Snake Island
Copyright© 2026 by James Foster Reed
Chapter 1: Mud Season
The dog on the table was a sixty-pound shepherd mix named Boone, and he did not want to be there. Nora Kelleher had her forearm across his shoulders before he knew he wanted to move, her weight settled and easy, her mouth close to his ear.
“I know,” she said. “It’s a rotten deal all around.”
Boone had a torn dewclaw, ragged and half hanging, from throwing himself at a chain-link fence over some grievance with the neighbor’s cat. He shook under her arm the way big dogs do when they’ve decided to be brave about something and haven’t quite managed it. Nora kept her weight where it was and reached back with her free hand, and Deb put the clippers into it without being asked, because after six years Deb knew that Nora’s hand would be there and what it would want. That was most of veterinary medicine, in Nora’s experience. Knowing what the next thing was before anyone had to say it out loud.
She trimmed the nail back past the tear, packed it, wrapped it. Boone submitted to all of it with the mournful dignity of the falsely accused. His owner, Carol Landry, stood in the corner of the treatment room with her coat still zipped, watching the way people watch when they are working out arithmetic in their heads and don’t want you to see it.
“He’ll favor it a few days,” Nora said. “Keep the wrap dry, which in April means keep him out of the yard, which I know is a joke. Do your best. If it soaks through, come back and we’ll do it again, no charge for the rewrap.”
“What’s it going to run?” Carol asked. She asked it lightly, the way you’d ask about the weather.
“Call it forty-five with the trim.”
Carol nodded and kept nodding a beat too long. “Can you split that over two visits? Gerry’s hours got cut again.”
“Sure,” Nora said, and she said it the same way she’d said the price, no pause in it, because a pause was a judgment and Carol Landry had done nothing to earn one. Gerry Landry had driven a forklift at Calder Paper & Fiber for nineteen years, and now he did stock two nights a week at the grocery in Barre and looked ten years older than he had last spring. “Deb’ll set it up at the desk.”
Carol got Boone down off the table herself, and the dog leaned against her legs all the way out, forgiving her completely, the way dogs did and people mostly didn’t.
That was the third split bill of the week and it was Wednesday.
The morning ran the way mud season mornings ran. A barn cat from one of the Cold Spring Road farms, brought in swaddled in a bath towel like a burrito with opinions, needing an abscess lanced where some other cat had disagreed with it. A beagle with an ear infection that smelled like a swamp in August. Old Mrs. Trombley’s older poodle, in for the arthritis check she scheduled every four weeks whether the dog needed it or not, because Mrs. Trombley was eighty-one and lived alone out past the cemetery and the appointment was half for the dog and half for the twenty minutes of talk. Nora gave her the twenty minutes. It cost nothing and it was the only prescription in the building that worked every time.
Between appointments she stood at the counter in the treatment room and drank coffee that had gone the temperature of a stone wall in the sun, which was to say not warm, exactly, but you could tell it had been. The clinic smelled the way it always smelled, disinfectant and wet dog and the cherry hand soap Deb bought in bulk because it was cheap, and under all of it the mineral smell of the mud that came through the door on every boot and paw in town this time of year. The waiting room floor had been mopped at seven and looked by ten like a topographical map of everywhere her clients had been. Deb mopped it again at lunch. It was a fight you had for six weeks every spring and lost daily and won eventually, when the ground firmed up, the way you won most fights around here. By outlasting.
The schedule had white space in it. That was the thing she noticed now, had been noticing since about October, the way you notice a tooth. Two years ago a Wednesday in April would have been booked solid to five thirty with a waitlist. Now there was a hole at eleven and another at two, and the holes weren’t because the animals of Calder had gotten healthier. People were stretching the annuals to eighteen months. They were doctoring their own hot spots with stuff from the farm store. They were looking at a nine-year-old dog with a bad hip and doing a different kind of math than they used to do, and Nora couldn’t fault a single one of them for it, because it was the same math she did now on the equipment catalogs that came in the mail. The new digital X-ray she’d been circling for two years stayed circled. The mill had closed fourteen months ago, and the closing hadn’t been an explosion, nothing so honest as that. It was more like a leak in a foundation. The water just kept finding new places to stand.
At eleven she used the hole in the schedule to look at a fecal sample under the microscope for Ed Prentiss, who was convinced someone was poisoning his coonhound. Ed stood in the doorway of the little lab room while she looked, narrating his suspicions, which centered on a brother-in-law and a property line dispute going back to the Clinton administration.
“Roundworms,” Nora said, sitting back from the eyepiece.
“You sure?”
“I’m looking right at them. Nobody’s poisoning Duke, Ed. Duke’s poisoning Duke. He’s been eating things out of the thaw.” Everything came up in the thaw. The woods gave back whatever winter had taken, and every dog in the county spent April conducting an inventory.
“Marlene’s brother said he’d,” Ed began.
“I’m sure he said all kinds of things. What Duke has is worms, and what worms need is this,” and she wrote the script, “and not a sheriff’s deputy. Twice a day with food, ten days.”
Ed took the paper and studied it as though it might be hiding something. He was disappointed, she could tell. A poisoning had a villain in it, and a villain was interesting, and worms were just worms. People wanted their troubles to have a face. She’d stopped being surprised by that a long time ago, though she had never gotten all the way to patient about it. Evidence was evidence. Feelings were real too, but they weren’t evidence, and the number of people who could keep those two piles separate on a bad day was smaller than anyone liked to admit. She handed Ed his wormer and his receipt and liked him anyway, which was the trick of a small town. You didn’t get to choose between liking people and knowing better. You had to carry both.
At noon Deb looked at the two o’clock hole and then at her. “Go eat something that didn’t come out of the vending machine. I’ve got the phones.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re chewing on the inside of your cheek. Go.”
Nora went.
She drove into the center with the window cracked, because the first fifty-degree day of April in Massachusetts was a holiday nobody had to declare. The road into town ran between stone walls and bare maples, the walls dark and wet-looking, the trees holding that particular red haze in their tops that meant the buds were thinking about it. Snow still lay in the north-facing ditches in gray, exhausted ribbons. Everything else was mud and standing water and last year’s grass the color of a paper bag, and the sky was a hard rinsed blue, and it was, in the way of mud season, both the ugliest the town got all year and somehow the most hopeful. Everything was over and nothing had started. You could see clear through the woods to the ridgelines, all the country’s bones showing, and away west, when the road climbed, a flat pewter shine between the hills that was the reservoir, lying there the way it always lay there. The water the whole eastern part of the state drank came out of those hills. There were towns under that water, or the cellar holes of towns, drowned eighty-some years ago so that Boston could run its taps, and everyone in Calder grew up knowing it the way you knew where the church was. It wasn’t a wound anymore. It was just a fact of the landscape, like the walls. Around here even the lake was somebody’s old bad luck.
Main Street was Main Street. The bank, the church, the Congregational church’s competing steeple a block up, Ferron’s Hardware with a pallet of peat moss out front under a hand-lettered sign, the pizza place, the empty storefront where the florist had been, the second empty storefront that had been empty so long nobody remembered to see it. The Common lay at the north end, a triangle of soaked brown grass with the war memorial and the flagpole and two benches nobody would sit on for another month. A DPW truck idled beside a catch basin with two men leaning over it in the ancient municipal posture of men deciding whose problem something was.
And down to the southwest, where Main dipped toward Bell Brook and the roofs of Mill Village, you could see the mill.
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