Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

The people in the church looked like strangers. Some or most I’m sure I’d met before, but I wasn’t seeing faces, just the rock-hard hearts. All of them thinking Mom brought this on herself, and was getting the last ride she deserved in that cheap white casket. 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. I watched them do it. If that’s all the better they could do for Mom, they were nothing at all to me. What I had felt at the Peggot house with the too-quiet cousins wasn’t wrong: I was a strange new being, turned overnight. Creaky liked to call us orphan boys, and I always felt proud inside for not actually being one. So that was me doing the same, building the wall with me still on the lucky side. Now I’d gone over to the side of pitiful, and you never saw a kid so wrecked. At the start of the service they did that song about Amazing God, and I felt exactly the opposite: I once could see but now I’m blind, was found but now I’m lost. The preacher and his sermon, the sin and the flesh, all that I won’t go into. I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about my little brother being in that casket with her. That part hadn’t dawned on me until I’d gone up to view her with Mrs. Peggot. She patted Mom on her dead hand and said, “Poor little Mama, you tried your best,” and that’s where it hit me: my brother was in that casket. I was ...