Chapter 7: A Milk Snake, Probably

Deb came back from Switchback with the muffins and a story, and the story was better than the muffins, which she said first, setting the bag on the counter like evidence.

“Roland Verrette saw a rattlesnake.”

Nora was drawing up a vaccine for the ten o’clock, a corgi named Pilot who screamed at needles he could not feel. She finished drawing it up. She capped it. Her hands did all of that on their own, the way they did most things, and it was a second or two before she heard herself say, “Where.”

“Out at his place. Sunday night, burning brush. Says it was lying along the bottom of the wall by his burn pile, big around as his wrist, and when he got close it lifted its tail up and buzzed at him.” Deb was unpacking muffins as she talked, blueberry to the left, corn to the right, an order nobody had ever asked for and she had kept for six years. “He got his brother on the phone before he even got back to the house, so by church it was all over the county.”

“Roland Verrette,” Nora said.

“The one out past Leona Cyr’s, where the road goes to gravel. Not the one in Barre.”

“What does everybody say it was?”

“A milk snake, probably.” Deb shrugged with one shoulder, the other hand still dealing muffins. “That’s the ruling. Milk snakes rattle their tails in the leaves, everybody’s uncle knows that. And it was almost dark, and Roland had been at the burn pile a while, and you know Roland.”

Nora knew Roland the way the town knew Roland, which was mostly as the man who had seen a mountain lion cross Route 32 in broad daylight some years back, a mountain lion that grew a little with each telling until Fish and Wildlife wrote him a polite letter and the retirees at Switchback started calling any large ambiguous animal a Verrette. He was not a liar. He was a man things happened to at dusk.

“Huh,” she said.

“That’s what I said.” Deb balled up the bag. “Poor Roland. He’s sticking to it, too. Told his brother he knows a milk snake when he sees one, he’s killed a dozen in his hen house, and this was no milk snake.” She laughed, not unkindly. “Which is exactly what he said about the mountain lion, except with bobcats.”

The ten o’clock came in screaming on schedule, and the day picked Nora up and carried her, the way it always did. She vaccinated Pilot. She expressed the anal glands of a Lhasa who forgave her instantly and completely. She rechecked Mrs. Trombley’s poodle and pronounced the ear a triumph, and Mrs. Trombley told her about her sister’s knee replacement in the kind of detail usually reserved for depositions. It was a good morning. It was a normal morning.

Underneath it, in the place where she kept the things she was not looking at, one fact had lain down alongside three others and gotten comfortable, and she knew it was there the whole time, the way you know there is a stone in your boot even on the steps where it does not happen to hurt.

Roland Verrette’s place was past Leona Cyr’s. The far end of Old Reservoir Road. She did not have to look at the map to know it. She had put the map up herself.

She went into town at noon because she wanted lunch, and she wanted lunch because it was true and it was also a reason.

The chalkboard easel on the sidewalk outside Switchback had a new special on it, in Nick’s fat confident capitals, with a snake drawn underneath in green chalk. The snake was smiling. It had eyelashes.

THE MILK SNAKE. STEAMED MILK & HONEY. NO VENOM. $3. (SEEN ONE? TELL US ABOUT IT. EVERYONE ELSE HAS.)

Inside, the noon crowd was as good as it got anymore, which was six tables, and the retiree table was in session with Denny Croteau presiding. Denny had the floor and was using all of it.

“So I call Roland,” he was saying, “because I want it from the horse, and Roland says to me, Denny, I know what I saw. And I says, Roland, you knew what you saw in oh-nine, and that turned out to be Ferron’s garbage bags.”

“That was a fisher,” said Arsenault, who defended Roland on alternate days as a matter of balance.

“It was garbage bags. Larry Ferron himself went out and looked.”

“Larry Ferron couldn’t find his own truck in his own barn.”

“Be that as it may.”

Nick was working the counter with a towel over his shoulder, and when he saw Nora he pointed at her with the coffee pot, which was how he said hello to people he liked. “Doc. You want the special? It’s medicinal.”

“What’s in it?”

“Milk. It’s the joke, see.”

“I got it, Nick.”

“Because probably that’s all it was.” He was already making it, not waiting to hear whether she wanted it, because he had decided she did, and he was right. “Denny bought two. One to drink and one to say he bought.”

“I’m supporting local business,” Denny said. “It’s called civic pride.”

“It’s called three dollars,” Nick said, and the table laughed, and Nora laughed too, in the right place, at the right size, and heard herself doing it.

The talk went around the way talk goes around, everyone getting a turn. Somebody’s grandfather had kept a milk snake in the corn crib on purpose, better than a cat. Somebody’s cousin down in the Blue Hills country said they had the real article down there and nobody made any fuss, you watched where you put your feet, that was the whole of it, been that way since the Pilgrims. Somebody observed that if it was a rattlesnake it had picked the right town, because nothing else moving in had, and the mill sat empty going on fifteen months, and maybe the snake wanted to open a little shop. Somebody said the snake could have Denny’s seat on the zoning board and the town would come out ahead, and Denny said the snake was welcome to it, the pay was the same either way, which was nothing.

It was funny. That was the thing Nora would think about later, at the sink, at the map, in the dark. It was genuinely funny, and they were not fools, not one of them. A milk snake by a burn pile at dusk with its tail going in the dry leaves is a rattlesnake to ninety-nine people out of a hundred, and the hundredth is a herpetologist. There were no rattlesnakes here. There had never been rattlesnakes here, not in living memory, not in the memory of anyone’s father, and living memory was the town’s unit of proof for most things and it usually served. The laughter was not ignorance. It was arithmetic. She would have done the same arithmetic herself, six weeks ago, and gotten the same answer, and enjoyed getting it.