“Get out of my house,” her grandmother was saying to Dirty Swallow, but Dirty Swallow was not listening to her. Dirty Swallow stood still in the center of the kitchen. There was a sense of movement around her, a draft of spinning air. Her skirt was soft over her fat hips and worn so thin in places Louise wondered if she was seeing flesh, certain she could make out Dirty Swallow’s dirt-dark skin beneath her pale skirt. The woman wore a belt of snakeskin and rattlers, her very presence a rustling noise that hushed the room. One rattle on her belt almost swept the floor and Louise tried to envision the length of the snake it had come from. A coolness whispered the linoleum floor, a vague scent of cucumbers split by sun was rising from the damp corners of the room. Louise heard the ticking shift of rattlers beneath the house.

“Go now,” her grandmother said to Dirty Swallow. “You’re not welcome here with your threats.”

Louise had heard that Dirty Swallow wore a live snake around her waist, a big brown rattler with yellow eyes. She tried not to look too closely at the woman’s hips, afraid she might see the shifting pattern of a diamondback. Dirty Swallow gazed out the open door, and Louise turned to see a snake belly up the steps toward her. Dirty Swallow clicked her tongue and the snake stopped and coiled on the porch, its rattle lifted. Her grandmother was eyeing the broom propped in the corner. Dirty Swallow faced Louise with the squinting eyes of a mean drinker, hard poised and grinning, unpredictable because she was not a drinker. “I want you to answer my son,” Dirty Swallow said. “Agree to marry him or someone in your family will be bit.”

“You old bitch,” Louise said loud enough to be heard.

“I see you’re not raising your granddaughters right,” Dirty Swallow said. “It doesn’t surprise me.”

“I won’t make Louise do anything she doesn’t want to,” Grandma said. Dirty Swallow clapped her hands together once. The rattler slid back down the stairs, leaving a belly trail in dust, silent and soon invisible at the edge of the weeds, and Louise knew then that Dirty Swallow had made her decision.