Read John Crow's Devil for Free Online Page B

Preacher thought of Jack and the beanstalk and an invisible giant suspended right below the ceiling but above the bed.
    “You can stay in here.”
    “This is where—”
    “Yes, this is where. Yes. But since him—I don’t sleep in here no more. Any more of me business you want to know?”
    “No. Tha—”
    “Dinner at 5:30. I suppose you can wear him clothes even though him did little shorter than you. I suppose if him have a problem him can always tell you, you bein spiritual and all.”
    Once alone the room became larger, more blue, more twilight, less him. Bligh remembered again he was fifty-three years old. He had his life all planned out by twenty-two. At forty he would slip into retirement for twenty years, after which would have come obscurity, gardening, and death. Irrelevance was to come after, not before. For a God so ambiguous, there were no two ways about his punishment.
    Dinner was to be served at 5:30 p.m. Hector Bligh whispered a prayer that along with the sunlight, memories of the day would lose color and fade into blackness
    “The food getting cold.”
    He sat down. For a woman who seemed to care little, she certainly prepared a table before him. There was simply no way she could have cooked all of this herself. Yet many women in denial of the emptiness that death brought still cooked as if the home was full. This was nothing new. Behind the mask of extravagance was the void cut open by grief. She had fried chicken in batter with honey garlic gravy to the side, steamed rice and peas and sweet potatoes, crushed bananas with butter, and shredded sweet carrots and cabbages together, then sprinkled them with cane vinegar. In the center of the table was a large glass pitcher with red punch beside two plastic cups.
    “Help yourself.”
    He would have rather she helped him. This was an uncomfortable experience, filled with disquiet. He remembered the unease, a child’s discomfort as he waited for his father to punish him. In that stiff silence there was nothing but the agony of him guessing. Too much food would be gluttonous. Too little would be scornful. Oh that he could simply eat like a man and be done with it. Women wanted men to be men, after all. Why else would such bounty be laid before him? Why prepare a table in the village of enemies? He piled a mountain on his plate. Food all steaming, dripping, savory, and chunky. His first real meal in years. The Pastor had a woman who cooked, but her meals suffered from an unsavory sameness. Two bites into the Widow’s meal, he almost choked on bliss. Juices came alive on a tongue that once felt dead. A million zesty kisses, each more delightful than the one before. The plate was empty and restacked in minutes.
    “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