The Strange Mother: Raleigh, NC, 1884
My neighbor’s kids are good at Watching.
They don’t play outdoors much, and when they do
it's usually with mechanical things like lithium-powered little cars
or bikes or skateboards.
When they get bored they mostly go back inside to watch things on a screen,
but sometimes they Watch me.
I tend a pollinator bed between their house and mine.
I’ll be on my knees watching butterfly larvae
in a clump of parsley,
and something will make me look up
and there they’ll be, three impassive little guys
aged three, four, and five, in adorably tiny
helmets and knee pads, Watching me.
Watching isn’t the same as simply looking.
Watching is about demanding answers, connecting the dots.
I have no kids myself but I’m amiable enough, moderately good-hearted,
and I’ve been told you can never go wrong
by speaking to a child.
So I show them the butterflies on the sedum
and the little wasps on the anise hyssop,
which smells like Christmas cookies and churches.
We compare husky bumblebees, who are bullies,
to the honeybees, who are smaller and seem
to want to do the job without any trouble.
And I urge them to wish the honey bees good luck.
“You play outside a lot,” says the oldest.
That’s because I like the outdoors, I tell him.
“Why?” asks the three-year-old.
Because it makes me happy,
and a better planetary citizen, I answer.
What about you guys, I ask.
Do you like inside or outside best?
The two youngest defer to the oldest boy.
“Oh we like inside best,” he says. All three nod emphatically.
But why’s that, I ask, when you can watch
butterflies in the bog sage? Or explore the pleasures
of dirt?
The oldest gives me a look
I’ve been getting from a lot of young men lately,
particularly young men who want to fix my cell phone or computer—
a look of pity and dismissal mixed—
and he says, as if it should be perfectly obvious,
“Because that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”
Well, we all have our needs.
Sometimes our needs take us to strange places.
For instance, in May 1884 in the northeastern part of Raleigh, North Carolina,
a farmer noticed that his turkey hen wasn’t acting right.
He knew she’d made her nest some distance from the house,
and laid a clutch of eggs.
and laid a clutch of eggs.
But she wasn’t on the nest that fine spring day.
She’d appeared on the front porch, flustered and oddly mute,
with a shocked look in her eyes—an observation which can only come
from someone who has intimate personal knowledge of turkeys.
So the farmer checked the nest she’d constructed so carefully
in the blackberry bushes on a southern facing slope
and had something of a shock himself:
A highland moccasin was curled around the eggs
as motherly as any setting hen.
No wonder the poor turkey had a mental breakdown.
The farmer was flummoxed, had never seen the like;
and while he had some doubts about the propriety
of the situation, he was a Watcher by nature
and decided for curiosity’s sake to see it through.
He kept his eyes and ears open
and five days later he heard the peeping.
He ran to the nest
and made it just in time to see the snake
making a sinuous break for it up the hillside
with the whole brood of turkey chicks happily following her.
The mother turkey never got over it.
She laid dud eggs that never hatched
and lost her excellent nest-building skills.
She’d looked into the lidless eye of the snake and seen something
she couldn’t resolve—perhaps some vastly primitive ancestral connection
between herself and the interloper.
The snake must have offered her a grim negotiation:
These Eggs are mine by right of Saurian Antecedent. Submit to my Need
or you will die, you disgraced descendant of dragons.
Encountering such vehemently cold-blooded desire
turned her brain to ash.
By the next autumn she’d taken to wandering alone
through the goldenrod at the edge of the woods,
her feathers dusty and unkempt.
A fox got her before too long.
She didn’t put up a fight, thinking, possibly, with some relief,
Well, at least this is normal.
The farmer, too, was changed by what he’d seen.
People’s lives were vastly more rural then
and being a Watcher, he knew something about snakes.
In his experience no self-respecting North Carolina moccasin
builds nests or incubates their young.
They bear their young alive and wiggling
and only spend a day or so with them, for politeness’ sake.
(By the way, to be perfectly clear, the only snakes that
incubate their eggs are the python species,
and the only ones who build nests for eggs
are king cobras).
Why would the snake act so contrary to its nature?
The episode was so unusual, so larger than life somehow,
that he kept turning it over in his head
to try to ferret out a meaning.
Was it a Sign?
Was it a warning that the world’s threads
were unraveling?
Was it simply that the wise (if emotionally vulnerable) old hen
had made her nest in such a warm and cozy spot
that the snake, still a little sluggish from her winter sleep,
had enjoyed it too much to leave?
That answer seemed to him almost too…mundane.
It had to mean something wonderful. He couldn't bear any other conclusion.
He finally decided that there was simply something damn special
about that snake and let it lie
because people got tired of hearing him
talk about it, and told him so.
He became more vigilant
of things like the number of crows on a fence
or the patterns left by snails in the pine straw.
And while he craved certainty more than before, he went to church less.
You have to wonder what became of the snake
and her flock of turkey chicks.
It couldn’t have been easy, being an interspecies blended family,
but I like to think they made a go of it.
There may have been some sort of kink
in her reptilian heart that prompted her
to forge such a strange family. She may have satisfied her heart’s desire,
and the chicks, well, they knew no better,
having been imprinted on the snake,
so she was all they could have wanted in a mother.
so she was all they could have wanted in a mother.
Check back weekly for more voices of the North Carolina Storytelling Guild. If you enjoy these stories, you're bound to enjoy the Tarheel Tellers Storytelling Festival on November 3 & 4, 2017, at the Andy Griffith Playhouse in Mount Airy, NC.
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