Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

I probably asked a dozen people if they knew any Betsy Woodall. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t. In Lee County if you were looking for some person by name, the odds are you’d hit a cousin or an ex by the third try. Not so in Murder Valley. Some gave me the brush-off, some jerked me around. A guy at the diner ran me off, thinking I was begging. There was a town with some stores still alive and lots more dead, boarded up. I don’t think they got a lot of strangers through there. But I had no steam to go farther, so I kept asking. Even if treated like a pest. “I got a wood-awl in my toolbox,” one joker told me. Another one said sure, he knew the lady. Last seen riding a broom. This was at the feed store and hardware that wasn’t open because of Sunday, but had quite a few guys hanging around the loading dock. The one that made the riding-a-broom crack was standing in the back of a pickup pitching hay bales into the back of another, with an audience of guys in overalls chewing their cuds. They all laughed. One of them piped up. “I’d say a boy that size, she’d put him on a spit and roast him for his brisket.” I was already walking away, but that made me turn around. It was like they were discussing a lady they knew, even if she was nobody you’d want to run into. “Are you saying she’s real? Like, a human person?” They looked at each other, then me. Leery. A whole lot of pigeons were lined up on the wire overhead, all facing my way, and it felt like they were staring too. The guy up i...