PROLOGUE TO:

THE SNAKE

 

            My dad Buck was pushing ninety when he died. He did that. He pushed things- to the limit. That’s the way he lived. Maybe that’s why he lived so long. He died in our home, Those last months he retold most of his old stories: great old stories of another era and of a farm boy growing up in a new land; these Heartland Hills of Mid America. During his ninety years back in those hills, Dad had many stories to tell. Growing up my siblings and I thought we had heard them all at least once.

But, the week before he died, Dad insisted that I slow down and sit down to hear one more story that perhaps I had not heard before. It was then he told the story of the young suitor, well-mounted who was taking the little known, nocturnal short cut home. It was a moonless night, the horse refused to move at all. That was when he saw this apparition the horse had sensed was with them all along. It was a snake but completely unlike any young Buck had ever seen or even heard of before.

            “All this happened so many years ago, back when my world was young,” he said, in reflection.

            Dad still recalled how fervently he tried to tell everyone what he saw, starting with his Dad, William Washington Vivrett. Old Bill was having none of it! ‘Buck’ even wanted to take his Dad back along the old river trail to the ancient Mammouth Cave on Big River where it all took place but, of course, his Dad would not go.

            “Imagination”, Old Bill said.

“We’ll speak no more of it.”

            So my Dad, “Buck”, lived the next seventy years in silence regarding the snake that never was, perhaps finally convincing himself of what all the rest of us already knew;

 

-         That giant snakes do not live in Missouri

-         That snakes with ‘braided tails’ are whip snakes, slender and unknown to be longer than five feet in length, ever!

-         That the entire incident never actually happened. He must have been dozing off, dreaming of the young lady while the horse brought him home.

In these last days, we had together Dad said, “I just had to tell that story one more time.”

            It was as if in this one last telling, he would be able to dismiss it forever.

 

 

NOTE:

            In many ancient cultures the serpent was an important religious symbol. In fact, even in these Heartland Hills, as recently as the COPPER-MISSISSIPPIAN PERIOD 1000-1673 AD the serpent was part of the shaman’s tool kit.

 

Also-

Read Numbers 21:8-9