Southern Cross the Dog

by Bill Cheng

  Shut your eyes, his grandma said.

  Above him, the man moved, shifting his weight, the floor straining against the balls of his feet. Eli could hear his hands, hear the wet slick of oil between the man’s palms as he rubbed them together. A band of warmth stretched across his chest.

  Don’t move.

  The heat was unbearable. It lay heavy like a second skin. He could feel the sweat between his shoulder blades, gathering along the ridge of his spine. It traveled down and down, a cold pearl at the base of his back.

  And inside, he could feel the small thing fighting in his chest, struggling against the root man’s ministrations. The Devil rustled. His lungs filled with feathers. There were hands upon him now, kneading hard against his breast. His heart raced. The air was shrinking. He could not breathe.

  And there was the thumping in his breast, and God’s hand in his throat. And there was his soul against his ribs. Outside, the trains let out their bellows, and in one sick lurch, he spit the evil yolk out onto the butcher paper. Eli hacked and wheezed and felt air crack deep into his core. The man stood him up and wrapped up the paper around the yolk, tucking the yellow mass into one of his dusty jars.

  FOR YEARS, ELI WENT TO see the root man, drinking his potions and huffing powders from his mason jars. In the afternoons, he helped him hunt through the thatches of johnsongrass outside the rail yard. The old man squatted down among the weeds, his desiccated hands searching through the loose soft soil. He plucked mushrooms from the cold black ground and tucked their caps inside his cheek. He’d hold them there for hours before spitting the runny mash across an Indian head penny. All the plants he could name by touch, the grittiness of the leaves, the firmness of the stalks against his fingers. Sorghum and boneset and chase-devil. He’d take a spade and dig down, prying up long tangles of blood root, and John the conqueror and the musky dripping vines called devil’s shoestrings.

  Folks would come from miles around—as far away as Prichard and Mobile and Tillmans Corner. The line would stretch out the door and Eli would watch them, their slack and tired faces, the nervous hands. Eli listened as the root man dispensed his advice: mashed-up snake root and grooveburr in a sachet under your bed. A strip of yellow cloth and powdered anise seed inside a flannel pouch. There were tricks for money and tricks for love and tricks to turn the Devil from your door. There were mojo hands and evil eyes and black cat bones. And all around was the invisible world, Eli realized, each of us caught in its strange currents. If he shut his eyes, he could almost hear it—the thump of blood. The driving noise. The deep and ancient undertows.

  The first trick he ever laid, Eli made a wish and rubbed a piece of lodestone to a purple kerchief. He buried the rock underneath a linden tree and burned the kerchief, setting the ashes into the wind. In time the universe would answer. When he was thirteen, a man came to his grandma’s house. He was tall and dark and slim with a mouth full of gold and he told the boy that he was his father. With him, he’d brought an old pine-top upright piano. The man said he had a job selling them all over the country. When Eli’s grandma found that man inside her house, she ran him off with a meat cleaver. She chased him clear out of town before he could recover his piano.

  For hours every night Eli would sit at the box, studying the keys. He’d pry open the top panel and watch the wooden hammers rise and fall across the long raking cables. He taught himself, and in time the piano became almost second nature. He liked the way his arms spread its length, the way the sound gave underneath his fingers. It became a conduit of his will. Anger and joy and sadness swooping out of his soul and into the air.

  And yet when he sat himself at the bench, when the fall board lifted away to reveal the peninsula of glowing keys, he could not say he was entirely himself. The hands were not his hands. They moved without his moving them, tensing into claws, doing their jitter jump. The chords rose like a heat above the keys and the thought occurred to him that maybe it was not his will that drove his hands, that spanned his arms, that struck and stroked and stomped his feet against the ground.

  ELI LEFT HOME WITH HIS mojo bag, a deck of cards, and a head full of humming. He spent years on the chitlin circuit—playing at the Queen City Hotel, Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, Doke’s Barbershop, and in the tiny jukes up and down Chrisman Street. He earned himself a name as a demon on an upright. For hours he’d play, his face stern and his clothes sweat-heavy. Folks would jam into the tiny halls, their bodies full of heat, and Eli would shut his eyes and feel their swell in the back of his mouth, their beating feet in his throat.

  Rumor had spread about the devil bag he kept at his waist, and after a set, there’d always be some desperate woman waiting for him outside. She’d tell him her troubles, and he’d listen—his face a blank, lost in the hiss of the gas lamps.

  When she finished speaking, he’d look her square in the eye.

  You got to be sure, he’d say, his hand laying warm across the back of hers. ’Cause once it gets doing, can’t get undone.

  Then he’d take her money and walk her back to someplace dark and quiet where they would not be disturbed.

  IN THE DAYS AFTER THE flood, it was so calm you could see clear through the water like it was a sheet of glass—torn-up roofs, stovepipes, drowned livestock made stiff and waxen. The D.C. men had come down on special order and they went around in their standard-issue tan, speaking in clean soft voices, sketching their plans on rolls of yellow paper. At night they went into the refugee camps, their lanterns flashing and disappearing through the weeds. They went to the coloreds first, rousting them from their beds with promises of work and food and a chance to help their country. And then there was Eli who was already up, who never slept much to begin with—Eli with his mouth on the mouth of a bottle of corn whiskey. He was by the fire, shooting craps—the dice heavy with mercury and firing sevens.

  He didn’t see the D.C. men, didn’t see them come up till one of them put a hand on his shoulder.

  You serving your country now.

  In the morning, they lined him up with the others and gave them each a ration ticket. They fed them on stores of stiff bread and a thin soup before driving them up-country to the levee camp. It was a wide and grassless clearing set along the water break, where rows of pup tents crowded into one another. The latrines were a network of shallow trenches running through the camp and out into the water. The mosquitoes raged thick and black, flitting on their eyes and skin and shit.

  They gathered the men to the water’s edge and one of the D.C. men stood himself up on a supply truck and sketched out what needed doing: a berm, ten feet high, six feet across, running two miles downriver. The work would be hard and long, but their work would live on in the state for years to come, he said.

  Then someone asked, How long we got to live here?

  And the man said, Long as it takes.

  Then they were given shovels.

  THE MAN IN CHARGE WAS a former overseer named Homer Teague. He wasn’t from D.C., but he’d run a plantation somewhere roundabout Indianola, and the D.C. men had figured that running coloreds is running coloreds. Teague was a fierce drinker. When he was angry, his face would turn wine red, and he’d uncoil that long bullwhip he kept at his belt and snap it in the air. If you didn’t shovel or haul fast enough, he’d pull you out of your line, and stretch you out under a tree and tear you through with a piece of splintered hickory.

  He lived out with his sister, Emaline, in a plantation house outside of town, a creaking place where the walls looked like bone and the stink of sulfur came up through the mud. It was always on his boots, kissing yolky daggers into the earth.

  Maybe it was the difference in their ages, but where her brother was mean and quick to anger, Emaline was gentle and easily moved to emotion. She was sixteen years old, a bird of a child. Some days, she’d come down to the camp done up in her gingham homespun, toting a basket of apples for the men.

  Eli would
greet her as she came down the line. Unlike the others, Eli wasn’t afraid of smiling at white women, big and toothy, full of nothing behind it. He’d bow, tipping some invisible hat, before righting himself and accepting her apple.

  But the biggest, reddest apples she’d save for her brother, who looked forward to her visits. Teague would crunch them between his teeth, gold-colored juices soaking up in his red beard. He’d lick the sticky off his fingers and Emaline would dab her kerchief on his lips and his hands, shaking her head, saying, Oh, Homer.

  For months, Eli worked out in the levee camp under Teague, digging ditches, driving mules, and hauling cement. Breakfast bell comes at five, and if you ain’t got your card, you ain’t eating—then it’s down to the riverside till the quit bell rings. In those long hours the men would wait on those bells, hearing them when there wasn’t nothing to hear at all—just a magpie screaming or some faraway train going, tearing through the world like it was made of butcher paper.

  The work was hard and grueling but on Saturdays, they’d clear out the equipment shed and him and a few of the boys would get a special dispensation into town. They’d come back with barrels of white whiskey and a hog to slaughter and roast over the fire pit. Once they stole a piano—took four goddamn men to lift—and Eli would drink that white whiskey and beat those keys and make them forget. The crooked card games, the lying women—one more song, just one more song. They’d rise to their feet, and shut their eyes, feel the wash of sound against them, pulling back like sand on the tide. And those D.C. white boys would just look the other way, down at their rolls of paper, at their pencil sketchings, and let those sorry niggers alone.

  ONE MORNING HE SAW HER, Emaline, stumble up the grassless path. The sun was on her shoulders, moving through her hair. Eli had been working at the wall, reinforcing the berm with cement when she stopped and greeted him, her high laugh speckling above the rill of moving water.

  You’re a performer, she said to him. That’s what one of the men told me anyways.

  Eli let his shovel rest.

  Yes, miss, he said. He stood the shovel against the wall and wiped his brow with a kerchief.

  I knew it! How come you never told me that before?

  Eli shrugged and glanced down the line to where her brother was busying himself with a mule driver and his team. He seemed irate, pushing that small man about and violently unhitching the beasts from the wagon.

  Nothing to tell, I suppose, Miss Teague.

  Well, what’re you doing out here?

  Even performers got to eat, he said.

  She thought for a second, then crinkled her nose, laughing.

  What do you perform at?

  I play the piano, Miss Teague.

  She clapped her hands together.

  The piano! Can you teach me to play?

  Eli smirked. I can teach you to shovel.

  She laughed again, touching the back of her wrist to her mouth.

  You’re too much, Mr. Cutter, she said before she continued down with her morning greetings. She was an attractive girl, he recognized. He watched the other men get mealymouthed around Emaline Teague, hemming and hawing and striking the ground with their heels. She flustered them with her jokes and that was her right, he supposed. But in his gut he could feel the danger there—her brother’s hot eyes on those around her.

  There were rumors about Emaline and her brother and the things that went on in that plantation house on the outskirts of town, but near as Eli knew it was only idle talk.

  Then one day Emaline stopped coming down to the levee camp with her basket of apples, and it seemed like that foul angry weather would never lift from Homer Teague. He’d come down to the banks, red and mean, his eyes puffy and his cheeks swollen, looking for any chance to take his meanness out of some nigger’s hide.

  He’d work his strop hard, taking whole teams sometimes out under the shady oaks. Each of them would off with their trousers and wrap their arms around a tree trunk. Real hard now, he’d hiss. Like hugging your sorry sag-ass mamas, and Teague would snap the whip in the air, rubbing his wrists and elbows. Real tight now.

  The men would close their eyes and feel the breeze move over their naked parts. The lash came down hot and sudden. They’d jerk against the pain, digging their bodies into the bark. Those who cried out, Teague would whup harder, lashing his shoulder down, and when the D.C. boys checked in on the camp’s progress, they’d nod to each other. They’d picked the right man for the job.

  THERE’D BEEN RAIN THAT SATURDAY night and the men came in, shaking off their clothes and hair, cramming into the makeshift barrelhouse. The whiskey stores were running low and their mood with it. Eli took the bench and began to play. He hadn’t had anything in mind particularly, just noodling to pass the time. He played something slow and blue and wearied and the men slouched down in their seats. They looked up at the ceiling, at one another, at the long lashes of smoke that ghosted the air. No one stood. No one danced. Eli shut his eyes, listened to the rain. The world was filling up.

  When he opened his eyes again, he was surprised to see Emaline there in their barrelhouse, the one white face in a sea of black ones. The others watched her in shock as she moved through the drifting smoke and took a seat near the piano.

  What was that you were just playing?

  Oh—nothing, Eli managed to say. Just a blues.

  A blues?

  He could feel the others watching them. Hear their low voices.

  Your brother know you out here with us?

  Don’t talk to me about Homer. Not now.

  Well, all right, he said.

  It’s pretty, she said. Whatever it is.

  Thank you, Miss Teague.

  She touched his hand and he took it away.

  I need to see you, she said.

  She rose and he followed her out, well aware of how it would look. They passed out into the rain and ran across to shelter underneath the equipment shed.

  They tell me that you can do things, she said. With powders and such.

  Eli was silent for a moment. Something was happening. What it was exactly, he could not say. There was something. A change in the air. A hardening in his gut. Yes, he said after a while.

  I need help. Her voice was weak and small.

  It was dark around them and he could not see her face.

  I don’t lay tricks for your kind. White folks, I mean. It’s not something that’s done, Miss Teague.

  They were silent for what felt like a long time. Eli could feel the liquor working through him, the warm ache inside his skull. She was crying, he realized. He let himself put his hand across her back.

  What’s wrong?, he asked.

  Oh, Eli, she cried. I don’t know how to begin to tell you. The pain is unbearable, you must understand. I’ve not been able to eat or sleep in weeks.

  She seized his hand and laid it across her stomach. There’s this pain in me, spreading like a fire.

  Eli looked at her and swallowed hard.

  You been to see the doctor?

  He can’t help me, she said.

  Eli nodded. Okay, he said. Come back here tomorrow night. I’ll have something for you.

  That night he hunted through his pouches for birthwort and pennyroyal. By candlelight, he ground them down with the edge of a lucky nickel and knit up the powder in a worsted sachet. He cut a slice of cohosh root and blessed it twice with St. Jude oil. He tucked it under his tongue, let the bitterness seep into his jaw.

  There was a devil in everything. In the good and the bad, in the water rising into his mouth. In every outstretched finger of his hands. In the secret inside her belly. Eli turned to his shaving mirror. The hardening in his gut had not gone away and he felt anxious. For what, he could not say. He looked at his reflection, as if for the last time. He asked for protection. For Emaline. For himself. Would it work? Had i
t ever? He blew out the candle. He was not sure.

  The next night, she was where he’d told her to be. The moon hung above the river, blighted and bad and full. A sightless eye. And beneath he could see its twin, smeared and milky on the water’s surface.

  He handed her the sachet in a yellow kerchief.

  Brew it up, he told her. And when the water gets a kind of clear yellow, drink it down. Every drop.

  She tucked the bundle into her pocket and started to go.

  He took her arm.

  I never done this before, he said. I don’t know what’s going to happen.

  She squeezed his hand and went on.

  FOR WEEKS, HE’D CRANE HIS neck out into the lane and look for the red checkcloth homespun and the basket of apples. But Emaline was nowhere to be found. Eli just kept on at his work and on payday, he’d beat the pine-top box, beat the sound from its cables, throw back his head and roar out for the world. He’d roll and sway and feel his troubles lift and lift until, like air, they weren’t hardly nothing at all. Nothing like the furious sound beneath his fingers.

  It’d been a wild payday. A few whores had come down into the camps that night, perfumed and big thighed. They fit easy into the crook of men’s arms, across their laps. The camp had gone through three barrels of whiskey that night, and there was some talk about a fourth, but everybody was already walking lopsided, with their words wet and running together. Eli stooped over the piano and the men would scoop their girls around the floor, testing their warm hands on those warmer bodies, the coins jangling in their pockets.

  But soon night passed into early morning, and one by one the crowd trickled out. There were only a few stragglers left, half asleep in their seats and Eli at the bench, numb except for his fingertips, which were bright and eager.

  Suddenly the door swung open and he turned to see Homer Teague filling the frame.

  The man looked different somehow. Brittle. Pale. From his color, Eli could tell the man had been drinking. He’d been done up proper in a waistcoat and hat as if he’d just come from a party. Quietly, he crossed the floor and took a seat by the piano, the same seat that his sister had taken.