Free A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews Page B

table and waited for him to taste it. He bent his head to the raised cup.
    “Is it good?”
    “Yeah,” he said, “it’s good, Elf.”
    She stood where she was, smiling now, but with her mouth conspicuously closed. “You know what, Joe Lon, honey?”
    “No, Elf.”
    “I made me a phone call this morning first thing.”
    “Okay, Elf.”
    Through the window he watched the little lady under the white bonnet where she sat unmoving in the bright November sunlight sticking rattles onto a stretched canvas. To the right and in front of her the three-thousand-dollar, thousand-snake deer with the razor hooves kept killing and killing the already mutilated diamondback.
    “You know who it was to?” said Elfie.
    “No,” he said, “I don’t know who it was to.”
    “To the dentist in Tifton.” Her voice was rising and lilting, full of surprised triumph. “I called the dentist, and I’m gone git these old sorry teeth of mine fixed.”
    He turned his eyes from the window to look at her where she had retreated to the sink. He could see now what she was doing. She was washing out baby diapers. Although he had not before, he now smelled the ammonia from his son’s piss and he wished he didn’t. He forced himself to smile at her as she still watched him over her shoulder.
    “That’s real good, Elf,” he said. “You done real good to do that for youself.” His throat felt very tight. “It’ll make you feel better.”
    She left the sink and came to stand behind him. “I done it for you, Joe Lon, honey. I coulda done without it for myself.” She moved closer to the back of his chair. Her thin soft hands touched him, one on each shoulder. “Me’n the babies love you, Joe Lon, honey.”
    He could only nod. He turned loose his coffee and took hold again of the table. He desperately wanted to howl.
     
    ***
     
    Lottie Mae had dreamed of snakes. Snakes that were lumpy with rats. In a dream she killed one of them with a stick and the moment it stopped writhing and was dead, the stick in her hand was a snake. When she tried to turn it loose she saw that she could not because the snake was part of her. Her arm was a snake. And then the other arm was a snake. And her two arms that were snakes crawled about her neck, cold as ice and slick with snake slime.
    There were other dreams, but when her mother, Maude, woke her, she could not remember them. But because she could not remember the dreams did not mean she had gotten rid of the snakes. Her mother’s hand where it touched her shoulder and gently shook her seemed snaky, the fingers cold with snake skin, and alive with a boneless writhing. She lay as still as stone under the snakes; all that moved was her eyes, which she cut toward her mother bending over her bed only to find the snakes had twisted themselves into the black braids of her mother’s hair.
    “Chile, I got the miseries,” her mother said.
    Lottie Mae said nothing but watched the snakes carefully.
    “You got to go to Mistuh Big Joe’s and do for me.”
    Lottie Mae drew back the light cover that was over her and got up. Her cotton dress was on the bedpost. She slipped it on and buttoned it up the front.
    “Chile,” her mother said softly. “Take it off. It got blood on it. I git you sompin else.”
    But Lottie Mae went into the kitchen instead, where she drank two glasses of water taken with a dipper out of a metal bucket sitting on a shelf. Her mother limped in behind her. The sockets of her mother’s hips sometimes fused with the miseries and when this happened the girl had to go to the big house to cook for Big Joe and empty his daughter’s slop jar. Her mother came to the water bucket and took her arm. Lottie Mae turned her vacant eyes on her mother. The expression on her face did not change at all.
    Her mother smiled but her lips were trembling. “You know chile, Mistuh Big Joe ain’t needin you. I spect he be just fine today lak he is. You gone back to bed. I’m gone git Brother Boy to go to the