As the crowd dispersed, she looked up and met Petey’s gaze. She was Madeline, beauty mark and all. She winked at Petey, the nineteenth-century chimney he clutched dissipated, and he slid screaming off the edge of the twenty-first-century roof, and into space.
Next thing he knew, he stood in the bedroom window again, as the powdered and petticoated Madeline tugged on his arm.
“Oh, mon amour,” she said. “How can you be so calm?”
“How, indeed?” Petey murmured. It was less a reply than a response, involuntary. He marveled at his hands so clean, his floor so level and trustworthy, his companion so vibrant and alive.
Then that jerk Alcide burst in with his sword, and it all happened again.
Petey was aware, throughout, that this sequence of events had happened before, but awareness was not agency. Unable to break free of the loop, he went through the motions of the scene already scripted: avoid, taunt, avoid, taunt, stab, rip, kill, clutch the chimney, be ignored. But this time, he was struck anew by the tour guide’s words:
“Every night, phantom figures reenacted that awful confrontation from long ago.”
“Phantom figures, my ass!” Petey cried. “Those phantoms are me! I mean, us!”
Then he fell again, screaming, and was back in the bedroom again—and so forth, as before.
This happened again.
And again.
And again.
And just as Petey began to realize this was it, this was his life from now on, he fell off the roof and landed in church.
* * *
—
“Sometimes he is called the Evil One, for he is evil in himself, and tempts us to evil.”
“Amen, brother!” the people cried. “Praise Jesus!”
Disoriented and dizzy, Petey now stood in sweltering heat in the back of a small, high-ceilinged, plainly adorned sanctuary. He was pressed on all sides by a crowd of people, their attention riveted on the spectacularly cross-eyed man in the pulpit at the front of the room. Every pew was crammed, every square foot of aisle and vestibule filled by men in knee breeches and women in silks and stays, and all in powdered wigs like an unbroken cloud layer throughout the room. Petey, too, was dressed in this fashion, as was the preacher. Though he did not shout, the cross-eyed man’s voice reached everyone’s ears, as though he spoke individually to each person present. Their natural rivalries aside, Petey sort of admired this. Interjections and affirmations in the crowd were constant, and here and there hands were raised, palms out, as if in supplication, but none of this detracted from the preacher’s inexorably friendly voice.
“Sometimes he is known as the Prince of the Power of the Air, for in the air he doth abide, chiefly, and through the whole world; and all that are not born of God are said to lie in him.”
As he began to recover himself, Petey realized that just as he previously recognized his St. Charles Avenue mansion in New Orleans and knew himself to be in the nineteenth century, so here he understood himself to be in the Congregational Church in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a century earlier, when New England was still subject to the king. He also saw that he was the only person in the room of African descent, though no one paid him the slightest attention. He was indifferent to the former, but exceedingly vexed by the latter.
“Aye, sisters and brothers, Paul’s words in the second chapter, eleventh verse, of Second Corinthians, are true unto this day: ‘We are not ignorant of his devices.’ No, indeed, my friends. Satan’s devices are known to us. We know that he is an enemy to God and to goodness. He is a hater of all truth. He is full of malice, full of envy, full of revenge. For what other motives could induce him to molest the innocents in Paradise?”
He paused to draw breath, at which point a second voice rang out from the crowd:
“Yeah, well, that’s, like, your opinion, preacher.”
Everyone in the room gasped and moaned in dismay and cast about to see who had spoken, except for the two who knew: Petey, who had spoken the words, and the preacher, who stared straight at him as he did it.
Aglow with delirious indignation, the preacher jabbed a finger at Petey, as if to spear him to the back wall. “I hear you, and I see you, sir,” he cried. “I know you who interrupt the Lord’s word, here in the Lord’s house!”
“Frankly, I’ve seen nicer houses,” Petey said. He sauntered forward in the space that opened up as horrified brethren rushed to distance themselves; he was pleased to see sparks fly up from his every footfall, a nice effect. “And while I am the first to admit my father-in-law has some genuine anger issues, and his impulse control is not so great, nevertheless, I think these good people deserve to hear more of a—what’s the phrase?—a fair and balanced presentation.”
“You dare to challenge me, fiend? I, George Whitefield, in the Colonies, in the employ of the Lord God Almighty? What claim have you on this pulpit, sirrah?”
“I’ll wrestle you for it,” Petey replied—and realized, as he said it, that this confrontation, too, was scripted, just as the one with Alcide had been; that he likewise was enjoying it; that it likewise would not end well.
“Done!” roared Whitefield, who seemed to have grown two feet taller and a foot wider during their exchange. Petey, too, felt larger and stronger. He tested this, as the preacher leaped an improbable distance out of the pulpit, by seizing the nearest pew-end and lifting the long oaken bench one-handed, swinging it as a child would aim a slat at a pinecone.
“You want a piece of me, sucker?” Petey taunted.
He threw the pew at the head of the preacher, who ducked, barreled forward, and head-butted Petey in the stomach.
In the years to come, a population five times that of the colony of Massachusetts would claim to have been present in the small church to see Preacher Whitefield fight the Devil (for so they fully assumed the black man to be), but in fact it was only a couple of hundred people who screamed and rushed into the churchyard, and another couple of hundred townsfolk who came running, abandoning their less-than-sanctified Sunday mornings to see what all the fuss was about. They watched deliriously as Whitefield and Petey Wheatstraw (who was not, of course, the Devil, not even the Devil’s blood kin, having married in) fought their way out of the church, across the yard, three times around the grounds (because three, in these matters, is a sort of the rule), then up the outside wall (a nice trick, that), and into the cupola atop the church steeple, where the bell rang out whenever Petey’s head, or the preacher’s head, hit it. BONG! BONG! BONG! People ran from Salem, from Lawrence, even from Lynn—Lynn, the City of Sin—thinking all Ipswich had burned down, and were pleased to find an even better show under way than that. No one actually wagered against the preacher—that would have been blasphemy—but a good bit of money did change hands based on how, exactly, Goodman Whitefield would prevail, and when. So some in the crowd were more exultant than others when the preacher finally lifted a dazed Petey over his head atop the steeple, yelled, “He’s all yours, Lord!” and flung him into space.
This fall, to Petey, seemed much slower than the one from the Devil’s Mansion rooftop had been. He had leisure to admire the grass-rippling countryside all around, to smell a hint of sweet woodruff on the breeze, to marvel that his wig had not fallen off, to hear the unmistakable sound of his father-in-law’s cackle, and to vow to kick the old man’s ass from West Hell to Ginny Gall, if Petey ever struggled free of this trap to which, he now knew, Old Scratch had consigned him.
Then Petey landed feetfirst on a granite outcrop and rebounded high into the air, as if launched from a trampoline at a circus, or a cannon at a dime museum. Thus propelled, he just kept on, higher and higher, and dwindled into a tiny spot in the sky like a cinder.
The townsfolk congratulated the preacher on his, i.e., God’s, great victory, congratulated themselves for their presence at the great contest, as if it were all their doing, and jostled one another to pla
nt their own feet in the smoldering, sulphurous dents Petey had left in the rock—just to compare shoe sizes, you know. Human nature. Remarkably enough, every single foot, whatever its size, matched the Devil’s Footprints perfectly, which makes sense when you think about it.
And they say that from that day, the Devil was never seen again in Ipswich.
“Here I am, though!” said Petey, who once again stood in the crowd at the back of the church. He knew he was about to mouth off, and get his ass whipped by a cross-eyed man in a powdered wig. He knew this would happen again, and again, just as New Orleans had happened again, and again. He also knew that, like it or not, he was in big trouble this time, and needed some serious help, perhaps even from the distinguished opposition.
* * *
—
Over and over, Petey reenacted the double murder in the Devil’s Mansion in New Orleans, the wrestling match that created the Devil’s Footprints in New England. And in between and among and alongside these episodes, he showed up in other places over and over, too.
Sometimes he landed on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, and tried and failed to cheat a six-foot-tall woman farmer named Molly Horn out of the best part of her crop. Each time, her response was the same: she rolled up her sleeves, folded her eyeglasses, set them aside atop a tree stump for safekeeping, then beat Petey like a drum until he hollered for mercy and she flung him headfirst into the bottomless part of the bay called the Devil’s Hole.
Sometimes he paced a forty-foot circle in the piney woods of central North Carolina, where no grass grew beneath his feet. As he stomped the ashen earth of the Devil’s Tramping Ground, he muttered: “Round and round and round he goes, and wherever he stops won’t be where he chose.”
Sometimes he sat on the rocky banks of the Nolichucky River in Tennessee, his back to the water, and craned to look up and up and up at the sheer rock cliff that might just, kind of, sort of, suggest a face, if you stared long enough and were prompted to see a face and were willing to be talked into it.
“Ain’t much of a likeness, though,” Petey mumbled, his voice lost in the rushing waters beneath the Devil’s Looking Glass.
And so it went, over and over, from the Devil’s Armchair to the Devil’s Bake Oven, from the Devil’s Dish-Full to the Devil’s Marbleyard, from the Devil’s Backbone to the Devil’s Elbow, from Devil’s Lake to Devil’s Kitchen—Petey ricocheted from one to the other and back again.
He groaned whenever he found himself in California’s Sierra Nevadas, as he scrambled to walk across a pile of ever-shifting rocks beneath a bluff that looked like a palisade of basalt pillars. Much as he tried not to, he could not prevent picking up a random rock two-handed and staggering, sweaty and footsore beneath its weight, only to drop it in some random spot yards away, then pick up a replacement random rock and head back the way he had come.
As he toiled pointlessly on the Devil’s Postpile, he subvocalized an impromptu incantation:
Pearleen Sunday, oh Sunday, please come around!
Old Petey is done for, if you let him down!
It was far from original—nothing more than a variant on the folk plea to St. Anthony, Patron of Lost Things—but Petey knew better than to call on that micromanaging son of a bitch. And the point of such spells wasn’t novelty, but repetition and focus. All the world’s magic-makers agreed on that.
“Pearleen Sunday, oh Sunday, please shake a leg!
Old Petey is sorry! Please don’t make me beg!”
Then Petey twisted his ankle and fell yet again, wincing as he anticipated another knee skinned by the jagged slope of the Devil’s Postpile…
…but instead found himself in midair and midfall, to howl wordlessly as he cannonballed once again into a deep, icy pool beneath a South Dakota waterfall. How did he know it was South Dakota? The same way he suddenly knew how to swim, if you could call it swimming. Hell wasn’t known for its aquacades. He thrashed his way to the surface and crested, with many a splutter and a splash, then backstroked his way to the grooved rock wall around the Devil’s Bathtub. He clung there and mumbled, through chattering teeth:
“Pearleen Sunday, oh Sunday, throw me a bone!
Old Petey is trapped, and can’t break free alone!”
* * *
—
Because Petey kept rebounding across time as well as space, any claim to know what Pearleen Sunday, the focus of his hopes, was doing at precisely that moment would be presumptuous and inaccurate. Suffice to say only that the waves Petey kicked up in the Devil’s Bathtub sloshed in all directions, everywhere and everywhen, and it was only a matter of time before Pearleen Sunday got her feet wet. Because much as they claimed otherwise, Pearleen and Petey had never been that far apart, not really, not since the widow Winchester had brought them together in the first place. They were a matched set, like March hares and marzipan, the Cassini Gap and the Cumberland Gap, St. Paul’s and Mrs. Paul’s, lightning bugs and lightning. Who can think of one without the other?
So somewhere out there, in another time and another place, on the farthest shore of Petey’s wave function, was a sunshiny bluebell of a July afternoon in the mountains of western Maryland, where the wise woman Pearleen Sunday was walking from Altamont to Bloomington—which is to say, from no place special to nowhere in particular, and downhill all the way. She was on what she reckoned was the direct-est route, along the Baltimore & Ohio tracks.
Now, in many a high and lonely part of North America, the railroad beds make the easiest walking. But railroaders know that particular stretch beneath Pearleen’s feet as the Seventeen Mile Grade, and they speak of it in hisses, like gouts of steam, for it is the steepest railbed in the East, and its 2.4 percent slope can turn a miles-long train of 143-ton coal cars into a cracking black whip that clears the mountainside down to the stumps and the graves. Pearleen did not fear the Seventeen Mile Grade, for she had no burden of weight behind her, and had never been given to acceleration.
She was just a little bitty slip of a thing, no more than yea high and so big around, and looked of course about eighteen years old, give or take a quarter century, which was just as she would look until Nixon’s second term, for wizards age more like mountains than like people. They differ from people in other ways, too, as Pearleen had just begun to realize, that early in her career, though she already had tramped so many miles of these United States, up and down and back and forth and twisted around-y round, that she expected her entry in the Great Ledger, upon her death, to sum up her long life in two words: “Walked, mostly.”
She was dressed for the long walk, too, in sensible boots and riveted denim trousers and a man’s plaid shirt, a denim jacket tied around her waist. A knapsack rode her shoulders, and held loose in her right hand was a whittled staff longer than she was, twisted like a snake that had paused to think things over.
Now, when we say “a man’s plaid shirt,” let us be clear that it was a man’s shirt by size and design. Whether it was ever inhabited by a man, and how it came to be subsequently worn by Pearleen Sunday, is a question to ask her on another day, and preferably from a great distance, perhaps across a couple of state lines.
So Pearleen walked down the railbed, confined her steps to the wooden ties, and avoided the gravel, as a sort of game, though whenever she came across a stray piece of gravel atop a tie, she tried to kick it or knock it back where it belonged. Some people are just like that, tidying the world as they go.
Pearleen knew Savage Mountain well, and she knew before she saw it that she approached the old Thomas spread, the one the late governor cleared, in retirement, to raise alpacas. She knew this by the curve in the railbed, by the crosstie fence at the woods’ edge that marked the start of the half-grown-up pasture, and by the ghost of Governor Francis Thomas himself, who stood where he always stood, at the spot where the 11:57 had killed him back in 1876. He smoked a pipe and fondly watched a half
dozen ghost alpacas that grazed the mountainside before him. Two of the alpacas were newborns, cute as buttons; they frolicked around, enjoying each other’s company, a fresh crop of flowering beggar-lice visible through them. That Thomas’s ghost would be fixed to that spot on the Earth’s surface—and not, say, to the official governor’s mansion in Annapolis—made some sense to Pearleen, but she had absolutely no idea why he appeared fully clothed, equipped with a pipe, and accompanied by phantom livestock. Pearleen had seen ghosts, and interacted with them, for years, but that did not mean she understood how they worked. Pearleen tried to live in a world of fact and not of theory. But she still knew her manners.
“Howdy, Governor,” she called to him, when she was just far enough away not to have to raise her voice.
“Miss Sunday,” he said, and gravely nodded his head.
“Mmm mmm mmm,” the alpacas said, in that high-pitched hum they make, their absurd long necks craning as they gathered against the fence to see if the newcomer had a treat for them. As they jostled one another, one of the babies got pressed through the solid wood of the plank fence. First his transparent head emerged, like a mounted trophy, and then the rest of him followed. Pearleen knew she couldn’t pet him, not really, but she reached out to do it anyway. He already had realized his error, though, and missed his family. Peeping in dismay, he whirled and wriggled back through the plank, vanished in sections to reemerge in the pasture where he belonged.
“So well behaved,” said Governor Thomas. “Unlike people,” he added, with unnecessary venom. The governor had had more than his share of difficulties with the legislature.
The Book of Magic Page 49