The Devil Three Times

by Rickey Fayne

Genres: African American Historical; Family Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

An audacious debut spanning eight generations of a Black family in West Tennessee as they are repeatedly visited by the Devil

Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form—the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice.
 
Their bargain extends far beyond Yetunde's mortal lifespan. Over the next 175 years, the Devil visits Yetunde's descendants in their darkest hour of need: Lucille, a conjure woman; Asa, who passes for white; Louis and Virgil, who risk becoming a twentieth-century Cain and Abel; Cassandra, who speaks to the dead; James, who struggles to make sense of the past while fighting to keep his family together; and many others. The Devil offers each of them his own version of salvation, all the while wondering: can he save himself, too?
 
Steeped in the spiritual traditions and oral history of the Black diaspora, The Devil Three Times is a baptism by fire and water, heralding a new voice in American fiction.

Release date: May 13, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 432

Sample

YETUNDE

(Unmarked)

I ASKED THE woman next to me if she knew my name.

She told me she did but had grown tired of repeating it to me long ago. Perhaps your name does not want you anymore, she said. Perhaps it is time to find another.

This angered me. If a woman knows a thing, I told her, and another woman asks it of her in earnest, she must tell it. I tried to turn away from her, only there was no turning. In turning’s stead I found agony: A pulsing pain beat the back of my head like a small drum. I tried to raise my hand to my head but found I could not. I was flat on my back, shackled to the floor.

Where am I?

Ach, the woman said, the most tiresome question of all. You are in the belly of a large boat. I will not tell you again.

Laughter pealed out of the darkness. Startled, I raised my head. Across from me, the outline of a man, also lying flat, barely visible, took shape. Chuckling, he reared his head. Had I been able to extend my legs, my feet would have kissed his feet. The boat lurched. I felt as if I were standing at the edge of a deep chasm, staring down into its fathomless depths. Above the laughing man, a break in the black of the hold allowed a sliver of light to cut across his face.

If I were you, the man said, I would start by asking what I am.

I told him that I was not a what but a who.

Perhaps, he said, laying his head back down so that the light shone red on his chest now, but what is a who?

No, I said, attempting to stretch limbs I could feel but not move, I’m not a who, I’m a we.

He laughed his laugh again. What kind of we does not know their name?

With a we, I said, wherever one thing stands, another stands beside it. And as I said this, I knew it to be a true thing. That a true thing had made use of my tongue to speak.

Now there is a start, the woman said, but she still would not tell me my name. So I asked her if she had known me before this, and she said yes. Yes, she had known me for quite some time. I peered into the darkness.

Sister? I asked.

Yes, my sister replied.

We were a we, weren’t we?

Yes, she said.

And then you died.

Yes.

When my sister died, she came to live again in me.

I may not be alive, my sister said, but for as long as you stand, I will stand beside you.

I am not now standing, I told her.

Ach, she said. You know what I mean.

I sighed. Relief, my sister was here with me. But this relief was not to last, for as soon as it washed over me a door opened, and the light of day robbed me of my vision.

Before my eyes could adjust to the sun, we were unchained, marched topside, given water, and instructed to throw overboard the dead. There, afloat on a wide river, as my countrymen hefted the dead up over the side of the boat, I raised my hand to the pained part of my head where, on the right side, I felt a scar and, underneath the scar, a knot.

As the dead were lapped up by the waves, a man, one whose child numbered among the dead, flung himself overboard. During the ensuing tussle, an ofay watched me. Wherever I went, the green of his eyes followed. The sun was hot and high and bright. Nowhere was there shade.

I marveled at the wideness of the water. The river I had grown up drawing from was lined with umbrella trees, fringed with sweetgrass, emerald when looked upon from the hills rising above it, and clear when cupped in hand. The dead-swallowing river was a deep, borderless blue.

When I turned away from the water, the laughing man from the hold was at my side. Where does this river bank? I asked him.

He said this was no river, but rather a bigger water called the sea.

I wanted to ask the laughing man more, but he bowed his head and left my side when the staring ofay approached us.

I knew nothing of the ofay’s kind, save what I had seen transpire when my countrymen ran afoul of his. For this reason, I cast my eyes downward at this one’s advance. The ofay grasped my chin and lifted my head. Once my eyes were level with his, he reached into his coat pocket and produced a small red fruit.

Apple, he said, placing it in my hand.

I held it up to my face. It didn’t smell like anything and so I gave it back to him.

He took a bite and chewed, his eager eyes fixing mine all the while. Once he had swallowed, he held the fruit out to me. I raised it to my mouth. It was tart but sweet. My sister, however, peering out from my eyes, did not like the taste and induced me to spit it out onto the ofay’s crisp white shirt.

My sister and I had been born to different mothers. I was born, and then the next day, a stranger appeared at our father’s doorstep, carrying her. Or was it me who was carried by the stranger and my sister’s mother who took me in? Sometimes it is not clear to me out of whose memory I speak.

You speak from your own memory, my sister said. Do not attribute the muddle of your mind to me.

Okay then, which of us did the stranger bring?

Ach, she said. I do not concern myself with such trivial distinctions.

When my sister used me to spit on the staring ofay, the same one who would later call himself my master, a Dahomean man next to him, whom my countrymen belowdecks called the Traitor, raised his hand to strike me. I winced but felt nothing. The staring ofay had stayed the Traitor’s hand, gripping his wrist firm in the air, and despite myself I admired the ofay’s strength. After this, everyone else was shackled and forced back belowdecks, but I was allowed to stay above and, with the staring ofay standing beside me, watch the sun sink into the depths of the sea and the crescent of the moon, flanked by stars, rise high above the night’s horizon.

From then on, I was with the ofay always. Unshackled, I slept on the floor of his quarters, ate food from his table, and sat between his legs with my back against his cot, the light of the setting sun upon my face as he rebandaged my head wound each evening. I wish I could tell you I hated the clumsy ministrations of the ofay’s callused hands, say I shrank away from his saccharine breath and lavender shaving soap, refused his preserved fruits, salted meats, and crusty bread, and stalwartly rebuffed his every kindness, but it is not in my nature to bear false witness. As a consequence of the ofay’s familiarity, my countrymen wanted nothing to do with me and ignored me as they did the Traitor. Save the laughing man, who never failed to seek my gaze whenever he was brought above deck.

In the time it took for one moon to wane and another to wax, my head wound healed and we docked in the port of a city of hard gray ground, tall buildings, many ofays, and countrymen dressed in the ofay fashion, speaking the ofay language. The others were marched to a large house in the middle of the city to be auctioned off. Pitying them their fate, for I had not yet realized the staring ofay had purchased me, I sought the laughing man to whom I had been shackled as my countrymen were marched by, but his face did not number among them. Often, I have wondered what fate befell him; if one day, while I was alone with the ofay, he was thrown overboard, or if he had slipped his chains and flown away.

The staring ofay and I stayed together in a room with a window overlooking the town square. It had a bed, a bureau, a dining table, chairs, and a water closet with two basins: one for eliminating waste and the other for filling with water with which one could wash. Using the latter, I bathed myself in private for the first time since I had left home. When I finished and came out, the staring ofay held out a yellow dress and gestured for me to put it on over my head. On the table was a tray with leavened bread; cheese, which I later came to understand was curdled milk from a cow; and an array of what were then, to me, strange fruits.

Sit, the ofay said.

Sit? I said, running my hand over the bed.

The man shook his head and gestured to the chair beside him. I complied.

Bed, he said, pointing to the bed.

Bed, I repeated.

Chair, he said, reaching across the table and grabbing the chairback. Yes?

Yes, I said.

He smiled, released the chair, and took up my hand.

Apple, he said, holding the red-and-white orb with a leaf and stem out to me. It was nearly identical to the one on the ship.

Apple, I repeated.

He picked up the orange ball and said, Orange.

Orange, I repeated.

He picked up one of the small purple ovals and said, Grape.

Grape, I repeated, and when I finished speaking, he held it up to my mouth. When I ate it from his fingers, he smiled.

The only foods familiar to me, aside from the apples, were the bananas and the bread, a version of which had been served to us on the ship, and so these were the only foods I dared eat. The ofay’s eyes were on me while I chewed.

Back home, my sister said, staring could get a man killed.

What home? I asked.

Then the ofay posed the question he was to repeat countless times over the course of my internment to him: To whom do you speak? This question was among the first sentences I learned of the ofay’s language.

This one is strange, my sister said. She stood us up, walked us over to the bed, and sat us down. Yes, of all the strange ofays, she said, this is the strangest one I have seen.

And just how many ofays have you seen?

Enough to know I do not like this one. Better off for you to have been sold like the others. Better yet for you to have drowned and joined me.

You are just jealous.

When my sister married the second son of the chief, she sulked and cried until one day, finally, her husband returned to our father and said: All right, I will marry the scrawny one, too. Our father had warned him prior to the wedding that we would not be easily cleaved.

No, my sister said, you have it the wrong way around again. You were the one who cried and sulked when I was gone and begged Father to marry you to my husband. There was nothing you would let me have for myself.

You cried, too.

Not nearly as much as you. Besides, what in your situation is there to envy? Him? she said, gesturing to the ofay. If I were alive, I would never suffer his touch.

The ofay, who had been watching me closely, pulled his chair up beside the bed and took hold of my hand.

To whom do you speak? he asked again.

My sister recoiled from me and lay down upon the bed with her hand over her forehead in exasperation. I tried to pull my hand away, but the ofay held fast to it, just as he held my gaze. Perhaps, I remember thinking, this is some sort of courtship ritual common to his people. In Whydah, the coastal city of the Dahomean king, we saw from the windows of the barracoon a number of our countrywomen in ofay dress. Through whispers, we learned that these were the wives of the ofays who had settled the coast to trade with the king.

Perhaps he intends to make me his wife, I said to my sister, remembering the women married to ofays back in Dahomey.

Then my sister rose from the bed, entered into me, and used my mouth to spit on the ofay. It landed on his cheek and dribbled down his shirt.

He raised his hand, and I closed my eyes, waiting for the blow. But to my great surprise, he laughed and did not strike me. He was only raising his hand to wipe the spit away.

My sister stood up out of me and leaned close to his face. This man, she said, peering into the green of his eyes. This man is not sane.

Whole days we passed alone in the room this way: the ofay staring at me, feeding me, finding reasons to place his hands upon me, patiently tolerating my sister’s violent rebuff of his advances. The only times his eyes and hands were not upon me were when they were on his texts. The ofay had a traveler’s trunk filled with a number of bound volumes he consulted throughout the day, flipping first here, then there, comparing the text in one book to a diagram in another.

One day he showed me an illustration of a woman lying in the middle of a circle. Around her were various symbols scrawled in chalk. After pushing the bed and bureau to the far corner of the room, he knelt and, with great care, copied the symbols onto the floor. Then he had me lie down and cross my arms while he drew the shades and lit a number of candles. He stood over me and read aloud from the volume, but to what end? I did not know. After repeating this exercise twice more, he grew frustrated, threw the book across the room, and, slamming the door behind him, left me alone for the first time since I had been captured.

Run, my sister exhorted.

Run where?

Anywhere. Go. Now.

I knew nothing of the place to which I had been removed aside from how much water stood between it and what was left of home. For a long while I sat staring out the window, imagining what route I might take were I to leave. Along the thoroughfare walked a number of my countrymen. Some of them were free, but most were in chains. Aside from his straying hand, the ofay had yet to perpetrate any of the cruelties I had seen others of his kind visit upon mine. I had not been made to work. I had not been subjected to any sort of overt sexual advance, and since I had left the ship had not been beaten or shackled. Instead, I had been clothed, fed, stared at, and made to lie on the floor. I could not yet picture how my situation might be improved, but I saw clearly all the ways in which it might worsen.

Later, the ofay brought back with him the Traitor from the ship. Seeing me there, sitting on the bed, wearing my new yellow dress, the Traitor balked and made a snide comment, the meaning of which I did not have to know the language to understand.

The ofay was stern with him once again. I relished the sight of the pale man dealing roughly with one of the swine who had stolen into my village under the cover of night to kill and capture and enslave.

Then you remember, my sister said.

Yes, I told her. I remember.

The day they came for us, my sister and I had arisen early to fetch water from the river. By the time we returned, the huts nearest the western gate blazed bright and smoke rose in stacks high over the village, blotting out the early sky. It was not until we reached the planting fields that we saw the Dahomean warriors, and now, each night, after the sun sets, I see them again.

I lay my head down to sleep, and on the ceiling above me, a one-eyed Dahomean man smirks, raises his bow, and shoots an arrow through the neck of a fleeing elder whose head, arms, and legs are on fire. I turn my head, and, cast on the wall beside the bed, a tall cowrie-crowned warrior woman in red catches a man by his dreadlocks and slashes his throat. Once his body falls, she stands over him and hacks into his neck with her sword until, seeming to tire of this, she throws the knife aside, turns the man over, kneels on his chest, and, with both hands, grips and twists his head free of his body. Every time I close my eyelids, the thatched roofs of my kinsmen’s homes burn bright behind them.

My sister drops her basket and races toward what is left of our home. The water splashes my legs as my feet follow hers. We reach our hut and are met by another sword-wielding, cowrie-crowned woman. This one holds by the hair our husband’s head. My sister screams, lowers her head, and drives it into the warrior’s belly, taking her to the ground before she can raise her weapon against us, and beating her with balled fists. I run past them into the burning hut, smoke and blaze all I see.

Hands in front of me, feeling my way to the pallet on the floor where we left them, I find our babies, my sister’s and mine, hidden, not crying, not cooing. My hands wrap them in a blanket, and before I can stand, before I can think, my legs are running. Outside, my sister beats the body of the cowrie-crowned warrior, even though it is stilled, even though her fists are raw and bloodied. My sister, my beautiful sister, she does not stop until my lips form the shape of her name. There are more warriors, but, strangely, they do not give chase, and we do not rest until we reach the river.

My people were river people, and after my sister and I came of age, our mother brought us to its banks and told us how we were born of the water and how, upon our deaths, it was to the water we would return. Wherever one thing stands, another stands beside it. But that morning, when we brought our daughters to the river, there was not time enough to explain how they were a whole they, that they would stand together in the next life, even though they had yet to stand in this one. It was while I stared into the flow of the water and all it did not yet conceal that I was struck on the back of the head. The world went blurry, then black. By the time I regained consciousness, my sister, having felled one warrior before catching the sword of another, was on the ground, bleeding. She could hardly draw breath, let alone stand. If I wanted her to live, they said, I would have to carry her, so I carried her. I carry her still.

The Traitor, admonished, sat down in the chair across from me and began to ask questions in one of the dialects of my native tongue. The ofay, he said, wants to know who you talk to. Who the other person you address is.

My sister, I told him.

And she is deceased?

Yes.

He translated. The ofay smiled.

This man, the Traitor said, he wants for you to speak to the dead on his behalf.

My sister is the only one who talks to me.

Then lie, the Traitor said. Your life with him will be easier if you tell him what he wishes to hear.

The Traitor turned away from me to converse with the ofay, seeking to extract some form of payment, as the ofay later informed me. He’d lost favor with his king and had bartered with the ship’s captain for safe passage in hopes of making a life in New Orleans, where he’d heard Africans could live free. But the free Africans were particular and would not accept him into their society. When the Traitor made ready to leave, I asked him what I was to call the ofay, if this was where we were to live, and whether I was to be his first, second, or third wife.

You may call him Laurent. You will remain here for a time but are to later be removed to his estate north of here in a place called Tennessee. As for the wife order, the ofays, at least the ofays here in this land, they do not make wives of our countrywomen as they do in Whydah.

Then what is to be my relation to him?

At this, the Traitor shook his head and laughed.

That night, I dreamed of my sister. We were by a river. She was teaching me how to weave a basket tight enough to hold water. I listened carefully and wove it just the way she instructed me, only when I dipped my basket into the flow of the river, it would not hold the water. Determined to make a basket without the aid of my sister, I went downstream, where she would not follow. There, I found the laughing man from the ship. He was standing at the base of an umbrella tree, fishing. I approached him. At his feet lay a basket identical in every way to the one I held.

He smiled and asked me if I wanted to see his catch.

I did.

He lifted the lid of his basket. Within, there was a green, wild-eyed serpent, coiled around two sleeping children, one black, one white. I tried to wrest the children away, but before I could, the serpent struck me.

FRANKLIN LAURENT

(1826–1890)

Father of Walter Laurent

Husband of Lucille Laurent

BY THE TIME the Devil made it over the ocean, down the Mississippi, and into the backwoods of West Tennessee, Franklin had run and been caught by Robert Reeves twice. The first time Franklin ran, Robert trailed him to where the creek marries the river and dragged him back by what was left of his right ear. “I’d have let you go,” Robert told the boy, “if you hadn’t have been fool enough to run south.” The second time Franklin ran, he feigned sleep until he heard Robert snoring, sneaked out of the cabin they shared, and saddled up Reaper, the fastest mare in the Laurent stable. But before Franklin could clear the line of poplars Jean Laurent planted to secret his land from covetous neighbors—neighbors who still couldn’t fathom why Captain Jack Talbert, the man whom their fathers had followed first into battle against the Indians and then, later, in a caravan of covered wagons, to the eastern banks of the Mississippi, had all but gifted his plantation to a queer Creole sailor whom nobody had even so much as laid eyes on when the county was rife with Protestant planters of marriageable age while others, those who’d heard the rumor about him and his daughter, wondered how he’d ever found anyone willing to marry her at all—Robert whistled. Reaper reared, turned tail, and unsaddled Franklin. “I don’t much mind what you get up to,” Robert said as he helped the boy to his feet, “but leave my horses be.” Later, Franklin heard from Ms. May, the only other person who’d been on the place as long as Robert Reeves, that back in Kentucky, back before Robert was sold downriver, Luke, the only child Robert and his late wife had been allowed to keep, was shot by a patroller as he crossed the frozen Ohio on their master’s stallion. Twenty years later, after he’d abandoned his own wife and son for the Oklahoma territories, Franklin rose out of sleep half hearing Robert call out to him the same way the old man had called for Luke in his dreams.

Franklin wasn’t born a slave, and if it wasn’t for Ashford, the man who killed Opa, the only mother the boy had ever known, he might have spent his whole life free. Opa found Franklin in a burlap sack by the river when he was a baby. Back before Captain Talbert forced what was left of her people west, Opa slit her husband’s throat with the same knife she used to teach Franklin to field dress deer. Besides her late husband, Ashford was the only white man Opa had ever allowed to get within shooting distance of her, and so it was this, not the murder of her husband, whom she’d found lying with her younger sister, that Opa closed her eyes to life regretting as Franklin met the butt of Ashford’s rifle.

Jean Laurent, having a penchant for unbroken slaves, purchased the dark brown knock-kneed boy no one at the Memphis market would buy at a discount. After breaking the boy off a piece of his sandwich—he was half-starved—Jean had Maurice, the saddle-colored manservant he’d inherited from his father-in-law and whom his father-in-law had clearly sired, take him to Robert Reeves to look after. That night, Franklin promised himself he’d kill Ashford, Jean, Maurice, and anybody else on the place who stood between him and his freedom, and in the morning, before he could wake up good, he was handed a hoe and put to work chopping cotton.

Young Franklin had never seen a cotton plant before and, as he was shown how to use the hoe to scratch the earth beneath it, couldn’t fathom why anyone would want so much of it. Slowly, and with more effort than Ms. May, who watched the boy from the next row over, felt was necessary, Franklin hefted the hoe parallel to his hip and brought it down just short of the ground, scraping over the stalks of the dandelion and pigweed—both of which had made better use of the late summer showers than the okra she’d planted the week prior—and missing their roots entirely. By the time the sun was high, he’d messed over two whole rows. Ms. May, knowing the cleanup would fall to her, made Franklin return the hoe to the barn, gather up what all everyone else had chopped, and use the wheelbarrow down by the woodshed to drive it over to the refuse heap. He’d made three trips before it was time to break for water and corn cake, and would make five more before hearing Rufus’s dinner bell ring.

Laying the wheelbarrow on its side, Franklin turned to watch Rufus, who, owing to the ghost his mother saw in the last days of her pregnancy, wasn’t fit for hard labor, raise and lower the cowbell like he was whitewashing an invisible fence that ran from the outdoor kitchen up near the big house, down past the fields, and on over to the low-slung row of slave cabins. There, in the lane between the cabins, Franklin got in line to receive a bowl of salt pork and corn mush. After being refused seconds, he returned to his cabin, lay down on his pallet, and passed out.

“Don’t you know no better than to wash up before you lay your head down to sleep,” Robert said, shaking the boy awake.

“I’m tired,” Franklin said, turning over.

“Little boy,” Robert said. “You ain’t yet begun to know what tired means.”

As Franklin got off the pallet, thinking, knowing, just which way he was going to slit Robert’s throat, Robert cut the boy an inch of tallow soap off a block he kept under his cot. Later, once they got along better, Franklin would be the one out in the smokehouse helping Robert make that soap, stoking the fire, washing and rendering the fat, straining out the gristle, waiting for it to cool, and stirring in the lye before letting it harden.

“Here,” Robert told Franklin. “This should be enough to get you clean.”

There was a path down to the creek, but Franklin cut through the woods and, because he liked the feel of fresh ground underfoot, strode far afield of the twin sycamores linking arms over the creek where everyone else drew water, walked until he could no longer hear the carousing children whom he longed to join, and kept walking until he heard only the rushing of water. It was owing to this that he happened upon the woman. She was standing on the bank, attempting to lift a carrying pole with a water bucket attached at each end. The only woman Franklin had ever known was Opa, and Opa, who had undergone the change of life long before she freed him from that burlap sack, had never been pregnant. And so, when the woman turned to face him head-on, he stared in slack-jawed wonder at the way her belly pulled her dress taunt.

“You going to help me or just stand there, staring?” she asked.

Franklin sidestepped down the hill, crossed the creek, and took up one of the buckets. The woman leaned down and took up the other. They left the carrying pole where it lay.

“Back up toward the row?” Franklin asked, wondering why she’d drawn water from the far side of the creek.

“No,” the woman said. “Down a little ways.”

They walked deeper into the woods, following a meandering deer path until there was nobody but him, the woman, and the evening birds flitting in and out of the trees. When they reached the woman’s cabin, they set the buckets down on a newly hewn wood table beside a wicker basket of apples.

“Whose little boy are you?” the woman asked, sitting down to the table.

“Nobody’s,” Franklin said, eyeing an apple. Out in the clearing near where he and Opa lived, there had been an apple tree. Each fall, Franklin would gather up armfuls of the fruit and carry it in for Opa to slice, slather in pine syrup, and bake in the woodstove.

“You got to be somebody’s.”

“Well, I ain’t.”

The woman sat up in her chair and grasped the boy’s chin to better see him.

“You favor my people,” she said, lifting his chin. “You could be my boy.”

“Your people ain’t from here?”

“No,” she said, seeing in her mind’s eye the village by the river that had once been but now was not, “and neither are yours.”

“I don’t have no people. All I got is me.”

As the woman eyed Franklin, seeing in the cast of the boy’s shadow the generations that had passed before him and sensing, vaguely, those that would follow, which were to be hers also, Franklin noticed the platformed feathered mattress with the soft red wool rug poking out from under it and wondered why her cabin was so far from the others and would have asked had not his gaze alighted again upon the basket of apples.

“You like these,” the woman said, picking up an apple.

“I do when they’re sweet.”

“You can have as many as you want,” the woman said, holding out the apple. “I can’t stand the taste of them anymore.”

Whenever Robert Reeves sent Franklin to wash, Franklin visited the woman who, for as long as he was allowed to see her, was never without some kind of treat she’d lost the taste for. As Franklin ate, the woman told him of her home and her people. How her mother made a stew of cassava and fish every Sunday. The way her father laughed in his sleep. How the dead spoke to the living in waking dreams. Once, while she was walking in the grove abutting the river, she saw a beautiful man sitting cross-legged at the base of an umbrella tree. He called to her by name, but she did not answer. The man sat, half in shadow, facing away from the water, which meant he was not a man but a spirit. If she answered his call, the spirit would follow her all her days and enter her dreams at night. The woman’s people were river people, and it was known among them that water bridged the worlds of the living and the dead.

“What did you do?” Franklin asked.

“I drew water and pretended I did not hear him.”

“And that worked?”

“No,” the woman said. “It did not.”

Robert Reeves, wanting to know where Franklin disappeared to each evening, followed the boy to the woman’s cabin one day and, later that night, told him about the time he’d seen the woman gather dirt from graves and how, at night, she flew all about the place dropping in on folks’ dreams. All this had led Robert to believe that the woman was the Devil’s wife.

“The Devil’s wife?” Franklin asked, scratching his head.

“Yeah,” Robert said. “Ain’t you know the Devil’s got a wife?”

“So what if she is?” Franklin asked Robert. “What’s so bad about that?”

Up until the moment Robert warned him of the woman, Franklin had never heard the Devil’s name. Opa, though her f