IT HAPPENED in the springtime. Minerva Atwater was eleven years old at the time. She lived in Grass Valley, California, with her father, Charles, and younger brother, Cortland. Their mother had died in labor with Cort, whose skull was evidently too wide for her birthing chute. The loss destroyed Minerva’s father, yet he continued on for the sake of his children, finding work in the silver mines.
They lived in an isolated shotgun shack skirting the Yuba Reservoir. In the summer months, Minerva and Cort explored the grasslands while their father toiled underground.
The day it happened was much like any other. Cort and Minny—as her father and brother called her back then—romped through the tall grass to a sandy wash, where the water rolled out blue and clean in the afternoon light. Cort was six. He was thin, his hair prone to cowlicks, and he wore wire-rimmed spectacles patched with cellulose tape. He wanted to hold Minny’s hand while they walked—sometimes she refused, finding it babyish, but Cort’s bottom lip would tremble as his eyes brimmed behind his thick glasses. He adored his big sister and was hurt when she denied him these small kindnesses. So she would take his hand, which was often sticky and moist the way only small boys’ hands can be. They would wade into the water with their trousers rolled to the knees to catch mudskippers and narrow-mouth toads.
In the late afternoon, they made their way closer to home; their father would arrive soon and call them in for supper. They lazed under the trees in a shady grove, sunlight hitting the leaves and giving their bare skin a faint green tint.
“Minny?”
“Yes, Cort, what is it?”
“Why can’t we have nice things?”
“What do you mean?”
Cort sucked on his knuckle. He’d skinned it scaling a rock.
“The Safeway has Granny Smith apples. I never seen a green like them. Different than grass green or leaf green or . . .”
“Or grasshopper green?”
Cort smiled. “They’s so perfectly green. But we never get none. We hafta eat the crab apples that grow around here. They give my tummy the crummies.”
“Apples are apples,” said Minny. “Don’t grumble.”
“And buttons, too. Minny, my shirt’s got two bust buttons, and Dad never gets new buttons to sew on.”
Cort held his shirt out as proof. Minny knew about Cort’s buttons. Her shirts were missing buttons, too, and her big toes had worn through her socks.
“We eat potatoes every night,” said Cort. “Boiled and baked and mashed without butter. I believe my tongue will fall off if I have one more bite of spuds.”
Charles Atwater was a fine father and a hard worker, but his one failing was at the card table. He was a gambler, and a poor one. And so, his children’s clothes had busted buttons. And so, his children ate potatoes and crab apples.
“We will eat high-class apples one day,” said Minny.
“Promise?”
“Of course.”
There came a rustling from the feather grass. Minny faced it, ears pricked. An arrow-shaped head appeared. It was green, too. Different from the grass green or leaf green or the green of a Granny Smith apple.
The green of a snake’s head. The largest snake Minny had ever seen.
She had dealings with snakes, as did any child growing up in the wilds. Harmless blackneck garters were most common, but she had startled coachwhips and Chihuhuan hognoses, even an old massasauga rattler coiled in placid contentment under the porch. But she had never seen the likes of this one.
It glided forward inch by nightmarish inch, its movements so silken it was as if its belly were lined with ball bearings. To Minerva, it was not unlike watching a train of inconceivable size steam out of a tunnel. Its scales had the shimmer of hammered copper gone green in the rain. It made its way toward them with a sickening but somehow dreamy speed, the grass whispering against its dry body.
Minerva grabbed Cort’s arm, jerking him up. He uttered a yelp of pain and confusion. The grove spilled down to the water; their only escape route was blocked by the advancing snake. Minny had half a mind to hurdle the thing. Jesus, it was thick, as stout around as a quarter horse’s leg—but she had jumped over bigger logs. But logs didn’t move the way the snake did, with those lazy yet threatening undulations. And she didn’t think the water was any way out: she was pretty sure the snake was as nimble in water, or nimbler, than on land. They would be at a disadvantage if it followed them into the reservoir.
So they had to go up. They would have to climb a tree.
Cort had seen the snake by then, too. He actually adjusted his spectacles, as if under the assumption they were deceiving him.
“That’s a biiiig one,” he said, his voice set at a high-pitch whinny.
“Go,” said Minny, shoving him toward the nearest hackberry tree.
The snake . . . sweet Christ, that snake. It was fourteen, sixteen, eighteen feet long. It did not have an end.
Minny did not know then that the serpent was a green anaconda, the largest of its kind. She did not know—in fact, would never know—that it had hatched in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela and was netted by an indigenous tribesman while it was still an adolescent. The tribesman sold it to an exotic animal merchant. It twice escaped containment and ate that merchant’s more valued specimens, a scarlet macaw and a spider monkey. The merchant then sold the snake to a Mr. Edwin P. Popplewell, operator of the Popplewell Traveling Menagerie. For some years, the snake had circuited the southwestern states, gawped at by rubes in Bullhead City and Las Cruces. One night, while the menagerie was camped on the banks of the Yuba, the snake escaped. When Popplewell noticed that its cage was empty, he did not search for it or report it missing. The snake was a menace, having consumed both his gnu and a tiger cub, offering nothing in return save its sullen lethargy. Let it be someone else’s problem, Popplewell figured.
Minny and Cort were halfway up the tree when Cort’s footing slipped. His heel slid on a branch with a frictionless sound, as if the bark had been oiled. Next, he was falling. He uttered a fearful squawk, but that was all. It happened quickly—so quick that Minny didn’t know he’d fallen at first. There was just this terrible absence below her, as if the ghostly outline of her brother were still there.
Cort fell fifteen yards straight down. He landed on his feet, the way cats always do. The lower bones of his left leg snapped with the sound of lake ice cracking in a spring thaw. He fell over then and struck his head on an exposed rock and began to jitter as if in a terrible seizure.
The snake rushed at him. Minerva’s lungs unlocked and she screamed.
“Daddy! Daddy, come quick!”
They were within shouting distance of their shack. Their father was almost always home by this time. A punctual man, was Charles Atwater.
“Daddy, please hurry, a snake’s got Cort!”
A snake’s got Cort. It sounded so silly. Something you might cry out in a dream. But this was happening. Terribly, it was happening.
The snake could have climbed up the tree. Minerva and Cort were no safer there than on the ground, as Minerva would later realize. But that was not necessary now, seeing as its meal had fallen right in front of it. It wrapped the boy in the greasy rope of its body, which flexed and thinned as the huge muscles worked beneath its skin.
“Oh no!” was all Minerva could say, watching the snake coil lovingly around her baby brother—for she still thought of him that way sometimes, as a baby, despite the fact that he could talk and count his fingers and toes. His little feet stuck out one end of the snake’s coils, one boot off, his baby toe poking out of his sock. His head on the other end, his spectacles askew with the right lens shattered, the pressure purpling his face. Blood squeezed through the pores of his cheeks and ran from the edges of his eyes. There came a series of shuddery snaps as his ribs broke.
Minerva couldn’t stop screaming. She wasn’t screaming for her father—it was too late for that. Not for God or some divine intercession. She just screamed at the horror of it all, at the dark, sucking hole that had opened so suddenly in her life.
The snake unwound itself. Cort’s body tumbled limply from its embrace. The snake’s jaw unhinged and it began to consume the boy, starting at his skull. He might still have been breathing.
Minerva screamed until she went temporarily blind with the effort. She screamed over the hot hum of the cicadas. This did not startle the red-tailed hawk circling the sky above. From that bird’s vantage, what was happening below was simply nature taking its course in the way nature sometimes did. Something splintered deep inside Minny’s head. Perhaps she went just a little insane on that hazy sunlit afternoon. Who could blame her?
Time passed. The snake slithered back into the feather grass. Its belly was swollen with the outline of Cort’s body, stretched so that its scales separated to show the silky silverskin beneath, so sheer you could almost make out the boy’s features.
Where was her father? Why hadn’t he come with an axe, a butcher knife, with only his two hands and the fatherly madness that must come when he sees his youngest in such peril? But he never came. He’d turned his back on her and Cort.
It was night by the time Minerva’s legs unlocked and she could move again. She shimmied down the tree—her body had detached from her mind, which was totally blank. Cort’s spectacles lay on the ground. The moon glossed the one unbroken lens.
She slipped across the night-lit field to their shack. She found her father sitting dead in a chair with a bullet hole in his forehead.
Minerva was too shocked to believe it possible. It wasn’t a hole at all. No, it was just a blot of raspberry jam on his forehead. Or a flash burn he’d gotten at the mine. Never mind that his eyes were wide open and his last thoughts were splattered over the wall behind him.
She touched her finger to the hole. She would wipe away the jam, was what she’d do, then tell her father what had happened to Cort. Then they would get the axe and the cudgel and find and kill that horrible snake.
Her finger slipped into the hole. Into her father’s skull. It was cold in there.