She looked again at the rattlers’ tails hanging on the bedpost. She stepped up close to count each section of growth, the length of the snakes’ lives. She lifted the tails up from the bed and held them close to her face, so close she could see small patterns of color, and her heartbeat rose in her throat. The rattlers were light in her hand and smooth to the touch. She looked into the pockets of their hollowness, holding each tail to her eye, turning them in her palm, each section shifting in balance, each section shifting small weight like heaviness. Each tail whispered like it was whispering to her and she listened but could not understand the power that had guarded her husband when he was still strapped to a cradleboard. What she heard was her own hard breath, the pale click of her teeth in the small, shadow-heavy room.

Louise had heard that the husband waits for the bride. The husband is left alone while the bride pinches her cheeks in the bathroom, while the bride perfumes her thighs and powders her breasts, while the bride washes herself again, cleans herself with hot water, hoping she will smell sweet as roses for her new husband. But Louise was the one who waited, knowing she smelled like tobacco smoke, a hundred swigs of beer. The perfume at her wrists had sharpened. She shook the tails again and again, finally taking the rattlers down from the bedpost, holding the tails up to her chest like small furious bells, hoping the sound might startle her husband to rescue her. But the door remained closed. She could only make a sound with the tails like an old man’s dry hands rubbing together. She remembered the rasp of brittle paper blown against grass before the rattler had struck her sister. She sat down on the bed. She lit a cigarette and remembered that her grandmother had not raised her voice when Baptiste had told her they were going to be married. “You’ll both be unhappy,” Grandma said. He had stood before her grandmother in his white shirt so stiff with starch that every time he shifted, the shirt had chafed his neck with a sound like Sister Sebastian whispering in church. In the dusky light Baptiste’s hands were so dark she could not see his veins. He had frowned, and she had wondered then if he knew her grandmother had spoken the truth.