What?
Snakes. I’m out. That’n there was the biggest. Biggest anybody ever seen or heard tell of either.
I wouldn’t dispute it, Holme said.
He was eight foot seven inches and had seventeen rattles. Big in the middle to where ye couldn’t get your hands around him. Come back here.
They made their way through a maze of crates, piles of rags and paper, a stack of warped and mildewed lumber. Standing in the corner of the room was a punt gun some seven feet long which the old man reached and handed out to him. Holme took it and looked it over. It was crudely stocked with some porous swamp wood and encrusted with a yellow corrosion that looked and smelled of sulphur.
What ye done was to lay it acrost the front end of your skiff and drift down on em, the old man said. You’d pile it up with grass and float down and when ye got to about forty yards out touch her off into the thickest of em. See here. He took the gun from Holme and turned it. On the underside was an eyebolt brazed to the barrel. Ye had ye a landyard here, he said. To take up the kick. He cocked the huge serpentine hammer and let it fall. It made a dull wooden sound. She’s a little rusty but she’ll fire yet. You can charge her as heavy as you’ve got stomach for it. I’ve killed as high as a dozen ducks with one lick countin cripples I run down. They bought fifty cents apiece in them days and that was good money. I’d be a rich man today if I’d not blowed it in on whores and whiskey.
He set the gun back in the corner. Holme looked about him vaguely. On a shelf some dusty jars filled with what looked like the segmented husks of larvae.
You don’t pick ary guitar or banjer do ye?
No, Holme said.
If’n ye did I’d give ye one of them there rattles to put in it.
Rattles.
Them snakes rattles yander. Folks that picks guitar or banjer are all the time puttin em in their guitar or banjer. You say you don’t play none?
I ain’t never tried my hand at it.
Some folks has a sleight for music and some ain’t. My granddaddy they claimed could play a fiddle and he never seen one.
None of us never took it up, Holme said.
I’d show ye snakes but I ain’t got nary just now. Old big’n yander’s the one got me started. Feller offered to give me ten dollars for the hide and I told him I’d try and get him one like it but I didn’t want to sell that’n. So then he ast me could I get him one live and I thought about that a little and I told him yes anyways. So he says he’ll take all I can get at a dollar a foot and if I come up on anothern the size of old big’n yander he’ll give double for it. But I ain’t never seen the like of him again. Might if I live long enough. I use a wiresnare on a pole to hunt my snakes with. It ain’t good now. Spring and fall is best times. Spring ye can smoke em out and fall they lay around to where ye can pick em up with your hands pret-near. I hunt them moccasins too when I can see one but they don’t pay as good and they more trouble. The old man spat into the barren fireplace and wiped his chin and looked about him with a kind of demented enthusiasm.
Well, Holme said, I thank ye for the water and all …
Shoo, come out on the porch and set a while. Ye ain’t set a-tall.
Well just for a minute.
They went onto the porch and the old man took his rocker and pointed out a chair to Holme. Holme sat and folded his hands in his lap and the old man began to rock vigorously in the rocker, one loose leg sucking in and out of its hole with a dull pumping sound.
You know snakes is supposed to be bad luck, he said, but they must have some good in em on account of them old geechee snake doctors uses em all the time for medicines. Unless ye was to say that kind of doctorin was the devil’s work. But the devil don’t do doctorin does he? That’s where a preacher cain’t answer ye. Cause even a preacher won’t say they cain’t help nor cure ye. I’ve knowed em to slip off in the swamp theirselves for a little fixin of somethin another when they wasn’t nothin else and them poorly. Ain’t you?
I reckon, Holme said.
Sure, the old man said. Even a snake ain’t all bad. They’s put here for some purpose. I believe they’s purpose to everthing. Don’t you believe thataway?
The old man had leaned forward in his rocker and was watching Holme with an intent look, his thumb and forefinger in his beard routing the small life it harbored.
I don’t know, Holme said. I ain’t never much studied it.
No. Well. I ain’t much neither but that’s the way I believe. The more I study a thing the more I get it backards. Study long and ye study wrong. That’s what a old rifleshooter told me oncet beat me out of half a beef in a rifleshoot. I know things I ain’t never studied. I know things I ain’t never even thought of.