Cainbrake

The fierceness of Doll's barking was a sure sign something was wrong. 

"Go see what's the matter out there," Stella quipped, staring out the kitchen window.

Dan exited the kitchen door, went through the screened-in patio, and into the back yard where Doll, the Cohens two year old miniature Schnauzer was in a corner barking with a ferocity and rage they had never seen or heard. Suddenly Dan turned and ran back into the house. 

"What's wrong?" Stella quizzed as Dan trotted to the gun case and pulled out a scoped .22 rifle.

"Snake."

"Oh God!"

They both ran out the back.

"He's big. Try to get her so I can shoot him. Be careful and grab her from the back or you might get bit."

The huge rattlesnake was coiled and ready to strike in a corner of the chain link fence. Doll was hysterical, jumping in nipping at the reptile and in grave danger of being struck, envenomated. 

Stella managed to nab Doll by the back legs and drag her away then hold her down. Dan raised the Remington, took careful aim through the scope, and fired a single bullet into the viper. The snake instantly went into a roll, tossing, coiling, but his death sure. 

"Take her inside," Dan barked. "That snake can still kill her." 

Dan went to the storage room and brought back a long-handled hoe which he used to drag the monster away from the fence. He then saw his bullet had hit just below the head, severing the spinal cord but not full separating the head from the rest of the beast.

Stella came back out while Dan went to the storage room again, this time to retrieve a kaiser blade to finish the job of removing the head.

"Is that a diamondback?" Stella asked.

"We don't have diamondbacks around here. That's a canebrake. But I swear, he's as big as a large diamondback. I'm gunna measure him."

Dan made his third trip to the storage room, this time to fetch a tape measure. He stretched the snake out on the lush green grass of their back yard and measured 6'1'' minus the head.

"Dang. That has to be a state record or something. Canebrakes usually top out at around four feet. I've heard of a five-footer but never seen one that big."

Dan took a few pictures with his camera then hoisted the huge creature with the hoe handle and carried him through the back gate and into the woods. He took him deep into the woods and tossed him into a gully. But he kept the head. He scooped the head into a galvanized bucket which he hung high on a nail in the storage room.

They had built their house ten years ago, their dream home located on three country acres of Carroll County Dan had inherited from his father. With his contractor business booming, they had paid for the house in five years and had purchased an adjoining 80 acres of woods and gullies behind them. When they enclosed the back yard with a chain link fence, Dan had the gate put in so he could walk right out of his back yard and into his little hunting paradise. There he shot squirrels, ambushed deer, and sometimes just sat under a large hickory tree and rested, listening to the sounds of the woods. When their daughter Delilah came along, the only thing that could make things better, in Dan's mind at least, was a son. They were working on that.

After their Saturday fright, Dan forgot about the snake head until Tuesday when he came home from work. He had locked the storage room door for safety's sake. A three year old can get into just about anything he had mused to himself. He unlocked the door and pulled down the bucket. It was empty!

What the heck? he thought. His brain whirled and his heart rate quickened while his eyes roamed the room. Then he jumped backwards striking a nail that he sometimes hung stuff on and cut his left arm. He had startled at the snake head on the floor not far from his foot. "How in God's name?" he querried out loud.

Regaining his composure, he scooped the head back into the bucked, still careful not to touch it. He used the blade of the same tool that had decapitated the creature three days earlier. This time he looked around and found a Styrofoam top from a minnow bucket to go over the galvanized bucket and pressed the styrofoam down tight into the bucket so there was no way the head could fall out.

Things got weird the next day. He and his foundation crew were busy trying to get a slab poured. It was fall, the rains would start soon, and he had to make money while the making was good. As usual, he received texts from Stella throughout the morning, but one stopped him in his tracks. Sweetie, their little house cat was swollen, sick."She needs to go to the vet!" Stella texted with an urgency Dan could feel through the phone. He decided he could be off site a while so he drove home just in time to hear Stella shriek when he stepped out of his truck. He rushed inside to find her and Delilah hysterically bawling. Sweetie was dead.

Snake bit most likely was Dan's estimation. He took her lifeless form and held her close, crying silently but forcefully. Unlike many men, he loved cats in general and this one in particular. Her death was devastating and he determined then and there to declare total war on all venomous reptiles. 

He walked outside in a daze trying to think where he might bury her. Then he saw it! In the flower bed behind the storage room was the head!  

"No way!" he yelled out loud.

Stella, having followed him out asked, "What?"

"That head."

"What head?"

"That one," he pointed to the rattlesnake head he had chopped off six days before. It still looked just like it looked then, like it had happened only minutes ago.

"Where did that come  from?"

"I had it in a bucket in the storage room."

"You kept that thing?" she shouted. "How did it get out here?"

"I don't know."

"You're the reason Sweetie is dead," Stella yelled in a rage.

Those words cut deep into Dan's heart like a knife plunging into a deer carcass. "We don't know that," Dan snapped back.

"Get rid of that thing and get rid of it now. Now. Before it kills something else." Her eyes registered her disgust and Dan knew her words were more than an outburst of grief. She blamed him truly. 

Dan scooped up the head with a shovel for the third time but this time carried it through the back gate. He walked deep into the woods and tossed it into the same gully he had tossed the body into. Then he went back and buried their little fur baby and placed some bricks over her grave so nothing would dig her up. 

After Sweetie died, a chill fell over Dan and Stella's marriage. She spoke little and he retreated into his work. Being blamed for the death of a beloved pet had hit him hard. He was sure he didn't deserve the blame but what else was new? She always blamed him for everything, even for their lack of a son.

During the following week, word started getting around that two neighbors lost dogs to snakebites. The Jones lost a full grown German Shepherd and the Shacklebees lost a poodle. When Stella brought it up, she gave Dan that look that said it all.

"It's not my fault!" he yelled.

"Don't raise your voice to me," she yelled back and left the room in a huff.

Everybody in the area was on edge. Dan had taken to carrying a .410 shotgun with him when he let Doll out to use the bathroom. He did this for a week until one morning he heard her yelp. He was horrified to see a rattlesnake head stuck to her back leg. 

It can't be, he thought. But it was. He pulled to head off with the muzzle of the shotgun then blasted the head with three shots at close range. Nothing was left but scattered blood and bits of snake skin. 

When Stella came out at the shooting, Doll was already on the ground suffering, swelling, yelping. She died within minutes.

"That dang snake head!?" she screamed at him.

"It could not have been the same one. It could not have been."

She wailed with a gut wrenching scream that itself was frightening and dropped to her knees. When Dan tried to comfort her, she pushed his hand away.

"Don't touch me you killer!"

"I didn't do it! I am not the only one who cuts the head off a dead snake."

But she would hear none of it. He let the snake head kill their cat, their dog, and she knew what was coming next. He would kill one of them.

Two weeks went by with no more problems. Although he and Stella rarely spoke, he was beginning to believe that bad stretch of crazy snake stuff was over. Then he stepped out the back door one morning and felt a pain in his foot. Yeah, he looked down and saw the snake head with its fangs sunk into his flesh.

He pried the head off with a shovel, smashed it, then ran inside. "Take me to the hospital," he said in a panicked voice. Stella didn't even ask why, but followed him to the car and drove furiously to Greenwood Leflore Hospital.

There was confusion in the emergency room. The doctors wanted a body, the actual snake so they could give the right antivenom. Even though both Dan and Stella told them it was a canebrake rattler, they delayed until Dan became very ill. Then they placed in ICU and began administering antivenom. His foot and leg swelled to the point that they no longer looked human. 

When Stella made the mistake of telling the doctors about the head that never died, the doctors and nurses all grew suspicious and stopped administering antivenom. Dan's condition, which was already critical, then began to deteriorate even further. His foot and leg swelled so large blood flow to his lower limb stopped. His kidneys failed even though the doctors tried valiantly to flush them with IVs. Despite pain medication, his suffering was immense, his nausea constant, and his complications multiplied. He fought, fought for his life, fought valiantly, but after three days he succumbed. At 6:36 am, Dr. Lazarus pronounced him dead.

Stella stood still and gazed at the wall. She had questions to answer. Where did she want the body taken? Did she have someone to see after her? Did she want a visit from a pastor? 

She answered nothing but stumbled from the hospital and strolled into the parking lot. Finding her car, she drove home without tears. Once there, she took a gallon of gasoline, poured it around in the house, on the couch against a wall, on the floor. From the open back door, she tossed a lit match inside and then watched from the road as the house went up in flames. She was standing there with a blank expression on her face when the fire department arrived. Jay Maxie, the head of the Gravel Hill Volunteer Fire Department tried in vain to talk to her. She was still there staring at the smoldering ashes when the firemen drove away.