It seemed pretty clear to Roosevelt that killing a snake on the church grounds ought to be a deacons’ job. But since he was out of work, and therefore out of excuses, here he was, sweating through his shirt in the tall grass next to the graveyard just to make Vidette shut up. The thought of his wife suddenly made Roosevelt very tired. Why was she on his back? It wasn’t his fault the Honda plant was scaling back their four-wheeler output. It wasn’t anything to get all worked up about; a man deserved a vacation every now and then anyway. Some vacation it was, though. In the four weeks since he’d been laid off, Vidette had put him to more work than he’d ever done at any job. If it wasn’t riding all over town paying bills and picking up cakes for church functions, it was running her mama to the doctor. And now she had him killing snakes. Right in the heat of the day, too.
When she’d called him that morning, she was so frantic it had taken him five minutes to get the story out of her. She’d been at the church that morning, meeting with the Reverend, probably complaining about Roosevelt being too lazy to find a job and too sorry to even come to church, when the guy who’d been cutting the church grass stumbled into the office and said he’d just been bitten by a rattlesnake.
Roosevelt could not figure out what this had to do with him until it became clear that Vidette had decided that it was somehow his duty to go and kill the snake. He doubted that he’d find the snake and doubted that he could hit it with the pistol even if he did. Everything he did on account of Vidette turned to shit, like when he built her a deck on the back of the house and before he could finish nailing up the rails her mama had fallen off it and broken her hip.
He wasn’t about to go home empty-handed. If he didn’t find the snake, he thought he’d go nose around the edge of the swamp and find another one. If that didn’t work, he’d spend the afternoon driving around and drinking tallboys. Surely he’d come across a snake dead on the highway, and with any luck it would be fresh enough for him to pass off as the one he’d hunted down in the churchyard. That would make Vidette happy.
Roosevelt began to pick around in the underbrush with the hoe. He reminded himself that it could be worse; the highway department could have been hiring. Then he’d be standing in the heat broiling up from the fresh road tar, turning a sign from “STOP” to “SLOW” while young punks with no jobs drove by with their music so loud it rattled their trunks.
A dry, deadly buzz jerked him out of his morbid fantasy and he froze, bent over in the tall bushes beside the graveyard. There it was, coiled up in a blackberry briar not two feet from the blade of the hoe, big around as Roosevelt’s arm, dusty brown diamonds giving way to satiny black halfway to its tail. It was the biggest snake he’d ever seen. Slowly, stiffly, he rose. He fought the urge to shoot it, because he was sure that he would miss, and the snake would melt away into the weeds never to be seen again. Knowing his luck, it would surface again Sunday morning and bite one of the little children as they flooded out into the sunshine when the Reverend had finally stopped preaching and passed the plate. Then he’d never have peace again, and all he’d ever hear from Vidette was that he was too sorry to work, too sorry even to kill a snake threatening the house of the Lord.
The snake weaved back and forth a little as if it was trying to charm him. Roosevelt thought for a moment about trying to catch it, grabbing it by the tail like that cracker on the television and stuffing it in a bag to take home to Vidette, but the thought evaporated as the snake rose a little and sang its rattles again. He tested it with the hoe and it struck, pinging against the flat of the blade. It did not back away.
Roosevelt pondered a little until he came upon a plan. With his left hand, he picked up a stick lying at his feet and poked at the snake with it. The snake struck at the stick, and Roosevelt impressed himself when he cleaved its head with the hoe. The body wrapped itself around the handle and Roosevelt shuddered, laughing at himself and his victory.
“How you like that, bitch?” he asked. The body still writhed, twisting itself belly-up in the sun. Roosevelt sawed through its neck with the blade of the hoe and kicked the head into the bushes. He’d heard of people being bitten by snakes that were already dead, and he didn’t want to add hospital bills to the list of things for Vidette to complain about, although he was sure her old soft and sympathetic nature would return if he got himself killed doing the Lord’s work.
He gloated over his prize before he picked it up by the rattles and laid it in the bed of his truck. He was so beyond satisfied with himself that he decided to buy a couple of tallboys and some crickets and go sit under the Green’s Road bridge and fish.
Four hours later he stood on the back steps of the house he and Vidette had inherited from his grandmother, his breath freshened by a mouthful of Tic-Tacs, holding the limp snake in one hand and a stringer of bream in the other, beaming like a little boy. He had the evening all planned out. Vidette would praise him for bagging the snake and she’d get the grease ready while he cleaned the fish. He’d promise to look for a job over supper, and they would spend the rest of the night knocking the headboard of the bed against the wall and making baby talk to one another.
He rang the doorbell because he couldn’t fish for his keys with his hands full, and he wanted Vidette to come to the door and see him with his bounty.
“You get him?” she asked though the screen door.
Roosevelt smiled and lifted the snake to show her, poising himself for her praise.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, and fainted dead away.
Roosevelt had known Vidette for most of his life, had been married to her for almost twenty years, most of which time they’d actually lived together, but he had never seen her faint. She’d wailed and wailed and fallen on the floor in front of his own mother’s casket, but he was pretty sure she’d been faking, just like she pretended sometimes to be so caught up in the spirit she spoke in tongues. She was not faking this time.
Roosevelt kneeled over her, thinking at first that she was dead, that he’d finally gone and killed her. But her breasts, straining the limits of her Covenant Road Praise-Off 2000 t-shirt, began to heave and she smacked her lips. He slapped her gently with the back of his hand.
“Vidette, baby,” he said to her tenderly. “Come on wake up now. I done killed your snake, baby. Come on.” She opened her eyes and closed them again, drawing shallow breaths.
“Wake up now,” he said, shaking her by the shoulders. “You got yourself a lot of bitching to do tonight, better get your ass on up and do it.” He went back to slapping at her cheeks with the back of his hand. “Come on, woman…Lord knows, longer you stay out, the worse I’m gone get my ass chewed, and I ain’t done nothing to deserve nothing like that, now. You been on the floor thirty seconds, and you know you gone be telling that Reverend you was out ten minutes. Come on, baby. I done killed your snake. It’s dead as shit, can’t hurt nobody.”
Suddenly, she came to, snotting on Roosevelt’s hand. “Get that nasty thing out of my house, Roe Law,” she screamed. “Nasty, nasty devil thing.” She shuddered and slid away from him across the floor. He looked in the direction of her horrified gaze. His heart sank when he saw that he’d brought the snake in with him. It lay in a fat, headless curve, leaking on the yellow linoleum. Silently, he picked it up and walked outside. It was dusk, and he stood, the snake hanging straight to his feet, looking at a sickly sliver of moon hanging in the sky, just over his neighbor’s roof. He turned to look at his own house, at the deck that still had no hand rails, at the grass that needed to be cut. The windows blinked blue with the light from the television. It made him very tired.
Finally, Roosevelt waded into the weeds beyond his pump house until he came to the chain-link fence that divided his lot from the one behind him. No one had lived in that crumbling old house for three years, and the entire back yard was choked with wisteria vines and blackberry bushes. He laid the snake gently just over the fence. It sank into the brambles and disappeared, and Roosevelt went back inside, hoping there’d be some boxing on cable at least.
* * * * *
The next morning, just after sunrise, the sun began to warm the body of the rattlesnake, which was already being tended by ants. She lay there, stretched to her full length, a marvelous specimen of her species, and seven perfect little lives quickened their squirming inside her belly. She had carried them for four months, each one coiled comfortably in its own sac, waiting to be pushed out into the world and scatter without so much as a goodbye nuzzle. What she lacked in maternal grace she provided in instant viability. Each little baby was a loner to the core, a taut cord of cold-blooded muscle guided by precise instinct, deadly from the moment of birth.
The first little snake nosed its way, slick and glistening, out of its already stinking mother and slid away into the brambles. Another tested the air with its tongue and began to crawl out of the high weeds toward Roosevelt’s house. It paused for a moment, and was pounced upon by a crow, which deftly pinched off its head and squabbled with a rival over the limp body. The last little snake, preferring the shelter of the tall weeds, crawled away and sought the cool, dry comfort inside the pump house, where it coiled in the lee of a broken cinder block and waited for the darkness to return.
* * * * *
Roosevelt was eating Frosted Flakes and listening to the crows raise hell in his back yard when the phone rang. He winced. Nothing good ever came of a ringing phone. At least he knew it wasn’t the cable company again. He’d already tried to see if there was anything good coming on the movie channels today, but all he could find on the screen was a message telling him to contact the cable company about his account, which Vidette had refused to pay since he’d been laid off.
The answering machine came on, Vidette telling everybody to leave a message and to have a blessed day. No blessed days around here, he thought. He winced when the tone sounded, expecting it to be the loan company asking again why he was two months behind on his payments, but it was only Vidette, on her break at work, admonishing him to wake his sorry self up and pick up the phone. Roosevelt kept crunching his cereal while she continued trying to arouse him from his sleep. Finally, she gave and up and said she had a job for him to do.
“Better not be another snake-killing,” he said to the answering machine.
“The grounds committee,” Vidette continued, “we decided the Christian thing to do is to finish up Mr. Silver’s job since he’s laid up with the snake. You need to get yourself over there and finish cutting the grass for that poor man. Needs to be done today, too.” She went on talking, but Roosevelt no longer listened.
“Cut grass at the church, my ass,” he said. She was still jabbering away on the answering machine as he drained the milk from his cereal and dropped the bowl in the sink. “You on my ass all week about cutting weeds in my own backyard and now I got to go cut grass at the church. I don’t even go to the church. Why I got to cut the grass? Shit, I ain’t cutting no grass at no church. Crazy if you think I’m cutting that grass.
“And you might as well stop talking about ‘Roe you need to get back in the church and quit laying out like a heathen,’ because Roe ain’t going to church. Ain’t nothing Godly happen in that church, just a bunch of old heifers trying to out-praise one another, falling all over Mr. Reverend with his Cadillac and his motherfucking purple suits, and his” –here Rooselvelt began to imitate Rev. Washington, his voicing rising and falling in evocation—“Brothers, Sisters, Children of God-uh, Now is the time-uh, to bear the cross-uh, the cross-uh—Brothers, can I get a amen-uh, Sisters, how about a Hallelujah?—to bear the cross-uh, and be not afraid, afraid-uh, of the fight, because the day coming, I say the day is coming when the lion gone lie down with the lamb-uh, and the people of God-uh, will need to stand up-uh, And fight-uh.”
He was interrupted by the phone ringing again. Vidette yelled over the answering machine again for him to wake up. He cussed her a little more, but in the end, he went to cut the grass, grumbling all the way. He knew she’d call back several times, each time she got a break at work. And each time she’d be surer that he was either lying up on the couch ignoring her or wasting gas driving around somewhere. He would cut her grass, all right, but he would time it just right, so he could be watching tv when she got home. She’d get a flea in her panties when she saw him lying on the couch, and she would launch into a bitching fit. He would absorb all her wrath and her preaching, and it would take the wind right out of her sails when he told her he’d already cut the grass, that she was raising Cain for nothing.
It was already hot when Roosevelt got to the church after breakfast. It took him a while to get used to the steering on the church’s riding mower, but he finished cutting the grass just after noon, and even had time to pick the weeds out of the flower beds. He sat on the tailgate of his truck and drank a Mountain Dew. The work hadn’t been so bad, especially with the riding mower, but he couldn’t imagine doing this every day for a living. He drank the last of his drink in one big gulp and grinned. The church yard looked fine, and he’d be home just in time.
* * * * *
Roosevelt’s plan worked tolerably well. He’d worked out a new wrinkle thinking about it on the ride home, and stopped to get a newspaper to make his plan complete. He sat reading the sports, and fumbled for the classifieds when he heard Vidette’s car in the drive.
She came into the house, kicking off her shoes and pulling off her panty hose, and when she saw him sitting there calmly reading the paper she launched into one of her best-ever tirades. Roosevelt sat and listened, watching Vidette over the top of his newspaper and marveling at her performance. She hit virtually every note in her repertoire, starting with her I’m tired of working putting food on this table while you lay up on your sorry ass salvo, rising into her better be glad your old truck is paid for cause ain’t no way I’d make payments on it for you to ride around not having a job riff, segueing into her might as well go on foodstamps like your sorry sister theme, and ending with that old standby, the hard to be a Christian woman in this house crescendo.
He wasn’t sure if she was done or just gathering breath for a new round when he put down his paper. “Woman,” he said, almost compassionately, “if you’d stop preaching at me for two seconds and let me talk to you, you’d know I done cut the grass at the church. And right now, I’m sitting here looking in this paper for a job.”
“Cable turned off and now you want to work,” was all she could muster.
They barely talked to one another for the rest of the night, though Vidette did fry the fish he’d cleaned the night before and finally thanked him for cutting the grass and taking care of the snake, even if he did nearly kill her dragging it in the house with him. Roosevelt fell asleep watching a show about two dumb-ass white girls having to do all kinds of degrading work for laughs. God, he missed cable.
* * * * *
The next morning Vidette awakened Roosevelt while she was getting ready for work. She was buck-naked and wet from the shower, and for an incredulous moment he thought she wanted to screw.
“Wake up, Roe,” she said, a little more patiently than she had the day before. “I got something for you to do and I think the Lord done found you a job.”
This, Roosevelt thought, could not be good.
“The Reverend called this morning,” she explained “and the church, we decided to pay the grass-cutting man, his name is Horace Silver, like he’d finished the grass. Took up a love offering, too.”
Roosevelt shook his head. Evidently, you didn’t get a “love offering” for getting laid off. You had go and do something stupid, like getting snake bit in the churchyard.
“The Reverend,” she said, brushing her teeth, “is going to drop the check off here this morning on his way to the hospital to see Sister Evelyn. Anyway, you need to go drop the check off with Mr. Silver.”
“Why can’t he do it his own self?” Roosevelt asked.
Vidette emerged from the bathroom and bent over to look in her underwear drawer. She turned to face him, strapping on a bra. “Because, Roe, the Reverend talked to Mr. Silver yesterday. He came home from the hospital, and he’s gone be alright. But he’s laid up for a while, and he needs to hire somebody to help him out. He’s got grass lined up to cut for all summer, got some bushes and landscaping stuff to do, too. So you going to drop off the check and tell him you’ll be his helper.”
Vidette had gone and trapped him into begging a white man for a job.
‘I got to go,” Vidette said. She kissed him on the top of the head. It was so unexpected he almost recoiled from her, but he circled her hips with his arms and buried his face in her belly.
“Goddamn you, woman,” he said, the words muffled by her stomach.
When she left, Roosevelt knocked around the house, talking to himself morosely, resigning himself to cutting grass for this Silver guy. He knew he had to go back to work eventually. In fact, he wanted to go back to work. But the thought of spending day after day tooling around on a lawn mower, turning tighter and tighter circles under the baking sun, filled him with dread.
Roosevelt was washing the supper dishes when the Reverend rang the doorbell.
“Morning, Brother Law,” the Reverend said.
Roosevelt grunted. He hoped the preacher was in a hurry, that he’d leave without wanting to sit down for a word of prayer.
“This here is a basket some of the Sisters put together for Mr. Silver,” the Reverend said, handing Roosevelt a plastic clothes basket filled with food. He pushed past Roosevelt into the house and sat at the kitchen table writing out a check. Roosevelt wondered what Vidette saw in the Reverend. He was black as a plum, his collar cut into his neck, and he was forever sweating. His jowls shook as he sat at the table and mopped his brow with a handkerchief that matched his tie.
Something in the basket Roosevelt still held smelled good. Sweet potato pie? Yams? His stomach growled.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways, Brother Law, mysterious ways. You been looking for a job, and here He done found one for you.” The Reverend began to slip, just slightly, into his preaching voice. “As the Psalm says, give thanks, I say thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, and his mercy endureth for ever.”
Roosevelt thought that if the Lord wanted to send him some work, he could have managed it without setting up somebody to get snake bit.
“Amen,” said Roosevelt, setting down the basket and taking the check from the Reverend, who gave him directions to Horace’s house. It was near the church.
“Be sure and give Sister Law my, uh…regards.” The Reverend began moving toward the door. “A fine upstanding woman is one of God’s greatest gifts,” he said, shaking his head and smacking his lips.
He left, and Roosevelt closed the door behind him and walked into the kitchen. “God’s greatest gifts,” he said, mocking the Reverend. “Fine, I say fine upstanding woman.” He pulled back the towel covering the food basket and surveyed its contents, laying each dish out on the table. Macaroni pie. String beans. Mustard greens. Pound cake. Fried chicken from Bojangle’s somebody had tried to pass off as homemade by wrapping it in tinfoil. Sweet potato pie.
Roosevelt’s heart sank when he saw the pie. He was hoping it had been yams he’d smelled. He could have dipped out some yams, but it was unthinkable to deliver a pie with a piece cut out of it. Instead, he ate a bowl of cereal, standing at the window looking over the knee-high weeds in the backyard, wondering what his new boss was like. He hoped he wasn’t a dickhead. Roe Law wasn’t going to work for no dickhead.
* * * * *
Roosevelt delivered the food and the check and left with a job. He didn’t even have ask; Vidette had gone and called Horace to set the whole thing up. “I heard you looking for some work,” Roosevelt’s new boss had said as soon as he knocked on the door. Horace seemed tolerable, if a little younger than he had figured, but the whole thing made him feel trapped and outwitted. There would be no convincing Vidette that it was anything less than a miracle.
Roosevelt drove away wanting to do seven hundred things at once. He wondered how anybody ever got anything done when there were so many options. He wanted to call Vidette at work to tell her he’d gotten the job. He wanted to lie and tell her Horace had already found somebody. He wanted to go to work cutting grass and trimming hedges. He dreaded the thought of spending his days stuck on a lawnmower and tending to other people’s bushes. He wanted to fish. He wanted to take a nap. He wanted another snake to kill. He wanted to hit the interstate and leave a message for Vidette that he was going to stay with his brother in Louisiana.
In the end he just spent his last twenty dollar bill on half a tank of gas and a tall boy and decided to fish because it was the best way to be alone. He drove into Columbia, past the football stadium and the farmers’ market, to a little park on the banks of the wide, muddy Congaree.
It was noticeably cooler under the trees here by the river, and he walked a little way down the cement sidewalk until he came to a narrow footpath leading downhill toward the water. It was steep and muddy, and he slipped a little, dropping his rods but managing to keep his balance. Finally he made it down to the water and worked his way upstream along the bank until he found a little sandy clearing. He sat there for a few moments, relaxing among the erosion-exposed roots of a dying chinaberry tree before he put a line in the water.
The Congaree was unpredictable, sometimes slowing to a trickle and often rising to flood, reclaiming its banks by stripping the encroaching trees’ footing in the sand. Today the water was fairly low, and the river slipped past quietly. He began to resign himself to his new job. It didn’t feel right to him, working for one man, being a glorified field laborer, but it would please Vidette, and she was tolerable when she was happy. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, he thought. No matter where you worked, what you did, you were still working for somebody. And cutting grass and planting bushes couldn’t be any worse than putting tires on new four-wheelers every day of his life, coming home with the ghost of the air-wrench still throbbing his hands. No, it wouldn’t be so bad at all, he thought to himself. He could get the cable turned back on with his first paycheck and work for Horace until something better came along.
He’d almost forgotten that he had a line in the water until the rod jerked out of his hand and skittered across the dirt. He thought he’d lost it, but miraculously it wedged itself in a dead tree limb hanging over the water. Whatever was on the hook was big; the line went tight again and the rod bowed, cracking branches until the tip of it nearly touched the river. He leaned out over the river to retrieve the rod and stood to get some leverage. Something silver thrashed the surface of the water.
Finally he was able to fight it to the shore, and had in his possession a striper as long as his arm and stout, big enough to feed a dozen people. He’d seen people in bass boats pull them out of the middle of the river, but it was unheard of to catch one like this, nosing around the bank with a cricket on a bobber. He stood dumfounded, marveling at his catch, and finally understood his luck when he saw another fish in its gaping mouth, a tiny bream no longer than his thumb. It had taken the bait and promptly been swallowed up by the bigger fish. He retrieved the unwitting bait from the mouth of his bounty and dropped it into the water, but it was bent crooked by the force of the attack and floated in fluttering circles, unable to right itself. Roosevelt felt a pang of remorse for it, this tiny little thing whose life had amounted to nothing other than being bait, whose stroke of incredibly bad luck had turned into his fortune. It was nothing short of miraculous, and maybe, Roosevelt thought, though he’d never admit it to Vidette, the Lord was looking out for him.
When he had his bounty off the hook, he hung it from a tree limb. It croaked and gasped, the flaps behind its head opening and closing, revealing gills red as heart blood. He drank the rest of his tallboy watching it die and scrambled up the bank feeling like a man.
* * * * *
The next day was Saturday, and Roosevelt wasn’t starting with Horace until Monday. Vidette hadn’t mentioned the weeds behind the house since he’d gotten the job, so he decided to cut them. Maybe it would be good practice for his new job, though he doubted the kind of people who’d pay to get their grass cut or have somebody plant bushes in orderly rows in front of their houses ever let their yards get knee-high. It was already hot when he got started after breakfast, but he swung the bush axe with a fury he didn’t know he possessed. He leveled the weeds, the sweat running in rivers down his bare chest, little tufts of chickenweed seed drifting like snow all around him.
Roosevelt was tired when the job was done, but his arms felt lean and hard. He ducked into the musty dark of the pump house to put up the bush axe. He propped it up in the corner, but it fell, scraping against the wall. When he crawled forward to reach it, something squirmed under his hand and he felt a sting in the crotch of his thumb and index finger. He stood up so fast he cracked his head on the cobwebbed ceiling and looked to see the tiny, dusty snake withdrawing from the rectangle of light shining through the door. His heart pumped dread into his chest and he squeezed his wrist against the venom, wondering just what it was the Lord had against him.
Joey Poole is a writer and English instructor living in Florence, South Carolina. “The Lord and Roosevelt Law” is the title story of a loosely-connected collection of stories which also contains “The Travel Writer,” published in the Fall 2008 issue of The Southeast Review.
Joey Poole, only Joey could write something like this, amazing, I laughed with Martin Fulmer, reading this.. I think Joey describes himself alot, with the banging headboards, Frosted flakes, Mountain Dew, tall boy, and of course, the best of all that mouth. Great Job Mr. Poole
Nice. when I heard that you had things published I was so intrigued. mostly to see what your writing style was. To see if it was different from how you acted. I know that the praise from a eng. 101 student isn’t much. but i liked it. “hand-Me-downs” is my favorite” but “the nude evangelist”is more real. the fact tht its a blog explains tht. lol. anyways … you are … interesting.
Thank you for the auspicious writeup. It in truth used to be a enjoyment account it. Look complicated to more delivered agreeable from you! By the way, how can we keep in touch?