John Crow's Devil by Marlon James Read Free Book Online

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