That was one time. There were other days when they went out to catch rattlesnakes. Dusk to dawn, they'd walked through the woods, carrying forked sticks, cloth bags over their shoulders and a metal box swinging from David's hand.
It always seemed to David that time paused on those days, the sun forever in the sky and the dry leaves moving under his feet. The world was reduced to just himself and his father and the snakes, but it was expanded, too, the sky opening vastly around him, higher and bluer with every step, and everything slowing down to the mo?ment when he spotted a movement amid the colors of dirt and dry leaves, the diamondback pattern visible only when the snake began to move. His father had taught him how to go still, watching the yellow eyes, the flickering tongue. Each time a snake shed its skin the rattle grew longer, so you could tell by the loudness of the rattle in the forest silence how old the snake was, how big, and how much money it would bring. For the largest ones, coveted by zoos and sci?entists and sometimes by snake handlers, they might receive five dollars apiece.
Light fell through the trees and made patterns on the forest floor, and there was the sound of wind. Then there was the rattling, and the rearing head of the snake, and his father's arm, strong and solid, plunging a forked stick down to pin the snake by its neck. The fangs extended, striking hard into damp earth, the rattling wild and furious. With two strong fingers his father gripped the snake tightly behind its open jaw and picked it up: cool, dry, writhing like a whip. He slung the snake into a cloth bag and jerked it shut, and then the bag was a live thing, quivering on the ground. His father flipped it into a metal box and closed the lid. Without speaking they walked on, counting the snake money in their minds. There were weeks, in the summer and late fall, when they could make $25 this way. The money paid for food; when they went to the doctor in Morgantown, it paid for that too.
David!
Norah's voice came to him faintly, urgently, through the distant past and the forest and into the day. He rose up on his elbows and saw her standing on the far edge of the field of ripening strawber?ries, transfixed by something on the ground. He felt a rush of adrenaline and fear. Rattlesnakes liked sunny logs like the one by which she'd stopped; they laid their eggs in the fertile rotting wood. He glanced at Paul, still sleeping quietly in the shade, and then he was up and running, thistles scratching his ankles and strawberries bursting softly beneath his feet, already reaching into the pocket of his jeans and closing his fist around the largest stone. When he got close enough to glimpse the dark line of the snake, he threw it as hard as he could. The dull stone arched slowly through the air, turning. It fell six inches short of the snake and burst open, its pur?ple heart alive and glittering.
"What in the world are you doing?" Norah asked.
He'd reached her by then. Panting, he looked down. It was not a snake at all but a dark stick resting against the dry skin of the log.
"I thought you called me," he said, confused.
"I did." She pointed to a cluster of pale flowers just beyond the line of shade. "Jack-in-the-pulpits. Like your mother used to have. David, you're scaring me."
"I thought it was a snake," he said, gesturing to the stick, shaking his head once more to try to clear away the past. "A rattlesnake. I was dreaming, I guess. I thought you needed help."
She looked puzzled, and he shook his head to clear away the dream. He felt terribly foolish, suddenly. The stick was a stick, nothing more. The day seemed absurdly normal. Birds called out, and the leaves began to move again in the trees.
"Why were you dreaming of snakes?" she asked.
"I used to catch them," he said. "For money."
"For money?" she repeated, puzzled. "Money for what?"
The distance was back between them, a chasm of the past that he could not cross. Money for food, and for those trips into town. She came from a different world; she would never understand this.
"They helped to pay my way through school, those snakes," he said.
She nodded and seemed about to ask more, but she did not.
"Let's go," she said, rubbing her shoulder. "Let's just get Paul and go home."
They walked back across the field and packed up their things. Norah carried Paul; he, the picnic basket.
As they walked, he remembered his father standing in the doctor's office, green bills falling like leaves on the countertop. With each one, David remembered the snakes, the whipping of their rattles and their mouths opening in a futile V, the coolness of their skin be?neath his fingers, and their weight. Snake money. He was a boy, eight or nine, and it was one thing he could do.
That and protect June. Watch your sister, his mother would cau?tion, looking up from the stove. Feed the chic'tens and clean the coop and weed the garden. And watch June.
David did, though not well. He kept June in sight but did not stop her from digging in the dirt and rubbing it through her hair. He didn't comfort her when she tripped over a rock and fell down, scraping her elbow. His love for her was so deeply woven with re?sentment that he could not untangle the two. She was sick all the time, from her weak heart and from the colds she got in every sea?son, which made her wheeze and gasp for breath. Yet when he came up the path from school with his books slung over his back, it was June who was always waiting, June who looked into his face and understood what his day had been like, who wanted to know all about it. Her fingers were small and she liked to pat him, the breeze shifting her long lank hair.
And then one weekend he came home from school to find the cabin empty, still, a washrag hanging over the side of the tub and a chill in the air. He sat on the porch, hungry and cold, waiting. Very much later, near dusk, he glimpsed his mother walking down the hill with her arms folded. She did not speak until she reached the steps, and then she looked up at him and said, David, your sister died. June died. His mother's hair was pulled back tautly and a vein was pulsing in her temple and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. She wore a thin gray sweater, pulled close, and she said, David, she's
gone. And when he stood and hugged her she broke down, weep?ing, and he said, When, and she said, Three days ago, on Tuesday, it was early in the morning and I went outside to get some water, and when I came bac't the house was quiet and I knew right away. She was gone. Stopped breathing. He held his mother, and he could not think of anything more to say. The pain he felt was deep inside him, and above that was a numbness and he could not cry. He put a blanket around his mother's shoulders. He made her a cup of tea and went out to the hens and found the eggs she had not collected, and he gathered them. He fed the chickens and milked the cow. He did these ordinary things, but when he went inside the house was still dim, the air still silent, and June was still gone.
Davey, his mother said, a long time later, from the shadows where she sat, You go off to school. Learn something that could help in the world. He felt a resentment at that; he wanted his life to be his own, unencumbered by this shadow, this loss. He felt guilty because June was lying in the earth with a mound of dirt over her and he was still standing here; he was alive, and the breath moved in and out of his lungs; he could feel it, and his heart beat. I'll be a doctor, he said, and his mother didn't answer but after a while she nodded and rose, pulling her sweater close again. Davy, I need you to take the Bible and go up there with me and say the words. I want the words said formally, and right. And so they walked up the hillside together. It was dark by the time they got there, and he stood beneath the pines with the high wind whispering, and by the flickering light from the kerosene lamp he read, The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. But I want, he thought, as he spoke the words. I want. And his mother wept and they walked silently down the hill to the house, where he wrote a letter to his father, telling the news. He posted this on Mon?day when he went back to town, with its bustle and bright lights. He stood behind the counter, the oak worn smooth by a generation of commerce, and dropped the plain white letter in the mail.
When they finally reached the car, Norah paused to examine her shoulder, dark pink from the sun. She was wearing sunglasses, and when she looked up at him he could not read her expression.
"You don't have to be such a hero," she said. Her words were flat and practiced, and he could tell she had been thinking about them, rehearsing them, perhaps, during the walk back.
"I'm not trying to be a hero."
"No?" She looked away. "I think you are," she said. "It's my fault too. For a long time I wanted to be rescued, I realize that. But not anymore. You don't have to protect me all the time now. I hate it."
And then she took the car seat and turned away again. In the dappled sunlight, Paul's hand reached for her hair, and David felt a sense of panic, almost vertigo, at all he didn't know; at all he knew and couldn't mend. And anger: he felt that too, suddenly, in a great rush. At himself, but also at Caroline, who had not done what he'd asked, who had made an impossible situation even worse. Norah slid into the front seat and slammed the car door shut. He fished in his pocket for his keys and instead pulled out the last geode, gray and smooth, earth-shaped. He held it, warming in his palm, think?ing of all mysteries the world contained: layers of stone, concealed beneath the flesh of earth and grass; these dull rocks, with their glimmering hidden hearts.
May 1970
I
E'S ALLERGIC TO BEES," NORAH TOLD THE TEACHER, watching Paul run across the new grass of the playground. He climbed to the top of the slide, sat for a moment with his short white sleeves flapping in the wind, and then sailed down, springing up with delight as he hit the ground. The azaleas were in dense bloom, and the air, warm as skin, hummed with insects, birds. "His father's allergic too. It's very serious."
"Don't worry," Miss Throckmorton replied. "We'll take good care of him."
Miss Throckmorton was young, just out of school, dark-haired and wiry and enthusiastic. She wore a full skirt and sturdy flat san?dals, and her eyes never left the groups of children playing on the field. She seemed steady, competent, focused, and kind. Still, Norah did not completely trust her to know what she was doing.
"He picked up a bee," she persisted, "a dead bee; I mean, one that was just lying on the windowsill. Seconds later, he was swelling up like a balloon."
"Don't worry, Mrs. Henry," Miss Throckmorton repeated, a bit less patiently. She was already moving off, her clear voice calming, like a bell, to help a little girl with sand in her eyes.
Norah lingered in the new spring sun, watching Paul. He was playing tag, his cheeks flushed, running with his arms straight down by his sides—he'd slept that way, too, as an infant. His hair was dark, but otherwise he looked like Norah, people said, with the same bone structure and fair coloring. She saw herself in him, it was true, and David was there too, in the shape of Paul's jaw, the curve of his ears, the way he liked to stand with his arms folded, lis?tening to the teacher. But mostly Paul was simply himself. He loved music and hummed made-up songs all day long. Though he was only six, he'd already sung solos at school, stepping forward with an innocence and confidence that astonished Norah, his sweet voice rising in the auditorium as clear and melodic as water in a stream.
Now he paused to squat beside another little boy who was skim?ming leaves from the dark water of a puddle with a stick. His right knee was skinned, the Band-Aid pulling off. Sunlight glinted in his short dark hair. Norah watched him, serious and utterly absorbed in his task, overcome by the simple fact of his existence. Paul, her son. Here in the world.
"Norah Henry! Just the person I wanted to see."
She turned to see Kay Marshall, dressed in slim pink pants and a cream and pink sweater, gold leather flats, and glimmering gold earrings. She was pushing her newborn in an antique wicker car?riage while Elizabeth, her oldest, walked by her side. Elizabeth, born a week after Paul, in the sudden spring that had followed that strange and sudden snow. She was dressed this morning in pink dotted Swiss and white patent leather shoes. Impatiently, she pulled away from Kay and ran off across the playground to the swings.
"It's such a pretty day," Kay said, watching her go. "How are you, Norah?"
"I'm fine," Norah said, resisting the impulse to touch her hair, acutely aware of her plain white blouse and blue skirt, her lack of jewelry. No matter when or where Norah saw her, Kay Marshall was always like this: calm and cool, coordinated to the last detail, her children perfectly dressed and well-behaved. Kay was the sort of mother Norah had always imagined that she herself would be, handling every situation with a relaxed and instinctive calm. Norah admired her, and she envied her too. Sometimes she even caught herself thinking that if she could be more like Kay, more serene and secure, her marriage might improve; she and David might be happier.
"I'm fine," she repeated, looking at the baby, who gazed up at her with wide inquisitive eyes. "Look how big Angela is getting!"
Impulsively, Norah leaned down and picked up the baby, Kay's second daughter, dressed in frothy pink to match her sister. She was light and warm in Norah's arms, patting at Norah's cheeks with her small hands, laughing. Norah felt a rush of pleasure, remembering the way Paul had felt at this age, his scent of soap and milk, his soft skin. She glanced across the playground; he was running again, playing tag. Now that he was in school, he had his own life. He no longer liked to sit and cuddle with her unless he was sick or wanted her to read him a story before bed. It seemed impossible that he had ever been this small, impossible that he'd grown into a boy with a red tricycle who thrust sticks into puddles and sang so beautifully.
"She's ten months today," Kay said. "Can you believe it?"
"No," Norah said. "Time goes so fast."
"Have you been down by the campus?" Kay asked. "Have you heard what's happening?"
Norah nodded. "Bree called last night." She'd stood, the phone in one hand and the other on her heart, watching grainy news on TV: four students shot dead at Kent State. Even in Lexington, ten?sion had been building for weeks, the newspapers full of war and protests and unrest, the world volatile and shifting.
