Southern Cross the Dog (4 page)

THE JOSTLING ON THE BUS
kept the sleep from settling. His eyes stung and his groin itched. The other passengers were asleep. Eli could hear them snoring, making low wet sounds, dreamy half words. The country spread black against the windows. Here and there he could make out the reddish glow of tramp fires through the pines. He closed his eyes and half expected to open them up again to his bunk back at the Farm and smell the stale sweat and manure hanging in the air.

But instead, he smelled perfume.

It drifted faint from the front of the bus. A fire lit up in his head, his nerves going hot and bright at the tips. She climbed on board, a gloved hand steadying herself on the back of a seat. The silhouette of a pillbox hat floated into the aisle. She took slow careful steps toward the back of the bus, arms feeling the dark space ahead of her. Her hips bobbed—
Swish! Swish!
—stopping in front of Eli.

Evening, she said.

Eli slid over and cleared a space for her to sit. The scent of calla lily grew thick and heavy. He could feel its weight in his mouth, like a lump of sugar on his tongue.

You a pretty little thing to go riding around this hour, he said.

Couldn't find no one to carry me, she said.

Now I don't believe that. You weighed five hundred pounds, I'd carry you. On my back if I had to.

The woman snickered. Maybe, but you can't take me any place I need to go.

Don't you worry. I know all the right places.

Oh, I bet you do.

I know all the right spots, he said again.

Eli couldn't see her face. He wasn't sure if she was ignoring him.

You going to see your man?

You're awful lippy, mister.

You didn't answer my question.

The woman was quiet for a while. I'm going to see my husband.

If I had a wife like you, I wouldn't never let her out of my sight.

Don't get fresh with me, she said. You don't even know me.

I don't mean offense. All I mean is lots of things out in these roads at night. Not all of them safe.

Like you.

Eli laughed.

Me? Sure. But there's plenty worse than me. When I was a little boy, my grandma told me about a gypsy woman live out in the country. If a little boy or little girl was in devilment, she'd come at night and take them away. Boil them up and eat their bones, then she'd spit them out and put them in her little conjure bag.

The woman laughed. He could make out the swell of her breasts, the smooth slope of her neck. The whites of her eyes glowed a dull blue even in the dark.

You ever been in devilment, little girl?

Bad boy, she teased.

'Cause I can devil you right.

He touched his fingers lightly to her skirt. The warm of her thighs came up through the cotton.

The woman laughed. I'm a full-grown woman.

Very grown, Eli said.

A grown woman ain't got no need for tall tales.

Maybe you ain't never had a tale tall enough.

Don't matter how tall if it don't do nothing.

Eli smiled. You don't believe me.

He could feel the bus rolling over the uneven country, a deep tremble plucking at his groin.

Let me show you something.

Eli unbuckled his belt and slid his hand down his waistband.

What're you doing?

He brought out his hand and in his palm was a small flannel bag. The woman let out a surprised laugh, then clapped her hand over her mouth. He untied the drawstring and took out a round dark pit.

This here is my little devil.

Oh, a
little
devil? Is that it?, she said, pouting.

Eli ignored her.

It's got powers on it. He held it out in front of her, rolling it gently in his fingers.

Go on now.

It's true.

Snuck it right from under that gypsy woman.

What's it do?

What's it look like to you?

It was dark and round and shriveled.

It looks like a man's . . . well, a man's part.

That's right, he said. He danced the pit dreamily in front of her, first in front of her eyes, then under her nose, grazing her upper lip.

His other hand settled lightly on her knee. He drew swirls gently on her skin.

All I got to do is give it a little rub right here, he whispered.

He passed his thumb over the ridges of the pit. A warm musk flowed from his fingertips and he glided his hand up her thigh.

Can I hold it? she asked softly.

He brushed the pit gently around the underside of her palm, then up the curve of her wrist, away from her stretching fingers. He could smell her honeyed sweat now, through her perfume. His frenzied blood ached under his skin.

Just a little rub right here.

H
e was born Elijah Philip Cutter outside of Natchez in Adams County—gray and small and out of breath—a caul across his brow. When he was two, his mama cut out to California with a man that might've been his daddy, leaving Eli to his grandma to raise up. He was a sickly boy. At night he could not breathe and would instead sit up in his bunk, his lungs filling with panic, and he'd listen, the rusty harp inside his throat, the ringing of the bottle tree.

When he was five, his grandma took him down to the small one-room shack out beyond the rail yard water station. All around he could hear the great breaths of steam let out from the chimneys. The house sat out beyond the weeds, its walls soot stained and ivied. His grandma unlatched the door and guided Eli in. There was hardly any light. He could barely make out the shelves that lined the walls, the dark dusty jars of powder and bone. There was a great shifting breath. He almost did not see him, sitting there on the bed. He was old, his eyes two milky orbs inside his skull.

The Devil's in your throat, his grandma said. It got to come out.

The man laid his frail hand upon the boy's body and undid the buttons one by one. The fabric fell quietly away. On his open chest, the man pressed his ear. He listened for the rattle of his soul.

When he was done, the man had him lie down on a sheet of wax paper. Eli looked at his grandma, who only nodded approvingly, and he obeyed. He spread himself out on top of the thin paper, and the man knelt down and lit a candle at his feet.

Shut your eyes, his grandma said.

Above him, the man moved, shifting his weight, the floor straining against the balls of his feet. Eli could hear his hands, hear the wet slick of oil between the man's palms as he rubbed them together. A band of warmth stretched across his chest.

Don't move.

The heat was unbearable. It lay heavy like a second skin. He could feel the sweat between his shoulder blades, gathering along the ridge of his spine. It traveled down and down, a cold pearl at the base of his back.

And inside, he could feel the small thing fighting in his chest, struggling against the root man's ministrations. The Devil rustled. His lungs filled with feathers. There were hands upon him now, kneading hard against his breast. His heart raced. The air was shrinking. He could not breathe.

And there was the thumping in his breast, and God's hand in his throat. And there was his soul against his ribs. Outside, the trains let out their bellows, and in one sick lurch, he spit the evil yolk out onto the butcher paper. Eli hacked and wheezed and felt air crack deep into his core. The man stood him up and wrapped up the paper around the yolk, tucking the yellow mass into one of his dusty jars.

FOR YEARS, ELI WENT TO
see the root man, drinking his potions and huffing powders from his mason jars. In the afternoons, he helped him hunt through the thatches of johnsongrass outside the rail yard. The old man squatted down among the weeds, his desiccated hands searching through the loose soft soil. He plucked mushrooms from the cold black ground and tucked their caps inside his cheek. He'd hold them there for hours before spitting the runny mash across an Indian head penny. All the plants he could name by touch, the grittiness of the leaves, the firmness of the stalks against his fingers. Sorghum and boneset and chase-devil. He'd take a spade and dig down, prying up long tangles of blood root, and John the conqueror and the musky dripping vines called devil's shoestrings.

Folks would come from miles around—as far away as Prichard and Mobile and Tillmans Corner. The line would stretch out the door and Eli would watch them, their slack and tired faces, the nervous hands. Eli listened as the root man dispensed his advice: mashed-up snake root and grooveburr in a sachet under your bed. A strip of yellow cloth and powdered anise seed inside a flannel pouch. There were tricks for money and tricks for love and tricks to turn the Devil from your door. There were mojo hands and evil eyes and black cat bones. And all around was the invisible world, Eli realized, each of us caught in its strange currents. If he shut his eyes, he could almost hear it—the thump of blood. The driving noise. The deep and ancient undertows.

The first trick he ever laid, Eli made a wish and rubbed a piece of lodestone to a purple kerchief. He buried the rock underneath a linden tree and burned the kerchief, setting the ashes into the wind. In time the universe would answer. When he was thirteen, a man came to his grandma's house. He was tall and dark and slim with a mouth full of gold and he told the boy that he was his father. With him, he'd brought an old pine-top upright piano. The man said he had a job selling them all over the country. When Eli's grandma found that man inside her house, she ran him off with a meat cleaver. She chased him clear out of town before he could recover his piano.

For hours every night Eli would sit at the box, studying the keys. He'd pry open the top panel and watch the wooden hammers rise and fall across the long raking cables. He taught himself, and in time the piano became almost second nature. He liked the way his arms spread its length, the way the sound gave underneath his fingers. It became a conduit of his will. Anger and joy and sadness swooping out of his soul and into the air.

And yet when he sat himself at the bench, when the fall board lifted away to reveal the peninsula of glowing keys, he could not say he was entirely himself. The hands were not his hands. They moved without his moving them, tensing into claws, doing their jitter jump. The chords rose like a heat above the keys and the thought occurred to him that maybe it was not his will that drove his hands, that spanned his arms, that struck and stroked and stomped his feet against the ground.

ELI LEFT HOME WITH HIS
mojo bag, a deck of cards, and a head full of humming. He spent years on the chitlin circuit—playing at the Queen City Hotel, Po' Monkey's Lounge, Doke's Barbershop, and in the tiny jukes up and down Chrisman Street. He earned himself a name as a demon on an upright. For hours he'd play, his face stern and his clothes sweat-heavy. Folks would jam into the tiny halls, their bodies full of heat, and Eli would shut his eyes and feel their swell in the back of his mouth, their beating feet in his throat.

Rumor had spread about the devil bag he kept at his waist, and after a set, there'd always be some desperate woman waiting for him outside. She'd tell him her troubles, and he'd listen—his face a blank, lost in the hiss of the gas lamps.

When she finished speaking, he'd look her square in the eye.

You got to be sure, he'd say, his hand laying warm across the back of hers. 'Cause once it gets doing, can't get undone.

Then he'd take her money and walk her back to someplace dark and quiet where they would not be disturbed.

IN THE DAYS AFTER THE
flood, it was so calm you could see clear through the water like it was a sheet of glass—torn-up roofs, stovepipes, drowned livestock made stiff and waxen. The D.C. men had come down on special order and they went around in their standard-issue tan, speaking in clean soft voices, sketching their plans on rolls of yellow paper. At night they went into the refugee camps, their lanterns flashing and disappearing through the weeds. They went to the coloreds first, rousting them from their beds with promises of work and food and a chance to help their country. And then there was Eli who was already up, who never slept much to begin with—Eli with his mouth on the mouth of a bottle of corn whiskey. He was by the fire, shooting craps—the dice heavy with mercury and firing sevens.

He didn't see the D.C. men, didn't see them come up till one of them put a hand on his shoulder.

You serving your country now.

In the morning, they lined him up with the others and gave them each a ration ticket. They fed them on stores of stiff bread and a thin soup before driving them up-country to the levee camp. It was a wide and grassless clearing set along the water break, where rows of pup tents crowded into one another. The latrines were a network of shallow trenches running through the camp and out into the water. The mosquitoes raged thick and black, flitting on their eyes and skin and shit.

They gathered the men to the water's edge and one of the D.C. men stood himself up on a supply truck and sketched out what needed doing: a berm, ten feet high, six feet across, running two miles downriver. The work would be hard and long, but their work would live on in the state for years to come, he said.

Then someone asked, How long we got to live here?

And the man said, Long as it takes.

Then they were given shovels.

THE MAN IN CHARGE WAS
a former overseer named Homer Teague. He wasn't from D.C., but he'd run a plantation somewhere roundabout Indianola, and the D.C. men had figured that running coloreds is running coloreds. Teague was a fierce drinker. When he was angry, his face would turn wine red, and he'd uncoil that long bullwhip he kept at his belt and snap it in the air. If you didn't shovel or haul fast enough, he'd pull you out of your line, and stretch you out under a tree and tear you through with a piece of splintered hickory.

He lived out with his sister, Emaline, in a plantation house outside of town, a creaking place where the walls looked like bone and the stink of sulfur came up through the mud. It was always on his boots, kissing yolky daggers into the earth.

Maybe it was the difference in their ages, but where her brother was mean and quick to anger, Emaline was gentle and easily moved to emotion. She was sixteen years old, a bird of a child. Some days, she'd come down to the camp done up in her gingham homespun, toting a basket of apples for the men.

Eli would greet her as she came down the line. Unlike the others, Eli wasn't afraid of smiling at white women, big and toothy, full of nothing behind it. He'd bow, tipping some invisible hat, before righting himself and accepting her apple.

But the biggest, reddest apples she'd save for her brother, who looked forward to her visits. Teague would crunch them between his teeth, gold-colored juices soaking up in his red beard. He'd lick the sticky off his fingers and Emaline would dab her kerchief on his lips and his hands, shaking her head, saying, Oh, Homer.