The Devil Take the Blues--Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Beatrice

“It is a scourge, a scourge that must be wiped from the face of the earth!”

Murmurs from the congregation voiced their assent. Fans flapped limp air onto faces that were droopy with last night’s excitement. My heel bounced against the floor.

“The blues is evil music…”

“Amen.”

Music that good could never be evil. Music wasn’t good nor evil; it just was. No, what was evil was dragging a man into the woods to kill. Pushing someone off the sidewalk. Stealing from my store. Preying on the weak, instead of praying for the weak.

Or being too weak to stop the men.

My stomach twisted. Twisted like ropes hung over trees, fibrous snakes squeezing the life out of him, this town. I rubbed my sweaty palms against my dress. I picked my nails. Guilt was a hard lump in my stomach. No matter how much I shifted, I could not get comfortable. Even now, I wondered if—by some miracle—Angelo had made it. If he had managed to fight them off, if someone had heard him screaming and came running, if they had let him go, if, if, if, ififififif….

This is what happens when you cross the line.

I fanned myself harder. It was difficult to breathe with all this righteousness in the air, people breathing their redemption all over the place. I coughed. Even now, I could still feel the anger zip through me, the powerlessness. Why wasn’t I out there looking for him? Why wasn’t I scouring the forest?

Because I was a coward. I couldn’t bear to find what I knew was out there.

“The blues does not belong here, with good, upstanding citizens…”

“Preach.”

I glanced around at these good, upstanding citizens. None of them knew. No one cares to see pain unless it is right in front of them; no one bothers to face injustice unless it affects them directly. How many other preachers railed against music and sex—the things that made us human—when at that very moment, people died for nothing more than existing?

Shame washed over me because I had been one of them. Content to ignore all the minor ways of robbing people of their dignity. Their humanity. I realized that if I did nothing to stop the system of power, then I was complicit in it. I didn’t tie the rope, but I had been a part of ignoring good people for far too long.

“I said THE BLUES…does not BELONG…for many people listen to it in those places ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRACKS, where they smoke INDIAN HAY…” Dixon clutched the lectern now. His eyeballs rolled in his head; he stamped and pawed the ground. He shook his arms and raised them up. It was too damn early to work one’s self into such a frenzy. “And it is WELL KNOWN that it causes women—those precious, vulnerable members of our flock—who have superb moral fiber, who are God-fearing, Christ-loving disciples…to let down their guard…”

A collective moan rippled through the congregation. Had any of them heard that a man had been killed? Did any of them care?

A man was dead because of me, and some fortune-teller had said that my sister was doomed to die. No one else should die because of me. I knew deep in my bones that if one part of the fortune came true, the other would. I prayed mighty hard that Sunday for an answer from the Lord, but none came. It seemed like none would ever come from a God who allowed such evil to happen.

Even though I had stayed up all night, with barely an hour of sleep, it was my sister who looked exhausted. Dark crescents hung underneath her eyes, and her face was a bit pale, and during the worship she did not sing with much enthusiasm. She had shaken me awake, and I still went to the old, whitewashed church in a floral dress, because it was Sunday. Not going to church was tantamount to slapping a sign on your forehead with “sinner” scrawled on it. I knew I was one, but it was bad for business if I didn’t show up every single week. I had gone with Agnes, because when I saw her face upon waking, I nearly cried in relief.

When the choir was done, and the wicker baskets had been passed around, with barely a dime here and there thrown in, Pastor Dixon minced his way to the pulpit. He had frowned at the contents of the baskets, then launched into a diatribe against those who wasted their money on drink and gambling, sins both.

I clutched my sister’s hand. She had asked me what had happened, but I had only shook my head. It was still too painful. I was still too ashamed.

“The blues is the Devil’s music!”

“Amen!”

At that point, I tuned out Pastor Dixon. My mind could not concentrate on anything except Agnes’ hand in mind, and how I would give anything to keep her with me. Anything.

The Devil’s music.

Spirits and haints. The graveyard at midnight. I knew there was something out there, something that slipped through the shadows and twisted everything around. I prayed like I had never prayed before in my life, staring up at the cross at the front of the church. No answer. I needed an answer.

Absolutely anything.

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" cried out the pastor.

What good is a soul without her sister?

I looked to Agnes, her long face, her porcelain skin, her tired green eyes. A monster lurked in this town, and to kill a monster, I needed one for myself.

I fanned myself harder.

My heart pounded inside of me. Every time I saw Agnes, all I saw was her corpse lying in a coffin. That’s all she became to me. Every time she opened her mouth to laugh or turned her head so that her reddish-blond strands flicked by her face, all I saw was a skull peering out at me.

Unless.

No answer came to me from above. Perhaps one would from down below.

Deep, deep down in the dark.

*

I couldn’t sleep that night. The night air was warm, but my body was frozen and wooden, and sleep evaded me. My mind spun and spun, but nothing came. No solution. Nothing I could do to stop this awful fate from happening.

Unless.

A voice slithered across my brain, smooth as snake’s scales. As I lay in my bed, the quilt useless to keep me from shivering, even though it was the dead of summer, that sweet whisper kept titillating me with possibilities.

There was no calling on God. He had never answered. No crying out to heaven. At this particular juncture, I did not know if He existed.

But I knew that voice did. Evil had laughed at me in the black nights of my childhood. I loved my sister more than I loved my own life.

She will die if I do nothing.

Unless.

I bolted upright. My heart pounded, and my hands shook as I flung off the scratchy blanket. No more thinking; no going back to sleep.

Can’t let her go. 

Throwing on some clothes, I knew what I had to do. Even now, I am not sure how I knew to gather what I needed. Maybe I could have grabbed whatever came to mind, but I had lived with the stories and the songs my whole life. I lived in a land of dark magic and ghosts. We had bad luck signs, omens, charms, and cures; we bathed cats in sulphur to detect storms; we sprinkled salt on two crossed matches to make it rain; we chewed sampson snakeroot to soften hearts; we planted mustard seeds under our doorsteps to ward off witches. And of course, we had rituals to summon the Devil.

Walk to the graveyard. Take out the blue bottle. Scoop some of the dirt from my parents’ final place of rest. Fill the bottle to the brim. Bring a knife. Shovel. Bring whiskey. Glasses. Bring blood and courage, insanity and desperation and just a touch of wickedness. 

I staggered to the path, dark as the shadows of the night. No moon shone, the darkness threatening to gobble me alive. My boots crunched the rocks beneath as I hit the road.

I could not kill myself to save my sister, but I had a soul to give. If she were destined to die, I could make a deal with the one who held the cards to destiny. I would do it. It did not matter the cost. All that mattered was that my sister would be safe. She would live. I did not care if I died; what a roaring, glorious adventure, when that final black embraced me, as unfathomable as anything I have encountered in these shadowy southern woods. I feared shackles more than I feared death.

When my feet touched the center of the road, I stopped, as if I had hit a wall. I was in the middle of two intersecting roads. The liminal space. The place of nowhere and everywhere. Betwixt. The crossroads. The world was thin here; if I reached out my hand, I could feel the eerie fissure, the crack between my existence and the next one. The very air itself vibrated, as if it had anticipated my arrival, as if it shivered in delight that I was there. All sound fled. The silence was achingly heavy. No crickets. No cicadas. No owls. It was so quiet that I heard a high-pitched whine, my own thoughts thinking themselves into existence. Even that faded after a while.

Bending down, I dug my shovel into the deep, rich earth. The aroma of the loamy, fertile dirt was divine. This was the earth that sustained me, that flowed in my veins. I was this earth, and now I was giving myself a perfectly circular scar. My tears froze in ice crystals on my face. Good. Something was near.

Once I had dug the circle, I carved a small hole in the center with my hands. I needed this connection. My body in those moments was not mine. I conjured the power, but the power subjugated me, for all I thought was Agnes, Agnes, Agnes, an endless, steady thrum. I gently placed the bone in the center of the hole, along with a small picture of myself. His three calling cards: spades to dig my grave, hearts to give away, and clubs to kill. Unstopping the blue bottle, I scattered the soil over everything, mixing it with that of the crossroads and buried my small offering. My palms turned red with the dirt.

I found a stick, stuck it in the small, upraised mound, and placed the bottle over it. It was a fledgling tree of sorts. Taking the bottle of whiskey, I poured a little over the mound. I chanted as I did, a single word, a dominant, enduring invocation of power: “Come, come, come.” It was all I needed. I needed not arcane knowledge, of the names of God or His fiends of ancient languages. As I spoke, the words transformed, shaping themselves into what they needed to be. I had sacrifice. I had intention. By all the dangers of hell, I had that. I took the knife. Slashed my palm. Watched the black blood fall into the ground, the dirt drinking it as deeply as it had the whiskey.

The air, once stifling and still, whipped into a frenzy. The tops of the trees twisted and bowed. The leaves rustled, and I swear, I swear to you that a harmonica wailed in the distance.

I turned around.

And the Devil Himself stood before me.

“You,” I said.

It was him. The man who had visited the store. His black hair was swept under a silk hat, and his suit was an immaculate cream in the clear moonlight. He had his hands in his pockets, as though he had all the time in the world.

Which, I suppose, he did.

The world tilted. That the devil ambled through Azoma and had appeared to me without me realizing it made me vaguely sick. But wasn’t that how it always was? Evil paraded right under our noses, and we were none the wiser. Went with us to the same church. I felt as though I had been caught bathing. I had sensed that there was something more to the man; I simply had not been able to make out what it was. The shock set everything in motion once more. The trees calmed, and the cicadas sang their nightly serenade.

He smiled, a cat’s grin before pouncing. “Me.”

My shaking hands lifted the bottle of whiskey. I twisted off the top, and the sound of the cork seemed too loud as it popped free.

“My favorite,” he said, glancing at the bottle. “I do love a good offering.” Even with those few words, the delicate Cajun cadence emerged. He spoke as though his French, with those clipped consonants, had been dunked in a barrel of molasses. He walked forward.

 “This ain’t for you.” Staring him in the eye, I lifted the bottle to my lips and drank. God, I would need this liquid courage. It burned going down, and the essence of smoke, vanilla, and summer skies rolled along my tongue.

He stopped, then laughed, a low sound that reverberated in my chest.

“So you know what’s at stake,” he said.

The whiskey flowed through me, warming my freezing blood. I took another drink. “The only thing I’m concerned about is my sister’s life.” I held out the bottle to him.

His blue eyes pierced me, held me to the ground. Whispers hissed in the background, but I paid them no mind.

When he took the bottle, our fingers touched. I snatched my hand back, not from disgust or fear, but in shock that some part of me had relished that simple caress. He casually lifted the bottle to his mouth and drank deeply.

“You’re different,” he said when he had polished off half the bottle. He stepped around the outline of the circle, and I moved in the opposite direction.

“No, I’m not,” I said, always keeping my eyes on him, as though he were a mountain lion from the Ozarks or a razorback hog. “I’m no one.”

Again, he smiled, and my legs went watery.

“Everybody wants something,” he said. He continued to slowly circle toward me. “It’s always the same. Money. Power. Talent. Fame. Comfort.” He tilted his head slightly to one side. “But you…” He extended the bottle back to me. “you don’t want any of that.”

Still he walked and still I evaded him. But I did take another sip. “All I want is for you to tell me that my sister will live. Do that and you can have anything you want.”

He walked through the circle. For a brief moment, I thought I saw his face change, shadows and fire, but when he stepped up to me, it was gone. He stood a mere hand’s breadth from me now. He stood so close that I smelled cherry tobacco and burned beeswax.

“Can’t. Her fate is carved into the face of time. Fate is like a train on a track—it barrels down time, but you’re free to move about the cabin.” His words twisted around me, wisteria around a house.

“What do I do?”

He hummed, almost a sigh. While he stepped around me, he lifted a finger and traced a line from my collarbone to neck. Then, leaning down to whisper in my ear, he said, “Marry me.”

I whipped around, the whiskey sloshing in the bottle. “Never.”

“I told you. You wouldn’t change your mind. Just your answer.”

I scoffed. “Why do you even want to get married, anyway? Don’t you have more important things to worry about?”

His eyes flicked to the bottle in my hands. “May I?” he asked.

I shoved the bottle in his chest. Once he had finished, only a quarter of it remained.

He shrugged, a lion yawning, showing its teeth. “I’m a man of practicality. Your sister married one of the most ambitious men in the state, which means that you’ll gain a few steps up in this genteel society.”

Carefully, he passed me back the bottle. “If I marry you, I can have a rather convenient foot in the door to conduct my many thriving operations. Plus you were the one who rescued me from the bottle, so you’re about as good as any other.”

Suddenly, I hated him. He was dangling my sister’s life in front of my eyes, and he wanted me to appease him in some sick game of pretending to be human. I sipped; my body spun, though my feet were touching the ground. The whiskey worked its charm. My marble walls melted; his musical voice lulled me into its sweet seduction. My god, Agnes, please, stay alive. Stay with me.

“So no soul then?” I asked.

He laughed. “Oh yes, that must be part of the bargain. The balance must be kept. But consider that an addendum. All I can promise is that she’ll have seven more months on the Earth to live. I will guarantee that much. You as well, as my beautiful wife. After that…” This time, it was he who closed his eyes, as if he were still savoring the whiskey. “We’ll go home.”

Some instinctual part of me shivered when he said “home.” I knew what he meant.

To buy time, I said, “Why even pretend to be human? Why not just…” I spread my hands.

…Stay in hell? Keep whatever dark powers you have? I thought.

“And ruin all the fun? Heavens, no.”

I stared at him, my lip curling just as surely as my hands were into fists.

“Anything else,” I said. Anything other than being shackled to him. Was there anything else that I could possibly offer that would not leave me as a prisoner in my town, in my own mind? I could give him my body; it would not be easy, but I would do it. But to live under the same roof, to go about life as though we were partners? It was a farce, a sham. I would have to pretend to love, and everyone knew what a horrible liar I was.

He shook his head, still keeping his eyes fixed on me. “Marry me. Or no deal.”

He turned away from me, walking back into the night. The darkness closed all around him, welcoming him back into its wild embrace. I felt a cord within me tied to him, and as he walked away, it stretched.

Agnes, with her beautiful smile, full of crooked teeth; Agnes, with her deep capacity to love and heal people, no matter who they were, or how they treated her; Agnes, the one who I raised when our father left. How could it be possible to love someone so much? It did not seem humanly possible. I loved her so much that it ceased to feel like love. We were rocks pressed together so deep in the earth that we fused. We were steel strings and sculpted wood of a guitar. Neither could exist without the other.

It stretched.

But I hated being manipulated. I hated giving in to what I knew to be puerile plucking of my strings. This man, who was no man, knew everything about me. He knew my pride, he knew how I did not bow before men. He was breaking into my solace and solitude, and I could have strangled him for it. Perhaps I would.

It stretched.

But…I needed him. Agnes needed him.

As he kept walking away, that cord grew tauter with each passing step. Cracks were beginning to appear in my pride, and it snapped.

“Wait!”

He stopped. I could feel his smile.

“I have conditions,” I said.

Turning around, he sauntered back to me. The entire forest screeched at me to back down, accept fate, to turn from this jagged path, with its razor edges. But I already had momentum, and I could not stop what was happening. That was what we told ourselves, in the darkest parts of our lives; I couldn’t stop myself.

“I love how you think you are in a place to bargain,” he said. “But I will entertain your notions.”

“I’ll do it,” I said. “I will live under the same roof and be called your wife. But I won’t bed you. You stay away from me. Or I will stab you in the eye. You may be immortal, but I bet it’ll hurt like hell.”

In a mouse’s heartbeat, my back was against a tree. I could feel the rough bark and smell the cedar. He had rushed forward, lifted me, and pinned me to the trunk; his hands held me firmly about the waist. Bending his head, he swept his nose along the skin of my neck, as though he were smelling me. The brush sent goosebumps down my arms.

“Chère,” he said, his mouth still a hair’s breadth away from my neck. “It is you who will beg me to be near you. But fine. I may be the Devil, but I’m not a monster.”

He released me.

“I have something else.” I hesitated, hoping he’d take the bait. My body was liquid, like I was floating in the sea. “If I can find who will kill her, and stop him, will you release her? And me?”

Frank whistled a series of bright notes. “Interesting…I like it. The balance would be kept.” He peered at me, reading every single mark that life had ever made on my body. The scar on my wrist when I fell from a tree; the lines on my forehead where the sun kissed me every day; the mole on my left hip that some boy from long ago traced with a finger after we made love. “Fine. Deal.”

 “What do I do?”

When he snapped his fingers, a parchment appeared, hung in midair. A quill and ink bottle appeared as well.

“Just sign.”

White hot words appeared along the brown, wrinkled parchment, so searing that they left an afterglow when I shut my eyes. The whispering and laughing around me grew louder. The letterwork ran until the very end. My fingers reached out to take the quill. I wasn’t scared. I was furious. As I cast my eyes over the words, I tapped the metal end of the quill to the glass bottle, making a tiny, musical sound.

The words were in no language that I knew.

“What does it say?” I asked.

A series of images flashed through my mind. Agnes. Me in a white dress. Agnes living, breathing, laughing. Me, hugging her one last time.

I lurched back to the present.

“Nothing that I have not already told you. Seven months…We have wonderful time ahead of us.” He ran a finger down the edge of the parchment, and I felt my spine straighten in response. “Don’t you trust me?”

The pen scratched the paper. All the while, he stood there, relishing the moment.

With a flourish, I signed. I usually never wrote with such grandiosity, nor signed my name with so many little embellishments, but if I was going to sign over my soul, then by god, I was going to do it with style. It was as though it were a small rebellion, my last insurrection.

“Done.” I handed him back the quill. He took it, then in a flash, grabbed my hand, held my pointer finger and stabbed the sharp point into it.

Crying out, I tried to jerk away, but he held me firm. He squeezed over the parchment, and a drop of blood dripped onto the sheet. He slipped a gold band from his pocket onto my finger. The metal burned my hand, cold as ice as it slid down my finger, sealing our agreement.

“Now it is done,” he said. “Be at the courthouse at ten o’clock Monday morning.”

The sun rose from its grave, and the sky faded from ink black to royal blue.

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