Introduction

On the morning of her release from prison, Sunny, who grew up in a snakehandling church in the Little Egypt region of Southern Illinois, rents a garage apartment from Jackson. She's been serving a five-year sentence for shooting, but not killing, her husband, the pastor of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following, after he forced her at gunpoint to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes.

Sunny and Jackson become lovers, but they're pulled in different directions. Sunny, drawn to science and eager to put her snake handling past behind her, enrolls at the university. Jackson, however, takes a professional interest in the religious ecstasy exhibited by the snakehandlers. Push comes to shove in a novel packed with wit, substance, and emotional depth. Snakewoman of Little Egypt delivers Robert Hellenga at the top of his form.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER I: RITE OF PASSAGE

On his fortieth birthday–August sixth, 1999–Jackson Carter Jones, associate professor of Anthropology at Thomas Ford University in west central Illinois, ate a poached egg for breakfast and then sat outside on the deck. It had rained recently–twice–and the stream, Johnson Creek, which sometimes dried up at the end of the summer, was full. When it was full, it emptied into the Lakota River, which emptied into the Mississippi. He was trying to decide his own fate, take it into his own hands. He took a coin out of his pocket. A quarter. One of the new ones, Pennsylvania, the American Eagle replaced by an allegorical female figure. He flipped it. It landed on the glass table top, bounced off onto the plank floor. The dog, a black lab with a little Rottweiler showing in her broad chest, jumped. The coin rolled in a big circle, then a smaller circle, and finally fell through a crack in the deck onto the sand and grit below, where a big groundhog had made his den.

Jackson had Warren’s .22, which he’d cleaned the night before. A box of .22 longs sat next to an empty coffee cup on the table. He was waiting for the groundhog to appear (as he did every morning), but the groundhog was too canny for him. It always out waited him, or took him by surprise. Took the dog, Maya, by surprise too.

In the old days Warren, the hired man he’d inherited from Claude Michaut, along with the house, had caught the groundhogs in a trap that cut their heads right off. The trap was still up in the garage, but Jackson didn’t know how to set it; and it was dangerous; and he didn’t have the strength; and he didn’t need the stress. He was still recovering from a bout of Lyme Disease. More than a bout. In the last two years he’d been diagnosed with everything from AIDS and the Chinese flu and mad cow disease to giardia, lupus, sleeping sickness, schizophrenia, and White Shaker Dog Syndrome. By the time a doctor in Chicago figured out he had Lyme disease, he was presenting psychotic symptoms–confusion, short term memory loss, disorientation, inability to recognize his car in the parking lot, religious hallucinations too–ghosts from the past: his mother, his father, Warren, Claude, Mbuti friends from the Ituri Forest–his girlfriend, Sibaku, and their daughter, whom he’d never seen. Now, on the road to wellness, the swelling in his joints was minimal and he could walk around without difficulty, once he managed to get out of bed in the morning, and he no longer had to leave written step-by-step instructions on his kitchen table explaining how to get through the day. No more visitors from his past life knocked on the door in his sleep. He was looking forward to the future for the first time in almost two years.

He looked through the cracks between the planks, looked in his pocket for another coin but didn’t find one. He could have crawled under the deck. The quarter would have to be there, heads or tails, unless it had gone into the groundhog hole.

Heads meant he should go back to Africa, which still felt like home to him after thirteen years; tails he should get married and settle down right where he was, where he already had a house in the middle of eighty acres of timber, and a garage, with a little apartment over it. The apartment was empty now, since Warren’s death. Warren had been a janitor in Davis Hall, which housed the Anthropology and Philosophy Departments, when Claude came to TF. He’d accepted Claude’s offer of free rent in exchange for looking after the property. He’d cut up firewood, stacked it, plowed the drive in winter with a little Case tractor with a blade bolted onto the front end, mowed the tall grass in summer and cut down the nettles on the other side of the stream and the poison ivy vines that grew as thick as your arm. He’d shot varmints, shot a deer every year and dressed it for Claude, paid the bills and the real estate taxes when Claude was gone. He’d stayed in the garage apartment even after he became head of custodial services for South Campus, and was living there when Jackson came back from Africa, alone, and discovered that Claude had left the house to him, though there’s legal difficulties because it had been difficult to prove that Claude was dead.

There were rumors, in fact, that Jackson had done away with Claude deep in the heart of the Ituri Forest. The rumors weren’t true, of course–Claude had been like a father to Jackson–but it was impossible to stop them, and they created a certain mystique. His colleagues in the department joked about it–“Don’t mess with Jackson”–but the important thing was that Warren hadn’t believed the rumors, if he had, he might have killed Jackson. Instead he took it on himself to look after Jackson the way he’d looked after Claude.

The prospect of going back to Africa appealed to Jackson. He’d gone to the Congo when it was still Zaire, just as he was about to start his third year in graduate school. Some grant money had appeared out of nowhere, and Claude tapped him to go along, probably because he spoke French and because he’d done well in Prof. Steckley’s two-semester Swahili course. Though there were others who had taken the course too and done just as well. Kingwana or “kitchen Swahili,” a Bantu language, was the lingua franca in the Congo. The Negroes who lived along the edge of the Forest spoke it, and the polyglot Mbuti spoke it in the villages, though they spoke a dialect of their own among themselves in the Forest. Jackson wouldn’t say he’d mastered this difficult dialect, but he’d learned it tolerably well in the four years he’d spent in the Forest. But what had given him the edge over the other graduate students was the fact that he played the harmonica, or the blues harp, at department parties, and Claude had got it into his head that Jackson was an ethnomusicologist who could help him record and preserve the Mbuti music.

Two and a half years after Claude’s death Jackson had been arrested outside Etienne Rameau’s huge mud mansion at Camp Rameau by two Bantu policemen. They’d been waiting for him to come out of the Forest for two months. Rumors of Claude’s death had reached the authorities, and the authorities had done what authorities always do. But suspicion of murder? Assisted suicide, possibly, though Jackson didn’t think the charge would have stuck in a court of law, and it hadn’t come to that. He’d been taken to the American embassy at Kinshasa. No one wanted an international incident. Claude was not married but had an illegitimate daughter living in Lyons. It was the University–Thomas Ford University–that had wanted to know what had happened to Claude. Had he returned to France without telling anyone? Had something happened to him? No one, it turned out had been inquiring after Jackson.

By the time Jackson was arrested his visa had long expired and none of his papers were in order. He didn’t even have any papers, in fact. Not the kind of papers that the authorities wanted. Though he did manage to bring back Claude’s notebooks, which Claude had given to him after his (Claude’s) first death in the Forest–before he was dead once and for all, absolutely and completely dead, as the Mbuti put it.

What had happened was, Jackson had gone native. He’d had a taste of something that he didn’t think he could live without–ecstasy, or joy, or maybe simply a settled conviction of well being, of being at home in the universe, of being where he belonged–though this settled conviction was punctuated by periods of incandescent… He couldn’t find the words. Perhaps Romaine Rolland’s oceanic feeling, though Freud had regarded this oceanic feeling as a delusion. Had what Jackson experienced been a delusion or an insight? a fantasy or a vision? But it wasn’t like that at all, really. And how could an oceanic feeling be incandescent? He could still remember the feeling even if he couldn’t name it. His body remembered. His skin remembered the overpowering moist heaviness of the gigantic trees; his eyes remembered the cool shadowy half light that spooked the Negroes who lived on plantations at the edge of the Forest; his ears remembered the birdsong and the monkey chatter and the night sounds that might or might not be the cough of a leopard; his nose remembered the smell of the munu’asulu leaves used to wrap food to be cooked in the embers of a fire and the sweet body odor of the Mbuti men; his tongue remembered the bitterness of liko, brewed from berries and herbs, and the sharp tang of termites–admittedly an acquired taste–which provided the Mbuti, as it did our earliest hominid ancestors, with a rich supply of protein.

Living in the garden of Eden. Not figuratively, but literally. That’s what Claude had concluded, and that was what he wanted Jackson to convey to the learned world. But it was a huge job. Jackson would have to decipher Claude’s baroque French handwriting, and then he’d have to edit what was essentially a collection of disjointed field notes.

And there were other problems. He didn’t want to make himself a laughing stock, or damage Claude’s legacy.

Claude’s reputation rested on a series of authoritative ethnographies, written in French and subsequently translated into all the major European languages–of the various ‘pygmy’ peoples of central and western Africa–the Batwa, the Bayaka, the Bagyeli, and finally, the Bambuti. (‘Ba’ simply means ‘people.’) What would happen to this legacy if Jackson laid out Claude’s claim to have located the Garden of Eden, right on the border between Uganda and The Democratic Republic of Congo?

Jackson’s own more modest reputation rested on his book, My Life as an Mbuti, which had drawn the ire of fellow anthropologists. Why? Because Jackson hadn’t played by the rules. On the one hand, he’d been too involved with the natives to see them clearly; the book was too subjective. On the other hand, he’d made the cardinal mistake of the old anthropology by assuming that Mbuti culture enacted a set of values and norms and cognitive frameworks and then by reifying conceptually convenient binary oppositions instead of unpacking and problematizing them.

But what really frosted his critics was that My Life as an Mbuti had been a national best seller and that in it Jackson had revealed what many anthropologists regarded as a dirty little secret that ought to be kept a secret: he’d slept with the natives. One of the natives. Sibaku, daughter of Asumali, the great story teller, and Makela, who supervised the elima.

If you’d asked Jackson who the president of the United States was when he came out of the Forest, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you, wouldn’t have known that Reagan had defeated Mondale in a landslide, or that Gorbachev was the new leader of the Soviet Union or that Indira Gandhi had been assassinated by one of her bodyguards, or that the Challenger had exploded off the coast of Florida after one of the O-ring seals failed at liftoff.

He had applied for a visa to return to Africa shortly after his return to the states–he wanted to see Sibaku, and he wanted to see his daughter–but his request had been denied. He hadn’t been able to produce a notarized letter from a host or friend in what was then Zaire, and with Claude dead and Camp Rameau abandoned, he wasn’t likely to get one. He’d been persona non grata, and neither the State Department nor Mobutu’s government was interested in having him return. But Mobutu’s government had been overthrown in 1997 by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, and had become the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kabila, a man with a reputation for burning his critics alive at the stake, was promising reforms, but the borders with Uganda and Rwanda were too unstable. Travel warnings had been issued. A cease fire had been signed in July between Kabila and the Uganda and Rwanda-backed rebels, but there was no question of trying to get across the border from Uganda or Rwanda. Or from Sudan. If he got someone to ferry him across the Congo River from the Republic of Congo in the west, where would he be? Five hundred miles from where he wanted to be. He could imagine surviving for a week in the heart of the Forest itself, living on nuts and tubers, mushrooms and honey, but not the five or six weeks it would take to reach the Epalu River, if he could find his way, which was doubtful. Besides, he didn’t think he could get from Brazzaville to Stanleyville without papers.

His daughter. He knew it was a daughter because of the last letter he had received from Etienne Rameau, but he didn’t know her name. The letter he sent to Etienne to read to Sibaku, his Mbuti girlfriend, came back five months later stamped DÉCÉDÉE. Etienne, not Sibaku.

He couldn’t make contact because none of the Mbuti could read or write, and they didn’t have addresses. He couldn’t call up a friend, because there were no telephones in the Forest.

He told himself that it was too complicated. But his daughter had come to him in his sleep. In his dreams she looked like her mother. Four feet tall. Bronze. Anthropologists often sleep with the natives, but they never talk about it. It was unprofessional. Regrettable. Always a mistake. That was the official line. But Sibaku had been museka–ready for sex but not yet married–and could sleep with anyone she liked without being reproached, as long as her lover made appropriate gifts to her father, which Jackson was happy to do, presenting the old man with his second best knife, a ‘C’ harmonica, and a pocket compass. The Mbuti practiced exogamy, and Jackson was the only one in the whole band who could have married her.

He wasn’t worried about his daughter. She’d be taken care of–mothered, fathered, uncled, aunted, cousined, loved. Soon it would be time for her elima, time for her to become a woman.

In his dreams she’s not unhappy. He doesn’t have to worry about her. But she worries about him. Is he happy? Does he have enough to eat? Does the Forest where he lives give him what he needs? Does the molimo come to wake up the forest where he lives? In his dreams he can hear the molimo (grunting, growling, singing, whistling, farting), waking him up just as his alarm goes off.

But was getting married in the US any less complicated than going back to Africa? And would marriage offer what he was looking for? And whom would he marry?

Actually there was no shortage of single women on campus, attractive women his age who’d pursued careers instead of marriage and family, who’d written books and secured grants and received awards and done all sorts of remarkable things, and who were ready to settle into companionable marriages. He’d enjoyed non-dangerous liaisons with a number of them, before the Lyme disease, and his old pal Claire Reynolds was bringing another one over tonight. Claire, whom he’d expected to marry back in his early days at TF, had married a priest instead, an Episcopal priest, and had lived the sort of life Jackson had expected to lead himself, at least at the time, in an old Victorian

balloon-framed monster with a porte cochere, two children, a dog. Well, he had a dog–Maya. Claire was always fixing him up. She saw her role as looking after Jackson. As an adult might look after a grown-up-but-not-quite-responsible child. She wanted him to live the life she was living and was always inviting him to this or that special service at Grace Episcopal Church.

Jackson didn’t mind, didn’t mind that she’d invited herself and her priest husband over for supper, so he wouldn’t be alone on his birthday. He didn’t mind her priest husband, though he was a bit of a dry stick. High church. The sort of priest who might have gone over to Rome if an attractive young woman like Claire hadn’t turned to him for spiritual guidance.

Claire was bringing along a friend, someone new in the English department who had the cry of the loons on her answering machine. Jackson should call her, Claire said, just to hear it. But he didn’t call. Claire had offered to bring the meal too, but she thought her friend Pam would be more impressed if Jackson did the cooking, which he would have done anyway, as Claire knew perfectly well.

So, there was Claire’s friend in the offing. And there was Warren’s niece, Willa Fern. Jackson had promised Warren to look after Willa Fern when she got out of prison. At least to keep an eye on her. And Warren had hinted openly that she’d make a good wife, and that he’d already spoken to her about the possibility of marrying Jackson, though the reason she was in prison was for shooting her husband, and as far as Jackson knew, her husband was still among the living, still her husband, in fact. Warren had hired a lawyer to help her file for a divorce, but then Warren had gotten sick, and the divorce-and-re-marriage plan had been put on hold.

Jackson hadn’t rejected the idea outright. Willa Fern was a good looking woman, at least in the framed photo Warren had kept on his desk, and she was neither too old nor too young–mid-thirties–and Jackson had entertained a Pygmalion fantasy in which he played Rex Harrison to her Julie Andrews, or perhaps her Audrey Hepburn.

He heard a sound under the deck. The groundhog. He’d been so quiet for such a long time in his musings that the groundhog must have thought it was safe to go down to the stream. The dog started barking, and instead of going back down in his hole the groundhog made a break for it.

He had a second hole, of course, in the front of the house by the woodpile. Jackson kept filling both holes with a mixture of dirt and clay, only to find them opened up the next time he looked.

The groundhog was scuttling down to the stream. He was half way down the slope by the time Jackson had him in his sights. Jackson kept both eyes open. He looked at the sight, not at the groundhog, but he could sense the groundhog turning to look at him. He started to squeeze the trigger but didn’t squeeze all the way. He let the groundhog go. He let him get away.

He took shells out of the .22 and put them back in the box on the table. He put the rifle back in its case. He made another small pot of espresso in one of Claude’s many espresso pots, a French pot with a little spout on it. This one had a little shelf. You put your cup on the little shelf and the coffee came out of the spout and into the cup. If you forgot to put a cup on the shelf, as he sometimes did, the coffee spilled all over the stove, ran down into the burners.

*

He drove into town. The dog, Maya, riding shotgun.

He stopped at Farm King on the way into town and bought a Have-a-Heart trap. The clerk, who recognized Jackson and called him ‘professor,’ suggested pouring antifreeze down the groundhog holes.

“What about the dog?”

“You want to keep the dog away from there for a few days.”

“Any other ideas?”

“Get yourself a hose and pour ammonia down the hole. Wait a couple of minutes,” she said, “to let the ammonia settle. Then you add a bottle of bleach and get the hell out of there. You don’t want to breath that stuff. You know, a lot of housewives get sick that way, mixing ammonia and bleach. They think…”

Jackson paid for the Have-a-Heart trap.

“You put some canned peaches in there, you’ll get something.”

“Thanks.”

He put the trap in the back of the truck and stayed on the highway instead of turning on Farm King Road to avoid the smell from the meat processing plant when the wind was from the north; past the prison, then east on Broadway to the Circle at the center of town. It was the most attractive way to approach the town, Colesville, named after Edward Coles, an abolitionist governor who eventually got disgusted with Illinois politics and went back to Philadelphia. Broadway, once you got past Lindon Road, was lined with big houses and big trees, oaks and maples and an occasional elm that had survived the blight. The houses were eccentric, but lovely in new coats of paint. Like the houses in San Francisco, except they weren’t all jammed together.

At Cornucopia on East Main St. he bought gorgonzola instead of one of the more expensive French blue cheeses, fresh pasta, French bread. He’d spent a year in France with his parents, when he was twelve, and then he’d gone back on his own for a year of doing nothing. After a week at the international youth hostel on rue Trousseau, he and a French girl from Toulouse who was looking for a roommate moved into a little apartment on the rue Stanislas, across from a tanning salon (Centre de Bronzage). They shopped every day at a fruiterie on the Boulevard du Montparnasse and at the same charcuterie that his mother had patronized across from the Metro station. He still shopped every day, at the HyVee in Colesville, and at Cornucopia. It was a way of getting out, giving a shape to the day, being around people, seeing what looked good. He hadn’t had much appetite for a while, but it was coming back, and he was able to drink a little beer or wine now without any ill effects.

And there were always good looking women. Wherever you went. Even in the HyVee. Amazing. So much beauty. Though not like Paris, where the women dressed up even to go to the butcher. His mother had dressed up. His father too. And Suzanne, the woman he’d lived with for almost a year, had dressed up just to look out the window, though she didn’t always bother to put on a skirt or pants. She was married now and lived in a big apartment in the 9th arrondissement, across the street from the house where Chopin lived during his love affair with Georges Sand, who had her own house on the same street. Every year she sent a Christmas letter inviting Jackson to spend the holidays with her and her family in their country place in the Dordogne. And Jackson sent her a Christmas letter inviting her and her family to spend the holidays with him in the woods.

He changed the menu when he saw fresh mussels at the fish counter at the back of the store. Remarkable changes had taken place at the supermarket in the last few years. You could be surprised by fresh mussels, or sea scallops, or wild shrimp, and sometimes even wild salmon. Hoisen sauce was on the shelves, along with Chinese soy sauce, next to the Kikkoman, balsamic vinegar, six or seven kinds of olive oil… You could count on radicchio and fennel and arugula in the produce section.

He’d eaten well in the Ituri Forest too. His father had warned him that he’d never make it as an anthropologist–because he didn’t like yams. And it was true, in a way. Oceana and large chunks of Asia and Africa would have been off limits. Yams morning noon and night. He couldn’t have faced it. The Mbuti ate yams, but theirs was not a yam culture. They lived on mushrooms and wild honey and plants that had no name in English, and roasted duiker, a kind of antelope, and vicious little mouse deer that lived on the river banks. And termites, and sometimes boiled monkey. Occasionally elephant.

*

When the guests arrived in Claire’s new BMW, the dog ran up the ramp to greet them. The house was halfway down a slope. The garage was at the top of the slope. At the bottom of the hill Johnson Creek separated the house from the woods beyond. The ramp was very romantic, but inconvenient. It would have been better to build the drive right down to the front of the house. Jackson had nailed little pieces of wood on the ramp, which was treacherous when it was icy and you were carrying bottles of wine in paper sacks. The guests stepped on the little pieces of wood even though it wasn’t icy.

People spoke of Claude’s cabin, but it was really a house–very rustic, but very comfortable. There was a Lopi wood burning stove in the large living room, which took up most of the first floor and was full of books, but there was a furnace too, and air conditioning.

Claire gave Jackson a couple of air kisses and introduced him to Pam. “You didn’t call her, did you? I mean, just to hear the answering machine?”

“The cry of the loons.”

“Why don’t you call now?”

“Why would I call her now?” Jackson asked. “She’s right here.” If she’s there she’ll pick up the phone…

Claire invited Pam to admire the kitchen, which Claude had designed himself–turning it into a sort of French farmhouse kitchen, with a large Lacanche stove set back into the wall, old blue and white pottery on the shelves, and terra cotta tiles on the floor. Copper pots hung from the ceiling, some with tin linings, which Jackson had retired, and some with stainless steel, which he used regularly and which needed polishing.

Pam was wearing a summer dress with a low scooped neckline. Claire was her usual classy self in a pale pastel sheath dress that would have been suitable for entertaining at the rectory, which she and her priest husband sometimes called The Vicarage–a beautiful Victorian balloon-framed monstrosity with leaded windows on the first two floors and eyebrow windows in the attic. Father Ray, Claire’s husband, was independently wealthy. So was Claire. At least her parents were.

“Jackson, if you’d listen to me you’d be able to afford decent wine.” She handed Jackson a paper sack with two bottles of wine. Claire had been putting money into dot.com stocks and was trying to get others to join her. Jackson was too stubborn. “Doesn’t it bother you to see everybody around you getting rich? It’s not too late, you know. And apparently this was the case, because shares kept going up and up and up. Jackson didn’t follow the market, but did listen to NPR.

“Get out while you can, Claire,” he said. “You’ll thank me later. This whole country’s gone crazy. It’s the South Sea Bubble all over again.”

Father Ray came to his wife’s defense. “It’s different this time.”

“It’s always ‘different,’” Jackson said. He deliberately didn’t take the wine out of the sacks till he was in the kitchen. Claire had spent a fortune on two bottles of Chateau Units. “Did you hear about that guy in Atlanta,” he said, “who killed nine people and wounded I don’t remember how many? He was a day trader.”

“He went crazy,” Claire said, “because he lost money, not because he made money.”

“I don’t want to be around when you lose all your money.”

“Jackson won’t listen to anyone,” Claire explained to Pam. “If he’d listened to me, he’d be a millionaire right now. Or at least a hundred-thousandaire.”

She turned to Jackson: “Pam’s just taken a course in day trading. She’s going to help us all get rich. We’re going to form an investment club. Pam will be our guru.”

Pam was a poet. She’d taken up day trading to supplement her income, because there’s not a lot of money in poetry. She’d gone to a seminar on day trading in Chicago that lasted a full week.

Claire said, “You paid $1500. Right?”

Pam nodded.

“What did you learn?” Jackson asked.

“Don’t hang onto stocks over night.”

“Why’s that?”

“Extra risk. You don’t need it. Especially when you’re starting out.”

“What kind of risk?”

“Well, if you go to bed holding onto your shares and they devalue the currency in Brazil, you’re in trouble up to here.” She indicated her chin. That’s what happened in January. The Dow dropped two hundred points.”

“But it came right back up,” Father Ray said.

“How do you know what to buy and sell?” Jackson asked.

“You get up in the morning and watch CNBC. You see who the guests are. If they’re on CNBC they’re not going to be bringing bad news, so you buy those companies. If it’s Michael Dell, you buy Dell. If it’s Steve Jobs, you buy Apple.

“You want to get in and out and make a lot of small profits. Everything is liquid, so you can buy at 60 and sell at 59 1/8.”

“Why would you do that? I mean, why would you do that? Sell at a loss?”

“Sorry. You could buy at 60 and sell at 60 1/8. Better?”

“If the market goes up. If you make two hundred dollars a day, that’s an extra $50,000 a year.”

“Don’t be such a stick in the mud,” Claire said to Jackson. “Pam says we should invest in ShoppingKart. Start with $5000 a piece. You can come up with $5000, can’t you Jackson? You’ve got nothing to spend your salary on. Unless it’s your Save-the-Pygmies fund.” Tell them about ShoppingKart, Pam.”

“ShoppingKart’s going to be huge. It’s going to target the entire American retail grocery market.” It’s a ten-billion dollar company.”

What does ShoppingKart do?

They’re reengineering the entire grocery industry. They’ve got a 330,000-square-foot warehouse in Oakland, and they’ve signed a deal with Bechtel to build twenty-six more, all over the country. You go on line and make a list. You’ve got three hundred different vegetables to choose from, three hundred fifty kinds of cheese; seven hundred wine labels. They assemble your order, send it to a docking station, and then it’s delivered right to your door. Profit margins of twelve percent. Do you know what the average is for supermarkets?”

No one knew. “Three percent. Three percent.”

“I like to do my own shopping,” Jackson said.

Claire was anxious for Jackson to open the wine. He put it off, just to let the anxiety build a little. As if he might not open it till they sat down to eat. Which was the sensible way to do things. Claire headed them toward the kitchen, and a corkscrew.

“This is what anthropologists call magical thinking,” Jackson said. “If you wish hard enough for something to happen, it will happen. Like the cargo cults. People think these dot.com guys are some kind of spiritual beings possessing divine powers. Like John Frum.”

“I’m wishing that you’d open the wine,” Claire said.

Jackson opened Claire’s wine. “Is this supposed to breathe, or can we drink it now?”

“Both,” Claire said. “Do you have any Campari?”

“No, I don’t have any Campari.”

Claire laughed. She always asked for a Campari soda, reminding Jackson of a time when they used to drink Campari soda all the time.

Pam stooped to admire the view through the kitchen window. “Do we have time for a walk before supper?”

She was looking at eighty acres of timber. Woodlots. Mostly second growth, but a lot of the old trees still standing. White oaks, red oaks. Horse chestnut. Hickories. Kentucky coffee trees, two or three elms that survived the Dutch elm disease that devastated the campus and the town. There were two cottonwoods at the far end of the property, where the stream ducked under Route 64, and plenty of wild cherry, Osage orange, walnut, hackberry, mulberry.

“You wouldn’t want to walk now,” Jackson said. “I didn’t get the paths cleared this summer. Warren–Warren used to live over the garage–always cleared the paths in the spring with a trimmer mower, but Warren got sick. Too much poison ivy, you’ve got to be careful. Too late to do it now. You’ve got to watch out for ticks too.”

“Jackson had this marvelous hired man who did everything for him. Plowed the drive, fixed the roof, cleared the paths… He inherited him from Claude Michaut. Mr. Pygmy.”

Jackson poured olive oil into a large tin-lined copper saucepan and added some minced garlic. Just before the garlic had started to turn golden, he added a generous splash of white wine.

“He’s got a niece,” Claire said. “Warren does. In the prison here. Henrietta Hill Correctional Facility–‘The Hill.’ He got her into Thomas Ford. Got her a tuition scholarship and left her enough money to pay for everything else. Jackson’s supposed to look after her.”

Jackson crumbled some gorgonzola onto the salad.

“Have you figured out what to do with her? I mean, is she going to live in a dorm? How old is she? She’s about thirty-five, right? Hard to imagine she’d want to live in a dorm with nineteen to twenty-two year olds. Of course, after Henrietta Hill, who knows? She could probably teach them a thing or two about group living. What about the church, Ray?” Ray seemed startled. “Can you think of anyone in the congregation who might be willing to take her in?”

“Not off hand, but I suppose we could put a notice in the bulletin.”

“She’ll need some friends, that’s for sure. We can help out there.”

“What’s she in prison for?”

“She shot her husband, isn’t that it?”

“I didn’t know that was a crime.”

“Very funny, Pamela. But it was more complicated than that, wasn’t it Jackson?”

“Much more complicated.”

“Her husband forced her to put her arm in a box of rattlesnakes, isn’t that right? Forced her at gunpoint.”

Pam expressed the appropriate horror. “So she had a good reason to shoot him. Did she get bit?”

Jackson was sorry now that he’d ever told the story to Claire. Like a lot of stories, this one had gotten loose, like a snake, and was probably going to start biting people. Claire had no doubt spread it around the university. Mea culpa. “I guess it was too good a story to keep to myself,” he said aloud. (Though he’d kept quiet about the Garden of Eden, and about his daughter.)

“She got bit, but I think it wasn’t real bad. They got her to the hospital right away.”

“Why didn’t they put him in jail?”

“I don’t know. I guess the bite didn’t swell up much. Her husband said it might have been their pet raccoon that bit her.”

“A snake box? Who’s got a snake box?”

Jackson dumped the mussels into the pan, put the top on, and looked at his watch. Soup bowls were stacked on the counter. A loaf of French bread, from the bakery, was on the table.

“Willa Fern’s husband, that’s who. He’s a holiness preacher down in Little Egypt. Southern tip of Illinois, across the Ohio River from Kentucky.

“Is that around here?” Pam asked. Pam was from California.

“Four hundred miles.”

“Why does he have a box of rattlesnakes?”

“They handle them during their services.”

“Is that legal?”

“Probably not.”

Claire poured herself some more wine. “Jackson, I’m going to go with you when you pick that poor woman up at the Henrietta Hill. She’s going to need a female friend.”

“We’ll see.”

“There’s no ‘we’ll see’ about it. She’s going to need some looking after. Imagine, your husband forcing you to put your arm in a box of rattlesnakes. And when you try to defend yourself you get thrown in jail. This country is unbelievable.”

*

Jackson specialized in simple French or French-type dishes. He had both volumes of Julia Childs Mastering the Art of French Cooking and a copy of Larousse Gastronomique in French, but the only cookbook he used regularly was his first, which he’d bought at Kroch and Brentano’s in Chicago. The Flavor of France. A picture on every page (of France, not the food), and no recipe was longer than a half a page. He hadn’t given a little intimate dinner in two years, and he was looking forward to the buzz–from the wine, and from the possibility of a strange woman spending the night.

Claire asked Ray to say grace and insisted that they all hold hands. Jackson, sitting across from Father Ray, held hands with Claire and with Pam, ready to disengage his hand before Claire gave it a special little squeeze. Pam’s holding strategy was neutral. She had no special message to communicate. No invitation.

He put a side of salmon on the grill so it would cook while they ate their first course, moules marinières. One thing he’d learned from Claude was how to give a nice rhythm to a meal by serving two courses of more or less equal weight. The salmon was not quite done by the time he’d cleared the mussel plates, so they picked up the thread of the earlier conversation–ShoppingKart–and then Father Ray pointed out that today was not only Jackson’s birthday, and not only the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, but also the Feast of the Transfiguration. There was a connection in Father Ray’s mind because his grandfather had been killed at Okinawa in 1945.

“Some churches have started to celebrate the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent. It’s not a bad idea, actually. It makes a nice transition between Epiphany and Lent. But I don’t know. It’s always been on August sixth, as long as I can remember.”

By the time they got back to the heat and the humidity the salmon was flaking nicely. It was beautiful. Jackson served it on large white plates that had room for the salad. A wonderful salad. Spring mix. All kinds of herbs and lettuces in special bags.

“You know what I’m thankful for?” he said. “I’m thankful for the salads in these little bags. It took them a long time to figure out how to get the bags right. Each bag is a miniature biosphere. You have to have a different kind of atmosphere for every kind of salad. You get the wrong kind of ink on the package, bang, your salad is suffocated.

*

Jackson didn’t keep any brandy or cognac around, no hard liquor in the house. So they drank more wine. Jackson had always enjoyed unbuttoned after-dinner talk, but he was thinking of introducing a system of entertaining in which people came over for a good meal and then left right away. That’s the way his parents had entertained. Before they’d lived in Paris. But it would be hard to explain this to friends and colleagues when you were inviting them to dinner. I’d like you to come for dinner, but I want you to leave as soon as we’re done eating.

Jackson made a pot of espresso. He was afraid to drink any more wine because of the Lyme disease, but Claire kept topping off her glass. Ray tried to slow her down without being too obvious about it, offering to clear her plate and glass. But she was not about to let the glass go. Or the second bottle of Chateau Nuits, which was still half full.

Later on, in the kitchen, as he was getting come clementini out of the hydrator, he had one of those inevitable refrigerator moments: you stand up and close the refrigerator door, and there she is, someone who wants to know how you really are. Someone you’ve been trying to avoid being alone with. You’ve been trying to avoid this moment. She’s unsteady. Glass in hand, she mouths her words: “You know I still love you, Jackson. Nothing can change that.”

Claire was still handsome at thirty-five or thirty-six, but her hips were starting to spread, and she wasn’t dressing her age, and she’d drunk too much wine and was looking blowsy. Jackson wanted to say that plenty had changed ‘that.’ But he didn’t say anything, because he remembered Claire. The way she used to be. Young and full of hope. A different Claire. His first real love. The first woman he’d gone to bed with more than two or three times. (Except for Suzanne Toulon, the girl he’d lived with in France.) Together they’d experienced ecstasy. He didn’t know what else to call it. Would she have become a different woman, he wondered, if she hadn’t dumped him for Father Ray? And would he have become a different man?

What had happened was, Claire and Jackson had come to Thomas Ford the same year. Both had been rising stars. Jackson had published a popular account of the four plus years he’d spent with the Mbuti, and Claire had an NEA fellowship under her belt. She also had a manuscript and a New York agent. She and Jackson soon became an item. Three years later they were still an item, but Claire’s novel, The Sins of the World, had been rejected thirty-nine times. Her classmates from the Iowa Writers Workshop were publishing novels, winning prizes, getting reviewed. Claire’s agent dropped her–there were no more publishers left–and Claire had to start submitting it to contests. She was suicidal. Jackson was afraid she’d throw herself off the roof of her building. He told her not to worry, that nobody read novels anyway, but this was her vocation, her calling. She couldn’t just walk away from it. She started going to the Episcopal Church–Grace Church, on Carl Sandburg Drive–and she stopped going to bed with Jackson. She needed to be chaste for a while. She turned to Father Ray for spiritual advice, and he told her about God’s love and she told Jackson about it. Then the news came. The Sins of the World had won the Donner Prize. It didn’t matter that no one had ever heard of the Donner Prize. The book would be published. Claire sat on this news for quite a while. Jackson wanted to have a party, offered to throw a party. But Claire thought it was a time to be quiet. Thankful. Prayerful. The romance was over. Claire married Father Ray.

She still came to see him now and then, when Father Ray was out of town or had a vestry meeting, and they’d make love on the big leather sofa in the living room. She thought she was doing him a favor, and he thought he was doing her a favor, and so it was never very satisfactory. But it was better than nothing.

“You don’t need to say anything,” she mouthed. Putting her finger to her lips. Then out loud: “I’ll go with you to pick up Warren’s niece–What’s her name?”

“Willa Fern.”

“You shouldn’t have to face that alone.”

The clementini were in a mesh sack. Jackson tumbled them into a glass bowl. “Would anyone like an espresso?” he shouted. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1. Snakewoman of Little Egypt takes place in 1999 and 2000, a recent past that readers
should remember well. What period details from the turn of the millennium come to life
in the novel? Why do you think Robert Hellenga set his novel at this time instead of the
present day?
2. As soon as she steps out of prison, Sunny declares, “I used to be Willa Fern. Now I’m
Sunny.” (35) What does this new name mean to Sunny? How does her outlook on life
change in this moment?
3. Consider how Sunny and Jackson tell their own stories. How do the chapters in Sunny’s
voice differ from the chapters told from Jackson’s point of view?
4. Discuss what snakes mean to each character in the novel. Why do Earl, DX, and the
followers of their church handle snakes? Why are Cramer and Sunny studying them?
Why is Jackson drawn to DX’s two-headed snake? What personal, spiritual, and
professional possibilities do snakes hold for each of these characters?
5. As Sunny decides to live in Jackson’s home, she tells him, “I don’t need anyone to look
after me. But maybe you need someone to look after you.” (63) Throughout Sunny and
Jackson’s relationship, who seems to look after whom? When does the balance of power
shift between them and why?
6. How does Claire, Jackson’s ex-girlfriend and occasional lover, change over the course of
the novel? Does Claire seem like a trustworthy character when we first meet her? What
about at the end of the novel, during and after Sunny’s trial? How does she eventually
earn Sunny’s trust and sisterly love?
7. At the end of her first semester at Thomas Ford University, Sunny says, “I was suddenly
overwhelmed with a sense of well-being, a sense that the answers to life’s big questions
had fallen into my lap.” (188) What important answers does Sunny learn from each of her
classes—French 101, Great Books, English 207, and Biology 120? What big questions
still remain unanswered for Sunny?
8. Discuss Earl’s leadership as the pastor of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs
Following. What are Earl’s values? What mistakes does he make when he is “backed up
on the Lord,” and how does he repent? Is he a villain in Snakewoman of Little Egypt?
Why or why not?
9. “For Jackson the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following provided a
professional opportunity too good to be passed up.” (140). Why is Jackson uniquely
qualified for this assignment of “salvage anthropology?” (123) What does Jackson seek
in Naqada, and what does he end up finding? Does his research take him closer to the
spirituality of the church or further away?
10. Twice Sunny stands trial for shooting Earl. How are the circumstances of each shooting
similar, and how are they different? At her second trial, Sunny realizes, “And the funny
thing was, I knew in my heart of hearts that in some ways the prosecutor was closer to the
truth than Stella, and he, the prosecutor, didn’t even know the half of it.” (322) What
version of Sunny does the prosecutor present to the jury? Why does the jury end up
siding with Sunny, even if the prosecutor is closer to the truth of her crimes?
11. During her trial, Sunny realizes, “And in fact in my own inner courtroom I was on trial
for going to Mexico with another man.” (314) Why does Sunny choose Mexico over
Paris? How does she atone for her decision?
12. Jackson often speaks of looking along a beam of light instead of looking at it. (168) What
vision does he seek when he looks along a beam of light? What are the rewards and
dangers of this point of view?
13. Warren, Sunny’s uncle, dies before the novel begins, but he has a strong effect on Sunny
and Jackson’s lives. What kind of man was Warren, according to Jackson and Sunny’s
memories of him? How does Warren manage to help his niece, even after his death?
14. In the end, why does Jackson return to Africa? Does it seem likely that he finds what he’s
looking for, even if Sunny never learns of his whereabouts? Why or why not?
15. Claire’s novel, Kiss of Death, ends with an engagement in France, while Snakewoman of
Little Egypt ends with a breakup and a fresh start. Which ending is more satisfying?
Which ending captures the “joie de vivre” that Sunny has been seeking since she left
prison? (340)
16. Robert Hellenga writes that the “two stories . . . are intertwined (like two snakes) in
Snakewoman of Little Egypt.” (341) How does the author weave the strands of the novel
together? What do the communities of Little Egypt and the Ituri Forest have in common,
and how are they different? How does Sunny and Jackson’s love story unite these two
worlds, and why does it ultimately drive them apart?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	You Tube Video Introduction of the book by author Robert Hellenga

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