Snake Pit

a ban on thoughts and prayers

My Uncle Eldon lived across the street from my grandma, my Colorado grandma, my dad’s mom. Uncle Eldon had an attic like a museum, full of kachina dolls and massive native headdresses of eagle feathers, civil war rifles and revolutionary war sabres, an honest to god conquistador’s helmet, cases full of arrowheads and ancient pottery, and more taxidermied rattlesnakes than a roadside steakhouse. I’ve heard at least 7 stories about where he got it all and even more about who was trying to buy his collection—from one of the lesser Kennedys to an unnamed Saudi Prince. It was always someone, according to Uncle Eldon. You have to add “according to Uncle Eldon” when you tell Uncle Eldon stories because Uncle Eldon was famously full of shit, which is to say, the man could tell a story. I liked him a lot.

Uncle Eldon was missing most of his index finger on his right hand. If you asked him how it happened, and because I was a kid, I did ask, he’d tell you everything from a “Jap bit it off in Guam,” to “got it stuck in a skunk butt and the smell wouldn’t go away” to “that’s what’ll happen when some boys from Chicago try and buy your kachina dolls and you don’t sell.” But his most common reason involved snakes. He hadn’t noticed a snake wrapped ‘round his axle. He pulled a dead one outta the cooler and it was still mad about it. He was playing with a head he’d taxidermied and the fangs still had venom.

Anytime we drove up to Colorado to visit my grandma, just as soon as we’d dispensed with hugs and turns in the bathroom, Uncle Eldon would walk over, settle himself in the easy chair and start with the stories. Most of his stories involved snakes. Come to think of it, snakes were “how Uncle Eldon got his collection, version 23,” something about trading snake skins with local tribes. He’d light up a Pall Mall and tell us he had a friend, who, last summer, got bit by a rattler and his arm swelled so bad, they had to cut it open so the skin wouldn’t burst. He’d gone to see him at the VA hospital and there he lay, with his arm swollen like a log, the skin stitched together leaving a 3 inch gap exposed where you could see all his muscles turned black from venom. He’d caught a few snakes and had them resting in the cooler so their skins would loosen, the heads cut off. And those mean little buggers were still snapping at each other the next morning, just the heads. He knew a kid who ate a bunch of rattles, snake rattles, and spent a week in the hospital. The man knew his audience.