James Marlon - John Crow's Devil

“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. It 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.