A Blacksnake Won’t Hurt You
My old foxhunting buddy, Sam, was afraid of snakes. It didn’t matter if the snake in question was a 30-foot python or an 8-inch garden snake, Sam was sure it was out to get him.
The summer I turned 8, I helped Sam build his new barn. My job was to straighten the coffee can full of nails that Sam had bent trying to drive them before I came on the job.
We had the first level finished and were putting up the rafters for the loft. Sam’s old milk cow was already enjoying her new digs complete with a feed room with a 55-gallon drum of corn. The old heifer called quitting time and we climbed down so Sam could milk her. Just as we walked into the barn’s dim hallway the last several inches of a long blacksnake disappeared under the feed room floor. Old Sam dropped the milk pail and ran about 30 yards out into the pasture. We had a blacksnake named Snidely who lived in the feed room of our barn and kept the rodent population in check. I laughed at my grown up partner and hollered, “Sam, it’s a blacksnake. They won’t hurt you!” To which Sam retorted, “Maybe so, but they could make you hurt yourself!”
That fall Sam and I had loaded up his foxhounds and headed over to Haywood County to see if we could get a fox interested in leading those dogs on a merry chase. We had no more than turned the pack loose and gotten our fire going when a huge black cloud let loose a deluge and soaked us to the bone. We hiked back down to where we had left the jeep and climbed in. The battery was as flat as a roadkill toad. We were freezing to death in that cool fall air and Sam suggested we hoof it down the mountain to the Miller cabin.
To 8-year-old me the Miller twins, Jack and Joe, looked to have been somewhere around a 110 years old. Now I realize that they were probably in their late 60s. They looked so much alike that I wondered how Sam could tell them apart. He informed me that Joe was the one with the tooth. Jack told us that he and his brother would give us a hand with the jeep in the morning and that Sam and I could sleep in what he referred to as “Mama’s room.” Sam and I followed Joe up a steep set of stairs to a tiny sleeping loft where an old iron bed sat next to a window overlooking the front yard of the cabin. Joe nodded at the bed and informed us that “Mama” had died in that bed some 10 years back. I was ready to sleep in the yard in the rain knowing that the old lady’s ghost had to still be in that room.
As Joe left the lamp and wished us a goodnight, I couldn’t help noticing that there was an odd assortment of paraphernalia lying on the little table beside the bed. There was a large pair of scissors, three or four shoe tongues, some gravel, a length of copper wire, and several forked sticks. On the wall beside the window hung about a 2-foot section of bicycle inner tube. I asked Sam what he thought about all that and he answered, “Old Selma was bedridden for years and she used to lay here in this bed and shoot rocks at the mailman with her homemade slingshots.” I elected to let Sam sleep next to the window because I was sure that ghosts used windows to come and go in their nightly wonderings. We settled in under a dozen or so quilts and after what seemed an hour I drifted off to sleep.
Sometime around 3 a.m. I was awakened by a bloodcurdling scream. I leapt out of bed and in the now moonlit mountain night, I saw the ghost of Old Selma at the window. I screamed. As reality set in I realized it was Sam. He was standing on the porch roof looking in the window. In the night he had rolled over and his hand had touched the inner tube and thinking it was a snake, he had simply leapt out the window.
It turns out, a ghost also might not hurt you, but it could make you hurt yourself.
About the author: Michael Reno Harrell is a songwriter and storyteller from Burke County, North Carolina.