I Remember Sarah, By Mauree McKaen

I Remember Sarah

The Day of the Snake
I remember talking to Sarah one day and discovering that we both remembered each other easiest among the six of us kids. In her first memory she describes it, “I am crying and crying and crying. Still nobody comes. First I saw that wild thatch of standing-up jet black hair and then an arm stretching through the bars of the crib and then my bottle rolling to me.” That must have been when we were living in Pinckney. I was perhaps two and half so she must have been one and a half.

In my first memory of her I am not nearly so heroic. In mine the sun burns hot but the shade stays cold. It is October on the Angle farm. I am on fire with fun chasing her and fat little Billy with a dead snake. It was a gigantic Blue Racer that had already been dead at least a day by the time that I wrapped it around a small tree branch I had turned into my magic spear. So it was big and stinky and plenty scary. No one recalls a family foot race that Sarah didn’t win but with every little shake of that snake stick she burst into after burn and only her shriek could keep up with her flying feet. This, of course, fired me up more. Round and round the yard we flew. The more she shrieked, more I laughed.

It seems funny now how many of our stories were in the fall. That autumn, it feels like we we’re nearly always laughing. In a blur, more felt than seen in my memory, we had arrived at the Angle farm not that long before snake day. While mom and Dad unloaded, we flew from the old Ford like kids exploding through the schoolhouse door on the last day of the year.

The Angle farm was the total opposite of the suffocating summer we had spent in Fowlerville just before. There the city pressed in on us on every side. Inside the tiny apartment the air stood still and stagnanted as everybody was pretty much forced to do everything in the same small room. Going out to play was prohibited where the only door opened practically unto the street. There is a photo of Sarah and I standing out in front that shows a barren grassless postage stamp of a place that couldn’t contain the two of us much less us and our two brothers. In the picture, we are in matching dresses that Aunt Denise and Aunt Nan bought us. I must have been three and Sarah two because the new dresses were to help welcome my mother home from the hospital with another baby brother, Bob. Looking at the photo now the thing I most remember is hating the dresses.

By comparison and in fact the farm was immense in our eyes. There was the farmhouse itself and a great old barn and outbuildings with acres of fields falling away on every side of the farm proper and fields and woods across the country dirt road as far as the eye could see. We flew first to the barn and then into the woods that lay just beyond it. Finally back again and through the back door into the house, catching our mom kissing our dad and laughing somewhere in one of the big farmhouse rooms between the front door and back. It felt so good to be there like begining all over again.

It felt best of all on snake day as round and round we raced, except that Billy, whose short two-year old legs couldn’t possibly keep up kept screaming “mommy, mommy snaaaaaake” as he ran. My mother’s words reached us before she did even before the screen door stopped slapping the frame behind her. “That’s it. I am not going to tell you kids one more time.” We screeched to a halt. Sarah scooping up a broken piece of brick even as she braked and me heaving Big Blue off my magic spear and into the deep weeds. If there was anything that got my mother going even more than us pickin’ on baby Billy it was snakes.

So there we stood, Sarah and I, at high noon in the front yard, the law bearing down on us fast; she with the small piece of ragged brick and me with the stick, face-to-face, eyes locked, “You better put that down.” “You put the rock down first.” My mother’s steps crunched ever closer. The movement was like silverfish . I released my magic spear in one smooth swift motion taking aim at her shoulder. Blood gushed out all over as the spear pierced her face. Looking up at me astonished, she blurted, “I was only droppin’ the rock” and burst into tears. My mother screamed and ran to her. I tried and tried to tell Sarah that I didn’t mean it all the way into the kitchen until my mother, pressing an ice-filled towel against Sarah’s face, told me I had done quite enough and to go away. By the time I turned toward the door blood had turned the white towel red and my mother was dragging Sarah and the phone into the other room to call my Uncle Kevin.

Through the door we could hear Sarah moaning and my mother crying as she talked to Uncle Kevin. I stayed in the yard around the side of the house watching until he came and took Sarah off to be stitched up. Then I ran to barn and cried.

I recently came upon a life history Sarah wrote for her first Psychology class. In it she said that she always knew that I never meant to hurt her on the day of the snake. By that point over 50 autumns had passed between us and she had been two more gone. Reading her words felt like hearing amazing grace.