My mind said “RUN,” but my body couldn’t comply. I can’t explain it, other than that I literally was so scared that I couldn’t move. I knew at that instant how Eddie must have felt when he first saw that Indian man on the creek out at the old house.
James made it out to the big oak tree in the yard. He was quickly joined by Lee, who, judging from how hard the back door hit the side of the house as he ran outside, understood the urgency in James’ voice. I could see them both through the open front door, but I still couldn’t run to them.
James saw me standing there in the middle of the living room, and motioned for me to get out of the house. Sensing that I wanted to run but somehow just couldn’t, he sprinted back up toward the house, stopping about two feet from the doorway. Standing only ten feet or so away from me, he yelled out “Mike, c’mon, get out of the house!”
Though his voice lost none of its urgency, my body finally did what my brain told it to do. I raced as fast as I could out of the house, past the oak tree. James and I ran together about another hundred yards down the gravel road. Lee was well ahead of both me and James. Once we got to where we believed was a safe distance, we stopped, breathing heavily. I asked James what happened.
“The fuckin’ devil, that’s what happened!” he exclaimed.
I didn’t know what the devil looked like, but I hoped and prayed that a towering red figure, replete with horns, tail and pitchfork, wasn’t going to pop out of the front door and start chasing us.
I thought I’d have a better chance without the boots, so I slipped them off. Hey, given the choice of two torn up feet or being dragged to Hell to burn for eternity, which would you elect?
We decided to get a little further away from the house. We walked backwards, keeping an eye on the house, ready to turn and sprint should the devil start chasing us. Actually, I didn’t keep my eyes on the house. I didn’t want to see the devil. If James started running, I figured, I would just start running with him. Besides, I thought I remembered hearing a rule that I had to see the devil before he could take me to Hell with him, so it was to my advantage to keep my eyes pointed at the ground.
After we made it out of sight range of the front porch, we turned and began walking forward. We caught up with Lee, who had made it all the way to the North School, some five minutes later. James told Lee what he saw, and Lee agreed that none of us should go back into the house until we got the devil out.
I thought I remembered hearing that someone had to do something pretty bad to get the devil himself involved. “James, what did you do to piss the devil off?” I asked, thinking maybe he kicked a dog or a cat, or stole some money from Ms. Schmidt.
“I ain’t done jack shit, at least nothing bad enough to get the damned devil chasing after me. Maybe he was after one of you two,” he said, studying us, hoping to find evidence of guilt in our expressions.
Lee admitted to smoking one of Feenie’s cigarettes, but quickly declared that James already knew that, since they shared that same cigarette. After a minute or two of debate, they concluded that many kids their ages had smoked, and none, to their knowledge, had ever been visited by the devil. Then they both warned me that I had better not tell anybody about their smoking.
Finally, James said “I don’t think any of the shit that we’re talking about even matters in the grand scheme of things involving the devil. I don’t know why he showed his face, but I know I ain’t going back in that damned house until that sumbitch is gone and gone for good!”
At that point, we weren’t far from Granny’s Greenhouse. I didn’t know if she was there or not, but I knew that she was one person who was not afraid of the devil, or at least she didn’t display any fear of him in front of her grandchildren. In fact, almost everyday, she seemed to want to do battle with him, telling him to “get out of her life and go back to the depths from whence he came.” She said that since she was one of “God’s children,” the devil couldn’t touch her, no matter how hard he tried.
We found Granny and Eddie outside. Eddie was weeding petunias, while Granny was making some sort of blue fertilizer mixture that she used to sell to customers who came to her greenhouse. About half of the customers that bought plants also bought her fertilizer mixture.
Running toward Eddie, I bellowed “James saw the devil!” My heart beat even faster as I said it.
Eddie immediately jumped to his feet.
Thankfully, Granny overheard me, my goal in shouting my proclamation. “What are you talking about?” she asked, studying me carefully, trying to find indications of a prank.
I rambled “James came running out of the bedroom and the devil was chasing him and I was real scared and we ran all the way here ‘cuz you go to church all the time and you will be able to fight him.”
Taken aback by both what she had just heard and the nature in which the news was delivered, she stood for a moment with an incredulous look on her face. She stared out into the distance for a moment, then turned back to me and asked “did you see the devil?”
I never lied to Granny. Sometimes I never told her the whole story, but I never outright lied to her. She said that God knew when I lied, so it was useless to lie to a child of God.
“No, I didn’t see him, but I know he was there. I think James must’ve scared him off when he came back into the house to get me. I literally couldn’t move for a long time!”
Granny went over to talk to James. I turned to Eddie and said hurriedly “Eddie, I was scared to death. I actually peed my pants. I think I did it in the living room. Feenie’s going to beat the crap out of me.”
Granny came back over to me and said “I’m going to call Annabelle Casto to come and take me up to the house. We’ll see what this devil wants. He was probably looking for food and just got lost.”
I was confused. I thought that the devil didn’t have to eat. “Why did she say that?” I thought. Though I wasn’t really sure, I knew that she knew a lot more about how to fight the devil than I did, so I didn’t ask her any questions.
Annabelle Casto was Granny’s best friend. She was a large lady in every sense of the word. Physically, she stood about five feet and eight inches and weighed upwards of three hundred pounds, provided she hadn’t eaten breakfast. Her stories were frequently so exaggerated that one couldn’t tell where truth ended and fiction began. Her car was bigger than any other I had ever seen. The only small thing I remember associated with her was her tiny, one bedroom apartment, into which she moved following the death of her husband. Even then, when she talked of her previous home, a modest, two bedroom ranch, she recalled it more of a spacious mansion so big she needed a maid to help her clean it.
Though she often went out of her way to try to impress people, I still liked her. I gave her the benefit of the doubt on her stories. She told them with such conviction I think she actually believed what she said.
I used to go to her apartment to take out the trash, help her clean her place, and wash her car. I hadn’t been there for over a year, since her son came home from serving in the military in some place called Vietnam.
She called Granny daily and they talked on the phone for hours. Though they really seemed to enjoy each other’s company, I hope that Granny didn’t believe everything that Mrs. Casto told her.
They talked about everything from the greenhouse to their various ailments, real and perceived. And though they got on each other’s nerves occasionally, fights always lasted less than a few hours, with one or the other calling to apologize.
They even talked about other people, something Granny insisted that people shouldn’t do. Eddie used to say that “Granny liked to talk the talk, but didn’t always walk the walk.” He thought that Granny was a bit of a hypocrite when it came to gossipers. He said that Granny told him God didn’t approve of gossipers, but “she and Old Lady Casto sure do a lot of it.”
Mrs. Casto arrived at the greenhouse about a half hour later. She and Granny went down the aisle between the geraniums and the marigolds and talked for
a little bit. I figured that they were talking about how to beat up the devil and get him out of the house. After a few minutes, Mrs. Casto looked back over toward me and James. “Let’s go find this devil and ask him why he’s terrorizing you kids,” she said.
Still frightened, I had no desire to go back. “Anything that scared James to that extent would not go down easy,” I thought. But Granny and Mrs. Casto were a formidable team. Together, I reckoned, they would be able to at least get the devil out of the house. “If nothing else, Mrs. Casto could sit on him and keep him pinned down until the police arrive,” I thought, though I didn’t have any idea what the police would be able to do with him.
It only took a few minutes to drive back to the house. Mrs. Casto pulled into the driveway far enough to catch shade from the big oak tree. She pulled herself out of the driver’s seat, then opened the back door for me. Eddie and James slid across the seat, getting out of the car on my side.
The door to the house was still wide open. Neither James nor I was worried about closing it when we ran out of there earlier.
Granny entered first, clutching her purse by the straps, so she could swing it if she needed to. Mrs. Casto was right behind her, holding a big, light blue umbrella in her right hand. I wondered to myself if she planned to stab the devil with it.
James, Eddie, Lee and I stayed outside, near Mrs. Casto’s car, debating what we going to do if the devil chased Mrs. Casto and Granny back out of the house. “If he comes chasing Granny out of the house, do we jump into the car and lock the doors, or do we take off running?” I asked. We decided that running was the best option.
After a few harrowing minutes, Mrs. Casto came to the front door with a troubled look on her face. Gasping, she declared “boys, I have both good news and bad news. The bad news is the devil got your grandmother and has taken her to Hell, where she’ll have to be his slave and do his bidding for eternity. The good news is he promised to leave you kids alone from now on. He even shook on it. Even the devil is required to honor a handshake.”
Eddie immediately sprinted up the stairs. I didn’t know why, but he later said that he was going to get Granny back from the devil. Just then, Granny came to the door, saying “stop it Annabelle, can’t you see that they’re scared enough?”
Mrs. Casto agreed. She walked back into the living room and plopped herself down on the sofa, pleased with herself that she was able to exploit, to such benefit, Granny’s failure to quickly make it to the front door.
Granny called us into the house. We made our way back to the bedroom where the devil had appeared. A hole formed in the wall, right where James said he saw the devil. Burn patterns, appearing to have started from inside the wall, flowed outward, giving me all the proof I needed. “See, Granny? The devil was here,” I said.
She told Eddie and me to go outside and play. “James and I are going to try and figure how to keep the devil out from now on,” she said.
About ten minutes later, James came out, steaming mad. He called Granny names under his breath. When I asked him what was wrong, he angrily replied “the old battle axe is calling me a liar. She’s accusing me of putting the hole in the wall and tryin’ to burn the house down.”
James hardly ever got angry with Granny. Sometimes he argued with her over her daughter, but I don’t remember him fighting with her over anything else. He said “now the old senile bat’s going to go tell The Old Man that I tried to burn down the house. If I wanted to torch the damned place, I wouldn’t hide in the bedroom and do it. I’d just throw some gas on the floor, light a match, and walk the hell away.”
Granny came back out of the house. “James Howard, come here, now!” On those infrequent occasions when Granny addressed us by both first and middle names, it was understood that she was to be listened to. “I don’t know what you saw in that room today. But I believe that you believe you saw the devil. And I believe you were scared. The door is completely off of its hinges. I know that Mike peed his pants. So, I’m not trying to say that you made it up, nor am I trying to accuse you of anything.” She went on to explain why she was having such trouble believing James’ story, saying “you see, sometimes grown-ups don’t see the devil the way you described him. Myself, I believe that the devil probably looks like a regular man.”
After about ten more minutes of talking, James had calmed down a bit. But he remained firm that he had seen the devil. I believe he saw the devil. The terrified look in his eyes that day told me all I needed to know. I had never seen true fear in his eyes before or since. He knocked a door right off its hinges. I could only reason that he did it to prevent the devil from grabbing him and dragging him to Hell.
The next couple of days were tense. Nobody wanted to sleep in that room. The four of us, Lee, Eddie, James and I each took turns staying awake, keeping an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. We reasoned that if one of us was awake and something came to get us, then we’d all wake up and beat the hell out of it, or at least run and get The Old Man so he could help us.
As time wore on, general fear turned to mild apprehension, which gradually faded. Before long, we all slept through the night without one of us standing guard. Less than a month after that incident, any or all of us slept there without worrying too much about the devil revisiting us.
The next few weeks were uneventful. We fell back into our routines, with each of us doing our assigned chores, and trying to stay out of Feenie’s way. Life returned to normal, but not for too long.
Chapter 14: The Watch
Eddie and I were playing a rock baseball in the road in front of the house. As I tossed him little mounds of dirt, he hit them over into the field. Holding the semi-straight tree branch in hand, he imagined himself as Joe Morgan, a slugger for the Cincinnati Reds. I imagined myself Jim Palmer, a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles.
He slapped one that went foul. I never gave much thought to it as it headed toward the house. After all, it was probably the fifth or sixth one hit in that direction.
A rock must have been contained inside, because the kitchen window shattered the very instant the clump made contact. It figures that the only clump that didn’t break apart when he hit it was the one that hit the window.
Fearing a severe ass whipping, we ran and hid on the east side of the house. We just made it around the corner before we heard that all-too-familiar scream. Within moments, it came. “Michael Steven and Eddie Ray, get your asses over here right now!”
Eddie peeked his head around the corner of the house and saw Feenie carefully looking about, trying to locate us. He quickly tucked his head back when he saw her scanning in our direction. He whispered “look, we might as well go in and get it over with.”
I generally preferred to delay the inevitable, if for no other reason than to deny either of my parents the chance to immediately quench their thirsts for revenge. But Eddie quickly grew anxious when we did something that justified a butt whipping, insisting that since we knew we were going to get beaten, we should get it over with as quickly as possible. “Waitin’ for the beating is far worse for me than the beating itself is,” he explained. Since the day he nearly hyperventilated while awaiting punishment, I joined him in getting it over with quickly.
As we slowly made our way to the porch, I glanced over at Eddie. His eyes told me, as they frequently did, that he wanted to get his beating over with first. Come to think of it, “frequently” is not the operative word. He always wanted to get his over with first. Either he didn’t much like watching his brothers getting whipped, or he didn’t want to watch what he knew soon would be happening to him. I think it may have been a little of both, but more of the former. Even after he took a good beating, he kept his eyes closed while running around, wailing.
Feenie stood on the porch, her hair rolled up in big pink curlers and some kind of whitish-yellow skin mask on. She held one of The Old Man’s leather work belts in her right hand, tapping her left hand with it. As soon as Eddie got within her reach, she grabbed him by the hair
, jerked him close to her, ripped his pants down and whipped him furiously for about ten or twelve good licks. After she was done with him, she gave me an equally brutal one.
She sent us to the bedroom. James was already there, having fought with Lee yet again, that time over him not cleaning his mess after making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Lying on the bottom bunk, he read a comic book he said one of his friends let him borrow.
Eddie and I agreed we probably deserved to get our butts whipped for breaking the window. But we still called her every name that we could think of, even chuckling at some of the names that we made up. “Stinky butt dwarf,” uttered Eddie. “Wicked Witch of Highland Park,” I replied. James rattled off a tongue-twisting list of his preferred vulgarities, causing both me and Eddie to stop and take notice. Knowing we couldn’t put together anything to challenge his tirade, we moved on to other topics. We talked about the old shack and the creek in Cravensdale, crawdad hunting, and, for some reason, Tink and Sis.
The Old Man made it home that night at about eight thirty. He must have had a pretty rough day at work. We fully expected him to storm into the bedroom. When Feenie told him what we did, he did just that. We fully expected to get a stern lecture. Again, he didn’t disappoint.
What we didn’t expect was being jerked out of the room and carried around like a couple of rag dolls. “I’m sick and tired of paying for shit like this,” he screamed as he carried us into the living room. He had Eddie by the back of his jean shorts. He carried me with his right hand under my left armpit.
He threw us down onto the couch, causing Eddie and me to hit our heads together when we landed. He yelled “you little bastards are going to stop tearing shit up!” Removing his belt, he reached down, grabbed Eddie’s arm, jerked him up and started wailing. Eddie ran around in circles, throwing his arm down to soften the blows, but The Old Man just kept lashing into him. He must have landed fifteen good shots on Eddie’s already welted back side. Eddie ran to the bedroom screaming as soon as The Old Man let him go.
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