It was locust season. Ma was finishing up the dishes and Pa was teaching Jehosophat how to whittle the baby Jesus. I was layin on the ground, scratching the dirt with a stick and thinking of Willard Pete, who’d tickled me in the schoolhouse today when the little ones were getting their alphabet lesson.

“Jumpin and Jehosophat!” Ma called. “Be fixin’ to rally home that Bess!”

I sat up and looked down the front of my pinafore. The dirt hid the pink gingham and what lay underneath in a pleasing way. “Jehosophat can go alone!” I called out. “There’s a rattler out there, everybody at school says so, and I’m too old for trompin around at night lookin for that ol hank o jerky!”

Instead of sassing me back my mother paused for a moment, and it was that pause that sealed my fate.

“Lawd!” By brother crowed. “Is this to do with Willie Pete sayin’ you
got tits?”

I was up faster that my mom’s holler flying toward his little form but
without a warning to the world I turned and skipped into the woods.

Well, it was darker than a wolf’s mouth. And I walked and called and
hollered through the trees and the treefrogs and when I finally heard
that bell down by the river that’s where the snake seized me, sunk its teeth in my arm like a ship in the deep blue sea.

Fuck.

I stumbled home by the grace of God. In the meadow of our cabin I fell. My family rushed. They cradled my pink and dirty body. My father sucked and spit, sucked and spit the venom.

“Disinfectant,” my mother intoned. “We’ll put set off the infection,
then someday she can write about it, with urban people, over computers.”

“Oh, Ma, you’ve lost it,” I whispered. Pa looked about ready to cry.

“I see you,” Ma went on in a singsong voice I couldn’t quite dislike. “I see you in a land of skyscrapers and martinis and brown people.”

“Come along, Ma,” Pa said, and we rose from the yard and went inside to prepare for bed.