Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver

Saying that word back at people proves they can’t ever be us, or get us, and we are untouchable by their shit. The world is not at all short on this type of thing, it turns out. All down the years, words have been flung like pieces of shit, only to get stuck on a truck bumper with up-yours pride. Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.

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.

After a while his arm stretches out on the seat and it’s him running his thumb over the back of her neck. He’s putting moves on this chick, thinking of pussy while driving me to see my mom get put in the ground. 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.

What’s an oxy, I’d asked. That November it was still a shiny new thing. OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself. For every football player with some of this or that torn up, and the whole world riding on his getting back in the game. This was our deliverance. The tree was shaken and yes, we did eat of the apple.

I had myself a moment there, against a poplar trunk, in the woods where once on a time I was happy. Fat trees with fat green leaves, fat boomer squirrels full up with the fat of the land. July being God’s month. And the end of the road for my dad. I’d spent so many Fourths mad at Mom for being a killjoy, without thinking of the man that gave me life, signing off from his. Never taking a minute to count up all I’d seen, that he never got to see. Yes, life sucks, hungry nights and hurtful people, but compared to buried in a box, floating in a universe of nothing and never? I wouldn’t trade.

Nobody rides you like you ride yourself, they say. But we get more than our share of help. These people and vegetarians and so forth that are all about being fair to the races and the gays, I am down with that. I agree. But would it cross any mind to be fair to us? No, it would not. How do I know? TV. The comedy channel is so funny it can make you want to go unlock the gun cabinet and kill yourself. Do they really think that along with being brainless and having sex with animals, we don’t even have cable? There’s this thing that happens, let’s say at school where a bunch of guys are in the bathroom, at the urinal, laughing about some dork that made an anus of himself in gym. You’re all basically nice guys, right? You know right from wrong, and would not in a million years be brutal to the poor guy’s face. And then it happens: the dork was in the shitter. He comes out of the stall with this look. He heard everything. And you realize you’re not really that nice of a guy. This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.

In ours, you live on a tether: to family, parents if you’re lucky, older people raising you if less so, that you yourself will end up looking after by and by. Odds are about a hundred to one, you are not destined for greatness. Your people will appreciate you all the same. On the other hand, if you poundcake someone or push them too far in the shame or shock direction, you will run into their people at Hardee’s or the Dollar General parking lot, in all probability within the day. There will be aftermaths. Same goes for raising your head too high on your neck, the tall weed gets cut. So. You wind up meeting in the middle on this follow-your-heart thing, at a place everybody can live with. Show me that universe on TV or the movies. Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell. It’s a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.

But Dori was eighteen, and that’s an adult, whether you know how to work the range or not. People come at it from any number of angles. Some have buried both parents, some have their own kids. Some few probably get to that age without ever having worked any job or gone a day hungry or seen anybody die. Nobody gives you a test, is the thing. The day comes, they hand you a new rule book. Dori was living in her own house with a plastic fucking horse on the roof and her name on the deed, and I could live there too if I wanted. Miss Betsy was all gloom and doom about me going over the adulthood cliff with nobody’s support checks to save me now. Like that was so scary. Ain’t no hill for a climber, I said. I’ve been doing this all my life.

“You’re sweet to worry about Lewis and me, but we’ve been through this so many times. There will always be some people around here that think our marriage is their business.” She said there used to be laws against the Black and white type of marriage, up till the 1960s. So, before any of us were born including her and Mr. Armstrong, but attitudes hang on. “Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.” I wondered if the laws pertained to my people making their Melungeon babies way back when, or if we were too far backwoods for the higher-ups to give a shit. Age-old story, who gets to look down on who, for what reason.

It was April, not quite a year after Vester, and it happened the way I knew it would. I came home and found her. Early evening, not yet dark. Damn April to hell, I could be done with that one. November also. Birthdays, Christmas, dogwoods and redbuds, even football season. Live long enough, and all things you ever loved can turn around to scorch you blind. The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.

What matters in a story is the heart of its hero. With no thought for his own safety, Hammer dived in to save the young man that fell from the cliff. True. Always and forever true. I couldn’t change that if I wanted to, and oh I did. We all did. My story left us wishing Hammer had been born with a selfish heart to keep him alive. Which made us remorseful and in awe of his goodness. That was the comfort I could give the Peggots.

The main one I could understand was that money-earning ones pay taxes. Whereas you can’t collect shit on what people grow and eat on the spot, or the work they swap with their neighbors. That’s like a percent of blood from a turnip. So, the ones in charge started cooking it into everybody’s brains to look down on the land people, saying we are an earlier stage of human, like junior varsity or cavemen. Weird-shaped heads. Tommy was watching TV these days, and seeing finally how this shit is everywhere you look. Dissing the country bumpkins, trying to bring us up to par, the long-termed war of trying to shame the land people into joining America. Meaning their version, city. TV being the slam book of all times, maybe everybody in the city was just going along with it, not really noticing the rudeness factors. Possibly to the extent of not getting why we are so fucking mad out here. It took a lot of emails of Tommy telling me how far back it went, this offensive to wedge people off their own holy ground and turn them into wage labor. Before the redneck miner wars, the coal land grabs, the timber land grabs. Whiskey Rebellion: an actual war. George Washington marched the US Army on our people for refusing to pay tax on corn liquor. Which they weren’t even selling for money, mainly just making for neighborly entertainment. How do you get tax money out of moonshine? Answer: You and what army. It goes a ways to explaining people’s feelings about taxes and guns.