Rat Snake

The total measure when you added it all together was a little over a half ton of man that made up Beth's father and uncle propped against the tailgate of the pickup truck in the front yard, most of it going toward the uncle. He was a colonel of a man with a round pot belly, suspenders and a constant smell of bourbon.  The sort of man other men deferred to on matters involving who to vote for or allow to come your dove shoot on a baited field. Her father was the exact opposite, rail thin in work boots and dark blue pants good for camouflaging the stains of a hard day’s work. Her father held himself against the truck as he did in all things; hands clasped around a can of Miller beer, his torso a permanent forward lean that made his spine look like the stave of a bow built only to shoot toy arrows. The collective courage of the both of them in the face of a woman amounted to little more than the spot of oil left behind in the driveway by the truck they leaned against. Beth glimpsed the scene through the poured glass windowpane of the farmhouse living room, it was the only one not cracked. She sought out their faces as respite from the tenant’s voice that had been following her from room to room spilling out the endless list of repairs needed to the house. They were not looking her way.

Half an hour earlier the three of them had stood on the porch together. The plan agreed upon by Beth and her uncle, the house’s current owner, would be to explain that the house would be sold to Beth and not the tenant who had been there for ten years. But when the dark haired woman came to the door her uncle had simply introduced the two women, referring to Beth as “the fly in the ointment” and the two men retreated to their current perch while Beth entered the foyer alone. “You are ruining my life I hope you know” were the first words the tenant spoke. She was tall and thin, made thinner by her stringy black hair that flowed over her shoulders and the cigarette in her hand. The house reeked of pot and stale tobacco, the living room with the stone fireplace had been converted to another bedroom which contained a man passed out on a stripped mattress. It was 11 AM and Beth surveyed the scene with a fair amount of sympathy. The woman was not much older than she and Beth recognized this portrait of a life as not a far walk from her own. She imagined the guy on the mattress sold pills to augment the tenant’s pay as a waitress and still she knew it was a struggle for them to make the $250 a month rent. It had only been a few years ago Beth and her own pothead boyfriend shared a trailer in the middle of some woods not far from here. When Beth realized she would not be able to begin her first job out of school until a bench warrant was cleared up on a speeding ticket, it had been the pothead boyfriend who suggested they hunt mushrooms in the adjacent cow pasture and sell them to pay the fine. Beth went for the idea and as a result was able to go to work as a teacher for the Department of Corrections the following month out west, where the pay was better. She could have gone to any of the landed gentry in her family to fix the problem but she knew it would only feed their view of her as a fuck up. So now she stood face to face with what could easily be a reflection of herself had she not reached outside the family land to find a fissure of independence.  Beth’s hair was washed and blown and her clothes a reflection of a woman with her own checking account.  The modest nest egg she had built up during her years out west had her in a position to buy her first house. Western money was good but southern property was better and Beth had decided to move home six months ago after the harshness of the west had her craving the green canopy of home. She decided to move back after her brother came to visit in his new Dodge flatbed pick up. It was a couple of months after her Grandmother had died and he let it slip that all the grandkids got money but her. She after all had thought she could do better away from the land so there she had stood with $40 in her bank account in a job that wouldn’t allow glass picture frames in her office, watching her brother pull away on a Grand Canyon vacation. As it turned out the money was nothing big, only enough for a down payment. Apparently, they all used their inheritance as down payments on something and now, five years later her uncle was in trouble and the farmhouse would have to be sold. She heard about that from her brother too and remembered the whitewashed carved wood that curved around the corners of the wide front porch. Embellishment such as that would easilly add another hundred thousand to a house like that out west, not to mention the 3 acres that came with it. The house was in a donut hole that was surrounded by her dad’s property, a right of way would have to be granted and she may one day get road frontage if she worked her way back into the inheritance pool. She wasn’t sure what that would cost but she knew for now hr nest egg wasn't enough to land something this nice on the inflated housing market. Besides, she needed to lay down roots somewhere and for the past few years these fields and woods surrounding the house were the places that always came to her in late night dreams.  The dreams always began with a realization that her grandfather had never died but was alive again.  He would emerge through some homemade barb wire opening in the fence or out of the logging road that went to the creek.  The recurring story was that he would appear and inform everyone present that he had never died but just retreated to those woods in his old age and lived there, letting the woods heal him from the series of strokes that had deemed him blind and speechless.  He would tell her things in her dreams, that he had watched her grow up running around those woods barefooted, that he was proud of her.  She would wake up in whatever foreign place she was in and nestle back on her pillow for a few moments still trying to feel the sagebrush around her head.  It never lasted longer than a few seconds and she would be forced to open her eyes to some place faraway from that scene, some place she would be trying to settle into as home but it never did stick.  A few times she tried to explain the dream to whatever man lay beside her at the time but for the most part she kept the dreams to herself.

She fought back the urge to commiserate or apologize to the tenant for her presence in a space that was clearly not her own but instead quietly walked from room to room, there to claim her version of a birthright she had been on the other end of for so long.  The entire house needed to be rewired and the hot water heater needed to be replaced, the chimney had never been swept and the well regularly needed to be primed in order to take a shower. These were the problems the tenant listed while Beth could spot a whole host of other problems from her vantage point. The kitchen would have to be gutted as well as the bathroom and the whole place repainted. But it was all encased in a beautiful endoskeleton of three inch thick heart pine floors and ceilings. The original stained glass light fixture still hung in the foyer and in the bedroom holes were drilled in the massive ceiling where a quilt frame once hung.  Dogs ran across the scraped floors around Beth’s feet but it was clear the wood was as sound as it had been when those dogs' great great grandparents were puppies being birthed out likely on that same floor. The tenant wasn’t giving Beth a second to admire the details and continued to rattle off problems as if she were begging for her life on the hangman’s platform. She spotted the attic door and remembered there were built in stairs, "stairs to nowhere" her uncle had described. She moved to turn the wooden latch to find escape in the darkness above her. “The stairs need to be replaced and are steep enough you’ll break your neck if you’re not careful” the tenant barked.  No movement of Beth’s was wasted as opportunity to point out another liability. Beth found the top step through a few cobwebs and a climb up a narrow entry built of plywood. Old newspaper from the seventies lined the tunnel meant to hide those details inferior to the rest of the house.  The cobwebs clearly had not been crossed since the Carter administration.  She found a joist to sit on and rested her feet below her on the stairs.  Her intention was to inspect the insulation and take a breath from the chatter below as well as that which was bouncing around the inside of her head making her doubt the whole deal.

The house originally sat on some land over by the railroad tracks.  Beth used to visit it with her parents when she was a child. The vacant old house had been placed perfectly under an oak grove surrounded by kudzu eaten land that her parents fantasized could be worked for profit. They would ride the ungated acreage on Sunday afternoons.  Beth perched between them on the bench seat of the old Chevy captivated by the volley of these young people’s dreams back and forth over her head. The original owner never sold until Beth’s grandfather was able to talk him into selling just the house. Beth's parents were well past Sunday drives when they got to watch as their Oak shadowed dream creep down the county road on two flatbed trailers and come to rest atop a hill bald of all growth except a few pines and underbrush. The house became a rental immediately and weathered many tenant renovations.  Simple add ons really that amounted to nothing more than excuses to not pay rent. The house outlasted her parents’ marriage and eventually passed on to her father’s brother who did nothing to elevate its condition; until today when he deposited his only niece at the front door.  Slips of light from the day were stealing in through the clapboard siding and broken attic vents. Beth wearily pointed the flashlight over the attic floor to survey the damage but surprisingly found nothing more than dry fluffy insulation throughout. There were no boards down for storage, no light, no perks but no leaks or moldy smells either. Beth knew buying from her family was a deal with the devil. Her mother would warn her not to do it. She knew what they were capable of, dirty land surveys, pay offs to inspectors and judges all in the name of family land. The history poured over her like a cold shower. Her grandfather loved this house but never gave it to her father, the offspring who spent his life watching it deteriorate like a burned out lighthouse looking over a sea of neglect. Beth ran the flashlight over the scene once more looking for rat nests. Out of the corner of her eye she caught movement but too smooth to be a rat. At first it looked like an electrical cord twisted through one of the attic beams but the smooth quiet motion revealed otherwise. The snake startled her at first, her years in the city still close to the surface. But the shock of her proximity to the reptile hit  her deep enough that she was able to regain herself in time for her nerves to smooth out before her body reacted to the initial adrenaline surge.  Fight or flight.  She remained still and watched through narrow light the black snake glide through the attic beam as smoothly as her grandfather had once driven the fields in his old chevy surveying the fields; knowing all the potholes by heart but in no hurry to get by them. Its length indicated it had lived in this quietness for decades, the stillness of the attic its domain. Beth had been taught as a child that to kill this type of snake was sacrilege to your home and hearth, opening the door to a plague of rats and vermin to a barn, crawlspace, or well house. To know this was a sign of belonging to this place. She remembered her grandmother cursing tenants who moved into their houses from the university only to kill the rat snake under the porch simply because it was there. As a result, money would then have to be spent on someone to spray or set traps. Beth had been taught the nuances of the serpent, a pointed head, a brown diamond pattern, and of course the rattles of a death warning.  All instincts of survival and all meant to be fear’s calling card. The rat snake had none of these, only a tongue and eyes meant to frighten the weak. Beth sat in the darkness as the snake passed like a quiet freight train at midnight. She would buy this house. She would get an honest survey, hire a lawyer and she would fix what was broken and make it her’s. The roof was free of leaks and the crawlspace dry, everything else could be built to be made strong again.

Radiant Heat

This is a revision to a January post entitled "Heat". I plan to submit it to Skirt Magazine at the end of the month for publication. Please feel free to offer feedback and criticism of the piece.

We are out of firewood in our small Atlanta rental house. This means we are left to the strength of the aging heat pump to keep warm, and tonight it’s one of the rare icy winter evenings of the south. In general our house has very little to brag about; but the small fireplace blazing up with split pine might as well be a bank vault filled with gold on a cold night. Said gold is usually transported in the trunk of my car from my dad’s wood yard in Alabama. But on this night, my car is up on blocks in the driveway. I’ve been waiting weeks for my husband to replace the water pump, and now he has to wait for the temperature to raise enough to loosen the proper bolts in order to proceed. His procrastination has triggered a chain of events that has left me wrapped in resentment and my grandmother's quilt here on the bedroom watching the sheet rock cracks. Held hostage by the lukewarm air falling flat around me like the dirty laundry strewn around the room.

When I was a kid, we lived in a house whose sole source of heat was fire, actually a wood burning heater. It sounds romantic but being anchored to one cast iron box for warmth only highlighted the reality of the cold world that existed mere steps away. Most winter mornings were greeted with the sound of newspaper being crumbled into the stove while my siblings and I crowding around the front waiting for the heat to come. We’d lay our school clothes on top and circle our palms across the fabric until the balance was struck between soaking warmth and singed fibers. We’d throw them on with the quick change skill and lack of modesty of runway models; safely escaping the tight pinch of cold creeping up our shoulder blades. My father was a pulpwooder so we managed to always have an endless supply of wood, but the fire had to burn hot to reach all the corners of the house; and in order to reach my room it had to have the trajectory of an Oliver Stone inspired bullet. One person would add logs to the fire while another had to open a window to avoid heat stroke. The heat was uneven, not to mention a lot of work stoking and stacking kindling; or walking outside to collect wood. I dreamed of the affluence where comfort could be activated by the touch of a button in the steadiness and consistency of air was only an afterthought. My parent’s relationship reflected this absence of balance as well. Mornings were often met with heated arguments or pots banging in cold silence over lack of money, intrusive in-laws, or alcohol. As a family, we were trapped between the extremes of icy breath and sweltering walls.

Around junior high we built a new house. My parents used subcontractors and paid as they could or did it themselves. Occasionally someone in the extended family took pity on us and decided to pitch in with some cash to cover the cost of say, sheet rock. I remember the debates over how we would heat the new house. Daddy wanted the ritual of the wood burning stove carried over to the new abode. He saw no need to make improvements while my Mama lobbied hard for central heat and air. After years of summer afternoons spent in front of the single window air conditioner with three kids, she was ready for an upgrade. My adolescent hopes on the subject went no further than the dream of a window unit for my bedroom. The compromise ended with a wood stove in the living room which inevitably threw off the thermostat in the hall, so on most nights we had a 90 degree living room and 40 degree bedrooms along with a bigger electric bill. My dreams of our new house elevating the quality of my parent’s relationship pretty much went the way of the new heat pump. A lot of money and resources used up to get pretty much the same results; only now they couldn’t blame the thin walls or lack of storage for their hatred of one another. This hatred ossified into my adulthood and my parents never spoke through three weddings and four grandchildren.

On my wedding day the two stood stiff on either side of me in complete silence as the photographer snapped away. I wondered what the point was of capturing such an artificial moment, how a hatred of another could live so long. On my wedding night, my husband and I fed each other wedding cake under an open skylight in our snug room at the inn. We exchanged stories about the day and I when recounted my moment with my parents, he reached for me and held tight for a long moment. We vowed to never let our relationship become so paralyzed by ego. It was a perfect September evening.

The temperature here in Atlanta is slowly rising. My nose isn’t cold anymore and I can wiggle my toes under the quilt with a little more comfort. My husband is in the kitchen trying to defrost salmon. It might be just warm enough to put some socks on and walk to the kitchen for some supper. But I'll stay wrapped in the quilt. After all, it's just warm air blowing through a vent.

Camping

My first backpacking trip with troubled youth had me outfitted with a borrowed pole tent and a trash bag for rain gear. Of course this would be the trip we let the kids make all the decisions. About 2 hours into hiking in the rain after dark I was rethinking everything about every decision I had made in the last two months. The layers of wetness on my person had become like second skin. The first layer of rain had mixed with sweat and formed a layer of grease over my skin that was close to my core body temperature; which was about as warm as shared bathwater when you are the youngest in a family of three. The new rain was getting colder to match the dropping temperature and hitting my uncovered head like nails dropping from the sky. I was carrying the rear of the group, supposedly making sure no one was attempting to run away. In truth, the only one even contemplating running was myself but I had no idea which direction would provide relief the quickest so I continued to follow the herd of troubled kids.

The trail was flat with the mountain to our right. When I say the mountain to our right, I mean you could hold out your right hand and steady yourself on the incline with not much lean. As we rounded to a creek I could see gear being shed through the black wetness and assumed this would be where we were staying for the night. I was one of two adults in charge of this operation and had no idea our coordinates or if the entire party was still with us. I found a flat ground and laid down my wal-mart tarp as my footprint and went to work securing shelter, my shelter that is. The damn kids were on their own. They had to go and snort Benadryl or break into a liquor store and now we all had to be miserable. That cool 22k I was bringing in for my new job with benefits was not in the front of my mind at that particular moment. I threw my pack into the opening of the tent and set the structure up with my gear inside. The tent had no rain fly so the footprint would have to be taken up to keep the rain from spitting through all night. By the time this was all taken care of my bed for the night was a puddle of water. In a panic I pulled any and all dry clothes from my pack to mop up the moisture, not thinking that I was breaking all ties at that moment with myself and anything dry for the next 48 hours at least. I caught my error just in time to retrieve my down sleeping bag and lay it on the borrowed thermarest. Water was already begin to pool around me on the tent floor. The sleeping bag was soaked at the head and foot but the middle was still dry. I recalled hearing from an eagle scout that the way to get the optimal warmth from your sleeping bag is to sleep in the nude. This worked out at the moment as I had no dry clothes left. So there I was, naked in a fetal position in the sleeping bag clamoring for the last few inches of dry as the water continued to fall and creep around me. This was my first job after quitting graduate school, my first venture out of science and into humanity as a profession. I still had a broken heart from a love lost that spring to the west coast. But I slept sound that night, curled in warmth, the stillness keeping me dry as I waited to be reborn in the first light of sun that would show me where I was in these dark north Georgia woods.

40 Words

He struck me as overly good-looking for someone both a preacher and a murderer. It was his physique, I would see him coming and going from the gym. That he tried so hard was the most troubling.

Maternity Ward

My mother did not call the entire last month of my pregnancy.  This was not unusual.  Ever since she became a minister her life was supposedly no longer her own and therefore we as her children had to get in line behind the endless tasks associated with guiding her flock.  And as if this were not enough, she had recently expanded her work to include an outreach ministry to the homeless.  Against the urging of her plaintive congregation, she had taken on the oversight of renovating Sunday school rooms to house the homeless in her small community on the Florida panhandle.  It was a visionary idea but quickly became the undoing of her life as a traditional member of the clergy. When she began her appointment at this particular church it housed your basic congregates of faith found in most protestant churches in the south.  There was a church secretary, vacation Bible school, a choir.  But the skyline from her pulpit changed significantly shortly after her endeavor to make her work as she put it more “transformational”.  Every 7-hour drive I made down Hwy 231 for a visit culminated in a knock on the door from law enforcement. A member of the church overdosed, a troubled youth kicked in a door, a pimp was hassling one of the shelter residents, and it went on and on. “Why can’t you just write sermons and preach to normal people?” I would wail. After all, we are Methodists; it’s not exactly a high maintenance denomination. My family blamed her new husband who seemed to have jump-started the whole thing by holding AA meetings in the church.  In the days leading to my first child being born I felt pretty sure she would not be involved.  Then I got a call late Saturday night as I was sitting in the bathtub in the early phase of contractions. She would be driving up after her church service the following day and planned to be there for the birth. Twenty-four hours later she held my son with tears in her eyes as I laid in my post partum bed laden with sleeplessness, epidural and post op drugs from the c-section.  The next day in the hospital my mother was a no show until 6 PM.  We had just got the baby to sleep when she stuck her head in the door.  She and her husband were on her way to dinner and quickly informed me that they would be returning home the following morning.  She had a paper to write for a graduate class she was taking in some minister education program she was in; church duties were calling her back, blah blah blah.  I didn’t have the energy to listen or respond.  “My HMO is more reliable than her” I cried to my husband after she left. The c-section had me stuck in bed for days trying to recover as I bonded with this new baby. My husband was still in school and only had a few days home with me before I was faced with new motherhood on my own.  My resentment toward my mother and her choices started to solidify in a way that could not be reversed.

Then, fourteen weeks later I returned to work and she came up for a week and half to stay with us and help me in the transition. I half expected the same manic, unfocused craziness I saw each time I went to visit. I was sure half way through there would be a crisis that would send her home early and my husband and I unexpectedly juggling childcare. The visit was anything but what I expected. She got in late Sunday night and met me in the baby’s room at the crack of dawn to help change him. Our laughter woke our husband as my new baby’s pee stream interrupted my rundown of where everything was. She cooked, cleaned, organized, and interacted with the baby non-stop. My husband was actually able to keep up with his school work for the first time since the baby’s birth. I greeted most mornings with tears over leaving the baby. Transitioning back to work was not greeted with much support from my workplace. One morning while my husband was letting me cry on my shoulder my mom came in. I wiped my eyes, and stiffened waiting to hear a superfluous metaphor that would end with “God Bless You” but instead she opened up. “When you were a baby you were on my hip all the time and I didn’t have a career. I know it’s hard but you are providing so much for your child by being independent and able to do both. I know it doesn’t feel like it now, but you are giving yourself so many more options.” I took in her words as if I were in the third grade soaking up her wisdom from my twin bed. Back then I knew no other source for where to get my advice and strength.

She was right. I remember how trapped she was all through my childhood. How much more she always wanted to do. I have worked in prisons, hiked the Appalachian trail with troubled youth, moved cattle in the rain for 14 hours straight, but this moment- motherhood is my pinnacle, where I see myself in my finest hour. I realized that for her, being a mom was not her greatest moment, it was now as she changes lives on a grander scale. We are two women, moving toward our dreams from two different polarities and in this moment we were meeting in the middle of a shared experience. Mom stayed the whole week and a half, she and her husband went and got us a load of garden mulch, took us to the Varsity, and my sock drawer makes more sense than it has in years. I’m planning a trip down in a few weeks and am sorting through my book collection to take a box for donation to the shelter. Mom says the women there need so much, it’s hard to know where to start.

Note to our Wedding Guests

Please do not be alarmed by the sheriff parked at the entryway to the inn. Please park on the left side, opposite the veranda.

Daily Bread

One of the most prized pieces on my over inflated bridal registry was a Cuisinart breadmaker. It oozed urban homesteader with the brushed chrome and ability to churn out whole grain goodness hands free in a Sunday afternoon. Upon registering for it the husband even got in on the excitement citing a morning ritual of coffee and warm homemade bread to begin our days of married bliss. Not to mention Barbara Kingsolver’s husband wrote an inset in his wife’s book about how to impress your wife with a breadmaker. When we opened the box our first Christmas from my mom, we felt we were so on the pulse of married trendiness we could hardly stand it.

We put the breadmaker to use probably more than the average person uses a small appliance with such limited output. Our Sundays were in fact filled with good bread, pizza dough, angel biscuits, and banana bread. We grew dill our first year of marriage and the husband churned out dill bread until Thanksgiving. When the economy started to fall apart and we were both faced with potential layoffs and the husband made the voluntary cut back to go back to school, the breadmaker took the place of store bought bread because we could always scrap together whatever kind of flour was left in the pantry to produce a small loaf for the week. The breadmaker fueled our creative survival as it could receive the most mundane ingredients stacking liquids under solids topped off with yeast to produce fluffy white decadence and make us feel like rich gourmets even if all we had to go with it was peanut butter or hummus from the back of the fridge.

When I was pregnant I made bread with rye or flax seed meal to fulfill my whole grain needs. Sometimes my shifting appetite would outlive the loaf which was left to mold in wrapped cellophane and the breadmaker parts would acquire layers of gunk while they sat in the sink waiting for the husband to wash them in between classes and all nighters. Little did we know our negligence of the breadmaker was the foreshadowing the relinquishment of sane living that comes with having a baby.

Today we have a one month old child and the breadmaker sits in a prominently displayed location in the dining room, set up by my mom who saw it necessary to spend the time I was in the hospital cleaning and organizing my house, beginning with washing our breadmaker and removing it from the very uncool location of on top of the dryer. While mom was swiffering and scrubbing our house the husband and I were drowning in a river of sleep deprivation. I was recovering from major surgery and learning to breast feed my son without falling asleep while the husband learned to change baby while figuring out how to balance his next week and a half of missed classes and freelance deadlines. Neither of us had a clue what we were getting into and had both assumed I would naturally push out an intuitive little soul who would sleep and feed naturally and life would snap back to normal in a matter of weeks. On money we would say “how much does an infant need in the first months anyway?” On childcare “the students at my school bring their dogs to class, I can certainly bring my baby” or “I’ll just set up a pack n play in my office, all he’ll do is eat and sleep those first months anyway .”

All this seemed life faraway fantasies concocted by very naïve people on the first day of my son’s life as as I, on my knees peeked out of the hospital bathroom at my husband soothing the baby in the rocking chair after his most recent crying spell. I had forgotten that the epidural was still flowing through my body and the painkillers from the C-Section had masked my lack of strength so much that the simple misstep of one foot had sent me to the ground. I pulled the emergency cord and the husband looked at me with total baby versus spouse conflict. I told him I was fine but when hospital staff didn’t come quick enough the baby returned to the cradle and he hoisted me back to my bed. Later that day as he e-mailed his freelance clients on the delay in getting his work done (and the delay of us then getting paid) the WIC woman stopped by to inform me that I qualified for vouchers for weekly food items for myself and the baby. As a nursing mom, I qualified for the “whole grain option”, meaning a weekly loaf of whole grain bread from any local large chain grocery store. I signed my name with relief on the government paperwork as my son rested on my chest in between feeding.

It may be months (even years) before my life evens out to one of homemade whole grain bread again. In the meantime I reach for the pre-sliced Sara Lee whole wheat without even bothering to toast it. These days, I can’t even keep night from day. But when it does, the breadmaker is still standing like a beacon of social savviness reminding or taunting us that we were once adults who sought a life of leisure in the form of warm simple carbs. I brush the crumbs of my Sara Lee slice off of my son who perpetually sleeps on my chest now and try to type over his tiny limp body to draw myself back into the world that was once myself. I hope to do it all again tomorrow.