He knew it all as soon as he heard the scream. She ran up from the barn, screaming, crying. He knew what it was, knew what he would have to do before she reached the house, knew even as she sprinted through the back door, kicked off her sandals, bypassed her Mama in the kitchen, and screamed, Daddy! Daddy! A snake at the barn! that he would have to kill it.

He sat shirtless in his armchair. It was Sunday. He worked mornings at Foster’s, came home for lunch, slept for an hour, and attended church in the evening. Unless, of course, his relief was late, or problems at home intervened. Either way, come six o’clock he’d be at the church; and for this reason, he regretted his daughter’s screaming in the living room. Because a snake was certainly a problem, and unless he denied the creature’s existence, or violated his own rules of Sunday conduct, he would have no choice but to forgo his nap and resolve the situation.

Will you have to kill it, Daddy? his daughter asked him, tugging his arm and pulling him from his chair. She was six years old and had never seen a snake despite her country upbringing.

Yes, her Daddy said and patted his daughter’s dark curls as he rose. I think so. Yes.

He hurried inside his bedroom and approached his gun safe. He examined the lock, adjusted its numbers, and as the door opened he pulled from the safe his Pawpaw’s pump-action 12-gauge, passed first to his Daddy, and then on down to him. He had never needed the gun, had locked it away ― an heirloom, he considered it ― but he was not at all surprised that a time had come to put it to practical use. He grabbed a box of #6 shot from the safe and loaded the gun, reminding himself of how his Daddy had handled such circumstances some 25 years in the past.

For like him, his Daddy, too, had been forced to kill a snake. He remembered it well — at 10 years old, a serpent coiled beneath the Kubota tractor, a copperhead in a sea of bahia. Daddy! Daddy! he had exclaimed back then. A snake in the yard! A snake! You’ve gotta do something! His old man had merely frowned and finished his breakfast. Sure you ain’t seeing things? his Daddy had asked, but then he had sighed and stepped into the back room and retrieved the gun. 

It was just like this, he thought as he loaded the 12-gauge and returned to his daughter in the living room. He followed her through the house, through the kitchen where his wife scrubbed the dishes (she cleaned a plate and said: Don’tcha do nothing stupid, you hear? Don’t get too crazy.), and then out the back door into the July sun and the sweltering heat that clung to him as if it were as much a living, breathing thing as the snake he had decided to kill. He felt odd and incredibly dizzy, and now, more than ever, he regretted the loss of his day and his afternoon nap.

As he and his daughter proceeded outside to the barn, he reflected on how he had once led his own Daddy into the backyard ― It was hot then, too, he thought. Not like this. Ain’t never been no heat like this ― and guided him to the snake’s lair beneath that rusted Kubota. There’s the snake! he had said. It’s in there!,but his Daddy had simply nodded and adjusted his weapon. 

He understood now, a mere 15 feet from the barn and from the snake itself, why his Daddy had remained motionless for so long and had fiddled again and again with a gun that was already loaded. I think I see now, he thought as he eased to the spot where the snake lay in wait. He plodded beside his daughter with a gun he scarcely knew how to load and had never fired. He felt weak from the heat. Yes, I think I understand, he thought, and he said it aloud. I think so. Yes.

He could see the snake — a cottonmouth — in the bushes by the barn, and so he halted back a few feet and avoided the thing’s vision. He balanced the shotgun in his hands and listened again to his memory and to all his Daddy had once told him about Pawpaw — a man (or so he had always heard) who feared nobody but God in His Heavens, and nothing else. Now, he could kill him a snake, his Daddy had said. Oh, but he could, and there was an odd mysticism in these words from a man so practical. When I was a boy, I would watch him, his Daddy had continued. We would see us a snake in the woods, crawling and creeping among the leaves, and he would say to me: Pay attention, boy, here’s how you do it. Pay attention. And he would move. Slowly, down through them trees, across the woodland floor, as quiet as the serpent itself. And then he would spring. Jump quick (he’d done it for years and knew he could do it again), grabbing the snake by the tail, pulling it up and back and popping it like you would whip a mule, snapping the snake’s head off with one hit, with a single crack. He’d stop then and look at me and say: When you’re ready, boy. Not now. When you’re ready. His Daddy had told him no more, and recalling it today he supplied for himself the coda: Never ready, he thought. Never that ready. I guess never.

And yet, somehow, his Daddy had managed to kill the copperhead that had concealed itself beneath the Kubota and frightened him as a child. He remembered the heat, and his Daddy’s cradling the gun; the serpent in the grass of the backyard, and the sunlight in the wee hours of the day. He remembered also the death knell ― the three shots ― as well as the hissing of the beast in its last moments as it passed on from its life. Yes, all of it: he remembered it all.

The cottonmouth he sought today with his daughter lay low in the grass and made no sound. Now, he thought as he neared its lair in the bushes. Right now. He disengaged the safety; the gun clicked. He saw at once as the snake awakened into itself, coiled into a protective posture, stretched out, and readied its strike. Its eyes were bright and mesmerizing ― he had forgotten those eyes ― and he knew in the oldest part of himself (the part that had hidden as a child and summoned his Daddy) that he could not hope to kill this thing, this demon of the past.

Daddy, he had said, as he’d watched the snake (or seemed to watch, it didn’t matter), What now, Daddy? His Daddy had paused and faced a child who waited a few yards away from a snake preparing its attack. Hush, his Daddy had said and raised his weapon. Hush now, son, it’s just a snake. He had grown quiet then and observed his Daddy’s ways and committed the older man’s actions to his memory. He had closed his eyes after he’d heard the first shot and had kept them shut tightly until his Daddy had touched him gently and said, It’s all over, son. It’s finished.

And yet, still today, he longed to shut his eyes to that serpent of his nightmares. He stiffened with the gun to his chest and heard from close behind his daughter’s trembling voice: Daddy . . . she said: it was enough. He fired. Three times the gun sounded; three times the snake recoiled; and as the smoke cleared the beast writhed in all directions, moving still, even in death.

He remembered how his Daddy had shaken him from his fear after killing the snake and had forced him to open his eyes and to study the creature’s broken body. He had lingered at the lifeless coils and stared at them and then left again to play, and now his own daughter would approach the corpse of the terrifying beast that had forced her inside to call her Daddy to her aid. She paused perfunctorily in front of it, and her Daddy draped his arms around her shoulders. She would see the snake dead and remember it so; she would see it all, he hoped, and never forget it.

But instead, she jerked out from under his hand after a mere 30 seconds and darted out farther into the yard to play for the remainder of the afternoon. As for her Daddy, though, he stayed by the snake and remembered for a while the way his own Daddy had touched the scaly body of the beast and felt for the last fragile remnants of life in the creature’s tangled corpse. He had bent low, had bowed his head, had taken in forever the memory of the creature he had slain.

And now, here again, he waited in the yard and knelt by a snake and registered its demise as his Daddy himself had done years and years before. This creature, this beast he had fled from as a child, was lifeless at his feet ― and it had been him this time, his gun. He bent low and pressed his head to the ground and, like his Daddy, observed the snake’s death, touching its tail and rubbing his fingers through its coils, thinking of the life it had surrendered to him and of the daughter it had been unable to terrify. In the yard today it was as hot as it had been 25 years ago.

Yes, he said, smiling and laughing at it all. I think so. Yes.

– John Cody Bennett