Will Hearn

Two boys walked a narrow levee path where grass grew sparsely in the thick, summertime shade. Every now and then one of the boys stopped to kick away a Sweetgum ball, as the gumballs hurt to step on barefoot. 

It was the time of year the boys savored most. The oak trees wore cheerful, green leaves that flashed their silvery undersides in the breeze, and it was never too cold for a swim in the pond. They were too young to feel punished by June’s heat, and because the days were long, breakfast being earlier and dinner later, there were more imaginary games played, critters collected, and learning of the kind school could never give them. Being over a month into summer, they’d forgotten their studies, and it was still too soon to begin thinking about them beginning again. It was a week from Abraham’s ninth birthday.

Abe, with acorn-brown hair and green eyes, pointed at the pond, and a hush came from both boys’ mouths. Donny, three years older and ten inches taller, fluidly took a knee and propped the rifle to aim. He closed one eye, and Abe did the same behind him. Both of their dark heads were perfectly still.

“Too far,” Donny whispered and opened both eyes again. They were hazel.

“Come on,” Abe said, his head falling. “You ain’t shot once.”

Donny stood. “Don’t want to scare something good.” He admired the gun he held.

“What’s wrong with turtles?” Abe touched his chin. “Dad says there’s too many of them.”

“Nothing wrong. Just nothing special about them. There’s likely to be snakes out,” Donny said, “getting ready to birth.” 

Abe sighed as the turtle disappeared in a swirl of water. He’d never even shot a bird.

A breeze picked up and blew some of the weaker leaves from their clutches in the trees. One landed on the pond where it floated like a tiny canoe, and the wind shoved it along in a winding path. Abe watched as is scurried towards the cedar tree that marked where they’d buried their labrador, Jim. 

It was the same cedar that, depending on its size, served as a time referential backdrop for any photographs their mother had taken of the boys: swimming across the pond, jumping from the long oak limb that fell in last year’s ice storm, or of trophy fish they wrestled to the shore. Of course someone had to retrieve her, and when one of them hooked something worthwhile the other would sprint up the hill calling. 

“Come on, Mom,” he’d cry, “it’s a huge one!” 

This was done with absolute certainty that his brother, if it were the other way around, would run just as hard and call equally as loud. Haste was imperative. A boy, no matter how grown up, can keep a fish alive in murky water for only so long before he begins to worry about what’s below the surface. The fish even, as it begins to come out of its shock, might chomp down on the boy’s thumbs. It could be a worrisome thing.

When their mother finally did arrive, she would smile at them in their excitement. “Alright. Come on up. Let’s see him.”

As the leaf disappeared in the shade of the cedar tree, Abe found himself nodding with a little turn of his mouth. It was a good feeling to hold something big, something that made other people say, “wow”. He wanted Donny to shoot a big snake as badly as he wanted to himself, almost more so. Because that’d always been the way–Donny first. As he ran to catch up, his hardened feet padded in the soft dirt of the trail. 

His brother stood at the edge of the spillway, a sloppy place where overflow left the property after heavy rains and where various sizes of tadpoles could be found. A tree trunk their father had placed as a bridge for them was worn in three spots. The middle spot was from their father’s long, single stride, and they stood admiring it.

A breeze touched their backs, and Donny spoke. “Bet I can cross it in two steps.”

“Nuh, uh,” Abe challenged. 

Abe had stood in the middle spot before–it was no short distance, and he didn’t think Donny had ever jumped it without him watching. It was a good dare.

Donny handed the rifle to his little brother and took a few steps back to lower himself, like a sprinter. He took a few false starts to warm up, making speedy sounds by blowing air through his lips.

Abe hefted the air rifle in his arms. He was rarely trusted with the gun, and felt torn between watching his brother and looking for a turtle, bird, or even a good tree limb to shoot. His mind wandered with a new delight. At any moment a buzzard might come soaring over, or a monstrous snapping turtle could surface with interest in the small boys, and Abe could now save them from a messy death.

The breeze blew the familiar sound of their father’s voice down the hill to them, a sing-song call of their names, “Dawn-aye, Aye-abe!”

It was a warm, smooth sound, like a canoe pushing water in his mind. It made Abe sigh and grin, a bittersweet knowing that he had to stop one thing and start another.

The boys looked at each other. Abe didn’t want to leave as he’d only just gotten the gun. He knew he wasn’t supposed to be holding it without their father’s presence, and it would be taken from him when they started for the house. But Donny had gotten himself ready to jump the spillway, and it was clear that he wasn’t going home before doing it.

Abe turned to watch, and Donny did his final stretch. He swept his dark hair out of his eyes so he might focus on his target. He took a few more breaths.

“Go already,” Abe said.

Donny looked over his shoulder until he heard the sigh that meant he would receive undivided, silent attention. 

As he launched himself in motion, Abe’s attention was, in fact, quite divided. He wanted two things almost with equal intensity–to see Donny jump the spillway, and to spot a critter worth shooting. He thought it more likely Donny would make the jump than to spot a target for himself. 

So, as Donny’s outstretched foot sought the spot, it was only natural that Abe would be surprised when his brother didn’t make it. Donny’s face went from an aggressive confidence, to surprise, to dread, and he went toppling over the log.

Abe muffled a gasping laugh with one hand, and his eyes widened as his brother struggled and failed to keep himself out of the muck. The thought crossed Abe’s mind that neither of the boys had fallen in the spillway since they were babies, and he saw the same thought register on his brother’s face.

As Donny rose from the muddy water, he turned his eyes on Abe who held one foot back ready to flee. Donny’s brow hooded his eyes in two dark shadows, and the corners of his mouth curled downward together. Muck dripped from his hair in sticky gobs, splashing legs that trembled, and radiating circles through the pool. Abe forgot himself and let a tiny giggle through his fingers. 

A dark and fathomless moan began in Donny’s chest that ended in an abrupt scream. He began fighting the thickness around his buried legs, all of his energy now aimed at getting to Abe.

Abe’s eyes widened. He knew better than to try and talk Donny out of it. He turned and bolted.

His feet thumped along the dirt path. Abe held the gun, already a burden, as though it were a baby–hugging it, promising it that he wouldn’t fall. He heard his brother’s cry behind him, and he remembered how much faster Donny was. It sent a chill and a weakness through his belly to his toes, and it brought him to tears with helplessness. And he still had to carry the gun. 

As Donny came running from the shaded trail of the levee, his head was down and his legs and arms pumped with single-minded purpose, a sort of blind fury. Abe had kneeled and the gun rested on his knee. He was shaking. When Donny finally looked up his face was still contracted in hatred. A look of confusion and a nimble twist of his body were all he had time for before the pop of the gun cut through the twinkling of the crickets and groaning songs of frogs that surrounded them in the tall grass.

There was a silence following the gunshot.

The sounds of the woods, the buzzing of grasshopper wings, and splashes of fish crept back into the air. Their father called for them again.

Abe was still peering down the gun sights when Donny stepped over next to him to look. There was a new calmness in the air between them, a new interest, a distance between one event and another. 

There, covering the worn foot path and extending into the grass, was the biggest Copperhead the boys had ever seen. It was writhing furiously, trying to wrap its horrible body around its own head, which was no longer a head at all but a strangely bloomed flower of pink flesh and mangled fangs, covered in mottled brown and black scales which made the obscene dance glitter now and then in the sunlight.

Abe hesitated to look at his brother, and was relieved to see he also had tears in his eyes. As they looked at each other, their breathing came back in heavy huffs. Abe was dizzy.

When Donny timidly reached for his brother, and when he nearly touched the gun, Abe stepped back. He looked up at his brother’s muddy face, saw the curious whites of his eyes, smelled the stench of the muck on him, and he squared his shoulders, even sticking his chin out. It was a sort of gesture he’d never done, and Donny pulled his hand back, for the first time seeming the smaller of the two.

Abe was aware that when he moved, a hot prod moved in his brother’s gut, and it had disabled Donny. There was hesitation to try and take the gun from Abe, a fear that failing would make the prod burn hotter. And there was a new power in Abe.

He stepped and grabbed the snake below its destroyed head, and it coiled its monstrous weight from his wrist up past his elbow. He thought of the stories of great amazonian snakes constricting children to death, and he faltered. But the snake writhed without purpose. Abe exhaled and gripped it tightly. He spun towards their father’s voice, but after a few strides stopped and looked back at Donny. 

He knew that what Donny saw, right then, would be the way he imagined Abe for many years, if not always–holding his rifle with one arm buried in the monster’s embrace, an exaggerated hero, the kind they pretended to be in their make-believe games. Abe was powerful. His entire life, before that moment, he had felt smaller–somehow less, and it was all suddenly dwarfed by a new awareness–that he was big enough. 

*

As the man waited for the boys to come up the hill, he leaned against the flat head shovel. The asphalt smelled like the streets in town. He admired it. It couldn’t simply be called black–it was impossibly black–a deformation in spacetime that he and a few friends had laid in only two days, a new line of gravity that led from the garage to the street that allowed nothing, not even light, to escape. It was a void, and he wondered that he should be standing in it at all. 

The man chuckled. How his wife would think him crazy if she knew the way he thought.

He could see the boys coming up the hill now, and as they came nearer he squinted. Shading his eyes with his hand, a soft exclamation escaped his mouth. 

“Ah.”

It was a scene so farfetched he first thought the boys were playing a game and were acting roles. Soon, though, he knew that the defeat in Donny’s eyes and inexplicable pride in Abe’s chin were very real indeed. 

He saw that not only did Abraham hold the gun without fear of his father’s rule, but he was dragging something that made the grass dance behind him. Donny, whose eyes were on the ground, now and then glanced over at it with a wince. 

“Oh my,” he said, seeing the snake. 

The boys stopped short of where he stood, and their drama was put on pause while they pieced together the coincidence. They looked at the snake at the man’s feet with its neatly decapitated head lying next to it on the asphalt, then at their father’s shovel, and at each other.

It was the first time Abe’s new confidence faced uncertainty, and their father was glad to see that he still looked to his brother. He was equally glad that it encouraged Donny to step forward. The boy lifted his head and blinked into the sunlight. 

“We heard you yell and we came running,” he said slowly, as if answering a question he was having difficulty remembering. He cocked his head sideways to look at the snake at his feet.

“Half way up the hill,” he paused, “Abe shot this one.” Then, with dawning excitement, “right in the head, Dad. First shot, right in the head.”

Abe dropped his head with embarrassment. Whatever power he’d found in the act seemed replaced with a shy pride. The man saw that a tear had come to the tip of his nose, but the boy couldn’t wipe it away because his hands were full. 

“Is that right, Abraham?” Their father asked. “One shot?”

Abe nodded, and when the tear fell from his face, he looked up. “Yessir.” 

There was a quiet moment while the man considered. He’d been meaning to guide Abe in shooting something, the way he had Donny, a kind of rite of passage and lesson in the reverence of killing with a gun. A bird, a turtle, hell, a grass carp would have done the trick. The situation at hand seemed to have appeared out of his and Abe’s need for a solution, and perhaps in light of Donny’s resistance to his little brother’s inevitable place as the keener of the two boys.

The man smiled. 

“What a tremendous beast.”

Abe’s mouth was a soft O, and a quiver passed through his body. He’d forgotten about hiding his watery eyes, and they looked like lily pads in pools.

He would leave the gun matter be. He turned to the eldest, who seemed a little proud of his brother, but nearly broken.

“How did you get so dirty, Donald?” 

The boys looked at the older brother, clearly having forgotten.

“I, ah–,”

“He had it, Dad!” Abe cut in. “I dared him to take your step across the spill, and he had it. Only thing is, there was a wet spot, probably from a turtle, see, and it caught him off guard.” He looked at his brother and said softly, “he had it though.”

“The spillway?”

Donny looked up at his father with unbridled shame, and a warmth spread through the man’s heart.

“Almost had it?”

Donny nodded uncertainly, and then with the first hint of a smirk, “yes sir.”

The man nodded.

Remembering his unhappiness Donny dropped the smile, but a lightness had come into his posture. He turned and looked at his brother.

The man leaned against his shovel as the boys proceeded to silently resolve what was between them. Abe kicked his tiny feet at the grass, and Donny watched unblinking. A locust buzzed nearby.

Abe moved first, dropping the huge snake as if it were a toy he’d become bored with. He took the rifle with both hands and stepped towards his brother. 

“Pretty lucky shot,” Abe admitted.

There was a moment of stillness, and Donny seized the gun. But he looked at it with confusion, perhaps feeling that the rifle had somehow changed in his little brother’s hands. Indeed, it did look different. When Donny looked back to his brother, Abe’s eyes were wide and his eyebrows had softened permissively. Donny put the gun to his shoulder and, with a sigh, touched Abe’s arm. 

“It was a good shot, too.”

The boys were quiet again, finishing the resolution, and when they looked up, their father remembered his place.

“Yes, well,” he said, nodding. “Let’s see him, then.”

They laid the two snakes on the asphalt, stretching them as long as possible. They were the largest snakes either of the boys had seen, and larger than any their father had seen in years. It was a week of great, new things, with the asphalt still being so fresh.

The one Abe killed was longer by a foot, and girthier by half. They admired them for a while, stepping around them and looking closely at the outstanding patterns that would render them invisible on the forest floor. On the black asphalt though, they were as striking as their neon tails. The boys poked them with sticks until all of the snakes’ reflexes faded. 

Their father stood quietly as the boys retold the story over and over until it had become the way they liked it, shaping it like a sculptor and his piece of marble. The boys told it in a way that, for all the man knew, was true, and in a way that seemed to give the brothers equal parts glory. Truly, it couldn’t have happened any other way.

When they had set the tale in stone, they stood looking at the pasture, the bright blue sky, and the snakes. They shook their heads in disbelief. Every now and then Abraham looked at his father with hopeful eyes, and the man would nod to him with approval. Donald too would look, and he too received a nod, for the thing had become a shared understanding between them, a great thing to be remembered–the day of the snakes. 

After some time the man realized what they were waiting for.

“Aren’t you boys going to get your mother?”

Abraham turned his green eyes towards his brother. After a tense moment, Donny spoke. “I’ll get her.”

“No,” the younger brother said. “I will.”

The man chuckled gently. 

“Nonsense, boys. What was I thinking,” he said, propping the shovel on his shoulder. 

“I’ll get her.”

He turned and strode towards the house, leaving the boys. A whistled tune came drifting to them, followed by the sound of the front door opening and their father’s voice faintly calling for their mother. The door closed.

The air around them was sweltering. The day’s freshness had evaporated as the morning turned to afternoon, and in their privacy the boys were struck with the starkness of the change happening between them. In their peripheral the snakes seemed to be disappearing, being absorbed by the blackness below them. Both boys glanced, to be sure. Against the probability that it might happen again, and by a dawning understanding that they would act nobly for one another the next time, they silently agreed that the photograph would be theirs together. The front door opened and closed. Their bare feet were beginning to burn on the asphalt where the gun lay between them. It seemed to be a directional needle that pointed down the hill to where the cedar tree stood, the symbol of the quiet, faraway passing of time, a hidden true north that reminded them what had come before, and a promise that something would certainly come afterward. Even the gun couldn’t hide from it’s truth, as if it heard the tree’s words, “remember me, when time passed in that way?”