before, and why they weren’t on it. It didn’t help to think about being kicked off of it or kicking other people off of it, or to figure ourselves as heroes. But Helen would have said not talking about it wouldn’t change anything, either. We stood around the stove with our neighbors and tried in vain to feel like we had something in common. When we got along at all, it was when we moved a woodstove together. It was when we pictured ourselves standing together against outside threats, instead of threatening one another. We preferred to imagine ourselves on the right side of things, including history. We preferred to stand side by side, thinking despising thoughts about people who were long dead and the mistakes that they’d made, instead of thinking despising thoughts about one another and about the mistakes we were right now making each moment. Then one of Frank’s daughters pointed down behind the woodstove and said, “Snake!”
The black rat snake slid from beneath the stove until it showed itself five feet long, and Frank’s daughters, all six of them, set up a delighted shrieking. The snake froze in place. It grew rigid and crimped up all along its length. It gave off a sulfur-and-onions smell, the fairy godmother crashing the party.
“You’re scaring it,” I told the shrieking daughters. “Black snakes kink up like that as an anxiety reflex. They only smell like that when they’re afraid.” But they continued shrieking.
“Be still!” Frank commanded. And they were still.
“We’re just playing,” the oldest daughter said. “It’s just an old black snake, we ain’t scared of them.”
“I am,” the youngest daughter said. “I am and I bet he is,” and she pointed at Perley. But Perley opened his mouth wide and made a happy screech, imitating the girls’ noise. I held him under his armpits, crouched down so he could get a better view. “Meet your new friend Snake,” I said, as he goggled and drooled. “This snake lives here, too.”
“That’s enough,” Lily said, grabbing for Perley, but I swung him up to my shoulder.
“What do you do about a black snake in your house?” Lily asked the room.
“You feel lucky,” Frank said.
“I got them at my place, too,” Mike said. “They’re not venomous. And they’ll eat mice and copperheads.”
“Come on, Lily,” I said. “You grew up around here. You know about black snakes.” Perley gripped my braid and pulled.
“Not about having them in my house. And I grew up in town. Not so many snakes in town,” Lily said.
Rudy said, “Black snakes are territorial. If they’ve decided to live here, it’s next to impossible to get rid of them. This is the time of year they move in, too. Autumn. When it’s getting cooler at night.”
“They?” Lily asked. “As in more than one?”
“You might get a lot of them,” her boss from the hardware store said. “They’re loners, but they all like the same thing. So if you’ve got a good habitat, they might all move in at once.”
“They need somewhere to hibernate,” the mill operator said. “A hibernaculum. Someplace warm to spend the winter.”
“A house full of snake experts,” Lily said. “So snakes need a place to hibernate. Fine. I don’t see why it has to be our house.”
“Good a place as any,” I said.
One of Frank’s daughters squatted down for a closer look, and the snake fled into the wall via one of the gaps we’d failed to seal, so that only its tail was showing. Perley laughed and tried to lunge out of my arms.
“They’re harmless, Lily,” I said. “Even Perley can see that.”
Lily closed her mouth on whatever she planned to say next. Deirdre fingered her sage, but the snake was better than any hijacked ceremony. The snake made me feel like our fucked-up house had been chosen.
“Black snakes in the walls are much better than having flying squirrels in the walls,” Frank’s wife said.
“Now, that’s true,” Mike said. “Or what about these red beetles?”
“The hornworms this year,” Frank said. And so the talk turned to the many disappointments and hardships of the lives we were living, and how once you got rid of one thing, another thing was sure to turn up, and how this succession of pests, irritations, and unfairness would surely last until we were too weary to move, and so lay down on the lush water-laden land, lay down to rest, just to rest, lay down and