The Shedding Snake

Claude: They called me Claude. William Claude Hawthorne, if you want the whole of it, but nobody in Janesville ever needed the whole of it. Claude was enough. I farmed cotton down in West Carroll Parish, in that little community folks named for the Janes family — the Janeses that came all the way from Eastern Europe to settle this corner of northeast Louisiana, long before I was tall enough to reach a plow handle. A man doesn't choose the ground he's born to. He just learns it, row by row, season by season, until the learning is the only thing he truly owns. Claude: Now, I never learned to read. I'll say that plain, because it's the truth and I made my peace with it a long time ago. The letters never would sit still for me. But I'll tell you what a man can do when the page is closed to him — he listens. He watches. I spent my whole life quieter than most, and folks took that for having nothing to say. What it really was, was room. Room to store things away. The look of a sky an hour before it turns. The sound a boll makes when it's fixing to open. The way a field breathes different in the morning than it does at noon. I couldn't read a word of it, but I could read all of that, and I kept every bit. Claude: I had a first-born son, William Edward. We called him Pete — a name that came down to him from my own grandfather, William Peter Hawthorne. Funny thing, blood. Pete favored that grandfather who raised him so close you'd have thought they were poured from the same mold, and him a first-born son just the same. Names go down a family like water down a row. One day a boy you love will carry a piece of that name into a life you'll never see, and he won't even know whose footsteps he's setting his feet in. That's all right. That's how it's supposed to work. Claude: But I didn't sit you down to talk about names. I want to tell you about the morning with the snake, because that morning has stayed with me clearer than most, and I believe it stayed with little Sandra even longer. Claude: They'd come by to visit — my daughter Maggie and two of her young ones. And it being that time of year, I asked if she'd care to walk the field with me and see how the cotton was coming, whether the bolls were near ready to open. She was always game, that one, full of go. And Sandra — my granddaughter, nine years old, skinny as a fence rail — she looks up at me and asks can she come too. Now I've never in my life seen a reason to tell a child no to a cotton field. "Of course, you can," I told her. And off she went, skipping out ahead of us into rows near as tall as she was, so all you could see was her hands waving up over the tops of the plants when her mama, Maggie, called to find her. Claude: I was walking easy, the way you do in your own field, when Sandra went quiet. That's the thing a farmer feels before he hears it — the quiet. Maggie hollered for her to slow down, and she did, but not on account of the hollering. She'd stopped because she'd come up on the biggest rattlesnake that Sandra had ever laid eyes on. Coiled up tight in the shade of a plant, wound and ready, its head up off the ground. And then she screamed it — "snake, snake, snake" — that word a body doesn't have to be taught to be afraid of. Claude: I'll be honest with you about what I did, because there's a lesson in it. I ran. I ran the other way — back toward the house. Now a little one might've seen that and thought her old grandpa was leaving her to it. But Maggie, she didn't run away from her own girl. She ran straight at her, quick as a whirlwind, and threw her arm out and knocked Sandra backward, clean away from those coils. A mother doesn't calculate. She just moves. I've thought on that many times since. Claude: And me — I wasn't running from anything. I was running for my hoe. Had it hanging in the shed, and I knew right where. I came back with it and I put the blade down on that snake and took its head off in the one swing. A field man's tool. Nothing fancy about it. I carried that snake back to the house held up high on the hoe, and I don't mind telling you I was proud as if I'd won something at the fair. Some prizes a man earns with a book. Some he earns with a hoe. Claude: I cut the rattles off the tail, wrapped them careful in a cloth, and I held them out to Sandra. Figured she'd earned them, having found the thing. But she looked at me and she said, "I don't want it." And I'll admit it stung me a little. I'd meant it as a gift. But a wise man learns not to press a gift on somebody who's still shaking. So I gave the rattles to the little one, Gary — four years old and more curious than scared — and he took them like treasure. Sandra, though, she carried the fear of snakes with her for years after. Which is its own kind of gift, if you think on it. It taught her to watch her step the rest of her life. Claude: Now here's the part I most wanted you to have, and it's the reason I've told you the whole of it. Before we went back in the house, I told Sandra she was lucky. She didn't feel lucky, I'm sure. But that snake was in the middle of shedding its skin. Working off the old outer layer to bring the new one up underneath. And a snake in that condition is half-blind and slow — its sight gone milky, its body not answering the way it ought to. That's a dangerous time for the snake, and it makes it touchy, quick to strike, because it can't trust its own eyes to tell it what's coming. Had that snake been whole and clear-sighted, it might've moved off before ever a soul got near it. It was the very act of becoming something new that left it coiled up mean in the shade where a child could stumble on it. Claude: I couldn't read that out of any book. But I'd watched enough seasons and enough creatures to know it, and I gave it to Sandra the only way I had — by telling her. That's all a quiet man is, in the end. A place where things get kept. And if he's lucky, if he's real lucky, somebody carries what he kept on down the row, long after he's gone from the field. Claude: They called me Claude. Don't you forget it.