A shovel or the mattock in my hands had caught it, a blow from heedless Heaven, as it coiled in concealed innocence. Jeremy put the snake gently back into the grass and it slithered off with unimpaired fluency, but I thought that a snake was not a ribbon that could be snipped anywhere: it had an anatomy, intestines and an anus, and no more than I could it live long with its nether portion crushed. I hate it when our human attempts to inflict order upon the land bring death and pain and mutilation to these innocents, whose ancestors enjoyed the earth for tens of millions of years before the naked ape appeared with his technology and enraging awareness of his own sin. I blamed Gloria, for having us remove this harmless, thriving clump of iris because it offended her frosty, simplifying eyes. Who are we to say what is a weed or a pest? Now the pretty snake, stricken in its perfection, must lie in some crevice feeling its slender body dam and slowly fail; a glaze of nothingness will close upon the little jewel of its unblaming brain.
Working alongside Jeremy made me try to remember working beside my own father. He could do things, up to a point: hammer and nail, handle elementary wiring and plumbing. He worked for a time for a roofing contractor, and though he said the heights didn’t bother him he would come home complaining of how roofers cheated people, even the most trusting poor widow. He had a vegetable garden out back that he would stand in at the end of the day, and a workshed on one side of the garage full of aligned jars of screws and nails getting rusty. For a time he had a job on the floor of the GE factory in Pittsfield, but the monotony of assembly, he confessed one night at supper, made him physically sick. He went from job to job, with his poor skills, his indifferent attitude, his lack of a trade. We did complete a few projects together—a doghouse for Skeezix, a soapbox racer, with the number 9 in silver outlined in black—but generally he was too tired. He just wanted to sit in his brown armchair with the fake leather worn off the arms and watch television and have dinner brought to him. I vowed I would never get that tired in life.
Last night I was in the bathroom when the commuter train thundered, louder it seemed than usual, along the tracks on the far edge of the woods. In a few months, when the leaves are down, I can see the golden windows flickeringly flowing by. I clenched with love of the muffled racket, an ecstatic sensation dating from my earliest intimations of traffic, of large things hurtling past on the road into the valley. I love thunder, too—the cascading and smashing first in the distance, like a strawberry box yielding to pressure, and then wildly, dangerously overhead, thumping the roof so the window sashes tremble in their sills and the thin clear panes shiver against their putty, and then the semi-satisfied, still irritable receding mutter, as the sated gutters gurgle. Things passing safely by: this intensely pleased me. Now perhaps I am the thing that is passing, my body a skin I am shedding, with resistance at some points of attachment.
The biopsy was neither painless nor painful. Giving myself the Fleet enema the night before and then again in the morning, on the cold bathroom floor while studying the underside of the sink and waiting for my bowels to feel revulsion, numbed my spirit to the humiliation of the ultrasound rectal probe and then the actual harvest of the tiny plugs of tissue—preceded, each one, by Dr. Carver’s murmured formula, “A little pinch.” A little pinch, a little pinch, and I was back in my street clothes striding, a bit tenderly, with tingling empty bowels, up Cambridge Street to State, where the old gang at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise seemed friendlier than usual—perhaps my expectations of friendliness had been lowered. I felt myself as a perambulating bushel of defective innards, and they treated me with civility as an intelligence, a faded eminence.
The urologist had been a young man with a head of receding blond fuzz and a complexion that had taken a pink humidity from the underparts that were his specialty. He had a big-shouldered, stern Irish nurse who stayed with us and, while the snipping was going on beneath