The science teacher had been at the small country school for two years when he decided to lead a field trip into the national forest to catalog trees with his fifth-graders. Nobody had ever gone on a field trip, he was told. The school didn't even have its own standardized parental-permission form template. The teacher typed his own permission slip, crafted it with love and patient skill at his typewriter late into one night. The principal had never seen a permission slip composed with such beauty, such shined, euphonious turns of phrase. She approved the field trip on the spot. The small country town's parents read it and felt a bloom of warmth in their chests. They hugged their kids the next morning, tucking the signed form into a pocket or backpack. The one mother who did not let her child attend the field trip let out a sigh of guilt so plaintive her youngest child burst into tears without knowing why.

Among the shortleaf pines and white oaks of the forest the science teacher led the children down trails, across dry streams and over small ridges, the books left behind, the classroom empty. Just before lunchtime, the science teacher caught a juvenile snake, dark in color. He held it wiry and vigorous in his cupped palms and when he opened them to show the children and the snake climbed over his hands and fell, he pinned it to the soft earth with his thumb rather than let it frighten them. The snake, a juvenile cottonmouth, bit the joint of the science teacher's thumb, releasing its full dose of venom.

The science teacher realized at once what had happened. He stood, his tongue already stiffening, speaking carefully to the children, telling the two oldest to follow the trail the half-mile back to where the bus driver sat smoking cigarettes.

When they had gone, he sat down, feeling ill. Before him the dappled light blurred and went dark. He woke in an ambulance, his arm so swollen he felt the limp and bloated weight of it pressed against his side. The darkness returned, and this time thinking it was death he hoped no child had been bitten.

Then he was in a different place, a doctor standing over him. “I'm afraid,” the doctor said, “you're not going to like what I did to your arm.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was considerable pressure to be relieved,” the doctor said. “I've never been scared of snakes, but I'm a believer, now.”

The thumb had been removed. The venom turned the skin of his arm a sickly grey and there were criss-crossed scars from wrist to elbow. He returned to teaching in the spring but the children could not take their eyes from his right hand. Even when he slipped the hand into his pocket and held it there he caught them eyeing the lump warily. They were stiff, reserved around him when once they had been affectionate and lively.

And the sensation was as if his hand had fallen asleep, the same half-tickling needle prick and sensitivity to jarring. It kept him awake many nights. All that spring, blurry with lack of sleep he worked through lessons, fighting to ignore the children's open curiosity and frank disgust, struggling against the endless petty frustrations of learning to cope with missing a thumb. Finally he forced the children to line up at his desk and touch his arm one by one, including one boy who waited until last and burst into tears.

“Now,” he snapped, rolling down his sleeve. “Can we finally go back to cell division?”

There were calls from parents. An awkward conversation with the principal. He knew which students had ratted him out. Afterwards he found himself dropping vague insults into his lectures. He started lowering his students' grades--he had always needed to be a tougher grader. These children who had loved him were most pained by their disgust toward his hand; they found it a relief now to dislike him entirely. On the last day of school one of these students put a rubber snake on his desk and his angry speech to the class was so spectacular the prank became an annual tradition.

The next year his new students were clearly afraid of him and he was surprised to find he enjoyed the feeling and that they learned their concepts and lessons just as well now as before. And so as the years passed he returned to the lessons of cruelty learned from his own teachers: the harping voice, the belittling practical jokes, the obvious pleasure in their inevitable and many small failures. One spring the faculty pitched in and bought him gag gift that featured a spring-loaded snake, a gift they passed off as a friendly joke but which was not.

In the summer of that same year, he raised the blade on his riding lawn mower and rode it across the street to the empty lot. A house had burned there a year back and the place had never been sold, and he had grown tired of the weedy, unkempt look of the lot. That was how he found the snake darting onto the sidewalk to avoid the mower. He caught the snake in an empty cooler and took it into his house. After a week it was still alive, so he brought home an aquarium that had been taking up space in the science lab in the cabinets beneath the flasks and test tubes. He put a heat lamp in the aquarium. He watched the snake and the snake watched him. It was a garter snake, green with a yellow stripe down its side. It was alive in a way that made an oily, cold spot form in his stomach, an odd feeling like the swirling of water down a bathroom drain. He stared at it, a beer in his hands. After some time he went to the pet store to find what snakes ate and brought home a beginner's reptile kit with warming rock, UV light and water basin. In another year there were five more snakes in aquariums around the house and one more he kept at the school and let the children give a silly name.

By the spring of his 27^th year at Irving Elementary, the science teacher had more than two dozen snakes at his home and classroom. In his neighborhood he was known as The Snake Man and more than a few mothers used him as a threat to keep their children well-behaved. He decided to retire, and on his last day stood for a moment in his empty classroom, his books gone, his papers packed away in boxes. Two trash bags of old tests and mimeographs he would no longer need. All but one of the snakes, a two-foot King in the built-in aquarium, had been taken home.

He looked around the room, dizzy with the sense of many years compressed into one space, a little melancholy at the prospect of the end of this part of his life. There were some regrets. He would like to have been married, but it had not happened. He no longer missed his thumb and the scars had been a part of him so long he could not imagine them gone. His first students now had children of their own in elementary school and he took some measure of satisfaction in the knowledge of them as might a distant relative.

Before he left the school building he pulled the King snake from its tank and held it in the light, admiring again the lustrous, glistening black of its skin, the alien intelligence of its eyes. Without knowing quite why, he let the snake wriggle free and watched it slither with thrilling smoothness across the shined surface of the floor toward the cabinets at the back of the room where it would find a dark spot to curl itself into. Hereafter, when he thought of the school, the new children with their new, younger teacher, he would think of that snake. He would imagine it silent and hidden in the classroom with them, tasting the air with its tongue, apart and alone and always watching.