William Gay - Little Sister Death

Binder shrugged. Why not?

I’ll get a hoe, Vern said eagerly.

Binder put out his cigarette beneath his shoe. He turned. I’ll get the hoe, he thought.

Vern was halfway through the wet grass to the toolshed. Binder followed him, quickening his pace.

He paused in the door for his eyes to adjust, but Vern was already in. He could hear him blundering around, kicking things out of his way. The halflight came into focus. Vern’s flowered back leant to pick up the tamping bar, stooping toward the gaudy scrap of rag.

Vern, Binder said. Don’t move.

Vern had seen it. He didn’t move anything but his eyes, which sidled sickly sidewise, gleaming with panic, blind fear rising in them like water in a glass.

Don’t even breathe, Vern.

The snake was coiled, her triangular head absolutely motionless, raised in the air a foot or so beside Vern’s outstretched hand. Vern was motionless as well, leant forward like a statue carved in an attitude of agony. Sweat beaded on his forehead. A crystalline drop crept out of the curls at his temple and down his cheek, hovered for a moment on his chin. Do something, Vern whispered.

I wouldn’t talk too much if I were you, Binder said. Snakes can’t hear, but they can feel vibrations in the air. We can’t have too many bad vibes here.

Kill it.

I aim to kill it, Vern. I’m just looking for something to kill it with.

He was looking for a piece of steel he could smash the snake’s head with, or at least distract it until Vern could get out of the way. He paused for a moment, watching. Vern might have been leaning to stroke the snake. Or Corrie’s arm, he thought suddenly, and saw quite clearly Vern’s dark hand laid positively on Corrie’s white arm, seeing not only that but Vern’s face as well, Corrie’s dark eyes turning up toward him.

What can I kill it with, Vern? Binder asked musingly. I can’t find anything. Killing a snake. You need just the right tool…here’s some onions, Vern. A world of onions. Do you reckon I could beat it to death with an onion?

What the hell’s the matter with you, you son of a bitch?

I may have to go get a gun, Vern, Binder said. You just stay like you are. I been aiming to get a gun anyway.

He picked up a broken plowpoint, eased soundlessly toward the snake. As he was raising the steel, Vern’s arm jerked involuntarily. He and the snake exploded into violent motion, Vern screaming and flapping his arm madly, the snake whipping back and forth, embedded in the flesh of his forearm, Binder trying to hit it as it flopped off. The snake struck the broken floorboard and Binder hit it with the plowpoint, the creature coiling in on itself in agony, bright drops of blood spattered in the pillars of sunlight.

He stared in stricken disbelief as from the snake’s mouth emerged a myriad of tiny, writhing baby snakes, perhaps a score of them, some already rusty miniatures of the mother, others almost glasslike, so translucent he could see the dusty floorboards through them. They fanned out on the planking, wriggling outward aimlessly in all directions from the epicenter of the dead snake’s mouth.

Vern was on his hands and knees clutching his arm. You filthy son of a bitch, he said.

Binder went to the door.

Get the truck down here, he called.

Binder sat in the truck in the hospital parking lot. He seemed to have been waiting for a long time. The sun was hot through the glass. He lit a cigarette from the butt of another, leant to the mirror. He could see Corrie approaching, hear her heels hitting the asphalt. She got in.

How is he?

They’re giving him antivenom. The doctors told Ruthie he’d probably be all right.

That’s good, Binder said abstractedly. He was hot in the car, wanted to be in motion. Wanted to be back at the homeplace. He thought of the cool glade by the creek, the autumnal hills beyond it bright with maples like bursts of orange flames. The trees were turning already. Tomorrow there might be the year’s first frost. He thought of the homeplace shrouded in snow, the road drifted deep, the place secure, inviolate.

Are they going back with us or what? Are we supposed to wait?

No, they’re keeping him, David. He’s too sick to go anywhere. And Ruthie…Ruthie’s going to a motel. They’re upset with you. Vern’s awfully upset with you.

Vern’s upset with me. Hellfire. I didn’t bite him. The goddamned snake did.

He says you knew it was going to.

Going to. Fuck him. How do I know what a snake thinks?

She watched him in silence. Binder could feel the silence grow accusatory, could feel her rising concern for him. It did not move him, even touch him. He felt a cold remove from it, from her, from everything. It was all just yesterday’s news.

From his childhood Binder had had the ability to look at himself with a cold and unflinching honesty, and he knew unquestioningly that he had changed. Winter ran in his veins and his insides were now chunks of bloody ice, and he knew he had crossed over into some foreign province of the heart, had left her more surely than he had ever feared her leaving him. He couldn’t find his way back, but the worst part was knowing he would not come even if he could.

Queen of the Haunted Dell

An authenticated history of the night the Bell Witch followed us home

HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED OR MAYBE HAPPENED OR IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE HAPPENED:

Adams, Tennessee, is in Robertson County, five miles from the Kentucky line. In 1804, when John Bell moved his wife and six children and slaves to a thousand-acre farm he’d bought on the Red River, Adams was a virtual wilderness. Skirmishes with Indian war parties up from the south were less than twenty years in the past. The Indians didn’t live here, but it was sacred ground to them and had been for thousands of years, since the time of the Mound Builders. It was also theirs by right of treaty. As was often the case, the treaty had clauses and fine print and footnotes, and the land was soon settled by prosperous white landholders, most of them from North Carolina.

John Bell was prosperous, too, but he seems to have had a clouded past. There were rumors of his being involved in the death of his former overseer. By all accounts he was a close man in a business deal as well, and it wasn’t long before he found himself in Robertson County civil court accused of usury in a slave trade with a woman named Kate Batts.

These things about Bell, by the way, are not folklore or hearsay: they’re a matter of public record, but they are not mentioned in the early books about the Bell Witch, which paint John Bell as a sort of stoic martyr.

Because of his legal trouble, Bell was excommunicated from the Baptist Church, and in a small community where almost every social function is tied in one way or another to the church, this was a big deal. Living in such a close-knit community of God-fearing folk, Bell must have felt like a pariah.

Then things got worse.

In 1817, John Bell saw an animal in his cornfield. It looked like a black dog but not exactly. When he fired his rifle, it vanished. Not long after, Betsy, Bell’s thirteen-year-old daughter, was picking flowers and saw a girl dressed in green swinging by her arms from the branches of a tree. The girl in green vanished.

There were noises in the house. Something gnawing on the bedposts, rats maybe, the sound of something enormous and winged flying against the attic ceiling, the sound of chained dogs fighting. Lights flitted about the yard. Covers were yanked from folks trying to sleep. Hair was pulled, jaws slapped. Betsy seemed to catch the worst of it.

This went on almost every night for a year before Bell confided in anyone outside the family. According to M. V. Ingram’s An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch , published in 1894 and based on an account written by one of Bell’s sons, things had come to such a sorry pass — nerves were frayed, nobody was sleeping — that Bell had to have help and opinions. Two preachers were consulted, James Johnson and Sugg Fort.