the biblical seductresses flashing through your mind. She was perhaps a year or two younger than Jerilyn. Long dark hair framed by the gathered darkness, rain coming down on her and bearing through the bramble patches. An expression of insolence or petulance on that face. She was compact and had graceful curves that crowded her outfit until the seams wanted to split.

She gripped a ringneck in each hand, casually holding them out before her. She struck a provocative pose, hip out, the snakes adding some indefinable wanton abandon. It was bestial in its own way. When she came at him again, it was with a slow, big-cat walk, predatory with a hint of violence.

Doom didn’t always sneak up on you, sometimes it sashayed.

“Hello,” he said.

There was meat and jiggle to her. A light blue skirt sheathed her fine hip, and she wore a loose black top cinched at the waist by a thick belt. He should’ve spotted her from twenty yards off but he hadn’t until she was on top of him. Her breasts moved vigorously beneath her blouse. A dab of crimson touched the cheeks in her round face, the lips equally red. Her hair coiled and clung against the sides of her neck. A flicker in her black eyes made him think of Callie Anson for an instant.

He hadn’t seen a woman-any woman-during the two years he was in the slam, and now they were coming out of the weeds to find him.

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Jenkins.”

It took him a second to find his voice. “You too, Rebi.”

Jerilyn’s eyes narrowed and he saw the anger move through her like an iron smoothing out creases. It had nothing to do with him. His presence served as a catalyst for some dispute that had started a long time ago.

“You’re a little wide-eyed, Mr. Jenkins. Never handle snakes before?”

“No.”

“You a’scairt?”

Everybody always asking him that, like they were waiting for him to fall apart. You say yes, and they have something to hang over you. If you say no, they shove the fucking thing right in your face. Better to sound like an urban hippie who’d never set foot in a field before.

He said, “I know enough to respect them.”

“Don’t you be worried none. If’n you get bit, we got plenty of that there antivenom serum.”

Just the thing to set his mind at ease. There was something sly about her that he both liked and hated.

“He won’t be bit, so long as you turn those ringnecks aside, Rebi,” Jerilyn told her. “You angered them some.”

“Oh, these is just babies. They wouldn’t likely break the skin.”

“Come on,” Jerilyn said. “It’s time for supper.”

Rebi looked at Shad, let her tongue out to moisten her top lip. “You eatin’ with us?”

“Yes, he is,” Jerilyn answered for him.

“That’s fine then. Daddy’s gonna enjoy meetin’ him.”

Rebi held the snakes up before him, opened her mouth wide, and brought the reptiles closer and closer and closer until all their tongues were flicking wildly together.

It made him sick to his stomach, and hard.

THEY LED HIM BACK UP OVER THE EMBANKMENTS and down to a trail that ran through a tract of catclaw briar. The rain came down and brought a cold that somehow became despair. It reminded Shad of the evenings when he was a kid and he and Pa would walk out to his mother’s grave and blunder their way through prayers. Six or seven years old, sometimes Mags would come along and say the proper words for them.

Rebi eventually let the two snakes she’d been carrying go free, and the girls began to walk faster. Rain cascaded off the slash pine, and oak branches snapped in the winds. The temperature dropped quickly until they could see their breath. Rebi began to laugh quietly.

He heard the other snake handlers up ahead on the trail, the children still giggling and chattering excitedly, parents giving sharp commands to watch for stickers. Jerilyn pressed a hand to Shad’s elbow, helping to guide him over the rough path.

When they broke from beneath the heavy brush, the trail sloped to a hamlet he hadn’t been expecting.

The community proved to be much larger than Shad had imagined. He’d been thinking it might be like the shantytown quarter in Poverhoe City, but it was much more formalized than that. Lottie Sublett had been right. Houses and cabins sat close together, porches bunched up to form plank walkways.

There was some money here in the settlement. But the men had done the work themselves and they hadn’t had the skills or craftsmanship to do an impeccable job. His father would’ve been appalled. Foundations had shifted and the walls inclined at bad angles. Rain would cause doors and window frames to stick or jam shut. They had sunk their own wells and septic tanks and the area had unnatural grades to it.

Now folks returned to their homes carrying their containers of snakes, the kids asking questions about church services, men talking about their hunger.

In the center of the small colony stood a two-story farmhouse with a wide veranda. It was much larger and better constructed than the surrounding buildings, erected on rocky, thorn-choked land that could never be properly farmed. It showed that these people either believed in miracles or had an insane amount of faith in themselves.

Unlike the other homes, which looked to have been built within the last couple of years, the farmhouse had been around for decades.

“That’s our place,” Jerilyn said. “It doubles as a communal center for the congregation.”

“A church?”

“We don’t really have a proper chapel,” Rebi told him, and when she spoke she turned and moved against him. He had a hard time listening even with her talking in his ear. “Just a big room in back of the house with seats.”