Bar, my Appaloosa gelding, slowly trotted a right turn back toward the house. His hoofs thudded against the half-muddy lawn like little thunderclaps. It was a crisp afternoon in Dover, Arkansas. I was eleven years old, and  I was tired of riding bareback around the yard. I wanted to into the woods behind our house, but Bar needed saddling first. 

My parents generally let me wander wherever I wanted to go, but they wanted me safe. That meant using a saddle when I took the horse out on the road. It meant wearing a lifejacket when we paddled the rivers in the nearby Ozarks. 

            It also meant constantly looking out for snakes. I'd heard my father's stories about moccasins. I'd heard how vicious they were. They jumped right out of trees into his canoe. They would slide up undetected, just where he put his foot when he stepped out of his boat.  I believed snakes were capable of any sort of evil they wanted to create. I kept a little personal serpent vigil at all times.

            I always checked the path as Bar walked, watching for snakes, or rapid dogs, or maybe livid possums. That afternoon, the yard was clear of evil critters. Bar’s feet clopped across the carport and back into the soft earth in the adjacent paddock.  I swung to the ground, tied him up, and went into the garage for Bar’s tack.

I saddled Bar and checked his girth. Everything seemed fine. I swung a foot into my thin aluminum stirrup and pulled myself onto his back. There was a long pause before Bar started to buck. I stared at the ground below me, knowing something terrible was about to happen. I couldn't stop it.

            I hit the ground hard, but not before I tried to brace with my elbow. It was crushed under my weight. A week and a surgery later, I was at home in a cast that would be on my arm for nine months before I started the physical therapy, which lasted a year and a half. My elbow needed a total reconstruction.

            When I got home from the hospital, I sat on the bed in the guest room, trying to finish a project on Antarctica despite being high on pain medication. Mom put me in the guest room so she could hear me if I needed her at night while I nursed my elbow. Our house was built by a couple that had been rumored to keep an illegal casino in the upstairs rooms.

The carpet was three-inch gold shag. The wallpaper was yellow, black and fuzzy; the "Fleur de Lis" design made me a little sick. The ceilings were too low for such a big house, so every space was dark, even with the lights on. It was hard to see the construction paper penguins I cut out with my one usable hand. Heavy dark gold curtains, made from thick velvet and backed with light blocking plastic panels, blocked all the light from one short rectangular window. The room felt like a solitary confinement cell.

            I finished cutting out a blue block of ice. Something against the wall caught my attention. I turned slowly to look: a long, thin dark line along the baseboard.

It could have been a thick electrical cord, except that I knew that there was no electrical cord that thick there. Or that brown. I couldn‘t fathom what I saw--a four-foot long copperhead lying along the baseboards.  I sat there, staring at it. The snake didn't move. It lay there, silent, completely camouflaged in the gold shag carpet.

            I was blinded by a memory.  When I was five, my father took us on an overnight float on the Buffalo River with a group of friends. One guy came across a three-foot rattlesnake along a trail. He shot it to keep it from biting him. Instead of just leaving the carcass to rot; he brought it back to camp.

I watched him skin the snake with a hunting knife. He left its white headless carcass draped across the campground grill like some kind of macabre scarf. Every five or ten minutes, the carcass would rise up, as if it still had a head. It turned its body left and right. It rattled its missing tail. Later that night, the camp grilled the snake and everyone ate a small piece. When it was time to try the meat, I had to imagine away the image of the headless trunk—white and sticky, covered in flies—rising up from the dead.

            I crept off the end of the mattress. All I could see was that barbequed rattler, headless and skinned, still trying to strike.  I put my feet on the carpet one at a time, making sure to stay completely silent. I didn’t want to disturb this live snake, since I‘d seen the energy of a dead snake. I stopped after every step across the carpet, checking to make sure the copperhead was still there. It took a hundred years to reach the doorway.

            I ran screaming into the kitchen. Our house was nearly impossible to navigate sober and healthy, much less terrified, injured, and zonked on Percocet.  I bumped down the long dark hallway, swung around the huge staircase, squeezed myself around the bar in the den. I arrived, panting, in the kitchen.

            "Mom! There's a snake in my bedroom!"

            She stood with a hand on her hip, a mixing spoon in her other hand. "You're seeing things. You're on pain medication." She didn't even blink.

            "I swear!" I was hysterical by this point, crying like the fifth-grader I was.

            "You are seeing things!" Mom sneered at me. I was an excitable child and she knew it. She didn't want to play with my foolishness.

            "Go in there and look."

            Mom looked. All hell broke loose. She stuffed towels under the door to the bedroom and then lined the hallway with canoe paddles, just in case the snake decided it was tired of the bedroom. I put on Mom's huge hiking boots and carried around a baseball bat. Dad curled up in a fetal position in the middle of his waterbed because the idea of a snake on his floor made him revert to infantile blubbering.

            Mom immediately called my grandfather, A.G. Barton. He hopped in his truck with a shotgun and a hoe and headed toward our house. The wait was torture. Mom paced outside the room, just beyond the perimeter of her canoe paddle fortress.  She poked her head into Dad’s bedroom every few minutes with an update.

            “It’s still in the room, at least.  We can find it in that room, can’t we?”  

            Dad mumbled something incomprehensible from the bed, then said clearly, “Did you call my Dad?” 

            “For the tenth time in two minutes, yes, I called him,” Mom snapped.  

            I sat on an old chopping block in the kitchen, keeping my feet off the floor.  Fifteen minutes passed before Grand-daddy was standing in the door to Dad’s bedroom, shaming him out of bed.   Mom slowly removed the canoe paddle fort, keeping one in her hand just in case.  They opened the door, then stepped back and pushed it open with the end of Grand-daddy’s hoe. 

            They found nothing at all. No snake. No sign of a snake. Mom got nervous. She opened every closet door on the first floor of the house.  Nothing there, either.  Dad and Grand-daddy stood in the doorway for a long time, trying to decide what to do. I watched them from the end of the hallway.

            “Turn over the mattress,” Dad said. “Let’s just look.”  

            The snake lay quietly on the box springs. Grand-daddy sliced off its head with the hoe. 

            Grand-daddy picked up the snake’s head with fire-place tongs. Dad scooped up the body with a shovel.  They walked together behind the house to a bramble of honeysuckle and briar. They threw the two parts of the snake in opposite directions.  

            Mom immediately swept into the guest room and gathered up my pieces of paper, my glue, and pieces of poster board in one hand.  In the other, she scooped up all my Antarctica books. 

            She talked to me over her shoulder as I followed her up the stairs. “You’ll just go back to your regular room. It’ll be farther away in case your arm hurts but you’ll be okay. You can take stairs in the dark, right? Just turn on the light.”  

            I couldn’t follow her back down the stairs because she moved too fast.  Mom stripped the sheets on the bed in the guest room before Dad and Grand-daddy walked back into the house.  The three of us watched as she cleared the closet. 

            We waited until the room was empty. We waited until the door was shut and towels stuffed under the crack, just to be sure.  Then we went to bed, with our shoes on, and dreamed about angry rivers, spooked horses, and rooms that magically grow snakes from bits of shag carpet. 

*This essay was originally a radio essay broadcast in 2007 produced by  Tales from the South, a show on our local NPR affliliate KUAR.   This form is slightly altered.