Tim Pratt: Sympathy for the Devil

“I know enough to stay out of ’em.”

His laugh was like a man cutting tin. “I swear you are a caution, John. It’s a wonder you died so young.”

We passed a right lot of folks, all of them working in the sun. Pulling tobacco. Picking cotton. Hoeing beans. Old folks scratching in gardens. Even younguns carrying buckets of water with two hands, slopping nearly all of it on the ground afore they’d gone three steps. All the people looked like they had just enough to eat to fill out the sad expression on their faces, and they all watched the devil as he drove slowly past. All those folks stared at me hard, too, and at the guitar like it was a third arm waving at ’em. I turned once to swat that blessed horsefly and saw a group of field hands standing in a knot, looking my way and pointing.

“Where all the white folks at?” I asked.

“They all up in heaven,” the devil said. “You think they let niggers into heaven?” We looked at each other a long time. Then the devil laughed again. “You ain’t buying that one for a minute, are you, John?”

I was thinking about Meemaw. I knew she was in heaven, if anyone was. When I was a youngun I figured she musta practically built the place, and had been paying off on it all along. But I didn’t say nothing.

“No, John, it ain’t that simple,” the devil said. “Beluthahatchie’s different for everybody, just like Hell. But you’ll be seeing plenty of white folks. Overseers. Train conductors. Sheriff’s deputies. If you get uppity, why, you’ll see whole crowds of white folks. Just like home, John. Everything’s the same. Why should it be any different?”

“’Cause you’re the devil,” I said. “You could make things a heap worse.”

“Now, could I really, John? Could I really?”

In the next field, a big man with hands like gallon jugs and a pink splash across his face was struggling all alone with a spindly mule and a plow made out of slats. “Get on, sir,” he was telling the mule. “Get on with you.” He didn’t even look around when the devil come chugging up alongside.

The devil gummed two fingers and whistled. “Ezekiel. Ezekiel! Come on over here, boy.”

Ezekiel let go the plow and stumbled over the furrows, stepping high and clumsy in the thick, dusty earth, trying to catch up to the Terraplane and not mess up the rows too bad. The devil han’t slowed down any-in fact, I believe he had speeded up some. Left to his own doin’s, the mule headed across the rows, the plow jerking along sideways behind him.

“Yessir?” Ezekiel looked at me sorta curious like, and nodded his head so slight I wondered if he’d done it at all. “What you need with me, boss?”

“I wanted you to meet your new neighbor. This here’s John, and you ain’t gone believe this, but he used to be a big man in the jook joints in the Delta. Writing songs and playing that dimestore git fiddle.”

Ezekiel looked at me and said, “Yessir, I know John’s songs.” And I could tell he meant more than hearing them.

“Yes, John mighta been famous and saved enough whore money to buy him a decent instrument if he hadn’t up and got hisself killed. Yes, John used to be one high-rolling nigger, but you ain’t so high now, are you John?”

I stared at the li’l peckerwood and spit out: “High enough to see where I’m going, Ole Massa.”

I heard Ezekiel suck in his breath. The devil looked away from me real casual and back to Ezekiel, like we was chatting on a veranda someplace.

“Well, Ezekiel, this has been a nice long break for you, but I reckon you ought to get on back to work now. Looks like your mule’s done got loose.” He cackled and speeded up the car. Ezekiel and I both walked a few more steps and stopped. We watched the back of the Terraplane getting smaller, and then I turned to watch his face from the side. I han’t seen that look on any of my people since Mississippi.

I said, “Man, why do you all take this shit?”

He wiped his forehead with his wrist and adjusted his hat. “Why do you?” he asked. “Why do you, John?” He was looking at me strange, and when he said my name it was like a one-word sentence all its own.

I shrugged. “I’m just seeing how things are. It’s my first day.”

“Your first day will be the same as all the others, then. That sure is the story with me. How come you called him Ole Massa just now?”

“Don’t know. Just to get a rise out of him, I reckon.”

Away off down the road, the Terraplane had stopped, engine still running, and the little cracker was yelling. “John! You best catch up, John. You wouldn’t want me to leave you wandering in the dark, now would you?”

I started walking, not in any gracious hurry though, and Ezekiel paced me. “I asked ’cause it put me in mind of the old stories. You remember those stories, don’t you? About Ole Massa and his slave by name of John? And how they played tricks on each other all the time?”

“Meemaw used to tell such when I was a youngun. What about it?”

He was trotting to keep up with me now, but I wan’t even looking his way. “And there’s older stories than that, even. Stories about High John the Conqueror. The one who could-”

“Get on back to your mule,” I said. “I think the sun has done touched you.”

“-the one who could set his people free,” Ezekiel said, grabbing my shoulder and swinging me around. He stared into my face like a man looking for something he’s dropped and has got to find.

“John!” the devil cried.

We stood there in the sun, me and Ezekiel, and then something went out of his eyes, and he let go and walked back across the ditch and trudged after the mule without a word.

I caught up to the Terraplane just in time for it to roll off again. I saw how it was, all right.

A ways up the road, a couple of younguns was fishing off the right side of a plank bridge, and the devil announced he would stop to see had they caught anything, and if they had, to take it for his supper. He slid out of the Terraplane, with it still running, and the dogs fell out after him, a-hoping for a snack, I reckon. When the devil got hunkered down good over there with the younguns, facing the swift-running branch, I sidled up the driver’s side of the car, eased my guitar into the back seat, eased myself into the front seat, yanked the thing into gear and drove off. As I went past I saw three round O’s-a youngun and the devil and a youngun again.

It was a pure pleasure to sit down, and the breeze coming through the windows felt good too. I commenced to get even more of a breeze going, on that long, straightaway road. I just could hear the devil holler back behind:

“John! Get your handkerchief-headed, free-school Negro ass back here with my auto-MO-bile! Johhhhnnn!”

“Here I come, old hoss,” I said, and I jerked the wheel and slewed that car around and barreled off back toward the bridge. The younguns and the dogs was ahead of the devil in figuring things out. The younguns scrambled up a tree as quick as squirrels, and the dogs went loping into a ditch, but the devil was all preoccupied, doing a salty jump and cussing me for a dadblasted blagstagging liver-lipped stormbuzzard, jigging around right there in the middle of the bridge, and he was still cussing when I drove full tilt onto that bridge and he did not cuss any less when he jumped clean out from under his hat and he may even have stepped it up some when he went over the side. I heard a ker-plunk like a big rock chunked into a pond just as I swerved to bust the hat with a front tire and then I was off the bridge and racing back the way we’d come, and that hat mashed in the road behind me like a possum.

I knew something simply awful was going to happen, but man! I slapped the dashboard and kissed my hand and slicked it back across my hair and said aloud, “Lightly, slightly, and politely.” And I meant that thing. But my next move was to whip that razor out of my sock, flip it open and lay it on the seat beside me, just in case.