James Marlon - John Crow's Devil

Lillamae.

Lillamae Perkins. Is was two years since the morning her father wake up but just for a minute to see him bed all red and blood gushing like spring from where him penis used to hang. Nobody never see what happen, but everybody see Lillamae, outside her gate looking like them obeah her, with one hand holding the knife and the other hand holding the bloody cocky. She eat green pawpaw to kill out the baby. Two years later, Sunday come and Pastor Bligh was him usual drunk self. Him fling himself into the Pastor seat by the pulpit like him would crash on the floor if him did miss. Lillamae goin up to the altar to have them drive out her sin and iniquity, even though Preacher never call nobody yet.

Everybody hear she.

“Lawd Jesus Christ! Lawd Jesus Christ! Consuming Fire! Consuming Fire! LAAAAAAAAAWD!!!”

Lillamae Perkins fling herself pon the ground. Her leg turn into scissors, she swing them open, then close, then open, and everybody could see her fishy which never cover up with no panty. Then she see Lucinda, who scream out to Holy Jesus Christ.

“Wha Jesus goin do fi you, river-whore? Satan watching you from you start mix tea,” Lillamae say. People screaming and running, and tripping and crushing and more screaming, cause when she open her mouth is a man voice come out. Then she see the Pastor and all Hell break loose.

Five deacon rush the altar. Churchgoer and sinner both call them “The Five.”

“One idiot, two drunkard, one sick-fowl, and one who beat woman. Now who is who? Who is who?” is what she say. The Five circle her, wrestle her, but nobody could pin down Lillamae. She slip from one like grease and claw through another one face. She kick a deacon in him seed bag and five man become four. Lillamae beat up all of them. She crick the second man neck, break all of the third man finger, punch asthma back into the fourth man chest, and blind the last deacon in him left eye.

Nobody know where the knife come from. Some people say she jump, some people say she fly. When demon take you, you can do anything. All people see is when she leap after the Pastor with the knife and him hold out him hand like him was goin catch her and she stab right through him left hand middle and him stuck on the wall like Holy Jesus crucified.

“Fool. You should a do this two years ago when we was one. Now we is one and seven,” was all she say. Pastor Bligh bawling and screaming, but nobody goin cross a girl with eight demon in her. Then she scream and run out of the church.

Two day pass and nobody can find Lillamae. Then Wednesday, a little boy find her body sailing down Two Virgins River. Pastor Bligh did drunk when him bury her. After that plenty people stop come to church.

Coming home from the bar, Pastor Bligh made his way up the road, teetering like a drunken colossus. But the fire dug holes in his gut and sent flame down his thighs screaming, Let me out! He moved over to the side of the road and released himself, bursting a black circle on the pavement with a torrent of yellow piss. The sun teased him from behind and suddenly there was lightness to the morning. He had learned long ago never to trust happiness. But something came over him, bringing both pleasure and a slight fear. A silliness that made him fall in love with pink-striped skies and opalescent dew bubbles and chickens crowing themselves awake. Bligh was still very much drunk. His pants were around his ankles and when he moved he tripped, fell backwards on the base of his skull, and knocked himself out.

A church sister saw him first. She had come out to water her hibiscus and thought a mad man or a drunkard had fallen dead in the road. She inched toward him, afraid that he was merely asleep and would awake at that very second to rape her with calloused hands and dirty fingernails. But when she saw Pastor Bligh’s face, the woman frowned, disgusted and unsurprised. “Disgrace” she said. And yet she was relieved by Pastor Bligh’s behavior, as were many in the village. So tormented was he by his own sin that he could never convict them of theirs. But as she summed him up from head to foot, her view came to a halt midway. There looking at her was his dark penis and balls, sprawled as carelessly as he was, bracketed by his thighs and the open ends of his shirt. She forgot his arms; the right spread open and the left under his back. She forgot his face, gaunt and gray, his mouth open and pooling with drool. She forgot his shoes, dirty, brown, and mostly covered by pants that strangled his ankles. There was only the thing, lifeless between two legs yet as monstrous as a serpent in Genesis. Her dark face went white, even pink, as she rushed back to her house. For several minutes he was unconscious. Minutes that horrified old women and scandalized children who passed by on the way to school. Lucinda, who never witnessed the incident, would nonetheless report of it in the first person in that tone she reserved for special heresies.

After the pee-pee incident, the concerned citizens of the village, namely Lucinda, had had enough.

“Him goin mistake him chair for a toilet next Sunday, just watch,” said one observer, but as he was not a member of the church no one heard, anticipated, or dreaded it. In short, that person was not Lucinda, who had begun a letter-writing campaign to have Pastor Bligh removed. Lucinda remembered very little schooling other than the Bible, so her words often packed more Hellfire and damnation than she intended. She wrote to every church she knew, even the archdiocese, despite Pastor Bligh being no Catholic. Bligh answered to nobody but God, and Jesus wasn’t saying anything that Lucinda wanted to hear.

Nobody answered Lucinda’s letters. She would never curse God, but reminded Him that this was why she also prayed to someone else. Then the Majestic Cinema started showing Sunday matinees at 10:00 and chopped the halved congregation to a quarter. The Pastor now drank day and night. He was spiraling downward and would have taken the village with him were it not for the other, who lead them instead to a light blacker than the thickest darkness.

He came like a thief on a night colored silver. He came on two wheels, the muffler puffing a mist that made children cough in their sleep. As his motorcycle coursed up Brillo Road it left a serpentine trail of dust. There were no witnesses to his coming, save for an owl, the moon, and the Devil.

A murder of crows came first. Hundreds. From no point of origin they blackened the sun, forming a shifty eclipse that descended on Gibbeah. The birds flew up the road in a parade of darkness, their wings cutting through the wind and scaring even the smallest children. As a few landed in the road their red necks exposed them. Not ravens, but vultures. Country people called them John Crows. Several more landed and hopped and hobbled, picking through garbage as they overthrew the village. As soon as they saw people the birds would tilt their heads and frown, looking curious and angry. Between the John Crows and the village began a horrific game of wait.

Then they took off. A chorus of flutters, louder than before, flew from roof to roof as if shaking loose evil spirits. Then nothing. The morning began to assert herself. Routine returned.

Brillo Road cut through the village like the trunk of a crucifix. Hanover Road sat near the top, completing the cross. From above the village looked like a squashed hot cross bun. This was Gibbeah.

The Astor Sugar Plantation was nearly thirty miles away. When slaves were finally set free in 1838, they were evicted as well. The white missionaries who pursued emancipation for the negro nonetheless recoiled at the thought of one in the dining room, boardroom, or bedroom of anyone white. They established free villages all over the island, Gibbeah being one. The freed slaves had their own land but no money or food. One year after the death of slavery, the ex-slaves were back on the plantation willingly contributing to its rebirth.