Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

If you care, you’ll learn one thing from another.

Keeping secrets from young ears only plants seeds in between them,

But a thing grows teeth once it’s put into words.

But if a story has all the elements, it will be legend around here, where we love our neighbors so much we can’t stop talking about them.

Who knows what turned Romeo’s eyes her way, but Mariah felt like she’d won the lottery, and Romeo acted that way too: like she’d won the lottery.

This is the era of cars beginning to get the fancy circuitry in everything from power windows to brakes, just so they can lose their complete minds at the drop of a hat.

But the wicked have a different head for numbers than most. Any bad they do will end up on the side of never-mind. What’s done to them weighs double.

The n-word is preferred by those guys. Mr. Peg said other people made up the n-word, not Ice Cube. And other people made up hillbilly to use on us, for the purpose of being assholes. But they gave us a superpower on accident. Not Mr. Peg’s words, but that’s how I understood it. Saying that word back at people proves they can’t ever be us, or get us, and we are untouchable by their shit.

A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain. Children, choices. Ruin, that was the labor and materials we were given to work with. An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe. We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.

It’s fair to say I was halfway in love or some damn thing with Miss Barks. And the other half of me was like, Lady, you are the ass-burn of my life, and I wish me and you had been born on different planets. I know, guy life. Get used to it.

a person could get used to anything except hanging by the neck.

“Just smell that,” she said. “Fall time.” Plowed-under silage fields, smoke from people’s leaf burning, and something a little bit sweet, maybe apples that had rotted on the ground.

But here’s the thing, she told me, you don’t give up, sometimes you just have to take second choice.

The rules are made by soil and rain and slope. Leaving your family’s land would be like moving out of your own body. That land is alive, a body itself, with its own talents and, I guess you could say, addictions.

Grow it with pride and smoke it with pride, they said, giving out bumper stickers to that effect. I recall big stacks of them at school, free for the taking. Grow and smoke we did, while the price per pound went to hell, and a carton got such taxes on it, we were smoking away our grocery money. We drove around with “Proud Tobacco Farmer” stickers on our trucks till they peeled and faded along with our good health and dreams of greatness. If you’re standing on a small pile of shit, fighting for your one place to stand, God almighty how you fight.

I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.

A mean side to people comes out at such times, where their only concern is what did the misfortunate person do to put themselves in their sorry fix. They’re building a wall to keep out the bad luck.

It hit me pretty hard, how there’s no kind of sad in this world that will stop it turning. People will keep on wanting what they want, and you’re on your own.

But in a city, the rules do not apply. It’s like everybody is bored of all the normal things, out looking for the weirder option.

She had no clue how people can be living right on the edge of what’s doable. If you push too hard, you can barrel yourself over a damn cliff.