When my friend Richard Hendrix was ten years old, he lived in the small coal-mining town of Carbon Hill, Alabama. The Hendrix home sat on the edge of a forest and had a spanning porch where his mother and grandmother worked peeling apples or snapping beans. Richard loved to play with his friends in the nearby woods, especially around a large, overturned pine tree.
One day, as the family sat on the porch, a stranger approached. Since Carbon Hill was a small town, everyone knew the neighbors. The man, however, was unknown to them. He displayed Native American features and was toting a rifle. He asked if he could walk around and hunt snakes.
“Mama ordinarily would have told him to come back when Dad was home,” Richard told me, “but for some reason she gave him permission. It seemed as though he belonged there; we felt safe in his presence.”
The stranger walked straight down to the fallen pine tree as though he knew where he was going. It was a distance away, out of sight from the house, and no one had mentioned the spot to him. But a few moments later, the air cracked with rifle shots. Shortly, the stranger reappeared with three large rattlesnakes. The largest had twenty rattlers. He had shot them where the children would soon have been playing. The man turned and walked back down the road and was never seen again.
“We asked about him,” said Richard, “but nobody knew him, and nobody in the neighborhood saw him come or go. If any of us had been bitten by one of the snakes, we wouldn’t have survived long enough to get to the hospital twenty miles away. I’ve always wondered if it was a coincidence of if we saw an angel without realizing it. I might be alive today if not for this mysterious stranger showing up unannounced at our house that summer day.”
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