How to Catch a Snapping Turtle on Your Finger

On a trip to New York back in the late sixties, one of my first, I encountered a Nigerian cab driver who I noticed had four slanting scars on each cheek and one or two on his forehead just above the eyes. I’d noticed these things before and was curious what they might signify. So in full-throttle provincial innocence I ask the guy if he’d explain the meaning of his scars to me. He said nothing. I asked again thinking he’d not heard me.

We stopped for a light and he wheeled around on the seat to say said, “Sir, you must not call them scars. It is an insult. They are not scars. They are marks. They are my proud marks telling of my family and my village. Wherever I go I am me to all the world. Can you say that? You must not call them “scars” they are marks.”

I said I was sorry and that I thought I’d just get out now and walk the rest of my journey. I gave him an embarrassingly large tip and he peeled away leaving me on the curb chastened—another untraveled American bonehead.

Thinking now about the encounter I know exactly what the guy was saying and why he was irritated. On my right hand I wear a ring my father and my grandfather wore. When I look at it for any length of time I am anchored, fixed in place and time. It is like a memory box; it contains my past like a talisman—happiness, hope and gratitude; sadness, regret and puzzlement over how some things turned out. Scenes from a life.

On my left had, on the index finger, I wear a scar that is very dear to me. Actually there are two scars on that finger, the other a crescent shaped result of a dumbassed whittling mistake made before I learned to take extra care when pulling the blade toward yourself. It should have been stitched up but it wasn’t and so remains distinct reminder of the old momism we all heard “Always carve away from yourself, son.” Of course most moms don’t carve slingshots or make tap sticks for rabbit hunting, thus are unknowing that properly knitching a stick requires an inward pull. But no matter now. Moms did have uses.

The other scar, although somewhat faint, a mark worthy of note at least to me, is a result of my having accidentally stuck the finger into the mouth of a large, angry chelydra serpentina. Now if you don’t know what one of those is—and I didn’t before I looked it up—try big damn snapping turtle: those guys you see floating just below the water’s surface in ponds, their fist-sized noggins sticking up for breathing, those guys you picked off with your twenty-two, who hissed at you and sprayed a puking smell when you messed with them, who snapped at you with a mouth like two bent knife blades. Bad fellows, these, but in the ponds of rural Alabama as plentiful as hoe handles.

They do make good soup. My grandmother’s cook at Thornhill, Chaney, a round woman with breasts like two balloons into which she would sweep me as a small boy, exclaiming, “ You is my heart!”, was a pro at turtle soup. Although, for reasons that will become clear, she rarely had this culinary opportunity because nobody wanted to mess with catching her a turtle.

A word about Chaney: she cooked for my grandmother, “Miss Helen” for over thirty years , living out behind the big house in a one-room cabin with a screen porch and plenty of shade, her home kept neat as a pin. I felt I was her favorite among my cousins—but perhaps they felt the same. The secret thoughts of servants like Chaney, loyal, faithful, always pleasant with a smile and a laugh just when it was needed, and savvy, so savvy, were just that in the end—very, very secret.

She made me buttermilk biscuits in the shape of airplanes and pistols. She wore a starched and crisply pressed white uniform and for all the thirty years had to ask Miss Helen for the pantry key before preparing each meal. Chaney said one early Spring morning when my cousin Louis, brother Innes and I were at Thornhill for a long week-end, “ Pastures is wet this morning an’ them snappers be walking around. You cotch me one up and I make soup for supper.” And off we went in an Army surplus Jeep my father had bought at some auction, or maybe got in some sort of trade over in Mississippi.

Snapping turtles are scavengers and in the Spring rainy season roam the fields searching for carrion. They will eat anything including each other. They can weigh up to thirty pounds and live as long as thirty years. In the water they are quite docile but on land they are always in a bad mood. Totally solitary creatures they spend much of their lives buried in mud. I’ve always figured their constant dyspepsia was caused by the fact that they got no mothering, none at all. Female snappers lay their eggs and hit the road, leaving their young, for the only fragile period of their lives, to fend for themselves. No momisms for these fellows, no night-night snuggles.

We found a large snapper pretty quickly in the muddy grasses below the Little Pond dam. He hissed, snapped and spun around a couple of times, but with a large cedar stick to hold him still we got a string around his hind feet and hung him on the hood of the jeep so that he draped down over the radiator.

We headed home to the soup pot but soon came upon another monster. Feeling cocky, that dangerous state of mind now referred to by free-fall knuckleheads as an “adrenalin rush,” I said, “let me get this big boy.” Louis pulled the jeep up to the big turtle and waited while I got the string, jumped out and put my foot on the turtle’s back to steady him. As I tried to loop his hind leg. however, he spun under my weight and snapped at my hand. Ah, but I was too quick! Quick, yes, but not lucky, Snatching my hand back from the jaws of my angry prey, I flung it, rather the index finger of it, square into the mouth of the turtle on the radiator.

The rest happened fast and doesn’t make much sense. They say that once a snapper gets hold of you he won’t let go until it thunders….and there was not a cloud in the sky. Somehow, thank God, the thing didn’t get a good grip and without thinking I snatched my finger out peeling off a strip of skin where his beak had dug in; hurt like hell but I was already recounting the event to the amazed girls I knew I see in the eighth grade Monday morning.

We had good soup that night. It was more like a stew actually. And we soaked up the broth with Chaney’s buttermilk biscuits. I wore a bandage for days longer than needed and bored crap out of my friends telling the turtle adventure. Finally, Billy Price said to me, “Tartt, that’s a pissant little cut. Quit going on about it. You’re lucky you ain’t Pine Knot.” Peter “Pine Knot” Prat was a guy a couple of grades ahead of me, short, funny, well liked and, so folks said, “tough as a knot in a pine board”. His daddy, Peter Prat Sr., owned the dry cleaning shop in Livingston. Pine Knot was bushhogging his daddy’s pasture one day and fell of the back of the tractor when he hit a bump hidden in the tall grass. The bushhog ran over him and cut an arm off at the shoulder. I had to admit Billy Price had a point.

Years later, while the scar was still a little pink, still worth noting, it came in very handy at boring dinner parties in our nation’s capitol (boring at least to me) and at pretentious art world lunches in New York. Just to spit in the soup, I’d hold up the finger and ask “Know how I got this scar right here?” Then I could once again find the voice of provincial innocence, feigned this time, an aggressive put on. Not like the authentic rube who offended the Nigerian cabby so much later. Scars and marks, road signs on the backward journey to where and who we are right now.