“And here is the serpent again,
dragging himself out from his nest of darkness,
his cave under the black rocks,
his winter death.”
– From “Snake” by Mary Oliver
There were nine of us and we all remember it differently. It – everything. When Mom’s memory got stuck in broken slivers of the past she repeatedly told me this story of a time we were in Vermont at her parents’ house. I say ‘we’ but I was not even there. Over by the shed the kids found a snake with a big bulge in its belly. They cut it open to see what was inside. Baby snakes fell out and they all died. The mother snake died too.
J., A., M., and JC. remember the incident of the snakes dying. J. says he thought the bulge was something the snake ate, and he was curious what it was. He went inside to get a knife. They cut it open and were surprised that the bulge was babies. A. said it was gross and Jean felt sad they all died. M. started to keep snakes in a terrarium when he got older, raising mice to feed them. His and J.’s bedroom was in the basement, mine on the second floor. I spent my adolescence with healthy snakes two layers below.
I wondered why Mom repeatedly told this story. Was it code for one of the many difficult things the family did not like to talk about? I imagined the dead baby snake story was about Mom or a close friend having an abortion when she was in school – the days when they were illegal, dangerous and women died. What I do know is that Mom had strong reactions when dead babies of any kind were mentioned. My youngest sister had that figured out before any of us. She demonstrated this one Christmas Eve when she was a rebellious teenager.
Christmas was my mother’s favorite holiday. She had created a whole ritualized set of actions for the whole season beginning with the annual picture of us for a Christmas card. We loved the whole season when we were children. As we grew up and left home, however, we pushed against some of them. On Christmas Eve we all gathered for a supper of melted cheese on toast, opened one present each which was always a pair of flannel pj’s, and hung our stocking over the fireplace. Our baby sister B. had gone out that afternoon and Mom made us wait for her to come home to eat dinner. After we all started to get grouchy and the cheese started to separate, she gave in and served dinner. Mom was increasingly distressed when B. was not still not home for opening the pj’s and it was very late by the time we hung up our stockings and went to bed. Still, no B. The next morning, we came down for breakfast. B. was still out. Mom was going through the ritual motions at a slow burn. While we ate her traditional Christmas breakfast, B. walked in the kitchen door. She looked at Mom who was ready to pounce and said, “Mom, the baby died.” Mom burst into tears and Beth ran to bedroom, shut the door and slept all day. Mom did not ever speak of this in our hearing. Nor did Beth.
Beth was not a baby when she died, but she was the first of us. At her funeral one of her friends eulogized her by remembering how long ago she had selflessly stayed up all night one Christmas Eve, helping him not sink into despair by destroying his hard-won recovery from alcohol and drugs. He called her a saint who saved his life. All of us grieving siblings started to whisper up and down the pew, ‘that was the night the baby died?…it must have been.’
Mary Oliver draws near to the conclusion “Snake”: “There are so many stories, more beautiful than answers.” Maybe we would have heard more of that beauty if we could talk freely about snakes, darkness and winter death.