The Black Snake

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened a month or two before my fourth birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

It was late Spring 1953 when my parents and I arrived in Massachusetts. I recall an arrival through the gates of Fort Devens while it was still light, and a stop somewhere on base to check in briefly. Then we were back in the car driving for miles. I didn't understand. If that was our destination, why weren't we staying there?

Of course, there's never housing on base right away. There's always a waiting list. We had to find a motel to stay at while looking for a house to lease until on-base housing materialized.

Fort Devens lies between two towns, Ayer to the East Northeast, and Shirley to the West. Neither was very large. Ayer may have had a population of 3,000 then. Shirley was smaller. I don't believe either town had a motel in those days. But if there were they had no vacancies that night, and we ended up near Clinton, about 12 miles away.

We stayed there a week or two, with no place for me to go and nothing, literally nothing and nobody to play with. Then one day my parents loaded me and everything else in the car, and I thought maybe were we giving up and driving back to Hawaii. I asked if that was what was happening. My father yelled at me. He said I was an idiot, and told me to shut up and never ask him a stupid question ever again. Especially while he's driving.

We ended up on a beautiful country highway, with a forested hill to our left and farm land with occasional lines of woods leading away from the highway to the right. I now know we were traveling west on Leominster Road away from Shirley toward Leominster, and the lines of woods followed streams leading from culverts. A couple of miles from the town the road itself was lined with trees. We turned right and north into a driveway. The driveway bent softly right just until the highway was lost behind us in the trees, then it turned back north.

It was a private 800 yard driveway to a two-story cinder-block farmhouse for a farm that was no longer being cultivated. The owner, the farmer who had worked the land, was by then retired. He was there when we arrived to hand over the keys. Later I learned that he lived in another farmhouse on the other side of the highway beyond where we turned in, altogether a quarter mile away. Our next nearest neighbors were a half mile away, the other direction.

The house faced west to the driveway. There were woods behind it, and overgrown grass stretched out before it. It had a flat roof. We found out later just how shabbily built it was (the first time it rained). To my parents it probably looked like a dump. To me it looked like a palace on the edge of a mysterious forest in a magical kingdom.

As the farmer left us, my Mother strode toward the front door to be the first to go in. I was right beside her, having already inched to it while the adults talked. Just as she stepped onto the first of two steps up the porch a shiny sleek four-foot black racer shot up from bushes from the left, onto the porch in front of her, and darted across her path and off to our right.

My Mother screamed bloody murder. I squealed with utter delight. I'd never seen anything so gorgeous and so purely alive. Pure concentrated life poured over the porch of that house! The place WAS magical!