A Story

Sometimes when something extraordinary happens in a family, it becomes a story to be told. Like the one about a child who turns over a rock in the mountains and finds, underneath, a rattlesnake. How she lifted it by the tail and watched it uncoil. When the father told the story, he’d say he saved her life with his quick thinking, coaxing her to bring it here sweetheart, bring it here my love, let me see. The mother would show how she’d covered her mouth with both hands to hold in a scream. In the telling they often talked over each other, the mother and father, especially at the part where he used a stick hidden behind his back to whack the snake from her hand when she got close. How he crushed its head with a rock, severed its rattle with his hunting knife and put it in his pocket. Probably a juvenile, he’d say of the snake, who like his child didn’t yet know fear or it would have bitten her. Eventually the parents died and years passed. She never told anyone the story, but she did once write about it in a poem. In her poem there was no snake, no stick, no rock, no knife, no spanking. There was only her father’s voice calling her to him, the way wind sometimes carries a sound over mountains and across miles of prairie.