By Allister Nelson
It had been a rough harvest on our orchard, more rotten than not, with meal worm and moth bug on the distended crop. Maman stretched our pottage with roots and tubers, and pawpaw slaughtered our last pig. We were out smoking it for winter in the salt shed, and brother John smelled of salt pork. I was splitting wood in a dress that was mostly brown kitchen rag patches – a coat of many colors – and the redbuds were shedding their leaves as the mountain laurels bore skeletal, silent witness to our own emaciated forms.
“Mamaw, we don’t got enough food for the winter,” I said quietly that night as we cut taters for dinner and boiled ‘em over the woodstove.
Mamaw’s lips were pale, a thin line. “The church’s coffers ‘r already stretched too thin, darling Evangeline. We’d best tighten our belts and make do with the forage. Chanterelles, lion’s mane, devil’s buckets. Perhaps the Moon People will bless us – we are of their line. Scare off the boo hags and haints when you wander these Smoky Mountains, dear Evie.”
She crossed herself, then smiled, twisting her silver wedding ring with a Herkimer diamond – worth barely anything, oh, but it sparkled – from mamaw’s hometown: Herkimer County, New York. It was the most beautiful thing I had e’er seen.
“Mamaw, we won’t survive the freeze. That was our last pig.”
Mamaw looked distant, and papaw and brother John were washing up with well water by candlelight and shaving. “It’s up to God, Evie. Up to our Lord God, whether we live or perish.”
I’d never been much of one for Our Lord God. Named after the Evangelist, but it sounded more like Eve: the girl who wanted knowledge. Maybe that was why I’d made a crown of dead leaved-redbud – which supposedly crowned Jesus and grew from his spilled blood – and went to the witching well abandoned by the early settlers. I took dad’s playing cards – Ace of Spades – and did some good old divination by bell, book, and candle.
“By twilight crossroad, by harrows and hell, I summon thee, O Lord of Apple, Lord of Shadow, Lord of Flies,” I said quietly yet full-lipped, using memaw’s old grimoire from her root doctor Melungeon days. My tiny, starving body only let a bit of my gruel-slop blood fall onto the playing card as I nicked my left palm with my pocketknife, drawing out the Devil.
Shadows danced. Out of the well sprung a goat-legged, refined gentleman with silver hair, a pocket-watch at his breast that pointed to the thirteenth hour, a midnight blue suit with coattails, pointed ears, and emerald green eyes. He looked like a fabled white buck mixed with the Wall Street businessmen I had seen in the paper dailies growing up.
“O Maiden Bold, what dost thou desire, blood gifted daughter of Eve?” the Devil of Proud Rock bowed, steam rising from his flesh with the scent of gunpowder and blood and something sweet, like fondant and cinnamon, wafting off him in waves.
“Make the last of the apples ripe, plentiful, and hold off the frosts. Make our harvest good. Bring the deer and rabbit in full throes into our woods, so that the hunt is abundant, and ensure our mushroom patches, herbs, and our winter garden are a’blush with fertility.”
“And what dost thou offer in return, pretty little maid? Virility demands blood, a specific type of blood, a witch’s mark, devil’s kiss, blood pact, gore bruise… for the Malleus Domestika.”
I lifted my skirts gently, drawing my mouth-wettened thumb up my pale thigh, my wood-dark hair spilling down my back and stained gown – curls peeking out the top of my bloomers. “My maidenhead, good sir. Tis all I have.”
“T’will not do, good lady. You have a much more powerful gift: I’d rather a song. If’n thou can sing to match my fiddle of gold, like my caged nightingale of silver in Hell that I keep down below these ancient mountains, all thoust desires shall be yours, and your maidenhead only given to me if’n thou still desires, with no demands made by me on my lustful behalf. I have heard you in my Brother’s pews each Sunday, songbird Evangeline, singing like my sister Gabriel. Thoust rival the Cherubim and old eunuchs of Italia, outshine Fellini. Thoust sing like an angel, girlchild. No, siren thou art, far too fatal to be angelic, are thou – luring my Odysseus heart to his doom. So, sing!”
The Devil of Proud Rock summoned a fiddle and fairies shaped like junebugs to accompany him.
A fiddle of gold played like the most beautiful bells and sinful strings. I danced with abandon, a girl in red ribbon-ed shoes that suddenly replaced my bare feet, and suddenly, my rags were replaced by a sparkling gold taffeta gown.
I felt a melody burble up in my throat – I, who reserved my singing for church. I sang of freedom, of moving to the city and wearing blue stockings and having my own flat, far away from the Smokies, being a big band girl, headlining festivals, having my own flat, a world traveling husband, wee babes of my own, and lifting my family out of poverty. The Devil of Proud Rock painted the air with the musical notes, sheet lyrics and tunes, and my heart’s desires painted the air like a book as my voice spilled out like Shakespeare’s most playful sonnets.
All I could do was sing.
And so, the song ended with me dancing with the Devil. He sealed our deal with a kiss, biting his animal fang down gently upon my lip to draw blood, swallowed, then kissed me chaste on the cheek.
The Devil of Proud Rock vanished, and all that was left were fluttering junebugs: out of season, premature.
The last apples came in and sold well. The deer and bunnies were plentiful and easily fell to papaw and brother John’s guns. But soon, a scout from Nashville heard me lead the chorus at our Baptist church, and he scouted me for the radio. Soon, I was famous, singing at the Grand Old Opry, meeting flappers. When the War came, I went on tour for the doughboys, and my guitar skills and long brown curls and deep blue watery eyes held cinema captive.
I acted! I danced! They called me the Starlet of the Smokies. I lifted my family out of poverty, set up charities for the youth and disenfranchised of Proud Rock, Tennessee.
And one night in Chelsea Hotel, when I was an old, old woman: 93, after my husband of a long, beautiful marriage had died after a fifty-five year love union, and our children and grandchildren were grown, and my parents a cherished memory, my star in Hollywood, my great-grandchildren and shopping and chanteuse-ing my hobby…
I heard a knock at my door, walked over in my evening dress outfit worthy of Zsa Zsa Gabor, and saw Him, my first talent agent: The Devil of Pride Rock.
And we kissed, and talked, and I gave my body willingly – I may have been soon to join the junebugs from that long ago 1920s memory, but from all the dancing and singing, I was as sprightly as any young thing.
And when the Devil of Pride Rock laid me down to eternal rest, I followed his golden fiddle up to the Summerlands, where us music-loving pagans have free roam of Heaven, Purgatory, the Fairylands, and Asmodeus’ gambling dens in Hell, and I saw my sweet husband and parents, my elder brother, my old friends and descendants in turn.
And you can see me singing in Big Mama Gabriel’s bars, accompanying Lucifer on stage in jazz shows, and h’oh Lord? If redbuds don’t bloom in His wake!
And apples taste sweet here, in Heaven.
Malleus Domestika, my pride
and joy.
Allister Nelson (she/her) is a queer, neurodivergent, multiple Pushcart Prize-nominated author appearing in The British Fantasy Society, Apex Magazine, ILLUMEN, Eternal Haunted Summer, Renewable Energy World, Frontiers in Health Communication, The National Science Foundation, Luna Station Quarterly, Prismatica Press, Coffin Bell, FunDead Publications, and many other venues. Her work has been translated internationally into Polish and Spanish, curated by Kevin J. Anderson, nominated for Poland's top fantasy prize, and appeared in anthologies alongside Graham Masterston, Ron Whitehead, CMarie Fuhrman, Bill Willingham, Poppy Z. Brite, Jane Yolen, Sebastien de Castell, and Alan Dean Foster. Allie has published chapbooks with various esteemed publishing houses - Southern Saints (Laughing Man House), Jethro's Daughter (Blood + Honey Press), The Sinners of the South (Alien Buddha Press), and Earth Girls Aren't Easy (PULP).
