by Tim Westover
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Caleb lingered in the inky night for a long time. Something was different. Something had changed. Three times he packed his pipe, his eyes darting occasionally to the pathway.
Nate would return, or he would not. It was all so hard to reconcile.
When the first indigo hues hinted at the coming dawn, he stood and went inside. He paused once, just briefly, in front of the mirror to study his face. The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth were more clearly defined, and the silver in his hair seemed just a shade brighter.
The boy would not return, it seemed, regardless of the outcome.
Caleb went to his bed; he slid beneath the covers. His brother was gone, and now so was his son. In sixteen years, when he was the oldest hilltopper still remaining in the woods of Georgia, there would be no new vessel—no late-night knock at his door promising youth and rejuvenation.
Instead, the ferryman’s toll, finally payable after all these years, would mark his final passage.
The Devil at the Crossroads
Wenonah Lyon
The kid’s bare feet made puff-puff-puffs of dust in the dirt road. He’d abandoned his shoes a mile or so back. They were too small, and the blister on the back of his heel burst. He stopped for a minute and set down the twelve-string guitar.
He’d looked at stories, songs, and television. Then he used a map and common sense. There were a lot of crossroads, and here was where common sense came in. Any fool should know you couldn’t summon the devil in the middle of a highway intersection.
He found a place that looked good, one where he could ride the bus to the end of the line and start walking. Foot miles were further than map miles, but he’d get there before midnight.
It was the dark of the moon, the trees’ branches that met over the road cutting out the little light there was. Starlight seemed bright after the tunnel of trees when he came to the crossroads: two country roads forming a cross.
Should he sit in the middle, or was that where the devil popped out? He decided to play it safe and sit a few feet back. He sat cross-legged and tuned his guitar to a C tuning. He ran up and down the strings using his knife as a slide. First, he played “Looky Looky Yonder.” Then he slid into “Midnight Special,” then “John Henry.”
The boy’s voice was another instrument. He started singing “John the Revelator,” and his fingers drummed on the top of the guitar.
He stopped and wiped his face.
“Boy,” he heard a voice say, “you are not at a Baptist church meeting with fat mamas testifying for the Lord. You are at the crossroads to meet me, I assume, and negotiate over your soul. The only less appropriate song is ‘Amazing Grace.’”
The boy looked up. A fine-looking man stood in the center of the crossroads, black as the ace of spades, dressed in black linen pants and a white cotton shirt, blousy and full so he could move his shoulders and arms. The boy was disappointed. He sighed.
“What’s wrong, boy? Cat got your tongue?”
“I always kind of hoped you was white,” the boy said.
“This better?” He looked like Fred Astaire. “I try to make my clients comfortable.”
“Are you really a little red devil with a pitchfork and a long tail?”
“I’m a spirit, not a cartoon.”
“Would you go back to the black guy then? I’d rather you looked like a pimp than one of those jerks whose eyes don’t see me.”
The devil shifted back to his first form and said, “You’re trying my patience. I suppose you want to challenge me to a guitar match and wager your soul for the ability to play like the devil himself.”
“I want to play like myself, not somebody else. Don’t mean to be rude, sir, but I want to play what I can—me—work at it, earn my music. Getting it handed to me . . . might as well just buy a record.”
“Hmm,” the devil said. Now the devil created the Protestant ethic. He’s the patron of noncommissioned officers. It’s angels that float around on clouds doing nothing all day long. He thought the boy might deserve a bit more investigation.
“What’s your name?”
“James Conroy, sir.”
Boy was polite too.
“So why are you here, James? Instant fame and fortune?”
“Wouldn’t say no, but that’s not what I’m looking for.”
“What do you want? To sit here and play twenty questions until sunup?”
“It’s my guitar, sir. Gone as far as I can on this one.”
“It’s a poor musician that blames his instrument,” the devil said.
“It won’t stay in tune because the pegs are old and slip. The strings are deader than dead. It’s missing some frets. See this part? The bridge is loose, and I gotta put a matchbook cover under the center, right there, or it buzzes.”
The devil took the guitar and sighted down the neck. “The fingerboard’s warped as well. Twelve strings put a lot of pressure on a guitar. The top is pulling up. Twelve strings, unless they’re very fine instruments, have a short life.”
“You got a twelve-string?” James asked.
A twelve-string appeared in the devil’s hand. “Twelve-string and fiddle are my instruments of choice.”
He handed the boy the guitar. “This guitar is Lead Belly’s Stella.”
“Did you steal it offen him?” the boy asked.
“I would never take a man’s instrument. Some junkie broke in, stole it, and pawned it. One of my minions saw it in a pawnshop for twenty dollars. This twelve-string was made by Pardini himself. Here.” He handed the guitar to the boy. “Go ahead, play . . .”
The devil handed him the top of a whiskey bottle. “Here’s my slide. Now that was made in hell. It’s the top of Jack Daniel’s bottles, black Jack, not that green label shit. Broke off in a barroom fight when one lowlife killed another over something too trivial to spit at.”
The boy slid the slide up and down the strings, picking—quick, quick, quick—at treble strings and thrumming down the base strings hard, and he could feel the drumming drone reverberate through his chest.
“Jesus H. Christ!” the boy said.
“No profanity. I don’t hold with profanity.”
“Wasn’t profanity! It was a prayer, saying, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making such splendid sounds.’”
“Had nothing to do with Jesus. I admit I like a bit of Mozart, a little Bach now and again. But the blues are my music. I’m a bluesman. Him upstairs? I’ve caught him listening at the door. Not the Father. The Son. But we’re not here for theological discussions. We’re here to play, boy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We got to get our contract sorted out. What do you want? If you win, you want my Stella?”
“That seems like a reasonable bet,” the boy said reluctantly. “But not really . . . first, when you said you ought not to take a musician’s instrument, it sounded right. Also, I like this guitar. I owe it. It’s taken me a long way. It’s got sentimental value as well. But I don’t see how I can go much further unless it’s fixed. New frets, new tuning pegs, new saddle and bridge. Plus you unwarp the fingerboard.”
The devil thought it over. “You know, you could get a job and get all this done for around six hundred dollars.”
“Who’d hire me?” the kid said. “I read good enough to fill in an unemployment form. Not much better. Quit school for reasons that are none of your business when I was twelve. I’m short, walk with a limp. I got jug ears. I’m ugly as sin, so they say.”
“I wouldn’t call you handsome. But I, the Father of Lies, will tell you true—you got a certain charm and nice brown eyes. And you got very big feet and a big nose, and you know what they say about big feet, big nose means big . . . ,” the devil trailed off delicately.
The boy blushed. “Thank you. But nobody else notices my pretty brown eyes. Jobs are not, realistically speaking, open to me.”
“Steal,” the devil suggested. “Better’n losing your soul.”
“I promised the man give me this
guitar I’d never steal ’less it was food when I was starvin’. I don’t go back on my word, especially to a dead man.”
The devil was amused. “But this is a kind of starvation. Not of the belly but of the heart. You need to create, need to make music like other men need to eat.”
For a moment, the boy was confused. “No. A promise is a promise. You’re talking wiggle room, lookin’ wormlike for a way of getting out of your given word. No stealin’ except for food, that’s what I said and that’s what I meant.”
“James, I don’t mean to be hard, but hell is not for you. Trust me, you wouldn’t fit in.”
The boy looked mulish. “I walked all the way out here oozin’ blood from my blister. I got rights. You don’t have no choice. You got to have the contest and bet me and beat me. All the songs say so.”
“All right then. We’ll play.” The devil hesitated then said, “Give me your guitar. Best you play with one you know, shit poor as it is. I’ll fix it for you.”
The devil took the guitar, looked at it long and hard, and handed it back to the boy.
The boy stroked the strings and listened to the true mellow tones. His fingers slid over the frets like butter over hot corn. “True G,” he muttered. “True tones.” He smiled. “My guitar and I thank you, sir. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. But music’s all I got, and if I can’t make music, I might as well be in hell.”
“You first or me?” the devil asked.
“You,” the boy decided. “Ain’t never seen no good players live. Maybe I’ll pick up something.”
The devil started to play. He started with a little tune plucked on the treble strings—a sad little tune in a minor key—something lost, not forgotten, never found. The slide came in, up and down, wailing, the sound of gulls at sea, battered by the winds. Then it was darker, dark as a sky when there was no moon, no stars; and the guitar began to moan, to howl, the despair of the junkyard dog, chained, badly fed, kicked to make him vicious. Dumb beast, dumb pain, living in a dumb universe.
The devil took everything that made up hell and imposed order on chaos.
He finished. “Play, boy.”
The boy picked up his guitar. I can never beat that, he thought, and I don’t care. This has been the best night of my life.
He started lyrically, delicately fingerpicking like Mississippi John Hurt—“Candy Man.” He wandered through songs and styles, delighting in his newly repaired guitar. He ended with “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor.” Dark had turned to grey, the sun dawning, light creeping up on the crossroads.
Reluctantly, he offered the devil his guitar. “Thank you. In hell, sometimes, could I listen to you play?”
“What makes you think you’re hell-bound?”
The boy was confused. “You beat me. You’re better than I am.”
The devil laughed. “Technically, for certain Almighty God sure. You got potential. I don’t think you’ll ever be better than I am, but maybe you could be.”
The boy frowned, unsure. “Maybes don’t count.”
“The blues is about hope, boy. Under all the pain, there’s hope. You played hope. You won, fair and square.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Not completely,” the devil said. “I admit I might not have used the precise word. Hope is close enough, and I thought you’d know it.”
“Explain it so a dumb person like me can understand.”
“You’re not dumb, James. Pig ignorant, yes. Dumb, no. Tell me how you feel, and I’ll try to find a better word.”
The boy sighed. “When you played, things made sense.”
“Even your mother’s pimp throwing a pot of lye in your face, leaving you piebald? That makes sense?”
“Some things don’t make sense. That’s one of them. So I’m too ugly—I guess that’s what piebald means—and too stupid to even get into hell.”
“Piebald means blotched, multicolored. You’re ignorant, not dumb. I don’t want to take you to hell because you don’t belong there. Let me tell about hell. You sneered at ‘maybes.’ In hell, you’ve got no maybes, only might-have-beens. Nobody tortures you, there’s no fire and brimstone. You go over every missed opportunity, every stupid choice, and you’re locked into every one of them. You ask if you could listen to me play. I don’t play in hell. I’m locked into the missed opportunities just like all the rest.”
“What was your stupid choice?” the boy asked.
“None of your business,” the devil said.
“You did play better’n me.”
“Of course I did. I’m thousands of years older, for a start.”
“Then this devil at the crossroads is just a con. You take ’em down to hell if you want to, don’t if you don’t want to.”
“It’s not that simple. Take your guitar—your very well-repaired guitar—say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and go home.”
“Okay,” the boy said. “But can I come back? Talk to you? Maybe learn a few licks? You’re about the nicest person, creature, I ever met.” The boy smiled at him. “You say you can only play when you’re not in hell. So it would be fun for both of us.”
The devil said, “I’m not a very nice fellow. You caught me in a moment of weakness. Get along home, boy.”
The boy got up and said, “Thank you, sir.” He hesitated then added, “You’re too hard on yourself. For pure evil, humans got devils beat by a mile.”
The boy walked back down the hill, puff-puff-puff as the dust squirted under his bare feet. He disappeared into the tunnel of trees as the sun came fully up.
A Busy Day for the Bayou Banshee
Herb Shallcross
Snakes and gators slipped away unseen. A cloud of mosquitoes wreathed the swaths of Spanish moss. Hawks and owls perched stark still between kills. And far off, an ominous primeval hum haunted the night. A stone’s throw from this teeming swamp, Edgar McIlhenny chawed his mouth in a show of solidarity with the horses he had tended so long. He removed a toothpick and spat in the mud, shaking his head at the rank terrain. Marcel Bettancourt stood in the doorway, scratching his head and looking over old McIlhenny. Twenty years they’d been friends, but now they looked on each other as enemies. All this because of love—Bettancourt could find no hint of sense in it.
“You don’t want to come in?” Bettancourt said. “You come an awful long way to stand in the mud and talk to me in the dark.”
“I didn’t come to make a social call,” McIlhenny said. “I think you got a pretty good idea why I come.”
The two had worked together as ranch hands in East Texas before Bettancourt had crossed the border to join his extended family here in Beauregard Parish. Now McIlhenny was the proud owner of his own East Texas ranch and carried visible contempt for Bettancourt’s humble home here in swamp country.
“I got some ideas,” Bettancourt said. “Say, maybe your wife wants to come in and get somethin’ to eat, have a chance to catch up with my lady.”
“My wife is just fine where she’s at.”
McIlhenny’s Dodge pickup idled behind him, its yellow headlamps casting a sallow glow over the swampland. The truck was big and shiny and new, everything that the low-slung Kammback behind Bettancourt was not. Mrs. Holly McIlhenny sat in the passenger seat, looking out at the men gloomily.
“Listen, Bettancourt, whatever’s going on between your son and my daughter, it’s gone far enough.”
“Why don’t you tell your daughter that?”
“Of course I’ve told my daughter to stay away from your boy!” McIlhenny snapped. “She’s a teenage girl. She refuses to listen to reason.”
“Teenage boys ain’t real famous for that neither,” Bettancourt said. “I’m not sure just what you expect me to do with Junior.”
“Do with him?” McIlhenny said. “I don’t care what you do with him! Chain him down if you have to, lock him in the cellar! Just keep him away from my little girl!”
Bettancourt hitched up his jeans and cast a level glare at his guest. Then he let his gaze fall
to McIlhenny’s black Lucchese boots sunk in the muck.
“I’m not at all sure I appreciate your tone, Ed,” Bettancourt said.
“And I’m not at all sure I give a damn.”
The two men shifted in the mud. McIlhenny stood upright in the manner he deemed befitting of a gentleman and a soldier—two identities that were identical in his way of thinking—and Bettancourt slouched with his hands in his back pockets. The pickup idled behind them with a guttural chugging that blended with the myriad croaks and caws of swamp life. The bleary yolk of the full moon swayed over the cypress trees. That ancient hum yet hung in the distance.
“Tell you what,” McIlhenny said. “Bring the boy out here, and let me have a word with him, man-to-man. I’ll talk some sense into him, by God.”
“Junior ain’t here,” Bettancourt said.
“And where do you reckon he might be?”
“He never said,” Bettancourt said. “Which likely means he’s gone off to meet your girl someplace.”
“Let’s just you pray that’s not the case,” McIlhenny said. “Priscilla’s at home with her older brother Les. I left the rifle with Les and told him that any visitors but his mama and me were to be regarded as trespassers and dealt with accordingly.”
“Well, let’s just you hope he’s not stupid enough to listen to what you had to say,” Bettancourt said. “Because Lord knows my Junior is no slouch with a pistol.”
McIlhenny spat and pushed back his hat and then slapped his neck where a mosquito was feeding on him. Far to the west were storm clouds. A high-pitched wail was mounting, ricocheting through the cypress and tupelo trees. Bettancourt’s eyes were big and wild, looking off toward the sound, but by and by, it subsided. The screen door swung open, and Mrs. Bettancourt poked out. She was a true Cajun matron in the old grandiose fashion, who kept her home ever filled with warmth and spice.
“You men just gonna stand out here in the dark all night staring at the mud ’r what?” she said. “I got cracklin’ in here if y’all are hungry.”
“I thank you, ma’am, but we haven’t time to set,” McIlhenny said.
“Best to get back in the house, Beatrice,” Bettancourt said, but it was too late. Mrs. McIlhenny had already thrown open the door of the pickup and was rushing around the front of the truck.
“Beatrice!” she said. “So lovely to see you!”
“Holly, dawlin’! Where y’at, cher!” Beatrice Bettancourt said broadly. “Dese fools refuse to listen to reason, but why don’t ya come on in and eat?”
The two women hugged, but McIlhenny pulled his wife back. The wind howled once more.
“Remember why we’re here,” McIlhenny said. “To separate ourselves from these people.”
“Edgar!” chastised his wife.
“Separate yourselves from us?” Beatrice Bettancourt demanded. “Sac au lait! Ya think ya better than us now, Mr. McIlhenny?”
“It’s not about what I think,” McIlhenny said. “The fact is that you are swamp people. This is the life you chose for yourselves. I mean, your boy intends to hunt gators for a living!”
“Yeah?” Bettancourt said. “At least we don’t spend our time wading through horse droppings!”
McIlhenny lunged at Bettancourt, and the two men locked hands over each other’s throats. In a flash, they were rolling through the mud and, in a flash, back up on their feet. They squared off with raised fists and soiled jeans, but then both men suddenly stopped. A cloud like a cauldron was bubbling savagely in the west, driving toward them across the swampland with unbelievable speed and volition. A thin high wail whipped through the trees, rattling the very moon. The cloud swarmed purple overhead, the cry like a mad widow desperate for vengeance. The women blessed themselves; the men looked around wildly. The creatures of the swamp migrated east in a frenzied and slimy stampede.
“What on earth is it?” McIlhenny demanded. “What in God’s name is wrong with this place?”
The cloud molded itself into the form of a woman cloaked in wispy rags of grey. She howled so loud that McIlhenny was forced to one knee. When he looked up, the phantom woman was looking down at him, but her face was that of his own son.
“Les?” McIlhenny said, shaken and lost. “Les, my boy, is it you?”
The apparition only howled its deafening howl, millennia of sorrow condensed in her bloodcurdling call. The phantom whipped around to face Bettancourt, who met her with wild and tear-rimmed eyes. The face he saw was that of his own son.
“Junior!” he cried. “Oh, Junior!”
The phantom woman erupted in a final spirit-shattering howl and then vanished, leaving only a fading aura like an electric current charging the air. Mrs. Bettancourt was sobbing profusely, repeating her son’s name over and over in a mournful whisper—“Marcel, Marcel, Marcel.”
“What the devil was that?” McIlhenny said.
Bettancourt shook his head.
“A banshee,” he said, broken. “She was a banshee. Come on, we have to get back to your house.”
Before McIlhenny could argue, the four of them had piled into the cab of the pickup and were roaring away toward the west, toward his home in East Texas. McIlhenny was still haunted by the banshee’s wail, so much so that he could not be sure if he was only hearing the wind rushing by outside or the ghost of the wail echoing through his memory or if the woman was, in fact, still with him, sailing along with the truck and heckling them all the while.
“Banshee,” McIlhenny said. “I heard of that years ago—myths and wives’ tales. What the devil is it?”
Bettancourt shook his head. “A messenger. The kind you pray you never get word from.”
“What are you talking about?” McIlhenny said. Mrs. Bettancourt wept on, oblivious to the discussion or the marshland rolling by outside, repeating her son’s name in those doleful, woeful whispers.
“The banshee chased Irish immigrants here across the Atlantic,” Bettancourt said. “The poor Irish family got run out of town, but the banshee decided to stick around and make these swamps home. Legend has it that whatever face you see on her, that person is no more.”
“No more?”
“Dead,” Bettancourt said.
McIlhenny was silent for a stretch. “Bull,” he whispered and then stepped on the gas and sped toward home. He saw now the distance that Bettancourt’s young son had traveled to meet his daughter each visit. Not much changed in the land as the miles rolled by. East Texas and the swampland weren’t so different, not in any way that mattered.
They found Priscilla on the porch, still on her knees and sobbing these many hours later. On either side of her, stretched out on their backs, were her big brother Les and her love, Marcel Jr. The rifle and the pistol had been flung away in the shootout. Both young men were bloody and still.
“He would do anything for me,” Priscilla whimpered. “He was the greatest man I ever knew.”
Nobody was sure which dead man she was referring to, and they left it that way. The five of them hugged and wept and shook their heads as if sorrow could be shaken out like a drop of water from the ear. But the banshee’s cry would not be silenced.
The Spook Light
Jay Rogers
I first heard this story from my Granny Annie in the late 1930s. The people in the story are real, and the mysterious phenomenon still appears to some who venture onto that stretch of dusty road in southwest Missouri. Ask the local folks for the directions. It’s called the Hornet Spook Light. You’ll know you’re at the right location when, at both sides of the road, you see lots of empty beer cans.
