As far back as I could remember my mother was scared to death of snakes. There’s probably a long psychological term ending with “phobia” to describe her terror, but around our house it was just plain fear and as much a fact of life as church on Sunday and eggs at Easter. Once I got big enough, she made me do all the snake-hazardous jobs like hanging clothes on the line when she took a notion not to use the dryer and pulling vines from the day lilies. I guess she figured there might be snakes lurking nearby. I didn’t really mind, especially since I’d never seen one.
The summer I was thirteen or maybe the one after that, I remember hearing Mom’s shriek coming up from the basement while I was spending a peaceful afternoon watching the soaps and sucking down a cold Pepsi. She scrambled up the steps, slammed the door, and gasped, “A snake!” Her face was stretched tight with horror. “In my basement,” she whispered as if this made it even worse.
I didn’t know what she wanted me to do about it. Dad was the snake protection officer in our family, and he was at work. I suggested shutting the basement door and letting him handle it when he got home.
Not acceptable. “What if it hides down there or crawls into the Christmas decorations?” She gulped to keep from hyperventilating. “Or it sneaks up the steps and gets under the door?”
I didn’t think this was likely unless we had an amazingly acrobatic snake on our hands, but I took her reply to mean that I was Dad’s deputy for the day. Whether it’d come from years of exposure to my mother’s fears or a natural dislike for the Villain of Eden, I didn’t much care for snakes either. And I wasn’t a particularly brave kid. Being around boys made my voice disappear, and I got palpitations over school dances, oral presentations, and the deep end of a swimming pool. But I was a good girl and didn’t have gumption enough to deny her my feeble protection.
“What do you want me to do with it?” I asked.
She braided her fingers until they turned white. “Kill it. Your father uses the end of a shovel.”
Ugh. I could just imagine the gobbets of guts that method would produce, but I trudged down the steps, shutting the basement door behind me. The fearsome serpent, maybe ten inches long, lay on the cool concrete in front of the washer. It’s a wonder it hadn’t slithered off in its own terror at Mom’s screeching, but it didn’t move when its Executioner approached either. I fetched a shovel.
The snake still didn’t flinch, even when I crept up to it. I considered the angle and the thrust I’d need, and then I hesitated. Mom had said I must kill it, but I couldn’t make myself jam the shovel into the snake’s body. I stood poised to obey, but then, unaware that I was setting a pattern for all kinds of future behaviors, I maneuvered the snake into the scoop of the shovel. It woke up at this and started wriggling, but I managed to get it out the basement door, carrying it down the driveway and dumping it in the farthest corner of the backyard. I tormented it a little to encourage it onto our neighbors’ property, and the snake took off.
I put the shovel away and went back upstairs. Mom was cowering on the couch, her eyes big and glassy. “Did you kill it?”
Nobody would’ve ever accused me of being a perfect child, but, other than shrugging off the blame for occasional incidents, I wasn’t in the habit of lying. “It’s gone,” I said.
“It’s dead?” She wasn’t going to be satisfied with anything else.
“Yep.” And I went back to the soaps with a clear conscience.
Judy Cooper has lived in Kentucky most of her life and worked as both a librarian and a professor of composition and literature. She’s published short stories in Kudzu, Appalachian Heritage, and Still. Writing as J.T. Cooper, she recently published her first novel, RUNNING.