Partners
by Joseph H. Delaney
Illustration by Dell Harris
Alice Simmons emerged from the kitchen door, wiping her hands on her apron. Her day had been busy. It had started at dawn, and now, at mid-morning, she felt the need of a break.
She stepped out into the Sun, which blazed hot already. The air felt damp, not quite humid enough to be called muggy, but close. It held a definite promise of afternoon showers.
Soon Mel, who had left home on his tractor before sunup, would be coming in from the cornfield to eat his lunch. Alice had been keeping watch on the grape arbor, her project, part of the garden which is every farm wife’s private fief, and she knew that some of the bunches were already making sugar and tasted sweet and juicy.
Upon that thought she retreated momentarily into her kitchen, found her shears and hustled off to pick some of the fruit to go with their lunch.
Her objective was the sunward side of the arbor, the final row, where the light was unobstructed and mother nature had been pampering the vines since the first thaw. She made for that like a bee after honeysuckle.
There they were, dusty blue, plump and heavy, already drooping against the inexorable cling of gravity as for as their stems would allow them. Alice was pleased to see no signs of rot, or of bird predation, which had so badly mauled last year’s crop.
She brought no basket. She would take only a couple of bunches, just what they needed for lunch, no more than a double handful. She searched out the ripest bunch and reached a hand under to support it while she cut the stem.
That was when she saw IT!
IT slithered away from her.
Alice screamed, and recoiled, drawing back against one of the arbor posts, which, rotten at the base, would not support her weight. It promptly broke and dumped her backward across the trailing vines. Alice screamed again.
The creature seemed to have heard. It glared at her for a moment but did not appear to be alarmed. It turned complacently back to its feeding, seized another grape in its jaws, pulled until the stem came out and strained to swallow it.
Alice struggled to her feet, outraged at its brazen behavior. She still wasn’t quite sure what kind it was, or whether it was poisonous, but there was no doubt in her mind that this was a snake. And Alice, like most people, was not particularly tolerant of serpents of any kind.
Her thoughts immediately turned from flight to defense, and from there she began to contemplate offensive possibilities. Alice resolved she would not be intimidated, she would not be robbed. She would arm herself and she would fight for what was hers.
She ran to the barn, where her gardening tools hung on a rack behind a creaky, immobile door that Mel kept promising to fix but never had. She selected a well-worn hoe, although its handle was cracked and bound with friction tape that made her hands black when she used it, was nevertheless clean and shiny and sharp where it counted.
Armed thus, she ran back to the arbor, creating enough disturbance to wake up the dog, Brutus, an old and mostly deaf beagle, who then followed along.
The snake was still calmly eating grapes when she got back, and seemed not to fear Alice armed and vengeful any more than it had feared Alice in flight—not until she took her first swing.
Then it fled, her swing having missed so narrowly that the breeze it made blew something off the creature.
In an instant the snake was gone, its pale white and curiously undulating form wiggling first along a thick vine and then dropping to the ground, where it retreated rapidly in a sort of combination scurry and slither.
Brutus caught a scent, but he didn’t seem to know what to do with it. It was as if it simply failed to excite him. He looked bored.
Alice tried to sic him on the creature, as she might have done to any other varmint, but unlike rabbits, which Brutus loved to chase in his own peculiarly leisurely way, this creature was clearly not prey to him.
With disgust, and promising herself that she would catch the creature later, when it got hungry and returned, Alice picked what ripe grapes the creature had left and took them in the house. She left the hoe on the porch, ready for instant use.
“Alice, I’m ashamed of you. You’re a farmer’s daughter and a farmer’s wife. You know snakes only eat meat. There aren’t any vegetarian snakes.”
“I only called it a snake because it looked like one, even if it was snow white and had these. ” She held up a tiny object.
Mel leaned over to study it. “Feathers? It had feathers?”
“I guess so. I saw this one fall off when I swung my hoe at it.”
“Looks like a chicken feather to me,” Mel shrugged.
“The chickens are all penned up. None of them have been loose for weeks…”
“Maybe Big George lost it, or somebody’s stray, or maybe it came off a wild bird, like a pigeon. The barn’s always full of them even with those owls hanging out in there.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I never said that. I said as far as I know snakes don’t eat grapes or have feathers. I don’t doubt you saw something, but—”
“Then I’ll catch it, or I’ll kill it, one or the other, but I won’t let it gobble up my grapes and I won’t let you tell me I’m losing my grip.” Alice stood and went to the sink to do the lunch dishes. She turned her back on Mel and wouldn’t look at him even though he hugged her from behind and tickled her neck with his mustache, something that always got her going when she wasn’t sore at him.
“I’m serious, Mel. Now, why don’t you get on your kiddie car and ride off into the sunset before my imaginary snake decides to crunch your corn crop?”
Mel was not a fighter. He was, however, a pretty good farmer and he knew Alice was right—if he didn’t finish the spraying he’d have all kinds of beasties living off his toil.
“I’ll see you later,” he said, giving her a chaste peck. “Be careful, will you? Just because that snake of yours is a vegetarian doesn’t mean he won’t bite.” Mel waddled off in his clunky boots, leaving Alice with a sobering thought; what if it did bite—and what if it was venomous?
Three days passed. Alice and Mel had pretty much made up, and both were smart enough to keep quiet about Alice’s experience. Mel never had believed that what she had seen was a snake and she was herself beginning to concede the possibility of mistaken identity.
Nevertheless, Alice kept a close watch on her garden, particularly the grape arbor, and never went anyplace without her hoe. She also prepared a forked stick, which she kept handy, though out of sight, because unlike the hoe the stick was something whose purpose Mel would guess immediately. He wouldn’t approve of such intimacy with a wild animal.
She could kill the snake with the hoe, of course, but the stick’s noose of baling wire might enable her to take it alive. She wasn’t about to try handling it bare handed, but if the noose worked she could drop it into the big thirty gallon trash can she was reserving especially for that purpose and prove to her stubborn husband that she wasn’t just seeing things.
But, no sooner had she prepared herself to do battle with the snake than she discovered she was armed against the wrong enemy. Another, even stranger varmint appeared, a cloud of ravenous litde creatures that crept across the ground with frenetic speed and behaved like a school of fish or a flock of swallows. It moved as one. It started and stopped in unison. When one turned they all turned, and the final turn they made was straight into Alice’s lettuce patch.
The “flock,” silent as a shadow and almost as quick, swarmed over three rows on one corner, and Alice was horrified to see that it operated almost like a buzz saw. Whatever these creatures were, they were behaving just like the leaf-cutting ants Alice remembered from the National Geographic programs on TV The only difference was they didn’t carry the leaves off, but consumed them on the spot. Greenery was disappearing with alarming speed, and these soft brown lumps were reappearing in its place.