And, like the moon, she saw the world as if from a great distance. The fields were brittle with weeds. She saw Baptiste Yellow Knife below her, smaller than a hummingbird, his tiny heart beating down the thin, thin walls of his heart. One hundred yards from him Malick’s store hid neatly stacked cans of soup, vegetables, baskets of penny candy. He could no longer touch her. The thought made her breathless as clouds. She looked down over the sun-silver hills and saw something moving. She sucked her breath full of wind. She saw the root cellar of her grandmother, the hill mound of rocks weathered smooth by rain, and, deep inside the cellar, the fat rattler that had outsmarted her family for years hiding behind fruit jars and gunnysacks of jerky, leaving the pale ghost peel of himself that grew longer and longer each year. She saw the hiding snakes in all their places.

In the damp shade of Grandma’s woodpile a slim rattler was sleeping. She saw the Ursuline school and the snakes in the field close to the playground. Lorraine Small Salmon, just five years old, turned jump rope while, close to the tips of her shoes, a brown rattler hummed. She saw her sister chase the rooster toward and away from the bottom land where the tender-fanged mouths of one hundred snakes waited in the weeds. She saw a fisherman she didn’t know, as vulnerable as his sunburned pate, at the Jocko, surrounded on all sides by brown rocks and rattlesnakes thick as lichen. She saw the dead snake the boys had hung on the cross of the French nun’s grave. She saw the road snakes that had been sliced and smashed by passing cars, their eyes lit with the hard, black backs of flies, and beyond them, more snakes. She saw the milk-white eyes of a thousand August rattlers. She saw Dirty Swallow walking toward her grandma’s rain-blistered door. Behind her, rattlesnakes trailed like a wedding train.

From a great distance she heard Baptiste Yellow Knife say, “Marry me.” Louise stepped back from him to leave. The air was clean and hot. A sudden wind snapped her dress tight to the backs of her legs. She shielded her watering eyes from the grit of dust. He never stopped watching her, and for one small moment, she felt bad for him and bad for herself. She could hate him enough to pull him inside of her, to melt his bones to water. She turned from him and began to run. She dropped her small bag of groceries to run faster, to run home, more afraid of Dirty Swallow in her grandmother’s house than of any field or road rattler.