The Snake Stick

The Snake Stick Joseph Abner Elsie Combs kicked at Rex in front of the stove, just enough to move him. He had started out in the corner of the room on an old baby quilt she had been given by some aunt or other thirty-four years before, but as the night had worn on and the banked fire had lost more and more of its heat, he had come closer and closer to the stove, 'til by the time she got up to build the fire back he was nuzzling the ashes at the base of the cold iron legs. "Time old dogs 'us dead, ain't you glad you's a pup?" she asked him as she kicked him again. He grunted a little and got up. She kneeled down on the warm spot of linoleum where he had lain and twisted the screws of the stove vents open, all but the top one which had frozen past her meagre strength years before . She would have Howard fix it if she ever thought about it when he was around, but she hadn't so far. Rex came and leaned his head on her shoulder as she started the fire with a piece of cornflakes box and some tar paper. The oak was green, and wet with the little rain that had come that year so far, and it would need the extra heat of the burning shingle to catch. 48 "Best kindling in the world, and people puts it on top of their houses." She shook her head at the dog. She had a tin roof herself. "Gummy Sparks used to sell kindling out here thirty year ago," she told the dog, "before he got that blood clot and they had to take his leg off." The fire was on the way to going now, and she moved back to the rocking chair to watch it. Rex moved with her, going back to his blanket in the corner. She had called him a pup, and he had been one when she got him ten years before. His muzzle showed white now, and a spit-grey cataract covered one mournful beagle eye. "Used to cut my own kindling," she told him. She did not tell him how she had stopped cutting it, when a missed blow of the hatchet had shaved a good two-inch strip of flesh from her left thumb. She had tied it up in a dishrag and Howard had taken her to the clinic to get it sewed up. It had cost him forty dollars. She used the shingles now; she had Elenty of them from the ruin of the unkhouse in back. After the fire had got hold, and she damped it enough to slow the burning, she got up to put the coffeepot on. She had sat back down and the pot was close to bubbling when she remembered she was out of coffee. Remembering this, and remembering the why of it, made her remember something else, and she got up again to turn on the radio. The ticket was in the Bible, like always , but she didn't get it out; she knew the number by heart: her Clem's birthday . She waited through the news and the weather and the little bit of commercials for the reading of it. It was April, and Sunday, and the commercials were mostly for funeral homes and cough syrup. One was for tires. The number was not even close. Elsie felt the souring depression that had followed the anticipation every Sunday for the last two years. Except for those Sundays when the money had not been there, or the weather had been too bad for walking. On those days she had listened in close dread, her heart pausing as the man come on with the number, followed by a loosening of relief in her chest when it was not her own. She had nightmares sometimes, and woke in cold sweat, thinking it had been the number and she had not been able to buy a ticket, or that the number had come, and that she had lost the ticket or burned it by accident for...