time that the vista ahead broadened and flattened to reveal a long, fairly narrow valley between two stretches of mountains. It was perhaps ten miles across before the further range began again, first with a few small foothills—brown and sere in the late summer heat—then more abruptly with granite walls approaching the vertical and stands of evergreens clutching for life in the thin, scattered patches of soil.
In between lay acres of fertile farm land, sectioned here and there by graveled roads that gave access to a few distant homesteads, usually a house, a barn, and a few scattered outbuildings.
We passed one or two such places and, since the road was becoming both more level and more easily passable, I had begun to speed up a bit—nothing hair-raising, mind you, but substantially more than, say, what one would expect of a Sunday afternoon sightseeing jaunt.
Moving for nearly the first time since she sat down in the car, Victoria suddenly rested one hand on my arm and said, “I think you’d better slow down, Lynn dear.”
“I’m not really speeding...,” I started to say but she tightened her grip on my arm with one hand and pointed toward the road ahead with the other.
“I really think you should slow down. You wouldn’t want to hit that.”
I stared ahead. And saw nothing, except a long, thin twig straddling the middle of the road.
A four-foot-long twig...that abruptly moved.
I must have nearly screamed—a combination of taut nerves because of the as-yet unnamed emergency that was so serious that Victoria didn’t even want to speak about it, and the sudden movement ahead as the twig raised its narrow, glistening head toward us and began to coil the rest of its long, lithe body.
“It’s nothing to worry about, dear. Just slow down and give it a chance to save face and get away. Remember, it’s more frightened of us than we are of it.”
Yeah, right.
I slowed.
Almost as soon as the car began to lose forward momentum, the twig—that is, the snake uncoiled and, moving in sinuous curves that held a curiously off-putting beauty and grace, slipped over the rough ruts and disappeared into a thick bank of white-flowered vegetation in the borrow-pit.
I knew those plants.
Queen Anne’s Lace.
After Victoria’s and my earlier experiences, I recognized the good Queen, and I tendered Her Majesty a good deal more respect and attention because of that. She and her dastardly cousin, Devil’s Plague—more familiarly known in the Fox Creek area as Western Water Hemlock, a fatally poisonous plant.
But that, as they always say in the books, is another story.1
Without realizing it, I had been holding my breath the whole time, until the smooth tip of the snake’s tail finally disappeared into the shadows. I let out the pent-up air with a distinct whoosh and turned to face Victoria.
“That wasn’t a rattlesnake, was it? I didn’t see any rattles or anything.”
She laughed again, the same water-over-stones light rippling laugh that still held a hint of something shadowy.
“That, my dear, was merely a kingsnake. Poor fellow was probably just resting after a long night hunting, and our noise startled it. By now it’s probably halfway home for a long day’s sleep, or maybe scouting out in the marshy areas for a final bit of a snack.”
“Poisonous?”
“Not at all. In fact, most of the boys around here, and probably more girls than would care to admit to it, have had a baby kingsnake as a pet at one time or another. For insects and worms and birds’ eggs—when they are lucky enough to find any—they are lethal. For us humongous humans, absolutely harmless.”
I couldn’t help it. In spite of the growing sense of something being wrong somewhere, I laughed this time.
Laughed and shook my head.
“I think, Victoria, that I’ve had just about enough of your royalty up here in the mountains.”
She looked momentarily puzzled.
“Kingsnakes scaring me half to death. And Queen-weeds trying to poison people.”
“Queen...? Oh, yes. Right.” She smiled to let me know she caught the joke. But it was a thin smile.
We were passing the final few patches of open field before entering Fox Creek proper. We clattered over an ancient iron bridge that spanned Fox Creek—unlike so many places back home, especially housing developments with pretentions to grandeur, up here, if something was called “Creek” you could pretty well bet that there would be a creek somewhere nearby.
The water was lower than it had been in early June but still higher than would be considered normal for this time of year, I was told by the folks who had spent their lives here. Summer heat coupled with the final spate of irrigation before harvests had siphoned off some of the earlier flow. Rocks showed in the middle of the channel, mossy and green a few weeks ago but now looking as if they had been thatched with ragged, clotted straw.
In a truly dry year, the locals assured me, Fox Creek could look like nothing more or less than a barely connected series of mudholes. When that happened, it was anything but a glamor spot.
When we hit the paved road on the other side of the bridge, we officially entered the town of Fox Creek.
It’s a small place, really, especially to anyone used to the ‘big city’ as I was, but I was surprised how long it took us to pass through four of its five intersections. Luckily, the lights were green. As far as I could see, there was no other traffic.
At the city limits, the state road turns into Main Street and continues under that name to the far side of the town, then it resumes its original moniker.
We didn’t get that far.
“Turn here,” Victoria instructed as we approached the fifth stop light. In “town talk,” that would be Avenue C, but again, once we passed the edge of town, it would continue as County Road 5A.
“Ellises live along here, about three miles farther on.”
We drove in silence. The county road was in better condition than the gravel track leading up to Victoria’s house, so there were fewer rattles and bumps. We didn’t see any more snakes, but I noticed a covey of redwing blackbirds perched on the cattails that grow in wild profusion between the roadbed and the nearest fields. The ground here would be swampy, damp even in August.
Once a quail darted into the middle of the road, hesitated for an instant when it realized we were there, then, instead of dashing ahead and getting across in plenty of time for us to miss it, it suddenly decided to go back the way it had come. It spun around so fast—its low-slung, plump body on those ridiculously frail-looking stick legs—that it nearly toppled over.
My front tires missed it by no more than a yard.
Foolish bird.
Victoria seemed not to have noticed the moment of comic by-play. Her hand was gripping the flap on her handbag again, and she was staring out the passenger window as if there were something of life-or-death seriousness happening in the passing fields.
“It’s not much further,” Victoria said a few moments later. She pointed with one hand, finally releasing her grasp on her handbag. “Turn in at the first place. Down there.”
Up ahead I could see two houses—traditional clapboard farmhouses, two stories high, with deeply set wrap-around porches, huge maples shading the front yards and gravel driveways leading to side doors. The two houses were perhaps two hundred yards apart. They might belong to different families—and from what little I could glean from Victoria’s few remarks, they did—but they were alike as twins.
Form follows function, probably. Both were at least half a century old, perhaps older.