“His hand is swole up big as my head. He said it was a copperhead.”
“Get in.”
Lee got in, laying the boy across his legs. He removed the boy’s tightfitting cap and wiped his hair out of his eyes, used the cap to wipe the sweat from his face. He laid the bitten hand across the boy’s chest. The hand was black and very huge. It looked as if if it were tapped lightly it might explode. Lee rolled up the boy’s sleeves. There were runs of red and blue lines going up his snakebit arm.
“See how it’s done him,” Lee said.
Marilyn glanced at the boy’s arm and hand, started onto the road.
“Thought I could get him to Camp Rupture, to a doctor, he’d have a chance,” Lee said.
“He’s got a better chance we go see Aunt Cary. She’s a midwife, but she knows about snakebites and all manner of things a doctor don’t. Guess she’s a kind of a doctor herself.”
“Hope you’re right.”
“She’s closer.”
“Camp Rapture ain’t as close as I remember it.”
“When do you remember it? How long ago?”
He told her.
“There used to be a straighter road to it,” she said, “but it kept getting washed out from the creek, so they reworked it. This one winds a mite, but it don’t get flooded as much.”
“You sure about this Aunt Cary?”
“Done a lot of people good,” Marilyn said. “Seen her do all manner of things. Seen her come into Camp Rapture once and deliver a baby by cutting the mother’s belly open. Baby lived, and so did the mother. Aunt Cary sewed her up with fishing line and she got all right. Something like that, or something like this, I trust her more than a doctor. Besides, she’s closer, and this boy needs whatever he’s gonna get right now.”
They took a turn off of the main road, down a narrow trail. The truck bumped and thumped along, the junk in the bed clattered. Lee looked over his shoulder through the back window. Saw posthole diggers and a shovel and axe leaping about back there.
He wished they would bounce out. The noise was giving him a headache.
At first Marilyn drove fast, but the trail was too bad for that kind of driving, so she slowed.
“He’s breathing funny,” Lee said.
“Snakebite affects the lungs,” Marilyn said. “All kinds of things, but the lungs is one thing. Get so you can’t breathe, then it pumps poisons to the heart.”
The woods grew denser. There were long vines hanging from dark twisty trees with thorns. They bounced along a path even more narrow than the one they had been on and pulled into a clearing where an old house set. The house was small and the porch sagged. The yard was littered with wagon parts, plows, a chopping block with an axe in it, and assorted chicken feathers.
Marilyn parked near the porch, got out, called to the house: “Aunt Cary. You in there? It’s Marilyn Jones. You in there? Got us an emergency.”
The door opened and Uncle Riley came out on the porch, followed by his son, Tommy.
“That’s her husband, Uncle Riley,” Marilyn said. “And that’s their son, Tommy.”
Lee noted that Uncle Riley looked younger than he was, hardly like an uncle. He was a big, powerful man with a shaved head. He was wearing too short pants and a too tight, stained white T-shirt. The boy was barefoot, wearing overalls. His hair was long and the kinks went up in the air like springs that had sprung.
“How are you, Miss Marilyn?” Uncle Riley said. “Can I help you?”
“We got a boy snakebit, Uncle Riley. Copperhead. He’s swole up good. We need Aunt Cary.”
“She out gathering some roots. Tommy, go find her, tell her get back here quick as she can.”
Tommy darted back into the house and out the back. They heard the back screen door slam as he went, snappy as a rifle shot.
“Let’s get him on in here,” Uncle Riley said.
Lee and Uncle Riley carried Goose into the one bedroom and laid him on the bed. Uncle Riley put a pillow under Goose’s head and looked at the hand.
Lee looked around. There were a number of shelves and on the shelves were jars and sacks, and in the jars he could see roots and what looked like dirt and some colorful powders and in one jar he saw several water moccasin heads floating in a liquid the color of urine. Some of the jars with snake heads had streaks of red in them like sticky runs of blood.
Uncle Riley bent over Goose, looked at the hand. “He was bit good.”
“Said it was a small snake,” Lee said.
“If it was a young’n, them’s the worst kind. They all hot with sap.”
The back door slammed, and a moment later a very pretty, slightly heavy woman with reddish skin and little black freckles on her cheeks entered the room. She had a red-and-black-checkered rag tied around her head. She didn’t pay any attention to Lee or Marilyn, but bent directly over the boy, looked at his hand, poked it with her finger.
“Tommy,” she said, “go in there and get me the little sharp knife. One I use on them pears. Bring it here with some of my medicine and a glass.”
Tommy left, came back momentarily with a glass, a pocketknife, and a jug.
Aunt Cary laid the glass and knife on the edge of the bed and used her fine white teeth to pull the cork from the jug. She poured a bit of what was in the jug into the glass.
“This here is some of Mr. Bull’s best,” she said.
Lee could smell that it was white lightning. Aunt Cary took a swig from the glass, poured a little more into the glass, set it on the floor and knelt down by it. She opened the pocketknife, dipped it into the booze and drank what was in the glass after she did. She sat on the side of the bed and took hold of the boy’s hand and poked the wound with the knife. She didn’t cut across or make slashes, just poked straight into the bite marks. Dark pus squirted out. She picked up the jug, splashed some of its contents onto the punctures.
“Get me my stone,” she said.
Tommy scrambled away, came back carrying a white knotty stone that filled his fist. Aunt Cary took it, pressed it against the wound.
Lee watched as the stone darkened.
“Is it sucking out the poison?” he said.
“It is.”
“That’s a rock?”
“I call it a milk stone. Tommy, go pull the milk jug up from the well.”
Tommy darted away. While he was gone, the stone became darker yet.
“I don’t know it’s really a stone,” she said, “but it sucks that poison out all right.”
Tommy came back with the damp milk jug. It had been hung down the well on a rope and the jug and the milk were cool. Aunt Cary poured the glass half full of milk. She set the glass on the floor, said, “Look at this.”
She dropped the stone in the milk and the milk turned dark as a thundercloud.
“Comes out best in milk. I done it in water some, but it don’t work as good. Seems to get sucked out by that milk.”
When the glass was so dark with poison and pus you couldn’t see the rock, Cary gave the glass to Tommy, said, “Pour that out and don’t get it on your hands. Bring it back to me. Mind you don’t pour it near the vegetable garden, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Once again, Tommy disappeared. He came back with the glass empty of milk and full of stone. The stone looked larger, like a sponge that had swollen, but now it was as white as in the beginning.
Aunt Cary poured white lightning into the glass, shook it gently, plucked out the stone and put
