About any of it, the snake, the frog, all of it. Any other woman would have been on the next stage out of town by Wednesday. She considered the question seriously. The way she seemed to consider most things, setting down her knife long enough to look at him directly. I had seven brothers, Mr. Whitmore.
There is very little a boy can do with a reptile that would surprise me at this point. She glanced at him sideways. Your sons aren't cruel. They're grieving and they're testing whether I'll run like the others did seems like a reasonable thing to test honestly in their position. I'd rather they test me with a bullfrog than not test me at all.
A boy who stopped testing has usually stopped hoping. Cal had no answer for that. He only stood there holding a dish towel he'd forgotten to use, watching a woman calmly gut a trout and dismantle 5 months of failed apologies without seeming to notice she was doing it. It was Johnny who broke first, as Cal had half expected he might, being the youngest and the least practiced yet at holding a grudge for its own sake. Bess found him crouched by Judge's crate one afternoon, poking a curious finger near the snake's coiled body.
His small face caught between fear and fascination, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds to be sure his brothers weren't watching him fraternize with the enemy's pet. "He won't bite you," Bess said, settling down on the floor beside him without ceremony, her skirts pooling around her. Snakes like him bite mice mostly and only bite people when they're scared half to death. Go on, touch him easy, right along the back, same direction his scales lie. Johnny touched him.
His eyes went wide with delighted wonder. He's not slimy. Nobody ever believes that till they touch one. Best smiled. Dry as your own hand, isn't he?
Softer even. By week's end, Johnny had taken to feeding judge scraps of bread crust the snake had no interest in and naming him the best pet in the whole territory loudly at supper until Mark could no longer maintain his stony indifference and drifted over to the crate himself. First out of curiosity, watching from a safe distance, then within days, out of the same soft affection his younger brother had already surrendered to, arguing with Johnny over whose turn it was to change the straw. Luke held out longer than either of them, arms crossed at the edge of every scene, watching his brothers defect one by one with an expression that mixed betrayal and loneliness in equal measure, though he would have died before admitting either. Beth noticed she noticed most things.
She found Luke alone behind the barn on a gray afternoon, sharpening a stick with more force than the task required. His jaw set in the particular hard line she recognized from the mirror of her own childhood grief. The year her mother died, and nothing anyone did had seemed like enough or like too much all at once. "You planning something new?" She asked, leaning easy against the barn wall.