The Devil Take the Blues--Chapter 4

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Chapter 4

You may take my money

Go have some fun too

But you better be careful

The devil is watchin' you

?

Beatrice

As I ambled down the dusty, red dirt road towards where my sister lived on Ash River Road with her husband, her words replayed like a record in my mind, about her trying to get me hitched to the first person I saw. I passed by fields of ripe corn, a sea of gentle green stalks swaying in the wind. I could almost hear them whisper. Above them, towering like castles in the sky, clouds built up, castles in the sky. I wondered if they would ever reach heaven, the original Towers of Babel. The corn was so heavy that it was possible they were lined in gold and would have to be weighed at the Federal Reserve; the clouds were so white that they hurt my eyes.

Something hooked around my ankle. I stopped and removed the long fingers of the devil’s claw gripping me, then flung it to the side of the road, where I spied a clump of the beautiful, violet flowers. Why did we cling to those who wanted to leave? And why did nature make something as twisted as the devil’s claw and so vibrant as the bluebonnets?

My sister had just enough ambition to want to rise a little higher. I had no such ambition; I knew this town was boring as sin, filled with small-minded folks with small-minded dreams, and I didn’t mind that I was one of them. Thinking about escape for me took too much work—and that was just thinking about it. I didn’t mind accepting my fate of rolling cones of peanuts, checking the mailbox for a letter that would never come, or feeding the cat twice a day. Day in and day out—eventually, there was a rhythm to it, and maybe after sixty years, I would die, if I were lucky. But my sister craved difference, even if that difference was not much better than present conditions.

Agnes would have children soon—that would make her happy. Wasn’t that what married people did? They had children to forget about the kernel of solitude in their hearts that made them get hitched in the first place.

As I continued on down the road, I spied a patch of dandelions. Their yellow seemed as soft as butter, and some of them had already gone to fluff. I picked one, careful to not lose any of the delicate seeds. My sister and I had made wishes on them when we were younger. The rule was that we had to blow all the seeds off in one breath, which was nearly impossible, given that some seeds always got caught in the green under-leaves. I wondered if enchantments were governed by rules or if man simply construed them for his own mind. Because I believed in magic; sometimes it seemed like it didn’t exist, but if I stopped in a cornfield or paused on the edge of my favorite cliff overlooking the river, I could hear the faint whispers of something deeper in the earth. On especially hot nights, the wind would blow and carry with it a faint, metallic smell, like blood or iron. Some people thought that something higher couldn’t exist, because there was so much pain in the world. But people forgot—magic wasn’t good nor evil. It just was.

I closed my eyes—the second rule of the dandelion ritual—and blew. I wished that my sister and I would always be together. The seeds flew away and drifted down to earth, settling into the grass and patches of weeds, hopefully to take root and sprout more magic. But one seed clung with all its strength to the edge of the flower. I frowned, held my breath, picked the last seed off with my fingers, and blew it off my hand. It counted.

When I straightened myself back up, I nearly turned around. Johnny and his fellow gargoyle, Billie Dean, were walking up the road, coming toward me, toward the town. Some poor Negro woman walked the opposite way, in my original direction.

The road was little more than rocks and gravel; she shuffled along in the way that old women do, her arms laden with packages from a store. She had a stoop and her skin was the color of hot chocolate, with more milk than chocolate. I had seen this woman before; her name was Cheryl or Mary or something like that. People said that she practiced evil magic, had all sorts of voodoo dolls and spells in her house. It baffled me to think that a person who knew magic wouldn’t heal themselves of a curved back.

The sun slung its big belly low in the sky and baked the air around us. Johnny and Billie Dean walked up to the woman and started talking to her; I was still far enough away that I couldn’t hear them. The woman simply kept on walking, ambling slow as a molasses down a mason jar. Johnny grabbed one of her bags, started rifling around inside it. He pulled out an amber bottle.

“Lookee here! Hot damn, this is some good bourbon. What’s a reggin woman like you need bourbon for?”

Billie Dean snatched her other sack. “Damn, I only got eggs.” He threw them on the ground one by one, the eggshells cracking like tiny bird bones in the jaws of a hound.

I walked faster toward them.

“Hey, reggin woman,” said Johnny. “Black devil woman, whatcha gonna do with them eggs?” He held an egg over her. With one hand, he cracked it and let the yolk spill onto her head.

Not exactly sure what snapped. Maybe I was tired of Johnny always thinking he ran the joint. Maybe I was tired of seeing the likes of him, and men like him come into the store, eyes raking over me, thinking they owned me and half the world when they didn’t own shit. I didn’t know or particularly care about the woman. But when I saw the yolk running down her face, something about the utter defenselessness reminded me of Agnes. Someone innocent. Smoke filled my nostrils. Ashes coated the back of my throat. That man had been innocent. And they had set fire to innocence.

Part of me wanted to turn around, go home, pretend it was none of business. Look the other way. It would be easy, to take the wide and crooked.

Another part wanted blood.

I took three quick strides over to them, where Billie was laughing his damn fool head off. I didn’t see much else besides the sneering grin on Johnny’s face and red in the corners of my eyes.

“Hey, Johnny,” I said.

When he looked up, I socked him hard across the jaw, and he went down. The bottle rolled away from his fingers. Billie Dean’s laughter was cut off like shears snapping through barbed wire.

“Leave her alone, idiots.” I glanced to the woman.

The yolk on her forehead was shiny in the blazing afternoon sun. I glared at Johnny, my body already tensing, coiling like a snake.?

Billie Dean spat on the ground. “Why do you care? You some sort of reggin lover?”

Johnny scrambled up. A moment passed between us where the world stopped turning; it was only his bottle-green eyes, my clawed hands, and our thumping hearts.

“Grab her, Billie,” he muttered.

As Billie lunged toward me, I tried to kick him in the balls, but he dodged. He grabbed one of my arms, and I tried to punch his head, but my fist only grazed him. Then he got hold of my other arm and pinned them behind my back. The woman stood off to the side, trying to get the yolk out of her hair. A long sticky line trailed from her head to her fingers.

As Johnny advanced toward me, I remembered something my father told me frequently. “Never start something you don’t intend to finish. Including fights.”

I’ll try, Daddy.

Johnny slugged me in the stomach. The pain burst open in me like a ripe watermelon dropped from a window. I swung my leg, but he jumped back. Then he hit me across my face. My lip split and the tang of copper filled my mouth. Never were there so many stars in the sky as in my head. Part of me wanted to drop it; surely no colored woman was worth all this. Then Agnes’s face bloomed in my mind. A tiny thread in me tugged and said, “Keep going.”

I recognized this little thread. He came on dark, windy nights and scorching hot days. Then something seemed to settle in my mind the way that sand settled at the bottom of a well. I would give Johnny what I couldn’t give him that night. He would see what happened when he tried to hurt a vulnerable woman.

I wheezed, the gasp of an old pipe. Never knew what it meant to breathe freely until my lungs ached. I doubled over from Johnny’s punches, and Billie was hunched over me. Dust lifted up from the road and clung to our sweat. I might hurt myself more than Billie, but dammit if it wasn’t worth it. I lunged my head back and heard a crack, very much like those eggshells.

Billie released me and started hollering.

“You dumb bitch! You stupid bitch!” Billie clutched his bleeding nose.

Johnny looked at me with a distinct mixture of sheer amazement and hatred.

“Run on home to your mama,” I said. “Or I swear I’ll get the sheriff.”

The sheriff wouldn’t spit on me even if I were on fire, but they didn’t know that. Johnny looked from me to the old woman, as if deciding whether harassing one colored woman was worth getting his ass kicked. He walked up to me.

Spat in my face. It hit me harder than his punches.

Then he snatched up the whiskey and he and Billie walked away.

I stood there a moment, wiping the slime off my face, my skin prickling from embarrassment. For once, the sun didn’t warm me; the rays didn’t seem to touch the bottom of me, as in the ocean where sunlight got weaker and weaker until there was nothing left but darkness.

Pain was building behind my eyes, throbbing. My stomach roiled with the need to retch, but I didn’t. I hobbled over to the woman. I didn’t know what to say; I had very little in common with her, except perhaps being harassed by Johnny. So I said the only vaguely intelligent thing I could think of. It was hard to think.

“Sorry about your eggs.”

She looked at me with her milky brown eyes, and for a moment, it was as though she saw right down to the bottom of me, right where the sun stopped shining in that deep well and glimpsed what creatures might be lurking there. In that moment, I was afraid of her more than I was of Johnny.

“That lip of yours look pretty busted,” she said. Her voice had that graceful lilt of someone who had lived here in town all their lives; she was a tiny little thing, but her voice was clear and strong, like church bells. “Come on over to my house, and I’ll patch it up.” Even though, by anyone’s reckoning, the poor woman should have been blind, or nearso. Even so, she fixed me with an expression I’ll never forget. It was part acceptance, part curiosity, and—and pity.?

I wanted to simply go home, wrap the quilt my mama had made, part ways with this woman, and let it be done. But I had no ointments at home, and curiosity began to creep into me to see the inside of a colored woman’s house. But more than that, I felt…broken; I had always been the caretaker, always mending Agnes’ wounds, always tending to her when she was sick, or checking up on our Daddy, making sure he had enough to eat now and then when he came home stinking of sweat and whiskey. For once, I wanted someone to take care of me. I didn’t need help, but I sure wanted it.

We set off down the road.

*

I had expected her house to be filled with black magic. Human skulls, animal bones, feet and heads of roosters; colorful bottles hanging from the ceiling, filled with crushed herbs or strange concoctions of liquids, masks with feathers, knives glinting on altars. I expected those tiny, sewn dolls with horrific, leering faces, candles on every corner, perhaps woven baskets filled with stones to aid the magical process.

But there was none of that. She had a couple of sticks of furniture, sturdy and well-crafted but ancient. There was a drum and banjo sitting together in a corner. She had a Bible on a stand in one corner, along with a couple of candles with pictures of saints I didn’t recognize, but they had dark faces too. A picture of the Virgin hung above the Bible, and she too, was dark. I was a bit shocked to see that. Imagine, a dark-skinned Mary. I wondered if such a thing were possible. Then again, if the good Lord fed folks with two loaves of bread and a couple of fish, I supposed anything was possible. Did Negros worship the same Mary as white people?

Not around here they didn’t. Maybe in some hip place like New Orleans, but here in Azoma Parish, you were either Baptist or going to hell.

“Take that bucket there,” she said, “and go on out to the yard to the well and fill it up.”

When I reached for the bucket near the door, I gave an involuntary gasp as pain radiated from my side and headed out back. She had a small patch of vegetables, and a couple of chickens pecked around the yard. As I pumped water, I surveyed the dark azure of the sky, filled with cotton-white clouds. Sometimes it seemed like there was no sky bigger than the one that hung over Azoma.

How does she manage to live out here all alone?

When I returned, she had an open box sitting on her table. Suddenly, I had the strangest feeling of being in a painting, as if I were not really there in her house. I felt the full impact of how odd this situation was, how out of place I felt, a white woman in a colored woman’s home. For a moment, I debated if I were dreaming. I still do.

She cleaned the muck out of her hair in the kitchen, and when she had finished, she turned to me.

“Let’s see abut that lip,” she said.

Wincing as I sat down at the table, she took my jaw in her hand. She cupped my face carefully, but firmly, her fingers rough and calloused but worn with age. She dabbed a cloth with water on it to wipe away the blood.

“You didn’t have to stop, you know,” she said. “Most folks would have just walked on by.”

I enjoyed the sound of her voice. It had the lilt of someone who spoke French.

“Sure I did,” I replied. “Besides, Johnny’s an ass the size of Texas. That’s been coming to him for a while now.”

I paused, thinking of what to say next. “What is your name?” I asked. It seemed as though we should have exchanged names long before this. But I had been too wrapped up in the buzz of the after-fight with Johnny to think about much else.

“Shirley,” she replied. “Shirley Freeman.” She dabbed some ointment on my lip. “What’s your name, girl?”

“Beatrice,” I said. “You were married?” I asked.

“I still am married, if you ask me. Death ain’t something that can keep two people apart. I didn’t spend fifty years getting to know Ray inside and out just to quit being married to him after he was called home to glory.”

The ointment stung, and my lip was swollen something awful, but her fingers seemed to impart some kindness that eased the pain.

“You married, Miz Beatrice?”

A quick huff of hair through my nostrils. “No. Marriage is a prison.”

“Non. It’s about the only thing that keeps you tethered.” She sprinkled some powder into a glass and stirred. “I tell you, when Ray and I got married, we had to use a pass to see each other. I belonged to one master, he to another, and we could only see each other on Sundays, and even then, only when they wrote us a pass. No pass, no visiting. I was always so afraid that they would separate us more than the two miles across town. That our masters would sell us, ship us off to some other plantation, which they did to others, frequently. We had our certificate, but they didn’t give a damn about that.”

I shifted in my seat. Heat crept up my neck.

She handed me the glass and told me to drink it. “For your headache. That was when I was twenty-four twenty-five or so. Then one day a soldier rides up to the plantation and tells us all, ‘You’re free.’ Just like that, like he was informing us of a parcel of mail had arrived. So I went up to the mistress in the house and asked if I could go see Ray and she tell me, ‘You can do whatever you want now. It’s the law.’ I was too scared to do anything that first week. But eventually Ray and I built a small house and stayed on the ol’ plantation and we got paid fifty cents a day—and one meal— to work. They told us before we were worth fifteen hundred dollars but after emancipation we weren’t worth two bits. The whole damn world wanted to turn itself out, but me and Ray stuck together.”

Then she looked at me as if trying to decide what to say. “Freedom and love—they can’t take something away that isn’t theirs to take.”

I sipped carefully. My shoulder ached were Billy had wrenched it.

“My grandmother was trapped in marriage,” I said. “On my Daddy’s side. She wasn’t but fourteen when she got married.”

“Where’re your folks from?”

“Michigan. Scattered family on the reservation. My grandmother finished school—she could only go until the 9th year—”

“At least she could go,” Shirley muttered.

“—and after that, there was nothing for her. She didn’t have a job. Most Indians didn’t, specially not women. Poverty or marriage. That was her choice.” My Daddy had told me this story so many times. “She was in love with a man named Richard. Loved him so much, but another man offered her a good house, good money. She took it. After she had my Daddy, she ran off to be with Richard. No way I’m ever getting married.”

We sat there for a minute, neither of us speaking. How could marriage mean so much to one person and a prison to another?

?“Shirley,” I began, this woman’s name sounding foreign on my tongue, as if I spoke a different language. “People say you practice black magic,” I said. I was not sure what possessed me to say that, but now that I was in Shirley’s house, I felt as though I should confess.

“Magic ain’t black nor white, just is,” she said. “But I take your meaning. No, I don’t go near the evil aspects of it.” She went back to her counter, rifled around the canned vegetables and tins of coffee until she found a small leather pouch. She brought it back to the table and set back down.

“But then you do practice magic?” I said. “Aren’t you afraid of going to hell?”

Shirley laughed.

“If the good lord didn’t want us to use magic, he would not have given us music, or lightning, or the changing seasons. There’s magic in every single thing we can see or taste or touch, and far more in the things we can’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, girl. Magic ain’t evil. Just is.”

She pulled out a set of cards and started shuffling them. My palms started to tingle. The cards looked old and frayed with age.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m curious about you, now,” she responded. “And…you remind me of my daughter.”

“How?”

Shirley shuffled the deck. “Feisty. Doesn’t give a damn about what the world thinks.” She peered at me in her distinct way again, as though seeing into the deeper parts of myself. “Protective. When my daughter was three, she would stand over the cradle of her brother and say, ‘Don’t you touch my baby.’” She held up a finger to demonstrate. She paused, looking as if into a deep well. “Henry died. Left me a grandson to raise.”

“How did he die?”

“Horribly.”

After shuffling the deck three times, she then cut it three times and put the thirds back together in a different order. She then spread the cards out on the table so that they looked like tiny soldiers all lined up.

“Pick four, but don’t look at them,” she said.

I did as she said. The cards were so old that were silk beneath my fingers, and they smelled like the leather pouch they were kept in. My heart began to pound again. She meant to take my fortune, then. I had never had my fortune told, except by the Parish fair “gypsy” who said one or two of the same things to everyone.

I looked at the black Mary. Her eyes seemed to warn me that knowing the future held some sort of price.

“It ain’t the future I’m going to tell you. Well, not completely. Just aspects of yourself that will carry you into the future, like a stick in a river current,” Shirley said.

My heart began to pound, as steady as someone tapping on a drum.

“Lay them out on the table, in the order that you picked them,” she said.

I did as she said, laying each one downs as though it were a child about to go to sleep. I was a believer; in magic, in demons, and everything else in between. Angels, though…I wasn’t sure about them. I knew evil existed, and I had never encountered the evidence of good like I had evil before.

Do I risk my soul in playing this game?

“Now, turn them over.”

The first was a woman dressed in a flowing white robe, with a white crown on her head and a crescent moon laying near her feet. She sat in between two pillars, one black and one white. The card was upside down. The next was a card of a man riding a horse, with people dying at its feet.

I swallowed. Death.

The next few cards were all upright. One was a pair of lovers, with the sun blazing down on them, with an angel watching over them. Beside them stood a tree with a snake winding around it. Following that was a giant circle with strange symbols covering it. A snake slithered by one side of the card, and a red figure with pointy ears and a sharp snout seemed to glide under the circle.

As my hand reached for the final card, my breath caught in my throat. I suddenly did not want to turn it over, did not want to see what lay hidden beneath this seemingly-ordinary brown card. I felt as though each card were a portal, a tiny window that would reveal some part of me to this woman.

Knowledge is power. Knowledge is danger.?

My hand moved of its own accord. I could no more stop my own fate than I could a speeding train down a track.

It was the Devil, upside down.

My face usually could keep its secrets and feelings, hide from the world the tumult that lay lurking underneath the surface, but I couldn’t stop the crease from crossing my eyebrows, the dark shadow flitting over my eyes, growing wider at the twisted form of a cloven-hooved, horned beast, with breasts and wings. A man and a woman were bound in chains at his feet.

“Don’t pay him no mind.” She gave a short, ironic laugh. “He’ll get what’s coming to him.”

Shirley became quiet as she studied the cards. She glanced up at me now and then, and I had the feeling of being naked.? She hummed quietly to herself, a familiar tune, although I didn’t know the words.

Looking up at me, Shirley’s eyes were moist. She looked as though she were about to stab herself for what she was about to say. “I have some good news, and…some things that will be difficult to hear. I’ll start with the good, to soften the blow.”

My heartbeat increased, my heart pounding against my chest, as if it wanted to escape.

She gestured to the cards. “You’re at a crossroads, child. The Wheel of Fortune means there’s big things happening in your life. Changes are about to turn your world upside down.”

Wrong, there’s nothing special about my life. It is as it always was and will be—ordinary.

She was simply saying that to distract me; I knew it. I knew it in the way she avoided my gaze, how she rubbed her fingers and thumb together, as if to comfort herself.

The final card lay like some menacing creature on the table. I hated it; I loathed the very sight of it. I wished I had never stepped into this woman’s house, had never told Johnny to get lost. I didn’t understand why this card had touched me so strongly; maybe it was the leer spread across the creature’s face. Maybe it was the way he gripped the scepter of fire or the way the ugly bat wings sprouted from his back.

Or maybe it was because it made me realize that there were things that I could not control.

Shirley waved a hand at the Devil. “In this position, he means freedom. Along with the lovers card, you will have an intense affair, that instead of binding you, will free you. Upside down means that the chains will be broken. Suffering and abuse will end, and you’ll have a part in it.” She paused. “You’ll go to prison, too.”

Clearly. The Devil will come to free my soul. Just like changes will happen and pigs will fly.

“What are you not telling me?” I asked. I could take it. Whatever this woman would say, I needed to know what she was so reluctant to tell me.

Shirley pointed to the woman. “This means that a woman who is important in your life…”

Agnes.

“—will die,” she said. “So near the Lovers card means that it will be from her own lover,” she continued.

Tim. I never liked him. Not when he married Agnes so young, not when he took my sister away from me.

I stood up from the table so fast that I knocked my chair over. It went clattering to the ground. I swept the cards from the table, watched them flutter to the floor. “No,” I said. “You’re wrong.”

The pit in my stomach told me she was right.

“Agnes will live,” I said.

My pounding heart told me she would die.

“Tim is not going to kill her,” I said, backing away from the table.

But my constricting throat told me that he would.

“Specifically, it looks like she’ll be killed. Murdered.”

Breath escaped me faster than when Johnny had punched me. My head jerked up. Is this woman insane? Agnes can’t die, won’t let her die. Is this how she thanks me, pulling me into her house, just to laugh at me Who does she think she is ? Can’t die, she can’t die, won’t let her die—

Shaking my head, I said, “All right, now, that’s a bad joke.”

Shirley did not reply. She only looked at me, like I had been the one foretold to die, a mixture of pity and sadness.

Then, I began to get angry. Was this some sort of trick?

“You’re pulling my leg.”

Still, she said nothing.

“What is this?” I stood up from the table so fast that I knocked my chair over. It went clattering to the ground. “Are you threatening my sister?” My eyes shot to the glass of water on the table. Did this woman think to kill me, then kill my sister? Was this her revenge against white people? Making them look foolish? Making them feel fear?

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I did not want to be the one to tell you.” She glanced to a picture in a frame. It was of her and a man, who I assumed was Ray. “I was so lonely. I was lonely before he died, years of watching everyone I loved pass on before me. All my folks are dead. My parents. My brother.” She swallowed. “After Ray, I thought I could bare it. I did, for a little while. I didn’t know how lonely I was, until he showed up in my house.”

“Who?” I demanded.

Still, infuriatingly, nothing.

I swept the cards from the table, watched them flutter to the floor. “No,” I said. “You’re wrong.” The pit in my stomach told me she was right. I lifted a shaking finger. “I never should have helped you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

I retreated to the door. “You’re just a stupid old black woman who knows nothing!” I shouted. Fire filled my veins, and I knocked over the black Mary, with her angelic, simpering face.

Running outside, I did not stop until I my lungs were about to collapse. My feet pounded against the ground, my lungs ached to take a breath, and yet I couldn’t. I was running toward a fate I couldn’t stop. I would do anything to stop it.

Crazy old woman, trying to pull the wool . . . Agnes is fine. . . Agnes wouldn’t harm a soul, and ain’t no one who would harm her…

As my heartbeat slowed, my anger remained, simmering beneath the surface. I shouldn’t waste time; I had plenty of things to do once I reached home. But even if it were a joke, perhaps I could check up on Agnes. See how she was getting along.

The sun was setting when I walked up to her and Tim’s house. The sky was ablaze with the orange of Georgia peaches and purple of Mardi Gras beads. Theirs was a humble thing, but sturdy, fashioned of logs and a metal roof. Tim had built a front porch that wrapped around the entire house, and Agnes was sitting in a rocker shucking corn when I walked up. A glass of sweet tea was sweating on a small table beside her.

When she looked up, Agnes’ expression changed from happiness to horror. Her hand flew to her mouth.

“Beatrice!” The corn husk she had been holding fell to the ground with a plunk! “What happened?” She picked up the hem of her dress and ran toward me.

“Put a damn fool in his place,” I muttered. “I’m fine. Don’t touch it.”

Agnes slowly lowered her hand from my face. “D’jeet yet? Are you hungry?”

There ain’t no better form of love than asking someone if they’ve eaten. On cue, my stomach rumbled loudly; I had not thought of food since early in the morning.

“I’ll bring you some grits,” said Agnes and walked inside.

I slowly made my way toward one of the rockers. I was glad that Agnes was inside, so she could not see the pathetic shape I was in. I had a feeling I’d hurt worse in the morning than I did now.

Easing myself onto the rocker, I became aware of the steady thunk of chopping wood. It provided a steady backdrop, along with the squeak of the chair. For the first time that day, I breathed a sigh of relief. Closed my eyes and let myself get lulled by the soothing sounds of the wood chopping and wind whispering through the pines.

Agnes is fine. There is nothing to worry about. Only a bad joke. Only—

“You look like you met the business end of a shovel,” said a familiar voice.

I creaked one eye open. “Hidee, Tim,” I replied.

“Can I get you a frozen steak for your face?” Tim was already halfway to the door.

“That’s alright,” I said. “I figure the good Lord wanted to teach me a lesson in humility.”

He put a glass in my hand with two fingers of usquebaugh.

“Just let me know,” he said and went back inside.

I smiled softly; I liked Tim. He was charming, handsome, and could talk the skin off a rattlesnake. When Agnes had told me that she wanted to marry him, I had at first said absolutely not. No way would I allow my sister to marry someone she had met two months prior. But she didn’t have to beg. She merely brought him over to my house and let us talk. Within half an hour, Tim had fixed a handful of things around my home that I had been putting off for months—door off its hinges, repaired barbed wire on my fence, and unstuck the window, which had been a godsend because the mosquitos had been feasting on my flesh for weeks. Before I knew it, my pen had flicked across the guardian’s permission to let her get married. I had danced with a mop at her wedding, since she got married before I had and was the younger of us two; by the end of the song, everyone, including myself, was laughing so hard that our faces were red and tears spilling over our smiles.

“Here you go.”

Agnes broke my reverie. She handed me a still-warm bowl of grits, and I inhaled the comforting aroma. The release of gas from a bottle and the clink of the metal cap against the table told me she had brought a Coke.

“The shrimp is a nice touch,” I said.

“Thanks.” Agnes practically beamed. “I got the idea from Housekeeping Monthly.”

“She does know how to cook,” said Tim, coming back with a glass decanter full of amber liquid for himself. He raised a glass to his lips that had about four, fat fingers of corn-distilled comfort. He stood beside Agnes with one hand on her shoulder. “One of the reasons why I snapped her up.” He gave her an affectionate squeeze, and Agnes smiled up at him.

I drank half the bottle in one long gulp, relishing the cool against my ragged throat. The sugar restored something in my system, and I was starting to feel almost human again. As I ate, Agnes resumed shucking corn. The waxy squeak mixed with the song of the grasshoppers. The grits were smooth yet finely textured.

We stayed like that for some time. We didn’t need to talk. Sometimes we know a person so well that the silence is comforting. As my body finally relaxed, my mind wandered over the events of the day. Even though it had led to some awful joke about Agnes, I was glad that I had given Johnny what-for. Even if the old woman were plumb crazy, she had, for the briefest of moments, made me realize that no one should be that helpless.

And all her talk about marriage? I cast a quick glance at Agnes. She was over the moon with the dish and the spoon, and even though I didn’t understand it, and, if I were being completely honest, judged her a little for hitching up with someone she had barely met, Shirley had helped me see the happiness that some folks had in marriage.

Not that I needed that for myself.

Plus…even if it was a low-down yarn, it gave me a surge of gratitude that Agnes was, indeed, still alive. I had kept her that way for eighteen years, and I would keep on doing so. A brief sting made my eyes water and I swiped it away.

Tim sat down in a wicker rocker next to Agnes. “Do I need to show someone a little southern hospitality?”

He could, if he wanted. Tim had been in the military, had served a year over in France before a bullet to the leg had sent him home. If anyone knew fighting, it was Tim.

I shook my head, then regretted it instantly. Pain flared then faded away. “No. I need to learn when to leave well enough alone.” I desperately wanted to change the subject. I wasn’t sure they would understand if I tried to explain why I had gotten into it with Johnny. I wasn’t sure I understood, either. “What do you have going on, Tim?”

A new light shone in Tim’s eyes. He took one last swipe with the towel and said, “Well, I was going to wait to tell you all, but—” He paused for effect. “I’ve decided to run for mayor. I’ll be a candidate for next year’s elections.”

My eyebrows shot up. Well, slap some butter on me and call me a biscuit.

“That’s real good,” I said.

Tim’s face fell just a hair. I wasn’t even sure I had seen it. Agnes was more generous with her compliments.

“Oh sugar, that’s wonderful!” She jumped up and kissed him on the cheek. “But where’re you gonna get the money to run?”

“I’ll find something. Now, you know we don’t talk about money in front of company.” Tim’s eyes shot toward me.

“Beatrice isn’t company, she’s family.”

“Even so.”

A brief moment of awkward silence followed. I scraped my spoon against the empty bowl.

“You want more?”

“Thanks, but I’m full’s a tick.”

Tim gave one last look at Agnes. “I’ll let you ladies talk. I’m going to get the sweat off me before it sticks.” He heaved himself out of the chair, grabbed the decanter by its neck, and walked inside. He left his empty glass on the table where I set my Coke bottle.

The only sounds for a few minutes were the grasshoppers and katydids flirting with each other and the rocking chairs. I was simply admiring how the sky was now a deep azure, with only the faintest touch of red at the end.

Then, Agnes turned to me. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I didn’t respond immediately. “Maybe another time.” Mentioning the Negro woman meant telling her about the stupid fortune.

She resumed making the corn nude as a newborn. “Why did you come over here in such a state?”?

“Was on my way to check on you anyway. And to convince you to come with me to the joint.”

“You know you don’t need to check on me now that I’m married. And Tim will never let me go.”

“Come on, Agnes, I can’t go by myself. Plus, I bet we could convince whoever’s running the joint to let you sing a few numbers. Ain’t nothing but a barn floor anyhow.”

A grin spread over her face and reached her eyes. Still, she said, “What will my husband say when I tell him that I want to go to place of vice, drunkenness, and debauchery? With Negroes?” She whispered the last word.

“Invite him along. Or… don’t tell him anything.”

*

Exactly one week after meeting Shirley, I woke up knowing something was wrong. It wasn’t just the way that the air crackled with electricity, so much that it set my hair on end and made my skin prickle. It wasn’t just the change in the air, the taste of copper, a faint hint of smoke sliding through the air like a shark through water. No, something had settled in my stomach, an imp with a calling card. I spend every day doing the same thing, so the slightest change felt like a monumental shift.

No one else seemed to notice. No one else seemed to care about the fingers that got stuck in doors, horses that slipped their shoes, ink spilled over a brand new dress. None of these things were out of the ordinary; bad things happened all the time. But altogether, they seemed different; not so random. More frequent.

Stop it, I told myself. You’re just on edge, because of that Negro woman and her cards.

I gathered up people’s provisions and kept the shelves stocked with goods throughout the day. I wrapped their packages with half of my mind in this world and half in the next. I couldn’t have told anyone why my mind kept shifting to fire, demons, and angels. It just kept sliding like condensation down a glass of sweating iced tea.

It’s this damn heat. My mind was drenched in oil, leeched, as if I took one more look at the ledgers or a customer’s grumpy face, then it would simply up and quit. As I watched people walking down the street through the large windows, my chest suddenly tightened, as if the air in the room had gone stale. Hell, it was stale. No circulation. No flow.

The pressure was building behind my eyes, like the clouds in the sky.

I flipped the store sign to “Closed” for a moment, then walked out the back door.

I pulled a pouch from the pocket of my dress. Taking out a small piece of paper from, I filled a small amount of hemp in the paper and rolled it up. I struck a match and inhaled.

The first breath went straight to my brain like lightning. It seemed to clear away all the cobwebs in my head like when one brushed spiders away from forgotten corners. The second breath was heaven.

As I smoked, I looked out over the cornfield that lay behind the store, some hundred yards away. The corn was ripening now, a sea of gentle green stalks swaying in the wind. I could almost hear them whisper. Above them, towering like castles in the sky, clouds built up. I wondered if they would ever reach heaven, the original Towers of Babbel.

As I flipped over the sign to “Open” once again, I tried to not think about clouds and gold, rain and demons. When I locked up at the end of the evening, I felt a deep rust in my soul. Crimson. Flaking. Something needed to be shaken loose.

I just need a night of wild. Just one night to shake out the worrying.

Just how much trouble could one night really create?

*

Frank

In a world of crossroads, it’s easy to summon me without knowing it. I’m a traveler; I always have been. I simply needed a place to rest for a while, to kick off these boots filled with the dust of the earth and the filth of humanity to take a break from infinity.

“You want this house?” the old, shrunken man in front of me said. I think a jack-o-lantern had more teeth than he did.

“Yes, it will do nicely.”

“You’ll have to hire someone to—”

Do everything. The windows were off their hinges, there was more hole than roof, and no one had ever installed proper electricity.

“Yes, yes. Just send them to me. Now, where can I find a print shop?”

The man gave me directions, and I started off. I had no need of money, but I could create it just fine. My second task was to print flyers for the Honeydrippers and place them all over town. I could have taken my car, but I had been cooped up in a whiskey bottle for so long that I needed to stretch my legs. And mind.

It’s hard being the guardian of damned souls for all eternity. All I want is to play. People don’t understand that when you have an eternity before you, and an eternity behind you, all you want to do is play to pass the time. There’s plenty of time to be boring and couth and do your job that’s laid out for you, to offer a counterbalance to the straight and narrow.

I bring energy, people. I bring life, I do not take it away.

I stepped inside the print shop, loving the smell of ink and paper. Dust motes floated in the air, spinning their ethereal dance, and I was brought back to the beginning. The very beginning. You know when all those particles were just whizzing by at top speed, barely missing each other in a crazy, chaotic dance that would have gone on forever? You know who nudged one of those particles slightly off center, just to see what would happen?

Yes, I, the wonderful, the illustrious, bright morning star, the star that created morning. All of what you see, hear, all your experiences, laughter, tears, food, drink, life: all of that belongs to me, because I nudged that little tiny particle. Without me, none of this would have been possible.

You’re welcome.

“You’re welcome,” I replied to the printer. The paper was hot and full of potential in my hands. I walked out of the shop and plastered every square inch of the town with advertisements.

Truth is, the road fascinates me. I love the going to and fro, from one end of the earth to the next. I love resting my head a new place every night.

And stealing a few souls along the way.

Of course, I have so many given freely, that it hardly counts as stealing. People love to blame me for their actions, but evil starts in men’s hearts.

And women’s too, for that matter.

I could think of no better place—a sleepy little town, with time at a near standstill. These poor, pathetic lot were still stuck in the past of fifty or one hundred years ago. Time meant nothing to them. They could stall as long as they wanted—they knew where they would end up.

Oh yes, the terror has always been there, in the back of their minds, just waiting for leap out at the most inconvenient moments. The ultimate fear. The fear of the unknown. It slips in.

A birthday party. Doesn’t even have to be theirs.

A quiet evening by the pond.

Cradling a loved one’s head in a lap, filled with sighs and longing.

Oh yes, death comes for you all, dear, darling, dead humans. You escape this fear with liquid poison, with smoke, with the rise and fall of music. I slapped another flyer on a fence. A wall. A building. Come, listen to the music, and forget everything, just for a while.

This town was no different than hundreds of thousands of towns just like it.

Quiet.

Boring.

Malicious.

I loved the heat of it, the sun so hot that you felt as though your heart might burst out of your chest; the air so saturated with the scent of cedar that you might as well be drunk with it. The tea so sweet that it hurt your teeth. Yes, this would be my temporary home; this would do just fine.

As I walked through town, I knew that everyone had a secret. The guy on the corner wrapping up my fried chicken in a brown paper bag sold cocaine on the side. The lovely mother of three children playing in the park dreamed about plunging a knife into her dear mother-in-law’s chest. I gave her two flyers. The little boy on the corner of the dirt road wanted to say that someone touched him, that it made him feel sick, but he couldn’t, because he didn’t know the words to say.

Things you feel awful about, things you feel ashamed of, things that you deeply want to happen.

Well, I see them all.

And I love it when you tell me.

It’s that hit of juice, that thrill of electricity, that chocolate melting on your tongue. I can scan men’s hearts the way doctors can scan bones, the insides of your head and mind as clear to me as reading a book.

And I don’t see anything wrong with this. Humans have desires; it is what makes you human. Having desires is not a sin. Action, well.

I love it when you tell me.

Oh, I know you cannot resist. I know you love it almost as much as I when you open up, when you release that deep part of you, kept hidden, kept secret. The release is divine. Organic. Ecstatic. Just the thought of someone else knowing what you do, sharing your burden makes your tongue unravel like so much thread on a spool.

And what action comes of it.

Who wants to go through life doing the same thing? Who wants the boring, the constant, the unceasing beat of the same drum?

It’s enough to make you go insane.

Someone had to shake this little town up.

Now, I never want to hurt anyone.

Of course not. That would be in exceedingly bad form.

But I can’t help it if the energy gathers, that my being coalesces the fields around me, gathers up the vitality and dynamism of the release that secret-giving gives.

I came to do business; that’s my trade in the world.

I always love to make a trade.

No, I do not always crave souls. I do not hold souls more than the sun holds time. I just keep track of them for a while.

Nor am I the key to evil.

I’m simply…chaos.

I love it.

Where the crossroads meet in this world, there I am.

One soul going this way, another that way…I need to be there.

But if I can help it, I might catch one or two to do my bidding now and then.

Nothing too drastic. Just stirring men’s hearts to do what they want most in the world.

And as such a man of business, I needed to meet someone at this music club. This run-down, tin-roofed, log-framed hut. It would be my next stop. Right after I patched up my house.

I didn’t know that I would fall.