“Come on, Lily,” I said. “You grew up around here. You know about black snakes.” Perley gripped my braid and pulled.

“Not about having them in my house. And I grew up in town. Not so many snakes in town,” Lily said.

Rudy said, “Black snakes are territorial. If they’ve decided to live here, it’s next to impossible to get rid of them. This is the time of year they move in, too. Autumn. When it’s getting cooler at night.”

“They?” Lily asked. “As in more than one?”

“You might get a lot of them,” her boss from the hardware store said. “They’re loners, but they all like the same thing. So if you’ve got a good habitat, they might all move in at once.”

“They need somewhere to hibernate,” the mill operator said. “A hibernaculum. Someplace warm to spend the winter.”

“A house full of snake experts,” Lily said. “So snakes need a place to hibernate. Fine. I don’t see why it has to be our house.”

“Good a place as any,” I said.

One of Frank’s daughters squatted down for a closer look, and the snake fled into the wall via one of the gaps we’d failed to seal, so that only its tail was showing. Perley laughed and tried to lunge out of my arms.

“They’re harmless, Lily,” I said. “Even Perley can see that.”

Lily closed her mouth on whatever she planned to say next. Deirdre fingered her sage, but the snake was better than any hijacked ceremony. The snake made me feel like our fucked-up house had been chosen.

“Black snakes in the walls are much better than having flying squirrels in the walls,” Frank’s wife said.

“Now, that’s true,” Mike said. “Or what about these red beetles?”

“The hornworms this year,” Frank said. And so the talk turned to the many disappointments and hardships of the lives we were living, and how once you got rid of one thing, another thing was sure to turn up, and how this succession of pests, irritations, and unfairness would surely last until we were too weary to move, and so lay down on the lush water-laden land, lay down to rest, just to rest, lay down and died.

4

LILY

The first snake lived in the wall behind the woodstove. The second snake lived among the pile of dish towels under the kitchen counter. The third snake lived in the drawer with the rolling pin and the measuring cups. The fourth snake lived on the bookcase, fourth shelf up. When I left for work at the hardware and salvage store each morning, a snake filled my right rubber boot with its coils. I used the broom to overturn it, watched it slink into a knothole in the floorboard.