Up Jumps the Devil (2 page)

The Devil, like the Pilgrims, became crowlike. He roosted in the thatch atop the blacksmith's forge, and cast a dark eye all around. He tried not to think about Pocahontas. She wouldn't have understood.

The Pilgrims did as they were used to doing. Some of them shouldered their blunderbuss guns and took to the woods a-hunting. Others tended gardens. Their leaders gathered by the creek, arguing about whether to build a mill and a waterwheel, and about whether it was a sin to put berries in porridge.

“
Everything
can't be a sin, Elder Mather,” said one.

“Life itself is a sin, Miles,” said Elder Mather, the minister. “Original sin.”

And someone else said, “Balls!” and another someone said, “Language, John,” and Miles said they needed to strengthen the fort before they thought about luxuries like waterwheels. To which John replied that if a wheel and mill were a luxury, then eating must be a luxury, to which Miles replied that not getting eaten by Indians would be a luxury, too, if they didn't watch out.

Meanwhile, from the houses round about came a general mutter of discontent, and by and by the wives came out into the little lane between their homes.

William, Miles, John, and the other notables marched over to see what was the matter.

“The butter won't come,” said the minister's wife, Jenny Mather.

The other wives echoed this complaint. It didn't matter how they knocked about with the paddle, neither butter nor buttermilk would form.

“You're stirring too fast,” suggested John.

John's wife suggested that she had been churning butter for thirty years and knew how fast to stir.

“It's too warm,” said Miles, and was ignored.

“Something frightened the cows, perhaps,” said Elder Mather.

“The wind!” someone suggested.

“Wolves!” said another.

The wives sighed and went about other chores.

“Frightened, indeed,” muttered Jenny Mather, who had green eyes like a cat. She gave the pasture and the woods a long, hard look, and headed home to do the spinning.

THE NEXT DAY
and the next, no butter came.

It was a hard thing, for these new Americans. Butter was one of their few comforts.

The Devil put on his best gopher-skin leggings and went to trade furs inside the fort. The Pilgrims preferred to trade with Indians who had been baptized. They called them “Praying Indians.” So a lot of the Morning People, including the Devil, got baptized in order to do business.

“Who's there?” asked the guard at the gate.

“A brother in Christ,” said the Devil, and the gate opened.

Between transactions, he played softly upon his fiddle, Old Ripsaw, and surveyed the village with a secret eye. The Pilgrims seemed glum, distracted, like a holiday turned inside out.

Good.

The blacksmith, who came to trade a hatchet for a sack of fox hides, was a quiet man to begin with, and practically mute today. His thoughts were elsewhere, and the Devil easily cheated him two whole furs.

“What's wrong?” he asked Giles Dorrit, a fisherman. “Bad weather coming?”

“The butter won't come,” growled Giles. “This beaver fur has a hole in it.”

The Devil explained that beavers had holes for breathing underwater. Giles shrugged, and paid full price in dried mackerel.

It wasn't so much that there was no butter to eat, the Devil understood. Religion and superstition were much the same, and cows that gave no butter meant evil was afoot.

A few months of this might see them on their way, the Devil thought, kneeling to gather his stock and profits.

But a shadow fell over him, and he looked up into Jenny Mather's cat-green eyes.

“The butter,” said Jenny Mather, “would come again soon enough if you left the cows alone.”

It was an inconvenient fact that some folks had eyes to see strange things, and the Devil was sometimes recognized.

“You wouldn't need to worry about me
or
the cows,” he answered, rising, “if you were to load them on ships and sail back to England.”

Jenny Mather was a handsome woman. The Devil looked at her down the length of his wooden nose and felt a powerful twitching all over his skin, and when Jenny Mather said, “If you leave the cows alone, I'll kiss you,” he found himself saying, “Deal.”

They slipped into the curing shed, where fifteen hams and a steer hung from the beams, and Jenny kissed the Devil deep and slow.

The Devil, gambling that a bargain for a kiss might go further, once begun, was breathless and disappointed when she pulled away and was gone without so much as a squeeze.

Still.

The Devil could cheat and the Devil could lie, but a deal was a deal.

He'd miss the cows.

The butter came back, and the glumness and the superstition faded, and things were much as they had been. The Devil watched it all from an apple tree, disappointed with himself and smoking baby birds like crazy.

SPRING TURNED TO
summer. The fort grew. The trees retreated before the Pilgrims' axes, and the hunters foraged deeper than ever into the woods.

The Pilgrims had brought disease with them, and Indians died. Lots of them.

The Devil resolved once again to be rid of the English.

This time his eye fell on the children.

He entered the children's dreams one night and whispered to them, then crouched behind the henhouse to await morning.

At dawn, the hunters went a-hunting. The notables gathered by the well, arguing about whether to send to England for a gunsmith.

“There's Indian sign on the deer trails,” said John, who knew a man who knew a man who'd been skinned alive in Virginia.

“The Indians are dead,” spat Miles. “Mostly.”

“But the ones who are not,” said Elder Mather, “are desperate and afraid, and may pool their numbers to attack. I think we'll always have Indians, in great numbers or not, which begs the question of the gunsmith.”

Indians prowled their dreams. They were in the closets and under the beds. Indians were blamed for everything from dull razors to spiders in the firewood.

Down in the lane between houses, a column of children appeared.

The arguing notables fell silent all at once, and stared.

Not a passel of children or a mob, but a column, as if they were soldiers. Ten children? Thirty? It looked like all the children in the village, from Molly Fellberry (young for thirteen) to tiny Abigail Fetters, less than two.

There was something disquietingly unchildlike about them. The men discerned an unnatural wisdom about their eyes, something otherworldly in the way they marched without making a sound.

This strange column turned left at the stockade gate, and filed in silence out of the fort.

The notables, followed by a number of wives and some fishermen, found the children stopped in two neat rows, like a choir, just this side of the pasture fence, staring at the woods below the hill. The adults looked at the children, then looked at one another. They were reaching for the children when the children began, all at once, to speak.

The children described the future as if it were something that had visited them in their sleep. They pointed at the woods as they spoke, because the woods were west, and the future was west.

They said that the Indians would die of mumps and pox and tooth decay, and other white diseases.

They told how the new country, starting right here in their churchy little village, would grow up rooted in blood and gold and slavery.

There would be a race of retarded people called Rednecks, kept like a national pet. There would be schools like factories, factories like prisons, and prisons like cities. There would be a machine like an eye, which would talk to people and show them pictures, and people would do whatever the eye said. That was as far as the children could see.

And then the children looked at their mothers and fathers, and said a thing or two about how some people today, right here at home, seemed to spend time in sheds and barns with people who weren't their husbands or wives—and you never saw a bunch of grown-ups move so fast; they snatched up their little ones, and bore them away to confinement.

FROM HIS WIGWAM
at the edge of the forest, the Devil watched the village retreat into itself. He hoped the Pilgrims were thinking about sailing back to England if the children didn't shut up.

At twilight, Jenny Mather crossed the pasture to stand at his door.

For a moment, her shadow and shape were enough like Pocahontas to make his heart ache.

Jenny untied her bonnet and shook loose her long dark hair, and offered to screw him inside out if he would lift whatever spell he'd laid on the children. The Devil heard himself agreeing. He couldn't help it.

THE DEVIL AND
Jenny Mather did things under the sun, and then the moon, which embarrassed the natural creatures all around.

After she staggered off home, the Devil fished around among his few things—furs and bones, arrowheads and seeds and his pipe—until his wooden fingers closed around a glass ball the size of his fist.

He stared into it. The glass ball was clear as a raindrop. Wasn't it? Or were there shadows and clouds inside? The more he stared, the more the ball changed. It showed the Devil the same future it had shown the children.

“Why does the future always look so hard?” he wondered aloud.

He put the ball away. It didn't do to see things he didn't understand yet.

AUTUMN CAME, AND
the Hunter's Moon. Crisp winds changed direction; the sea and sky turned gray. The Devil lost himself on the deer trails, lost himself in the harvest feasts of the Morning People and the Fish People and the Big Voice People. He lost himself in thinking about
her
.

He was going to have to stop that. Time moved forward. No one knew that better than he.

The villages of the forest people were smaller than before. Fewer.

“Watani-ay tougash misoughioughi,”
one sachem told him. “It is the coughing sickness.”

“Ni quoi quoi ai watha,”
said another. “The old ones shit themselves to death.”

These were strong people, and they were dying of children's diseases.

The Devil remembered to be angry with the Pilgrims. When they died, more Pilgrims appeared from over the sea. When forest people died, perhaps children would be born to replace them, but the children died, too.

When winter came, sure enough, the Pilgrims shut themselves indoors and began to freeze and starve and die. The cemetery bulged. Even the cows died, which saddened the Devil.

These people were not fit to build a nation.

There would have to be fighting. The Falling Water People had fought, at Jamestown. The Devil winced. Pocahontas had hated the fighting.

Still, he went to the forest villages and said, “You should do something about these clowns while you still have some warriors left,” and they agreed.

THE PILGRIM FATHERS
were gathered in the meetinghouse, in retreat from a screaming arctic gale, telling scary stories.

“At Jamestown”—John coughed—“they starved so badly they began to dig up the dead.”

“Bosh!” sniffled Miles. “It was only the
fresh
dead that were eaten.”

Elder Mather tried to add something, but it was lost in a great sneeze, and before he quite recovered, they were interrupted by the watchtower bell, its alarm riding the howl of the wind.

“Indians!” They all coughed, and ran outside to see.

Indians, indeed! They seemed to be part of the storm itself, pouring out of the dark, loosing arrows or throwing hatchets, then vanishing again. It was hard to know what to shoot at.

BOOM! BOOM! Musket and blunderbuss flared on the stockade wall, followed by wheezing and feverish moans.

One Pilgrim fell outside the wall with an arrow in his throat. Another died of the flu while loading the swivel gun.

In the lane by the well, Jenny Mather raised a lantern for the wives and children, who followed her to the meetinghouse, where they coughed and shivered and prayed.

Outside, they heard the wind, and fewer gunshots. More and more, there was the wind and Indian war cries.

“We're lost.” Teenage Molly Fellberry sneezed.

The younger children began to bicker about whether 'twas a sin to want to be buried wearing ribbons.

THE DEVIL WAS
among the first warriors over the wall.

He set fire to the potato barn and was just about to piss in the well when a dark figure emerged from the driving snow, green eyes inside a woolen hood, reflecting the Devil's torch.

Jenny Mather looked frightened, but she had come to do something that needed doing. She offered to give the Devil her soul if he would let them live.