then when I had another one I was ready to talk. It’s a snakebite, I said which was easy to say because it was true.
How did you get a snakebite? Ms. Carroll asked.
A snake bit me, I said.
Were you unsupervised? the principal asked. That one made me pause for a second because it sounded like a trick. I was supervised, I said because from the way they said it I could tell that you were supposed to be supervised. I said, It’s just that I was asleep and the snake was in my bed with me, and it was my fault because I rolled over on it. I think that’s what I said or pretty close. I have replayed it many times in my mind. I have replayed it like reading and rereading my comics to find out what made Ms. Carroll and the principal have those looks of disbelief and sorrow but also of what I would call satisfaction on their giant friendly faces.
9
LILY
I know it looked bad. The snow had begun. It was late afternoon. I stirred a pot of nettle stew over the campfire, hunched into Karen’s overcoat against the wind and the thickening flakes. The dice were against us that week, so I worked through our stores. I added dried nettles by the handful, doused the stew with soy sauce for flavor, a cup of acorn flour for texture, a half cup of lentils for protein. My ingredients were lined up on a cinder block, and I held my coat open to shield them from the weather. I know it looked bad. We should have strung a tarp.
The dice were against us, but inside the crammed house, Helen leaned against a heap of fiberglass insulation, processing a roadkill deer by candlelight. She’d made it down to the guts, which were folded into a bloody soup in a five-gallon bucket at her feet. She meant to make thread from the sinew, pudding in the stomach sack, she meant to boil the kidneys in milk when we could get some. On the range, the deer’s head simmered in the large canning pot. She meant to render the fat and save the skull. The whole mess reeked, swampy, warm iron, fat, shit, and wax, steaming up the windows.
After school, Perley had bolted straight out into the snowflakes. He wanted to check on some secret places he knew, wanted to see if the creek was frozen, barely allowed me to yank a blaze-orange hat over his ears. I’d told him to stay within whooping distance, but I’ll admit that I hadn’t whooped in a while. I’ll admit that if my boy had fallen down a sinkhole, say, or met a rabid animal, or met a pervert wandering in the snowy forest, I might not have known. Dignity of risk. That’s what Karen called it. I know it looked bad.
It might have looked worse if Karen had been home to get angry, but she had gone to answer a nickel ad for free scrap wood. It certainly would have looked worse if Rudy had been there to swagger and brag, but he was binge-drinking on the coal company land. Helen, Perley, and I were the only ones on the land that dark afternoon, and we fucked it up properly all on our own.
I took the intake worker for a Jehovah’s Witness because I wasn’t expecting anyone. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and she came struggling down the path past the duck shed in sneakers and a long denim skirt, the hood of her sweatshirt hiding her face. The ducks ran before her, beating their wings, sounding the alarm. She swatted at snowflakes, dodged frozen lumps of duck shit. She tried hard not to touch the ground. About fifty feet from me, she waved, and I waved back. I figured I’d offer her some stew and then send her on her way, wait to burn up The Watchtower until after she’d gone. No need to hurt her feelings.
She made it to the campfire and she tilted her head back so I could see her face under that hood, and I saw how young she was. Nearly a kid. Then she raised up her feet, caked in icy mud, and she wiped her sneakers on my cinder block. The cinder block was my kitchen counter, my bottles and jars, my wooden spoon all lined up, but she was blind to it. She mistook it for a mud scraper. So I began to feel dread.