CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Good Lord,” one of the men whispered.

“That’s the one,” Victoria said softly. Then, to Deputy Wroten: “There’s your killer, officer.”

That’s all it took for the men—and myself, since I am telling only truth today—to cluster back around the bed of the pickup.

The two men who had been manhandling the bale had backed to the cab window and were leaning against the pickup’s roof, inspecting their gloves as if they were afraid they had somehow been infected by mere proximity to the hideous head.

Victoria remained where she had been, standing firmly on the tailgate, looking down at the instrument of Eric Johansson’s death.

“Here, ma’am,” Tom Neilson said gently, “Let me help you off of there.”

“Thank you,” Victoria said. She was shaking now. As rock-solid as she had proven all day, now that the moment of revelation had come, she suddenly seemed her age. Or almost her age.

I’m not sure anything will ever make Victoria Sears seem like an old woman to me.

Neilson held her arm while the two of them walked over to where I was standing. He handed her off to me, then continued around until he was standing on my other side along the bed of the pickup.

“If that don’t beat all,” someone said. And from another: “Well, I never....”

“I have,” Victoria said. All eyes turned to watch her. “I grew up on a farm not far from here. My granddad and my father ran a few head of cattle, Grandmother and Mother had a few chickens and a fairly large truck garden that supplied a goodly number of the neighbors with vegetables and berries—especially strawberries and raspberries—during the summer months.

“I was an only child, so I became a sort of tom-boy, always following either my granddad or my father around. Mom and Grandma took care of the house and garden.

“I remember one day—hot, like today, toward the end of summer and the beginning of haying season—I was alone with Granddad, walking the edge of the field not too far from a little creek”—she pronounced it crick, as I knew she would. “Granddad was irrigating that day, so we had his old shovel with us. I was balancing it on my shoulder, trying to look grown-up.

“All of a sudden, he whipped the shovel off my shoulder and without any hesitation at all, flung it right out into the middle of the field. I followed him out to retrieve it. With that single throw, he had nearly decapitated a field mouse.

“‘Got to get them before they eat up all the grain,’ he said, knowing I had a soft spot for ‘little critters,’ as he called them. I swallowed, accepting the truth of what he was saying but at the same time grieving that this little fellow’s death had been seen as necessary.

“‘Can we bury him?’ I asked.

“‘Sure we can, darlin’, sure we can.’

“So we gathered the body up on the scoop of the shovel and carried it out a little way beyond the edge of the field, right by the creek. Granddad scooped out a little hole and nudged the body in, then covered it with a bit of earth and tamped it down with his boot.”

I noticed that several of the older men were nodding, as if the experience were familiar to them, either as children of farmers or as fathers of farm children.

Some lessons had to be learned, but they didn’t have to be learned brutally.

After a short pause, Victoria continued: “We stood for a minute near the little mound of dirt, listening to the water gurgling over the rocks in the creek, then granddad said it was getting on time to be heading home.

“I wasn’t ready to leave yet. ‘Can I put some flowers on the grave?’ I asked.

“‘You sure you want to do that? It’ll make everything seem sadder if you do.’

“But I was sure, so he gave me the okay.

“There was a big rock a short way down the creek, white granite, I remember, no doubt warm from the long day’s sunshine. At the base of the rock there was a small patch of red tube-like flowers—I’ve since learned that they were penstemons—that I thought would be perfect.

“I was picking my miniature funeral display when my Granddad suddenly called, ‘Freeze, Vicky. Don’t move an inch.’

“It was a tribute to how much I loved and trusted him that I did exactly as he said. Still bent over, I froze, one hand stretched half way to the tallest penstemon stem, the one I wanted as the centerpiece of my tiny bouquet.

The next thing I heard was the ‘whoosh’ of the shovel as it passed by me, blade first. Then I gasped as my grandfather grabbed me under the arms and with a single smooth motion swung me up to the top of the rock.

“‘Stay there until I tell you otherwise. Do not move!’ he whispered as he hesitated for an instant to make sure I wouldn’t fall, then ran off into the low brush at the edge of the field.

“The rock was three feet high or so, with a broad, almost flat top—probably one of the frequent remains of long-past glaciers that dotted the area—so I had no trouble keeping my balance. And I had an unimpeded view of my granddad, who was now moving slowly, cautiously through the wheat field, shovel in his hand, blade down, handle up over his shoulder, as if he were holding a pike or some other weapon.

“It seemed like days that I stood on the top of the boulder. Probably it was less than an hour. And all of the time, Granddad was prowling through the wheat field, as tense as I had ever seen him...or ever would see him.

“Then suddenly, without raising the shovel blade, as if he had been ready for action the entire time, he thrust.

“Just once.

“That was enough.”

Another pause.

All right, I suppose that Victoria did it for the dramatic effect; who could blame her? She had a rapt audience hanging on her every breath, and even if we already had an inkling—judging from the evidence in the pickup bed in front of us—of what was going to happen, we were caught up in her words.

I had to break the silence.

“What was it, Victoria? What did he kill?”

She smiled at me, almost as if thanking me for coming in with the proper question at the proper time. But she didn’t answer directly.

“He leaned over and scooped something up with the blade, then, carrying the shovel as far up the handle as he could manage, he returned.

“On the blade was the head of a rattlesnake, its skull sliced nearly in half, with perhaps five or six inches of body extending behind the jaws. The severed end was crusted over with dirt and small bits of hay it had picked up as it had made its way through the field.

“Granddad didn’t apologize for showing such a grisly thing to his little granddaughter. Quite the opposite.

“‘Sweetie, I want you to remember this, that’s why it’s important that you understand what I just did.’

“He rested the shovel—its curved blade still cradling the rattler’s head—on the nearby stump of a tree that had fallen across the creek some years ago, and helped me down and away from the rock.

“He pointed a few feet away. There, still coiled as if ready to strike, was the body of the rattlesnake. It later measured over five feet long...without the head.”

“A big’un,” one of the men broke into the story to say. “Though I’ve seen ’em six, seven feet long in good years.”

“Yes,” Victoria said, “It was a big-un. It was rattling its warning to me but because of the sounds from the crick, and probably because of my excitement over the mouse-burial, I hadn’t heard. Granddad saw it just seconds before it would have struck. He severed the neck just far enough beyond the head that the rattler was still able to maneuver into the undergrowth. He knew what that meant.”

“What?” I was a novice to rattlesnake-lore and had no idea what it meant.

“It meant, ma’am,” Tom Neilson said, receiving a nodded permission from Victoria to continue the story, even though he had not been present back then, “it meant that there was an angry, hurting rogue rattlesnake out there, one that still had enough of its vitals to keep on going for some time, for hours, maybe days, and that it no longer had the capability of warning anything or anyone that it was nearby. It meant that it was a real danger to any living thing in the area, pet, cattle, human.”

“You see, Lynn dear,” Victoria picked up the story without a hitch in the rhythm, “Granddad’s initial strike had left enough of the snake’s body still attached to the head that the snake could live for quite a while. He knew that he was responsible for that—later, he apologized for missing the vital spots with his shovel, didn’t know what had come over him, easy shot like that, he said. So he knew that he had to hunt the thing down, right then, and make sure it was dead. You don’t leave an injured rattler free to strike again.

“I didn’t realize at the time, or for years after, what an incredibly brave thing he had just done, scouring that wheat field for the rattler’s head, depending on his eyes alone to find it.”

“I heard a story like that when I was a kid,” Neilson said. “Man was changing a flat tire a few miles out of whatever town he lived in—this was back in the days of inner tubes rather than steel-belted radials. He wanted to be sure that whatever had punctured the tube wasn’t still embedded in the tire, so he was feeling around on the inside of the tire for anything sharp.

“He found it. Pulled his hand right out of there and saw that what he thought must have been a long, sharp thorn had sliced into the meat of his thumb. He didn’t think much of it. He finished putting the spare on the car, stowed the flat in the trunk, and headed on home.

“Halfway there, just as he got to the edge of town, he started feeling distinctly un-good, dizzy and sick to his stomach. Luckily for him, he was only a few blocks from his doctor’s office. The doc took a look at his thumb, listened to his story, and called the state agent to request an immediate and emergency shipment of anti-venin.

“Man nearly died. Just because of a flat tire.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I had the feeling that, while Victoria’s story might have been intended for all of us as an elliptical explanation for why she had been so adamant about being careful in moving the bales, Tom Neilson had told his story to me. I was sure his men had heard it before, and from the way Victoria was nodding, I was just as sure that she had heard it, also. Even Carver looked anything but surprised.

I was the only outsider.

In an odd way, I felt that through Tom’s story, I had become a little bit less of an outsider and more of what might someday become a local.

“So this is what you wanted us to find, Miz Sears,” Deputy Wroten said.

“Yes. I had to be certain that it was here before I told you. And I had to be certain as well that no one touched the bales until we had a chance to examine them. The snake may be dead—I think that twitch was more a reflex than a living movement—but it could still have been deadly.”

“And if I had stacked it with the other bales and then broken it apart for the stock someday soon...,” Neilson said.

“It’s possible it might have killed one of your cows as well. Or worse. The snake is dead, but the poison is not.”

Neilson removed his hat and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “That was quite a story, ma’am.”

“And one my granddad would be pleased to know that I never forgot. That was why, as soon as I saw poor Eric Johansson’s body and heard Carver’s explanation of what had happened yesterday, I began to wonder if perhaps snake-bite rather than the consequences of a savage beating might have been what killed him.”

“But...,” I began.

“There’ll be plenty of time for questions later, ma’am,” Wroten said, somehow just avoiding sounding brusque. “Right now, I’ve got to get this bale and its...uh...contents back to town. Doc Anderson will want to see it when he gets home. All right with you if we leave it where it is for now, Tom? Can one of your boys drive it on into town. I’ll radio ahead and let the boys at the station know it’s coming and what they should do with it. And how very carefully they should handle it.”

“I’ll drive it on in myself,” Neilson said.

“And maybe the rest of the men could check out the field. It would be helpful if we could find the remains of the snake. It must have been caught up in the blades of the combine and cut into pieces. I’d be grateful for as many of those pieces as you might be able to locate.”

The men nodded. They could do that.

“Then perhaps we should get going as well,” Victoria said, to Carver and me as well as to Wroten. “I think that we still have several very important stops to make, and we might as well get on with it.”