“Daddy wants us to bury that snake,” I said. He didn’t turn around. “He wants us to go out there and do it before something carries it off.” I heard Mama leave the bathroom and walk toward our room.

“Hold on, y’all,” she said. She walked into the bedroom with some gauze pads and some tape and some first-aid ointment in her hands. “Sit down on the bed here, and let’s see what we can do,” she said. “After that y’all need to get changed out of them church clothes.” She looked at my shirt where that blood had dried all over the front of it. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about that,” she said.

I SCOOPED THE RATTLER’S HEAD INTO THE SHOVEL, AND THEN I scooped up its body. I carried the snake out in front of me real slow so I wouldn’t drop it, and I walked behind the barn down toward the creek, where the shade kept the ground damp and soft. The snake’s body was so long that it almost drug along the ground, and I had to raise the shovel to keep it from catching on something and getting pulled off.

“It’ll be easier to dig down here,” I told Stump. He walked along beside me and stared at the snake. At the bottom of the hill I stopped and dumped it out into the grass a little ways away from the creek. It was quiet down there, and I thought about how if I had to be buried I’d want it to be in a place just like this. All the graveyards around here are up on the tops of mountains or set right into the hillsides. Daddy said they put them up high because of the rain. He said if you put a graveyard in the bottomland then you’d better be all right with seeing coffins float down the road after a big storm. I figured it didn’t really matter what happens to you after you die, and, if I had my way, I’d rather be down here by the creek where it was shady and nice and cool instead of up on top of some hill where there ain’t even any trees to block out the sun. Nobody’s going to want to visit you up there in the summertime when it’s hot.

I dug the shovel’s blade into the ground, and then I turned the handle up toward the sky and jumped on the top of the blade with both feet to force it down as far as it would go. The dirt was soft and loose, and the blade sunk in easy. I raised the first shovelful of thick, dark dirt and saw a couple of earthworms wiggling around in it.

“Look here, Stump,” I said, and I moved the shovel over to where he could see it. He’d squatted down by the rattler and was poking at it with a stick like he was afraid it might just come alive and snap at him. He raised his head and looked at the worms where they wiggled around in the shovel, and then he went back to poking at the rattler again. I dropped the dirt right beside the snake’s head and scooped up another shovelful.

I kept digging up and dumping out the dirt until I’d made me a hole about knee-deep and big enough around to hold two snakes without them even touching each other. I stopped and put one foot up on the top of the blade and looked at my hand where Mama had put a gauze pad on my palm and wrapped tape around it. The tape had started to come loose, and the pad was just about soaked through with dirt and sweat. I undid the rest of the tape and tossed it into the hole, and then I lifted up the gauze and looked underneath it at my hand. The skin around the splinter was white and wrinkled like I’d kept my hand in the bathtub for too long, and I took the gauze pad all the way off and tossed it down into the hole beside the tape so my hand could get some air and dry out. I switched hands so I could hold the shovel with my left, and I put my right hand on top of the handle so it wouldn’t rub against the wood. I scooped up the snake’s head and dropped it down inside the hole. It rolled down the side and stopped right in the center. Stump stood up and looked down at it.

I looked over at the rattler’s body where it lay on the ground by Stump’s leg, and I walked over to it and stared down at the little rattle on the end of its tail. I bent down and touched it, and then I picked it up and stood up straight. I shook it and listened to the sound it made.

“Look here, Stump,” I said. He turned around and watched me hold the snake. I rattled its tail. “Listen to it,” I said. “This would be the last thing you’d hear if one of these boys snuck up on you.” I made a hissing sound and rattled the snake’s tail again. I laughed and walked toward the hole to drop it in down inside with the head, but just when I reached out my arm and got ready to let it go, the bloody stump where the head used to be reared back and struck me on the inside of my arm. It made a soft, squishy noise when the snake’s guts smacked up against my skin, and for a minute I thought the blood it had left behind was mine. I screamed and dropped the snake into the hole and fell back onto my butt and covered up the inside of my arm with my hand. I looked up and saw Stump standing over the hole and staring down into it. “Leave it alone,” I said. “Don’t touch it.”

I stood up and wiped the snake’s blood off my arm and onto the back of my blue jeans. Then I walked over to the hole and stood beside Stump and looked down inside. The snake’s body was crawling around down inside there, and I could just barely hear that rattle going on the end of its tail. It looked like the head had come alive too, and its mouth was opening and closing and its tongue was sticking out. We stood there and watched it for a minute, but then I started wondering if there was any way it could climb up out of there, and I picked up the shovel and started covering the hole over with dirt.

ONCE I HAD THE SNAKE BURIED, ME AND STUMP WALKED DOWN TO the creek. I kneeled down in the soft mud and washed the snake’s blood off the inside of my arm. Stump walked a little piece down the bank and squatted down and started turning over rocks and looking for salamanders. I could hear his hands splashing around in the water and cleaning the dirt off them. I looked down at my own hands, and then I looked up at Stump where I could just barely see his back through all the ferns that grew along the water.

“Do you think we should’ve said a prayer or something?” I hollered at him. I waited for a second, and then I heard a splash and I knew he’d done turned over another rock. “I don’t think we should’ve either,” I said to myself.

I wiped my wet hands off on my jeans, and then I stood and walked through the ferns to where Stump had squatted down by the creek. I sat down on my butt beside him. He had both his hands in the water, and he was digging into the mud and pulling it up by the fistful and looking at it up close to see if it had anything in it. You could find you some awfully good rocks doing it like that. I knew his pockets would be full of them if he found any.

“Mama thinks you talked in church today,” I said. Stump rocked backward onto his behind too and crossed his legs and sat Indian-style. He wiped the water off his hands and onto his knees, and then he looked up into the trees like there was something up there he expected to see. “Hey,” I said, trying to get him to look at me. “Hey,” I said again. I reached out and touched his arm, and he looked at me for just a second, and then he raised his head back toward the trees. “It was me,” I said. “It was me she heard. Me and Joe Bill were outside, and we saw what they did. I was too scared to say anything because I knew how mad Mama would be at me for watching when I wasn’t supposed to.” He turned his head and looked up the hill back toward the barn. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I should’ve said something to Mama on the way home, and I should’ve tried to stop them from doing what they did. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

Stump looked at me like he just might’ve been listening to what I was telling him, and then he stood up and walked away from the creek and up toward the hill. I didn’t watch him as he went, but I could hear the ferns swishing against his legs when he walked through them. I sat there alone for a little bit, and I thought about how it was this time, two days before, that me and Stump had been coming up the hill from the creek when we stopped underneath Mama and Daddy’s open window. I pictured Stump climbing up on top of the rain barrel to see in, and I remembered the feeling I had when I saw Pastor Chambliss come around the corner of the house and reach down and touch Stump. I still felt his fingers on my hand where he’d held it tight to get a good look at where that splinter had gone right in. I imagined Chambliss laying his hand on Stump, and then I imagined the weight of all those men pushing down on top of him. I knew that me and Stump had both seen things we would have been better off knowing nothing about.