RAT SNAKE | Fiction by Anna Robertson

The three hard knocks pounded on the hollow metal door at seven AM. Only Beth’s brother knew that she had been held up in his camper, tucked away in the hay barn, and this morning she was pretty sure that even Justin wished he didn’t know that she was there.

She opened the door to find her Uncle Hubert. A colonel of a man with a round pot belly and suspenders and leather suede brogans suited to watch a person work from the cab of a pickup truck. The sort of man other rural Alabama landowners deferred to on matters involving who to vote for or invite to a dove shoot on a baited field. And there he stood, balancing himself on the rickety front step of the metal contraption.

Beth did not bother to say hello. She just opened the door and stood in silence. He knew she had come back four weeks ago, broke, tail between her legs.

“Still the proud one, you haven’t been to see me, so I came to you” were the first words spoken between them in six years. Hubert looked at her with a mixture of sympathy and victory as he spoke.

Beth leaned against the RV doorframe. She could have folded the soft aluminum casing in half with her palm, as tight as she gripped it, standing a good 12 inches higher than Hubert. She observed the top of his scalp and the thinning circle starting to take shape around a nest of hairs slicked with pomade and combed in the same direction since he had been in grade school. Her blue eyes met his gaze with silence. Hubert’s eyes were chestnut brown and piercing into her stretched-out frame. There was more victory than sympathy in this visit for sure.

“Didn’t want to infect you.”

“Aw hell, that shit is fake,” Hubert snorted, referring to the corona virus that had shut down the world six weeks prior.

“Well, me losing my job was real,” Beth replied. “So, I’m not taking any chances. Thanks to Governor Mee Maw, this is about the only place in the country that’s hiring.”

Beth sat on the cinderblock pile she had recently converted to a stoop and lit a cigarette. Hubert threw his head back in silent disapproval as her thigh tattoo of an oak tree emerged from under her shorts.

“You look about rurnt,” he said as she stretched her legs, and breathed in her first drag.

She was used to this shift between love and spite from family.

“I worked late,” she offered, knowing his assessment was referring to her entire being rather than situational dishevelment.

“You planning on sticking around?”

“It seems that way.” She replied, halfway through the cigarette by now.

Beth’s long blond hair was matted by saliva against her cheek from the night’s sleep and her thin frame tilted toward gaunt. Once muscled out and healthy from farm living, it was clear she hadn’t tossed a hay bale in years. Hubert smelled of Irish Spring and last night’s Old Grandad. His work clothes, jeans, and denim shirt stuffed underneath suspenders were dusty from the wheat chaff that floated in the air this time of year.

“I got something for you. I got a tenant out in that house above the branch. I need help getting her out. She’s into the drugs. If you can help me out, the house is yours.”

“Are they growing in the attic?” Beth asked.

“No, cooking in the kitchen”

“Why can’t you do it?” she asked, hoping he would own up to his sensitive side that only she knew he had.

 “Well, I can!” Hubert barked. “But you look like you need something better, and I was thinking you would be grateful.”

He offered the plan with a forcefulness like she had no choice. But she knew she did. That was the thing they resented in her most. As a child, she had rejected most of the choices thrust at her. Other girls would go hunting with the boys in full hair and make-up and sit quietly in the deer stand, never laying their manicured hands on the shotgun. Those were the girls who were expected to pick a good man to marry who looked and thought like the men in Beth’s family. Any deviation from the norm implied lesbianism or worse, a feminist. So, Beth headed west at age twenty. Let them chew on that choice for a few years.

“What do you need me to do?” she asked Hubert, surprised by the words coming out of her mouth.

“She needs to get out” he said, “and I can’t get her to leave. You get her out. You can move in and have yourself something with a commode that flushes.”

 “How much is the rent?”

“We’ll talk about that once she’s out,” he responded cryptically.

Beth was used to this tactic. It had been the same one used on her parents by their parents whenever any piece of ownership in the family’s sprawling Alabama farmland was up for grabs. But that truth was too far in the back of her mind now to retrieve in this moment. What was fresh on her mind was the measly shifts she had managed to cobble together in her waitress job in the nearby college town where students were all now hunkered at their parents’ posh homes on lakes and in mountains learning virtually. When she did work the tips were shit because people were pissed about the mobile menus, masks, and having to sit outside. She could go her entire remaining days and never have to utter the word “curbside” again if it were up to her.

The last rent she paid was on a trailer in Galisteo, New Mexico, on a dusty mesa overlooking a catch pen where the locals roped calves in the evening. Beth landed there after jumping a Bureau of Land Management fence and harvesting hallucinogenic mushrooms from the cow patties to cover the deposit. When the stimulus money ran out Beth looked over her options and decided to head home like everyone else in the country seemed to be doing.

The least punitive person to call on was her recently divorced brother, who took her in but did not want her to curb his newfound freedom to fuck every woman in the county. So, the barn became her home.

The next morning Beth found herself up early of her own accord. Cleaning her armpits with a wet rag from the hose. Her father would be with Hubert, she was sure of it. When the truck pulled up, two doors slammed shut and Beth braced herself for what was next. Hubert and Leland were waiting on her in the yard between the barn and the house.

The total measure was a little over half a ton of man propped against that Dodge’s tailgate. Hubert with his usual commanding presence stood stout with one hand against the truck as both he and Leland appeared to ponder the red dirt mudholes. Hubert glanced up at the sun with some impatience to get on with the planting of the day, but her father continued to gaze forward. Leland was rail thin in worn-out work boots and dark blue pants good for camouflaging the stains of a hard day’s work. He stood a collapsed version of himself from the man Beth left. Hands clasped around a can of Miller beer as if in prayer, his frame hunched forward like the stave of a bow built to shoot toy arrows. Hubert’s countenance on the other hand had spread like an oak tree. Neither man looked her way.

She slid onto the bench seat between the two men, her father initially barely acknowledging her presence. Hubert began to explain the situation plainly as the truck wound its way through pastureland where Beth used to collect arrowheads. It seemed the whole family had used Grandaddy’s inheritance on a down payment for something, leaving them all land poor.

“The way I see it, you need some stability, something to build on.” Hubert began. “That RV where the chickens roost is no place for you. I want to sell you this house. Fifty thousand. That’s all I want.”

Beth watched the landscape rise around them.

“No bank is going to give me a mortgage. I’ve only ever rented, and most of that was under the table.”

Beth was surprised at her own honesty and frankness.

“I work in a cash economy, and even then…”

Leland held his hand up to his daughter, palm facing her as if to stop her. Like he wanted to keep her from saying too much. His face met her gaze, but she could not read it, the spit and vinegar had long drained away.

“Hubert is hell bent on selling this place and it needs to stay in the family,” Leland spoke for the first time. “I talked to the bank president over at Farmer’s. He’s going to accept my land as collateral.”

Beth fixated on her father’s hand. She didn’t know how to respond. The skin around his knuckles sagged and the muscled callouses had been replaced by purple veins and liver spots. Beth did not trust this sudden benevolence. Coggins’ land was only ever known to be owned free and clear. Not one acre had ever been put up against so much as a car loan since it came to the family in the Creek land lottery a little over a century ago. This was a serious offer, and while it made her nervous, it wasn’t the worst proposition she had received.

The trio eased up the driveway to the white clapboard farmhouse situated on a hill as if they wanted their presence not to be noticed. The white paint was dirty and covered with kudzu that appeared to be swallowing the dwelling at the same pace as the crawling truck. The slow-moving dream whirling in Beth’s head came to an abrupt stop as the three of them stood on the porch at the threshold of the front door waiting for the tenant to answer Hubert’s forceful knock.

The plan agreed upon in the truck was for Hubert to explain with his broad mouthed southern gentleman tone that it was time for the house to be sold and Beth, being family, would be the buyer despite the tenant’s fifteen-year residency. But when the dark-haired Shirley Mase came to the door, Beth’s uncle simply introduced the two women, referred to Beth as “the fly in the ointment,” and the two men retreated to standing around the bed of the truck while Beth entered the foyer, dispatched to do the dirty work alone.

Beth knew this was a test. A test to make sure no softness remained after her collapse out west and prodigal return home. If she was to be allowed back at the table, she must be willing to claim her birthright unmoved by the suffering of others. The reward would be this house and a monthly mortgage payment set up at the bank where Leland had an account and was ready to cosign his daughter back into the family.

“You are ruining my life,” Shirley said, her voice cut across the wood frame walls knocking Beth out of her mental rambling and back to the purpose at hand.

Shirley stood tall and thin, made thinner by her stringy black hair that flowed over her shoulders “like it had pissed on by a pole cat.”  That’s how Hubert had described it on the ride over.

“CNN said you can’t evict me. Joe Biden is stopping evictions,” Shirley said.

“Not in Alabama.” Beth replied, motioning to her kin perched outside.

“Didn’t they tell you we were coming?”

“They don’t tell me nothing.” Shirley spat her words. Smoke curling up her bony hand as the cigarette hung limp.  She flicked an ash into the stone fireplace to land on a pile of cold butts.

An antique bed with no sheets sat in the opposite corner containing a shirtless man passed out face down. The house reeked of pot and stale tobacco. It was right at eleven o clock, and it was clear that Beth’s arrival was the first sign of life the home had seen that morning. These were not the same people her grandaddy had dealt with.

“Look, Shirley, even before Covid, it’s been six months since you paid anything. All we can do is give you thirty days to find a new place, and that’s just because I convinced them that you would leave the storage shed out back.” Beth spoke with an authority she had never heard in her voice before.

“What’s this ‘we?’ Bitch I don’t know you.” Shirley’s hair flung to one side as she shook her head and fixed her gaze to the floor. When Shirley looked up at Beth her eyes glared with darkness. Beth held the gaze. Something she was sure neither Leland nor Hubert had ever done before.

“You know this place has ghosts. You ain’t going to get anybody else to live here because,” she paused for effect, “it’s haunted.”

By this time Beth had moved away from the passed-out man into the kitchen. The room was filled with two pulled out broken dishwashers and a sink overflowing with dirty dishes. “Yeah,” Beth called out, “what ghosts would those be?”

Shirley stood in the door frame and jerked her head toward the window looking out into the portion of Leland’s pasture that had been claimed as a yard. Her neck and shoulders shivered and jerked about involuntarily, remnants of last night’s speed high still in her body. The summer sun was rising over the back of the house and the heat seemed to ignite the odor of neglect that floated through the dust.

Shirley pointed frantically out of the kitchen window “Once, I saw a confederate soldier, with one of those black powder revolvers, and all his uniform and everything, sittin’ right out there under that tree. And when I blinked”—she opened and shut her eyes quickly—“he was gone.”

Beth stood in silence. She knew this was Shirley’s last stand in hanging onto her home. Shirley was not much older than Beth and Beth recognized this portrait of a life as not a far walk from what could be her own. This was the sort of house Beth used to end up at after a night of partying to drink and smoke to moody music and colored lights to avoid going home to her own bleak existence. It was always cold in these houses, colder than outside. The people living in them always cast offs from regular society. But that had never stopped Beth from crawling under the dank sheets with the greasy men who lived in them to generate a few hours of warmth, so she didn’t have to walk out into the darkness alone.

“Does that dude live here too?” Beth asked, referring to the passed-out man in the living room, “or is it just you on the lease?”  

“Just me,” Shirley said, her body slumped.

The haunted stuff wasn’t going to pierce the reality that Shirley was standing in. They all knew that the guy on the mattress sold pills, and it was still a struggle to make the $250 a month rent. Fifteen years ago, Beth’s grandfather had rented the house to Shirley. Back then, she was single and a paraprofessional with the school system. She drove a clean car and paid rent on time. Then she was laid off when the county voted to reduce land taxes. After that, Shirley waited tables for college boys at Darnell’s bar. Speed helped her stay awake for the late nights. But as she got older, she was pushed out eventually for younger “less tweaky” girls when the new bar owner took out the pool tables. Now she had been living on the good will of the old men.

Beth was familiar with women like Shirley. They usually had one or two kids at their heels and lived close to the bone just like Beth. She would give them rides home from the laundromat and spot the men peering out at her with suspicion from whatever ratty dwelling they all lived in.

Beth remembered her mother pulling over the station wagon to pick up poor, black women walking to town. Beth would listen as the women talked in the front seat. Usually, the women were married to men who worked for Leland. It seemed none of the men treated their women any better. Oftentimes the women had been put out for one reason or another and were looking for a ride to town until things cooled down at home. Beth’s mother seemed to know this routine by heart and would ask the women if they needed groceries before dropping them at a relative’s house. As a child, Beth and her brother had ridden across the county to her grandparents’ many times for the same reason. That was before Beth’s mom got sick. Before the cancer that took her away

Now that she was grown, Beth prided herself for keeping her situation simple. All her belongings fit into her Honda Civic so she could bail at any time. Being alone and broke was never as painful as having to answer to someone else for your choices.

Shirley shadowed Beth’s every move through the farmhouse with her chaotic chatter.

“The entire house needs to be rewired, and the water heater needs to be replaced, the chimney has never been swept and the well needs to be primed in order to take a shower.” Shirley went on.

Beth listened but could see even more problems as she moved from room to room.  The kitchen would have to be gutted as well as the bathroom and the whole place repainted. But it all appeared to be encased in a beautiful endoskeleton of three-inch-thick hardwood pine floors and ceilings. 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 grandparents were puppies being birthed out likely on that same floor.

Beth spotted the attic door. Dark planks of wood nailed together with cross boards in the shape of a “Z.” The latch nothing more than a rectangle of smooth wood she turned to open the door.

“The stairs need to be replaced and are steep enough you’ll break your neck if you’re not careful,” Shirley barked as Beth moved into the narrow plywood opening. She stopped for a moment, about to give in to the dangers Shirley kept on about. But the chatter quieted down as Beth moved in and let the door close to a crack behind her. Like a cat she crawled up the steps on all fours feeling the air get hotter with each incline. Beth found the top step through a few cobwebs that had clearly not been crossed since the Carter administration. Old newspapers from the seventies lined the ceiling. She found a joist to sit on and rested her feet on the stairs below.

Slips of light from the day were stealing in through the clapboard siding and broken attic vents. Beth wearily shined the light from her phone over the attic floor to survey the damage but surprisingly found nothing more than 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. History poured over her like a cold shower. The house had originally sat on some land over by the railroad tracks, placed perfectly under a kudzu eaten oak grove. Treva and Leland Coggins would ride the ungated acreage on Sunday afternoons, volleying their shared vision for the homeplace over Beth’s tiny head. The owner never sold until Beth’s grandfather convinced him to make a deal for just the house. Beth’s parents were well past Sunday drives when their oak shadowed dream crept down the county road on two flatbed trailers and came to rest atop its current perch and was immediately rented out. Her grandfather loved this house but never gave it to her dad and mom, the people who spent their lives watching it deteriorate like a burned-out lighthouse looking over a sea of brokenness.

Did she really want to kick Shirley out and become one of them? This was supposed to be a hideout until she had enough cash, and the country opened the spaces she had always felt were safer than here. This virus that had inflicted isolation on everyone else now had her jammed up next to her family and her past.

Beth ran the light over the scene once more looking for rat nests or anything alive. That’s when she caught the smooth movement just a few feet above her head climbing the rafter toward the ridge of the roof. At first, she thought it was an electrical cord twisted through one of the attic beams but as it crept upwards, she deemed it reptilian. The six-foot-long black snake glistened against the artificial light and Beth felt a shudder pass through her but did not move. The time it took for the initial panic to spread from her brain and bump up against the inside of her skin, her instinct to jump had had smoothed to a calm. She knew the score. She sat and gazed at the harmless snake just above eye level. It had been years since she had encountered a rat snake, and maybe never this up close. Yet somewhere deep inside her was the knowledge to not bolt, not run. Just be with this creature who was the likely reason there were no rats infesting the insulation.

She watched the black snake glide up the attic beam as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. It moved as smoothly as Leland’s old Chevy used to, knowing all the potholes by heart and in no hurry to get by them. The snake’s length indicated this had been its domain for some time. 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 information was just part of belonging to this place—pointed heads, 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. She remembered her grandfather cursing tenants who moved into this house 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 sat in the darkness as the snake passed like a quiet freight train at midnight. She had never considered that her birthright would be her salvation. That perhaps she belonged to this place on a cellular level, a flawed woman in a flawed landscape. That all her survival skills could be turned inward to make a home for herself to claim on her own terms.  She sat in the darkness rationalizing that Shirley would find a better place. Maybe she would get her life together if she could leave her own dusty past behind as Beth had the benefit of doing. The men outside knew nothing of her, a woman willing to fall on her knees digging mushrooms out of cow shit for rent. She would buy this house. She would do what it took to make it whole. The roof was free of leaks and the crawl space dry, everything else could be built to be made strong again.

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