Wiley Cash - A Land More Kind Than Home

“It looks like it would come out right now,” I said.

“It’s a whole lot deeper than you think it is,” Mama said. “That skin around it is nice and tight.”

She picked at it with that needle a little bit longer, and then she laid the needle down on the napkin and picked up the tweezers. There was a little bit more of that splinter sticking out of my hand now, and Mama took the tip of the tweezers and closed them around it and gave it a tug, but that splinter wouldn’t even budge.

“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.