I got the urge to travel last week and decided to return to some of  my old haunts in Arkansas. My wife’s people were from Jeffersonville and during our courtship days I met some exceptional people while rambling around over there.

Among them were the Jakes Family. They specialized in raising hell, hogs, and children, in that order. Jeff grew corn and sorghum, and Sukie, his wife, in keeping with her Choctaw ancestry, distilled it into a more manageable form. It proved to  be a most recreational elixir.

Jake had a repo business with a few local banks and used car lots, and in the spring, summer and fall collected venom from whatever poisonous reptiles their children could manage to hem up on their section of Crowley’s Ridge. Between the kids and a dozen or so breeding hogs and their offspring, those snakes had a pretty rough life.

I ran into Sukie on a Wal-Mart parking lot surrounded by a new crop of pre-adolescent snake wranglers, driving that same old pulpwood truck that her granddaddy had left her.

It was just like old times except there was no sign of Jeff. As if she could read my thoughts, she said, “Jeff’s at home laid up. He got bit back in the fall and it looks like he might lose his thumb and trigger finger.”

Now, that sounded bad, but it also sounded strange. Shoot, Ole Jeff had been bitten by everything that could crawl in Arkansas, probably 50 or 60 times at least, and seldom even bothered to swell up about it. What could have changed?

I thought about that big old rusty copperhead he used to keep on the back porch in a chemical barrel. That old snake probably came over on the Mayflower. He was about twice the size of an ordinary member of his species, weighing about nine pounds, four ounces and stretching to 49 1/2 inches.

Jeff took him into the Chinese-owned store and weighed him on the meat scales, cooler and all. Then he gave the snake to one of the children to hold while he went back in the store and weighed the empty cooler. He said it was the best way to weigh a snake in a store, and I’m sure he was right.

A fractious store owner could be a problem in a crowded store with a snake who was known to be a little fractious himself. I forget what the cooler weighed, but the snake weighed nine pounds, four ounces barefooted. It would be natural to assume he would be capable and possibly even anxious to account for a digit or two.

I remember the first and last time that I saw the copperhead in their kitchen. Jeff and one of the junior wranglers had him stretched out across the table while Sukie sewed his mouth shut with an upholstery needle. I couldn’t see the purpose of the procedure, but it was apparent that it was not improving the snake’s attitude one bit.

It seems that Jeff’s pilfering neighbors had burglarized Miss Sukie’s pulpwood truck for a CB radio and a Bob Dylan eight-track tape on the same day that little Jake and Annie had found that snake. After he was tightly stitched, Jake took him outside in full view of those neighbors and aggravated him into striking him about the face and neck.

The neighbors warily and wisely observed the proceedings from a safe distance — to distant to allow them to see the stitches. After three or four strikes hard enough to leave bruises, Jeff threw the exhausted copperhead into Miss Sukie’s pulpwood truck where he continued to squirm and strike from time to time at whatever he could reach in futile rage, Arlo Guthrie tapes and baby bottles among them.

I had to ask Mrs. Jakes if it was the same snake. (They had thoughtfully removed the stitches years before to depopulate the rat herd at the hog pen.)

She said, “Naw, that old snake got et up by a mean sow years ago. It wasn’t even a snake what bit Jeff; it was one of them younguns. Ain’t no snake bite gonna slow Jeff up. He’s been bit by them before.”

Still travelin’

Ricky Harpole