Crossroads and Unholy Water

Niska and the Snake

 Niska and the Snake . . . honey you are a dead duck! You can do all the glou glou glou under water you want and look at me with those yellow bald beady eyes of yours, I am not going to take my foot off that brick crushing your back, I am keeping it until you choke. I have been watching your slinky slithering around my pond for a while. My goldfish are not up for grabs and at three-for-ten-dollars I paid I wasn’t buying you lunch with those ritzy tadpoles of mine you have been keeping an eye on while they’ve been doing their job keeping an eye on the bottom of the pond to clean it. This here is my piece of tropical dreamland—my white hyacinths, my purple peckerels, my water lilies and my yellow irises. Babe, I’m gonna weed you out of my grass! Your name may be Water Moccasin and you think this water’s for your roaming but my name ain’t Eve. I know your kind! All Cottonmouth that you may be, you’re not gonna sweet-talk me or frighten me out of this Paradise. It’s happened to me, once before, and I was just a child. Haïti! That really was the Garden of Eden for me, until same kind of snake you look like—soft talk, loves the poor, justice, democracy, great promises and all—skinned, choked, beheaded all the goldfish he could catch, terrorized all the tadpoles left behind. That cottonmouth snake could have made a difference, but like all the others after him,  he just went for the best catch, ate his fill, fat in the sun. Ain’t life sweet after all! Well, I am not about to forget the way my brothers and I left home and childhood behind: “wake up . . . Mother? . . . hush. . . . put this on . . . why? . . . hush! . . . cover your face . . . hold this tight . . . get to the car, hurry! . . . where are we going? . . . keep your heads down . . . we’re there, get out now . . . where are we? . . . quiet! . . . quick . . . go up the plane . . . why? . . . move! They are looking for us, same who killed your father . . . why? . . . to kill us . . . are we coming back someday? . . . no . . . never? . . . no. Good-bye all, I’ll be gone when you wake . . . family . . . cousins . . . all sleeping . . . don’t know we are no longer there. Good-bye Granmanman and Grandpère! Good-bye Garden and Calabash tree! . . .” Ha! Grandmother in the pool looked like a big mother frog sitting on a navy blue lily pad, with the skirt of her bathing suit floating around her waist and belly. Not a wild swimmer— absentmindedly kicking her short legs back, her wide breasts looking like eyes scouting for her kiddies. All that’s now . . . gone! So you see, snake? What’s happening to you, I learnt from your kind. It’s been a long trip for me until I meet you here—Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, France, Texas, Alabama— but I am not running any more! My own kids are grown and I’m going to be a Grandma. This Florida pond is mine! I am now a Southern gal in a hell of a mood, who thinks you are taking your sweet, long time to croak, my husband is gonna be home soon, I’ve got to fix his dinner and he won’t find me here, a foot on-a-brickon -your-back, a foot on the shore, so I am picking up another brick . . . here . . . and this stick in my left hand I slip under your sorry belly . . . right here . . .  I just loosen my foot, a bit . . . that’s right . . . and you just wiggle a little bit from under the brick on your back, and that other one in my right hand is fixing to land on you just as you try running away in the grass— and I already told ya I’m gonna weed ya out of my grass— you’re doing great . . . OK . . . try to wiggle out a little . . . more . . . and my stick is going to flip . . . you out onto the grass . . . look at me all you want . . . I am still going to do it. . . . there we go . . . FLIP! . . .YES! . . . run, run, run . . . WHAM! GOTCHA. ...