SNAKEHEAD
“I seen a peckerhead,” Cassie said.
The appropriate amount of giggling followed. Two little girls sat on the front porch of the old house which clung to a hill just north of Bedford, Indiana. They played, watching the rain gently blow down the hillside and into the woods. It smelled fresh, and was a welcome switch from the lightning and tornado-filled thunderstorms of late.
“I seen a huuuge peckerhead,” Melissa said.
Mel, for short, was nine. Her blue eyes sparkled with joy against her red cheeks and rusty hair. Her sister, Cassie, just two years older laughed deep from her belly. The kind of laugh that makes mothers and grandmothers worldwide turn warm and fuzzy.
“What’d you see?” came from the doorway.
Both girls straightened up, looking guilty. They turned slowly, wide-eyed, to meet the gaze of their great-grandmother, still ruling the household at ninety-four years old, outliving all of her siblings and her own two daughters. GeeGee as they called her had lived in that house her entire life. The girls’ family had only moved in when her health began to fail.
With some noticeable effort, her wrinkled face melted from stern and stoic to a toothless smile. Then she leaned toward them with the aid of the wooden door frame.
“I seen a peckerhead or two in my time, too.”
The three had a great laugh as GeeGee sat down in her porch rocker for one of her famous stories. Mel and Cassie scooted in front of her, rain at their backs, to hear what she had to say.
The little one piped up, “GeeGee, I’m sorry I said a bad word.”
“You was talkin’ about mushrooms, hon. It’s not your fault what people call ‘em. When I was your age, we called ‘em snakeheads. Used to find ‘em all over those woods, but there’s too many folks out here these days.”
Then the old lady paused with a pained expression. The girls stared in anticipation of her next word which seemed would never come. The wind shifted directions and a quick burst of chilly morning air snapped GeeGee from her elderly moment.
Cassie said, “Can we go hunt some?”
“Oh, shug, I haven’t been hunting for those things in near eighty years. Folks bring me some on occasion, but I don’t go lookin’ for trouble.”
The pained expression fought through the warm smile again.
“Trouble? It’s just mushrooms, GeeGee.”
The ancient woman uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to assert her opinion.
“Can you keep a secret?”
Their heads rocked in the affirmative, jaws slightly open, practically drooling at the impending story.
“I haven’t spoke o’ this in decades, girls. It need be kept a secret. You can’t even tell your brother.
“Andy? He’s not home anyway. He’s sleepin’ over at the Jackson’s. Momma and Daddy won’t be home from church for another couple hours.”
GeeGee shook her head, understanding it was just between the girls.
“When I was about fourteen, I went off in the woods with my sister—your great, great aunt Angie who is long dead now-and a boy from the neighborhood. His name was Allen.”
“Was Allen your boyfriend?” Cassie said, smirking.
GeeGee held up one paper-skinned hand and the girls settled in, criss-cross-applesauce, and neither dared make another sound. “He was my friend,” she answered and her red-rimmed eyes moistened. “I didn’t know nothin’ about huntin’ mushrooms and didn’t much like the taste of ‘em, but he promised me and my sister, Angie, we’d be seein’ something special that day and into the woods we went.”
She pointed down the hill near the mailbox. Across the road was still thick with hardwood trees, but there was a dirt path worn into the trees by so many feet looking for mushrooms.
“Right about there.”
The girls turned and looked.
“Allen skipped ahead of us. We weren’t stupid. We thought he was tryin’ to fool us in some way, or get us lost. He was always showin’ off in some way. We stuck together and kept a little distance from him, but a few hundred yards in, he stopped.” She swallowed hard and one of those tears finally escaped and scampered down her cheek. It was wiped away with a sniff.
“When we got to where he stood, he just smiled at us with his arms stretched out like Jesus on the cross. We looked at each other wondering what he was up to,” she laughed a little. “Then he said, ‘don’t you see them?’ and we looked at each other again. That’s when he looked at the ground and we noticed he was standing inside a circle of mushrooms. Snakeheads or peckerheads, as you call ‘em.”
“Growin’ in a circle?” Mel said.
“Yes ma’am,” the old woman answered. “A circle of mushrooms’s called a fairy ring by some folks.”
She paused before continuing. “I call it a devil’s ring. After the incident, my daddy told me that was a place where Satan his-self stepped on his way to no good. His giant hoof print burned the earth and the only thing that’d grow out of it was those blasted snakeheads. Them serpents was a reminder of a place not to visit.”
“Weird,” the girls said in unison. Cassie gulped and Mel shook off a shudder. GeeGee leaned a bit further to pat each of their little heads.
“No need to be scared, girls. That’s why I’m tellin’ you this story, girls. To keep you safe.”
Cassie’s eyes were fixed, unblinking. “What happened?”
GeeGee looked distant for a moment, then folded her hands in her lap and frowned. “Allen stopped smilin’. He said he heard noises, crunchin’ sounds like somethin’ was walkin’ toward him, smashin’ the leaves and twigs ‘neath heavy feet. ‘It’s somethin’ big,’ he hollered and he spun this way and that way a-lookin’ for it. My sister and I laughed at him standin’ there in that ring o’ snakeheads. We laughed until I saw a tear squirt out of his eye. Then he said ‘dear sweet Jesus’ and held his hands up. I will never forget the way he said it.”
She was still staring down the hill at that place in the woods. The rain had stopped and the sun was struggling to light the day.
“GeeGee,” Cassie said touching the old woman’s knee. “Are you ok? What happened to Allen?”
Absently the woman responded, “He disappeared.” Then she straightened up as best she could and looked at the girls with hardened eyes.
“The devil came and took him for messin’ where he wasn’t wanted,” she finished, but she couldn’t tell them what she remembered in her head. She couldn’t say he was bitten in half by something so horrible, so evil, that she was mute for six months, almost catatonic. Something invisible dissolved into reality while Angie, still oblivious, laughed. Then it ate most of his body in one big bite. But GeeGee had seen his tears and his fear. And she watched while his blood dripped from its mouth and soaked those damned peckerheads in that devil’s ring. His legs were all that was left standing there, one from the knee down and one from the ankle.
Her face was twisted and old, looking more like a skeleton than living breathing woman. When she realized she’d scared the children, she wiped another escaped tear from her cheek and motioned to gather them into her arms. The girls complied.
“I’m sorry, angels. GeeGee didn’t mean to scare you. But you stay out of them woods, you hear? Nothin’ good ever came from bein’ in there.”
“Yes ma’am,” Cassie said and Mel agreed.
“GeeGee’s tired now. Y’all go on and play. Your momma and daddy will be home soon.”
Her bones creaked as she stood up from the front porch chair, and she shuffled ninety-four years of experience and wisdom back to the downstairs bedroom where she sat in her rocker and went to sleep for the last time.
The girls played in their front yard with whatever was handy, and took turns on the tire swing that hung from the old oak tree that might have been a sapling when GeeGee was born. After fifteen or twenty minutes, their dad’s Chevelle rumbled up the hill and settled next to the house. Their mother and father stepped out in their Sunday best and the girls rushed to get some hugs.
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“Are we goin’ out to eat lunch?” they asked.
Mom felt the little one’s forehead, then the older one.
“Feels to me like you still have a bit of a fever, girls. Maybe we’ll pick up something after your brother gets home. He just called and said he was goin’ huntin’ for snakeheads with the Jackson boys.”