John Crow's Devil

by Marlon James

  REVIVAL Part One

  Six men, seven women, and three children got saved on Sunday. lived outside Gibbeah and would never be seen again, but the number was still more than all the years of Hector Bligh’s pastorship, by Lucinda’s count.

  Just after he prayed for salvation and sent the newly saved to their seats, the Apostle commanded The Five to remain at the altar. There they lingered, one standing alert, one fidgeting, one glancing right, the other left, the last to the floor, all fearing they would be made an example of.

  “In the name of the Father I rebuke the evil spirit. I bind it by the blood of the lamb! I loose it from their dreams and thoughts and cast it back into Hell.” Then York spoke a language never heard before. All that happened next, happened to Tony Curtis first. Mute since an accident at twelve, he screamed a noise that shook the church. He had not yet fallen when the rest of The Five began to yell, scream, and fall to the ground in spasms. People remembered that before Lillamae stabbed Pastor Bligh she had damaged each of The Five who tried to subdue her. So when Brother Vixton leapt up screaming, Hallelujah! his stiff neck was stiff no more. Brother Patrick remained on the floor bawling at having taken his first deep breath in two years. Deacon Pinckney clutched his left eye and cried when he saw out of the right one. Brother Jakes thanked the Lord that he wore tight briefs, as his miracle brought a flush of fear. His blessing stood erect all the way home, where for the first time in two years he could violate his wife.

  “You think it goin dry by itself?” she said, an annoyed parent in the weight of her tongue. She was in the bathroom with Pastor Bligh, losing her patience. After eleven years with a man, she no longer recognized the walls that men and women kept up between each other. To turn away from a man merely because he was undressing or shitting seemed as absurd as lying about the blueness of sky. She certainly wasn’t leaving before he handed her the shorts.

  This was what she would do to him, he knew it. She would make him young, but only in the most wicked sense of the word. He was to be reduced from man to child, helpless and under manners.

  She left him there, closing the door with a man’s strength and stirring up a wind that chilled him. Lavender rose up to his nose.

  After she became a widow, Mrs. Greenfield restored femininity to the bathroom. The rest of the house still carried the manly stamp of her husband’s presence. Rooms with patterned wallpaper that haunted her with tobacco, Old Spice cologne, red dirt, and Earl Grey tea that only he drank. The bathroom was not only pink but lilac and purple, with a translucent shower curtain trimmed with crocheted lace. An oval carpet covered the tiled floor and the lid of the toilet. The mirror, also an oval, mocked him and he looked away.

  This must have been where she reclaimed herself. But there was nothing about the Widow that he could color pink, lilac, or purple. Maybe this was where she left behind a former self.

  Water hit the back of his neck and he pissed on himself. He had heard of showers but had never felt one before this day. Little rays of water sprung from multiple holes like a hydra and attacked him at once. He raised his arms and let the water wash away secret stenches. Water beat his face, punched his eyelids, and pushed wrinkles away from his cheek. What a thing this was to make him feel young again. This was a chance to be new. God’s gift.

  Pastor Hector Bligh was fifty-three years old but guilt had pulled down his face. The promise of towering height was thwarted by his slouch. He was on the brink of a new resolve when his thoughts went south. The shower had led him to believe too much. He wondered if people left their homes similarly deluded every morning because of invigorating water jets. His dirtiness could never be washed away. The Widow barged back into the room, unconcerned with his shock or shame.

  “No you just bathe in river water?”

  “N-no … Y-Yes … I …”

  “Suppose you need white soap to feel white as snow. Here me think you did need the holy spirit. Suit you’self. Towel in the closet outside. Anyway, I need the toilet.”

  “The toi—”

  “Me have to pee-pee! You understand me now?”

  She pulled down her panty before he went to the door. He left the room clutching his crotch, almost slipping as his wet feet skidded across the floor. Before closing the door he heard her piss stream pierce through the pool of toilet water. The Pastor grabbed a towel from the closet and waited in the hallway. In minutes she emerged, wiping her hands on her skirt.

  “Follow me.”

  She took him down the hallway to the dining room, which had a dim light. From the dining room she swung left and he followed her to a darker bedroom. Although only 2:30 in the afternoon, the room spoke of twilight. Clothes were everywhere, as were chests, cupboards, and books that had not been opened since her husband died. In the center of the room was a four-poster bed. Each post had been carved with a pattern of vine leaves, which twirled and danced to a knob at the top. The Rum Preacher thought of Jack and the beanstalk and an invisible giant suspended right below the ceiling but above the bed.

  “You can stay in here.”

  “This is where—”

  “Yes, this is where. Yes. But since him—I don’t sleep in here no more. Any more of me business you want to know?”

  “No. Tha—”

  “Dinner at 5:30. I suppose you can wear him clothes even though him did little shorter than you. I suppose if him have a problem him can always tell you, you bein spiritual and all.”

  Once alone the room became larger, more blue, more twilight, less him. Bligh remembered again he was fifty-three years old. He had his life all planned out by twenty-two. At forty he would slip into retirement for twenty years, after which would have come obscurity, gardening, and death. Irrelevance was to come after, not before. For a God so ambiguous, there were no two ways about his punishment.

  Dinner was to be served at 5:30 p.m. Hector Bligh whispered a prayer that along with the sunlight, memories of the day would lose color and fade into blackness

  “The food getting cold.”

  He sat down. For a woman who seemed to care little, she certainly prepared a table before him. There was simply no way she could have cooked all of this herself. Yet many women in denial of the emptiness that death brought still cooked as if the home was full. This was nothing new. Behind the mask of extravagance was the void cut open by grief. She had fried chicken in batter with honey garlic gravy to the side, steamed rice and peas and sweet potatoes, crushed bananas with butter, and shredded sweet carrots and cabbages together, then sprinkled them with cane vinegar. In the center of the table was a large glass pitcher with red punch beside two plastic cups.

  “Help yourself.”

  He would have rather she helped him. This was an uncomfortable experience, filled with disquiet. He remembered the unease, a child’s discomfort as he waited for his father to punish him. In that stiff silence there was nothing but the agony of him guessing. Too much food would be gluttonous. Too little would be scornful. Oh that he could simply eat like a man and be done with it. Women wanted men to be men, after all. Why else would such bounty be laid before him? Why prepare a table in the village of enemies? He piled a mountain on his plate. Food all steaming, dripping, savory, and chunky. His first real meal in years. The Pastor had a woman who cooked, but her meals suffered from an unsavory sameness. Two bites into the Widow’s meal, he almost choked on bliss. Juices came alive on a tongue that once felt dead. A million zesty kisses, each more delightful than the one before. The plate was empty and restacked in minutes.

  “Mind you choke,” she said.

  The Widow appeared to smile but then she pushed her chair back into the dark before the Pastor could confirm it. She ate nothing herself. Dinner was a noisy clutter of mouth sounds. Lips and gums slapping food with spit and teeth slicing, tearing, and chomping the whole thing down to paste, followed by the glorious gulp of a swallow.

  He was the only one doing the eating, so she must have been doing the watching. Women loved to watch men eat, he thought. I
t was the last blast of primal energy that the hunter-gatherer had left to show. But whenever he raised his head, even suddenly, hers would be elsewhere, lost in her own inner space. A bitter place, the Pastor concluded, but no more so than his. As she showed no interest in watching him, he decided to watch her. She was a pretty woman, but used her bitterness to look older. The frown between her brows fought against the suppleness of her dark skin. She plaited her hair without care, but had little gray. And there was no diminishing her large, round eyes, no matter how much she scowled and shrunk them. But widowhood came too soon. She was the youngest of them in the village. Old women were better prepared. When intimacy dies, the man dies with it. There will come a time when the bed becomes a gulf and two not-young bodies give up on being one flesh. The chill of sexual heat will be the first death. The silly talk of lovers giving way to instructions, rebuttals, and refusals will be the second. His discovery of a quiet place inside his head or outside the house is the third death. Drinking the fourth. Disease and his mind rotting away, the fifth. Bathing and cleaning him like a child, then combing his hair and scooping away his shit, is the sixth death. And when the seventh death comes—when his lungs collapse, his eyes go white, and the flies know first—the sequence is as banal as dusk.

  But Mr. Greenfield died young. She carried the memory like Sisyphus. This was the thing that widows did until death came for them too. God had saved her from seeing her husband’s death herself, but the drunkards saw. They said this of his death. He took four shots of rum, cursing his hard-to-please wife with each gulp, then walked in a straight line from barstool to door to road. He stepped into the loud blur of the truck speeding by and vanished, leaving nothing but the echo of metal and glass slamming into flesh.

  Within a week the truck was back on the road, picking up stones the villagers broke from rocks. At the funeral, one of the few occasions where Pastor Bligh was sober, the Widow went up to the casket, whispered something, and left the church. She did not return, not to the funeral or the church. Several members of the choir, those who stood near the coffin, swore that she cursed God that day. Widow Greenfield went home and put curtains over her windows. Marriage was a journey neither she nor her husband had packed for. They had no children.

  The Widow looked up and their eyes met. Her face was bland. Not relaxed, but resignatory. He looked down at his empty plate.

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  “You welcome, Pastor.”

  “I, I going back to the room. I—”

  She waved him off and he felt dismissed and offended. But what he saw when she looked away was a woman who knew nothing more than how to live in a broken space. Had she opened up her brokenness to him? He went back to the room confused.

  9:30. There was a theory that he had, which he even preached, that every person in the world had a God-shaped void in his heart, but few chose to fill that void with God. Maybe he filled his with liquor. Or guilt. Whatever, the emptiness gnawed at him. Emptiness was an unnatural state. Frustration or guilt. Is that what a Wednesday night had become, a choice between two unsavory states, with happiness anathema to either? Pastor Hector Bligh wanted a drink. They called him the Rum Preacher, but he never drank rum, preferring whiskey. Scotch had a sulfurous skin, a bitterness that punished you for thinking you had the chest hair to drink it. He thought of this. A room of drunkards, all downing a liquor that nobody could enjoy. Onanism? The bitterness of malt was the bitterness of life itself. But the drink stirred a dumb faith. A stubborn hope that at the bottom of that glass, at the bottom of his life, at the last drop of substance, there must be some final note of sweetness. There had to be. He was beyond reason.

  9:45.

  “I goin out.”

  She was still at the table. He wondered if this was where she slept. Maybe she was waiting for her husband’s ghost to come for dinner. Maybe this night he would stay away and she would watch the roaches and mice as they pillaged the table. Then they’d gnaw at her flesh and there she would still sit, waiting not out of faith, but because there was nothing else to do. She did not answer.

  There was one place to escape God’s white throne of judgment. Maybe not so much an escape, but the musty roof, rollicking ska jukebox, and lazy tongues muffled Jehovah’s thunder. The bar. Drunkenness was a communal and personal pleasure at once, a miserable state only to those not drinking. Sobriety to him was a cruel attack of conscience masking itself as awareness. If sober people were so aware, how come they only spoke truth when drunk? Give him the romance of a drunkard over the indignation of a teetotaler any day. At the door of the bar, the clink of glasses, the haze of smoke, and cheerful talk of sin welcomed him.

  “The mistress is here?” Bligh asked.

  “No baba.”

  “She sick?”

  “Why you want to know, you goin heal her?”

  He looked at her, this little girl trying on a woman’s tongue for size. There was a fate for girls like her. It started with a smile and ended with several ugly children and a husband who would beat her for her rudeness.

  “You said she sick?”

  “Me never say nothing to you.”

  He did not even know the girl. She aged before him into a woman older than what Widow Greenfield was trying to be.

  “She staying home. Say she reading her Bible,” the girl finally said.

  “Bible?”

  “You turn echo now that you done be preacher? Yes sah, she on fire for Jesus ever since Apostle York kick—I mean, come take you spot. She into the Bible reading hard. She all a talking bout selling the bar. Poor people soon out o work.” She looked at him as if he was responsible. The Pastor said nothing. She had wanted him to say something. She was ready. The girl had an unbroken stream of expletive prepared that would have withered him where he stood. But he fed her nothing and she stood there with the stillborn response stuck in her throat, too nasty to swallow.

  “What you want?”

  “Scotch and soda water. The mistress, she always forget where she keep the soda.”

  “But it right underneath the counter.”

  “No. What I meant was … she always forget where she keep the soda.”

  “You ears hard? Me say it under—”

  “Is a game between me and she, just pass the soda!”

  “You mean Scotch?”

  “Yes, Scotch! Scotch! Scotch!”

  “Hey, don’t jump after me cause bigger-balls man go make you look like bitch.”

  “Leave the bottle.”

  Let the Rum Preacher testify to this. He was far more comfortable at the bar than at the altar. As the head of the church he could never escape the collective weight of judgment. But that cup had passed, and sliding toward him was another, wet, golden, and tinkling with ice. What lay beyond shame, freedom? He was seven sips away from not giving a damn, fifteen from not remembering who he was, and twenty from pissing on himself. Take it easy, Preacher, the bartender would have said by now, but she was off enjoying company more divine than his. With her absent, there was no one to talk to but himself. He was drunk. This was usually a state of perfect peace, but something had gone wrong. Usually, whiskey could erase a sentence midway before it was even finished. Like chalk on a blackboard, the memory was never gone, only smudged, indecipherable and irrelevant. But this time memory came in waves, history he had forgotten for years. Suddenly, afflictions not his own were thrust upon him. His left eye went black. A pain ran along the course of his spine and he fell off the barstool. He tried, in a desperate fit of wheezing, to catch his breath. A force unseen hit him in the scrotum, a battering ram, a rolling calf. The Pastor doubled over, lost his balance, and fell on the floor. Whiskey and bile erupted from his stomach. His teeth chattered violently, chomping on his tongue and causing his throat to fill with blood. He threw himself into the fit, as if a spirit was trying to flee his body. Bligh’s eyes rolled back into his skull and his head hammered onto the floor.

  “Jeezus Christ! Him have fits! Him have fits!” said a ma
n beside Bligh as he fell.

  “Rahtid,” said another.

  “Unu fling this spoon in him mouth quick!” shouted the young bartender. “Bout him want bottle! You know say is a whole o Johnny Walker him one go fi drink?”

  “Him still a fits?”

  “Is the Devil in him. Me read that in the Bible,” said the man nearest to Bligh, holding onto the spoon that he had shoved in the Pastor’s mouth.

  “If you read Bible, me frig with donkey,” came from the end of the bar.

  “Me no business a wha,” said the bartender, “Get him out o the place!”

  “Me? Me nah touch that deh, baba. You no see that him still having fits? You want him kick one o we?”

  “Whoever take him out get the next three drink free,” she said.

  “Like is your bar!”

  “See it deh! Him stop jerk now. Alright … alright … alright … There. See, him stop shake. Now give me me spoon and get this shithouse out of me bar. Mr. Cee, you and him drag this damn Rum Preacher out!”