Pap grabbed Johnny’s shoulders and kneed him in the potatoes. Uncle Johnny tried to clinch, but Pap wouldn’t let him. He’d dance back and jab, his raw knuckles cutting Uncle Johnny’s face up like he was using a razor.
On this went until Uncle Johnny got savage brave and come running at Pap. Pap stepped to the side and kicked out and hit Uncle Johnny in his left thigh with his shin. Uncle Johnny tripped and cussed and fell flat on his face.
He was trying to get up when Pap got him around the neck with that borrowed, dead man’s arm, and squeezed his neck so hard that within a moment it looked like a deflated inner tube. Then there was a cracking sound like a wishbone being pulled, and then Pap got Uncle Johnny around the waist, lifted him up so his head was down, marched to the fire, and stuck Uncle Johnny’s limp head right into the still-hot cooking grease. The air sizzled and there was a smell like bacon in a pan.
Pap held him like that for a while, then lifted him out of the grease and tossed him aside.
He turned then toward Mama.
She trembled. She said, “Now, Phil, you don’t want to do nothing. It’s you I love.”
But Pap did want to do something. He come charging toward her on those dead legs. She tried to mix in with the crowd, but they weren’t having that. They didn’t want no part of Pap. He came and they spread, and there she was, standing lonely as the last pine in a lumberjack run. She stood there like she was nailed to the spot. And then he had her. He picked her up by the waist, raised her high.
She looked down at him, he looked up at her.
I thought for a moment he was going to put her down, but he turned his head toward the fire and smiled, and ran right at that big ole blaze of crackling logs and sputtering fire, leapt right in with his heart’s desire, dropped her on her back, and lay down on top of her. The scream she let out was almost enough to make me feel sorry for her, but not quite. They squirmed there, overturning that grease pot. The hot grease splashed onto them and over them and the fire lapped it up.
The flames spread, ash and sparks flew. That fire wasn’t like any fire I’ve ever seen. It ate them right down to the bones in seconds, burned the bones black, turned them to a powdery ash. A blue cloud swarming with flies and blown by wind lifted out of the blaze and climbed on high, rode on up in front of the moon, weaved there like a drunk storm cloud, and then it was all gone and the air was still and the world was so quiet you could have heard a gnat clear its throat.
After a while Conjure Man said, “Well, I guess that’s all for the festivities, and now it’s time for me to go. Thanks for the presents. Thanks for the food. I got the bets in my pocket, and I plan to keep them. You want entertainment, you know where to find me. If you want a spell to cure up that constipation, or make some man or woman love you like they was insane, you come see me. And bring your money.”
He walked on out to his truck without nobody asking for their bets back. That big black dog come out of the truck and met him, licked his hand. They climbed inside, the engine got started, the lights came on, and away they went, clattering over the pasture and onto the road, driving around a wall of trees and out of sight.
People headed out of there quick like, leaving the food, the beers, the whole kit and caboodle. In a moment’s time the place was clear of everyone but me and Mama Mooney and her old car nestled up under a heavy old willow.
She said, “You ought to come home with me, sugar.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “I sure ain’t going back to our place. But I’m moving on, Mama Mooney. I’m moving on away from this place, going just as far as I can. I’ll catch a train, I’ll hitch a ride, I’ll walk at night and sleep in the day, under a tree if I have to. But I’m away from the place, and away for good.”
She gave me a smile and a soft pat on the shoulders, and that’s how it was. Over and done.
I got hold of Uncle Johnny’s shirt, ’cause I knew he had some money stuffed up in his pocket, a handful of bills. That was my seed money. I put it in my pocket with Pap’s knife that I had hung on to, and then Mama Mooney drove me to the wide gravel road, gave me a hug and a kiss, and I got out.
She drove one way, I walked the other.
It was still night, the moon was bright, and I felt good about what I had done. I walked on and pretty soon Pap was walking beside me. I could hear his feet crunching on the gravel, same as mine.
He looked like he always had, except for his head being broken open in front. He said, “I showed them, didn’t I?”
“You did,” I said. “You showed them good.”
“You’re gonna be all right, son,” he said. “You gonna be fine.”
“I know,” I said, and then he was gone.
I walked on.
THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO BOSTON
CAITLIN KITTREDGE
Caitlin Kittredge is the author of the Black London series, the Iron Codex trilogy, and the Nocturne City novels as well as a number of short stories and coauthored works. Her YA novel The Iron Thorn was a YALSA Best Book of 2012. A native of Massachusetts (Go Sox!), she conceived “The Devil Went down to Boston” as a tribute to the weird, seedy city of her childhood, which has mostly been pulled down and replaced with condos. Caitlin blogs rarely and tweets often; visit her at caitlinkittredge.com or twitter.com/caitkitt.
-1-
Ellie Keenan was twelve the first time she saw the Devil. He stood in the front room of her father’s third-floor apartment, the quietest floor of a quiet block on a quiet South Boston side street. Tall and thin, the Devil cast a tall thin shadow.
Ellie wasn’t supposed to be awake. It was close to midnight, and her father’s bottle of Johnnie Walker would have been empty for a while. No one in the family came out of their rooms when he got like that. Sean put on his headphones and disappeared into the world on his computer. Finn waited until Dad was too sloshed to hear him and climbed down the back porch to go to his own party.
Ellie hid. She was the youngest and the smallest and curled herself up in a tight ball. She watched the shadows on her bedroom wall. The wallpaper was older, older than any of them. Cartoon cowboys and smiley-faced cacti, lassos and boots and sheriff’s stars. Boy wallpaper. Worn-out and wrong for them, just like everything else in the crappy apartment. Like everything else on the street, and the street after that, until you drove out of Southie and into a better part of the city.
But that night, Ellie heard the front door open and shut. She thought the cops might be bringing Finn back, like they did some nights. She crept down the hall, avoiding the screeching boards under the balding carpet. Peered through the pocket doors that never quite shut because they were so warped from damp.
And she saw the Devil. Saw him stand in front of the fireplace that produced no heat but plenty of drafts. Saw him lean on the dusty mantel that held a collection of grimy picture frames blocked off by rows of whiskey bottles.
As Ellie crouched, fingers digging half-moons of dry rot out of the crooked door, she felt her stomach flip. Her dad wasn’t a mean drunk, not really. He yelled and sometimes he slapped her but then he’d feel bad and cry, and tell her she was his whole life.
That was a lie. The only life, the only family Declan Keenan had ever known was the one he’d found in the streets. Those hard-eyed, hard-voiced men who came in and out of the apartment at all hours, who sent Ellie’s dad home with cut knuckles and wads of wrinkled, nicotine-stained cash, he’d always come when they called.
Ellie knew what her father was, what she was, her brothers too. She knew why her mother had left. It wasn’t a mystery. As long as there had been Irishmen in Boston, there had been the Folk among them. They came from all over Ireland, for all kinds of reasons, spilling off the boats in Boston Harbor, at Ellis Island, leaving behind the famine and the Troubles for a place among the regular people who surrounded them, only a few lengths below Ellie’s feet.
The Devil handed her fath
er a black fountain pen. It was old, and the point was silver. It looked like a beak, Ellie thought, the beak of something hungry, something that would swoop down and carry you off in its talons.
Declan Keenan took the pen. He was sober, no fresh bottle with a slick of brown whiskey rolling in the bottom anywhere to be seen. He sat on their sofa, the same spot he’d worn a groove in. “You promise me, now,” he said. His voice was rough, like it was after he’d finished crying. She’d heard him sound that way before, though not often—the time Finn had mouthed off, and Declan had broken his nose. Forgotten the gentle slaps he reserved for his children and treated Finn like one of the losers stupid enough to try to wriggle out of a debt to Blackie Farrell, the man who’d given Declan food and shelter when he’d come to America, nurtured his power from a spark into a flame, and given him a job. The man, as Dad often reminded Ellie, to whom they owed everything. Finn had let out a half yelp, rolling on the ground, blood gushing from between his fingers, and Declan had crumpled on the carpet beside him and sobbed.
Later, after Sean had taken Finn to the emergency room, Declan pulled himself up. “I didn’t mean to,” he told Ellie. She hadn’t wanted to say anything back, so she pretended to watch TV until he passed out.
The Devil was at no such loss for words. “I promise,” he said, and he smiled. His shadow got bigger, and longer. It reached up into the water-yellowed plaster of the ceiling and tried to worm into every corner. Under the sofa, across the floor, through the wreckage of Ellie’s backpack and homework, searching for something.
Ellie drew back, pressing her hand over her mouth. She saw what her father, stoop-shouldered and broken, didn’t. The Devil didn’t have eyes. Where they should be was darkness, sucking holes that pulled in all the light around him, that would pull you right down like a riptide on a Cape Cod beach. She wanted to scream, to warn Dad not to do anything, just to run, but she pressed herself into a corner, silent and breathless, only able to watch.
Her father signed a single sheet of paper, which the Devil took and slipped into a black case. He straightened his black tie. His shirt was white, whiter than smoke, whiter than snow. “Pleasure doing business with a Folk talent of your caliber, Declan.”
Her father pressed his head into his hands. Dark hair, lank and greasy and days since washing, hung over his fingers. “I just want my kids to be safe.”
“Here’s a tip for your next life,” said the Devil as he snapped the case shut. The latches sounded like teeth to Ellie’s ears. Click-clack-snap. “If you care so much about your offspring, don’t steal from a man who breaks legs for the fun of it.”
Ellie’s dad didn’t say anything. The Devil took his hat from the table and settled it low over his brow. It disguised those horrible eyes. It made him appear as if he had no face at all.
Ellie watched the Devil, still frozen as he stepped from the front room. He took his black greatcoat from the tree where Sean’s Red Sox parka and her own thirdhand wool coat hung, damp and musty from melted snow. The Devil opened the door and stepped onto the balcony, wind pushing through the broken screens that enclosed the rails. Snow fell, thick and silent as pulling a blanket over your head, but not one flake touched him.
Ellie waited until the Devil shut the door. She heard no footsteps descend the creaking stairs to the ground, so she waited until gray light replaced the gold-tinged black of the streetlamps outside the dirty, salt-crusted windows. She stood up, feeling the cramps and the needle pricks work their way up and down her legs. She slid the pocket door open and peered into the dim front room. “Dad?”
He would not answer her. The paramedics told Sean, and Ellie heard them even though they were trying to be quiet, that he’d probably been dead since late the night before. “Right around the time the snow stopped,” the man said, as another pulled a sheet over Declan’s face.
There were no footprints on the stairs before the ambulance came. No mark on the dusty table where the Devil’s hat had lain. No one except Ellie to say he’d even been there at all.
-2-
The day of her father’s funeral, it rained. Ellie sat in the front pew of the funeral home, feeling damp work its way inside her dress shoes, cheap and shiny and black, pinching at her toes, which had grown at least a size too big since the last time she’d had any reason to be dressed up. Sean sat on one side, Finn on the other. Finn fidgeted and didn’t stop until they were out of the service, in the car going to the reception. He went outside in the alley with some of the Keenan cousins and kicked the soccer ball back and forth against the brick wall.
Sean stood by the buffet table and accepted the handshakes and tearful hugs from the various family members. He’d called their mother, and she was coming, but Ellie figured it wouldn’t be for long. Sean was eighteen. He could take care of them, and her mother would never come back to Boston. Especially not to take care of her three Folk children, in the same neighborhood she’d fought so hard to escape.
Ellie sat in the corner on a straight-backed chair, kicking her heels against the rungs. She wasn’t supposed to even be in the pub, but nobody was going to say anything. She set up three paper cups from the open bar and stuck a dirty penny she’d found on the floor under one, moving the cups around each other, skipping the penny from one to the next, sometimes with her fingers and sometimes with magic. Her dad loved the game, had run it on a street corner when he was barely older than her. The penny was a Folk twist—most kids in the tradition learned how to manipulate their talent with metal, since it was easy to grasp onto and control. They used coins and nails and other small things until they progressed to harder stuff, bindings and spells and demon summonings.
Her stomach knotted. She hadn’t told anyone what she’d seen. She’d promised she never would. Even among a crew as shady as Blackie’s, what had happened to her father wasn’t something anyone would approve of. Whatever it was. She’d never seen a demon, never met anyone who had. They were summoned for terrible bargains, and they were bound by the bargains they struck, yes, but they were still dangerous and would still get your skull cracked if a Folk boss caught you dealing with them.
She moved the cups faster and faster, until the motion almost hypnotized her, never letting her fingers falter, until she didn’t need her fingers anymore, the magic popping the penny in and out of existence, moving from cup to cup so it would never be caught. She didn’t look up until a shadow fell across her.
“My girl,” Blackie Farrell said. He put a hand on her shoulder. His knuckles were lumpy with scar tissue from his time as a bare-knuckle fighter, and his nose and jaw were crooked.
She knocked a cup over, penny skittering away across the bar. Ellie squirmed out from under Blackie’s hand. “Hi, Mr. Farrell.”
He coughed. “Sweetheart, I’m not your school principal. Call me your Uncle Blackie.”
Ellie nodded. “Okay.” She didn’t want Blackie Farrell near her, but she didn’t have a choice. You didn’t turn away from his goodwill, not if you wanted to keep breathing. Sean had an after-school job, but he’d need Blackie’s help if they wanted to stay in the apartment, in Boston, and not get shipped off to California whether their mother wanted them to come or not.
“You want to see a trick?” Blackie said, producing a quarter from his pocket. “I got a lot of tricks I can teach you. Your da was always on about what a clever girl you are.”
He was too close, his breath too hot and stinking of whiskey and cheap cigarettes and he was staring at her with an intensity that bothered Ellie. It wasn’t creepy, not like those guys Sean warned her to stay away from in the park, but it was predatory all the same. Blackie had decided what she was good for, and Ellie didn’t want to find out what that was.
“Leave her alone, Patrick,” someone said from behind Blackie. He flinched at the use of his proper name and straightened up, glaring at the gray-haired figure standing a few feet away.
“Mind your own, Doyle. I’m
just cheering the poor girl up.”
“I think she’ll be a lot more cheerful when you get out of her face.” Ellie looked up at Doyle. She’d seen him around her father when she was young enough to actually be impressed by magic tricks, but less and less since she’d started middle school, and her dad had started drinking every night instead of just on weekends and nights the Patriots were losing.
Blackie muttered, but he left, going to Sean and pumping his hand. Doyle followed Ellie’s gaze and patted her arm. “Don’t worry. That brother of yours can handle himself.”
His touch wasn’t oppressive, so Ellie didn’t try to escape. Doyle smiled at her. “I’m not going to show you a trick. I think you can do a few of your own.”
Ellie blushed. She’d always liked Doyle—he was exotic, not one of the thugs her dad usually hung around. He spoke quietly, never bragged, and always wore the same green sweater with a hole in the elbow. He’d added a black sport coat for the funeral, but nothing else had changed.
“I thought you didn’t like us anymore,” she said. Doyle’s mouth crimped.
“Your dad was a sick man, Ellie,” he said. “A good man, but a sick man. I don’t want you thinking less of him, so that’s all I’ll say. What I will say is this: There will be a time when Blackie Farrell is going to try to use you. You’re talented, by far the strongest in the tradition of any of you three kids. You tell him no, all right? No matter what he offers you. Tell him to go straight to hell. If you need anything, you come see me.”
Ellie nodded, thinking that Doyle was a little crazy if he thought Blackie would ever want anything from her. She was a girl; she wasn’t strong like her brothers. Folk traditions were traditions—no girls allowed, not even talented ones. If Blackie wanted her, he’d want to marry her off to one of his many grandsons, produce strong talents that would sustain the Farrell stranglehold on their little corner of the world. She wasn’t meant for a life on the streets, in a crew, using magic to bend the world their way. “I guess,” was all she said.