Snakes (Part Three)
When I had called Tom earlier in the day, he had told me he doesn’t often do snake removal, but, he added, he likes it because he gets to see how other people live, to poke around in their space. I can see he’s aching to poke, and I’m happy to let him. I spent the first five and a half years of my life living in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Some people confuse it with Mountain View, a mid-sized city that attracts vacationing retirees and empty nesters. Mountain View offers luscious views and city services. Mountain Home, on the other hand, offers dirt, poverty and a healthy range of poisonous snakes.
When I was three and we lived down in the holler, my mother sat me down in the dirt yard in front of our house, and she went inside to have coffee with her friend Donita Deckard. A little later she heard me calling “Nake, Mama. Nake.” When she ran outside, I was sitting in the dirt, legs splayed out in front of me, and our Siamese cat Tootsie was holding a copperhead at bay. The snake was coiled and striking at the cat, but anyone could see that its real and first target had been me. Donita cut the snake in half with a shovel, and as my mother tells the story, when she gathered me into her shaky arms, I was covered with blood. I don’t remember the incident, but I have always been certain it accounts for my terror of snakes. Lizards and alligators and other reptilian creatures don’t bother me, but a snake of any size or color has the power to make me faint.
I find the flashlight for Tom and explain how the basement works—the two crawlspaces and the deep box sills, and I steal a mask out of our contractor’s box so Tom doesn’t have to breathe in the dust from mouse droppings or plaster. He tells us that we should continue pulling insulation out of the living room crawlspace so that he can determine where the snakes might be entering, and then he marches off toward the basement. He calls out to us, “If we’re lucky, we’ll find it.” I can hear him in the basement, sliding the bags of insulation around and rearranging the stepstool so he can look into high places. Jesse and I return to the job of removing insulation from the living room.