been fixed up real nice.”
Hazel beamed, and without waiting for Floyd to get her door, hurried out of the car and ran up to the house. The front door was unlocked. Before Floyd had made it up the walk, Hazel was running from room to room. He was right. It had been fixed up nice, and already furnished to boot. There was an indoor bathroom, floors that were smoothed and varnished, and rugs throughout. A wringer washing machine sat right out on the back porch. There were two bedrooms and brown iron beds with roses painted on the posts. It even had a little parlor with a couch and two stuffed chairs.
Then Floyd took her into the kitchen. “Look, Hazel, a stove that don’t need wood.” He turned a knob and a blue flame snapped to attention. As soon as she saw it she began to cry.
Floyd’s face fell. “Don’t worry, Hazel. One day I’ll put you in one of them houses up on a hill. I promise.”
“Oh! No! It ain’t that. I love the house.” She sobbed louder.
“Then what is it?”
“Oh, Floyd.” She blew her nose into a tissue. “I ain’t been honest with you. I can’t cook. I can’t sew. I don’t even know how to change a diaper or burp a baby. My sisters done all that. All I learned to do was pick cotton and strip cane and dig taters. I ain’t no good to you!”
Floyd smiled at her. “It don’t matter, don’t you see? We’re starting fresh. You and me are through with them old-timey ways. I don’t care if you can’t cook. You’re my wife. You don’t have to earn your keep. And we going to have children ’cause we want children, not farmhands. I’ll take care of my family.”
Hazel looked up to find herself reflected in his eyes. My God, she thought, he still wants me. She leaned her head against his chest and started to cry again. Today she was a brand-new wife to a new kind of man, living in a storybook town overlooking a mysterious flattened-out world. Her future was as wide open as that view from the bluffs, without a single familiar landmark. She felt lost and found all at the same time.
Chapter Three
A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL
Billy Dean Brister was chugging to the top of Redeemer’s Hill, and he wanted it all to himself. After honking twice, he butted his rattletrap Ford up against the tailgate of a gin wagon that was hogging the gravel road. The colored driver swung about, but when he saw the two white men, he smiled weakly, touched his hat, and popped his mules smartly with the ends of the reins.
Nothing was going to hold Billy Dean back. He was determined to have clear sailing on the downslope. Though blind to oncoming traffic, he swerved the car toward the far ditch and held his ground.
“Wait on it, you hear?” his uncle said. “They ain’t enough road for you to pass.”
Billy Dean grinned. He drove the left tires into the ditch and straddled the road ledge.
“Dammit to hell,” his uncle muttered.
Billy Dean had no doubts. Good luck had finally shifted to his side of the road. Billy Dean Brister, once destined to take his place in a long line of white-trash Bristers, was going to break from family tradition. Come fall, Hopalachie County would be his for the taking, and nobody could keep him from grabbing ahold of it with both hands and a knee to the throat. No matter if he did have to make a deal with the devil to get it.
With two tires on the road and two in the ditch, dirt and rock slinging out from the rear, he drowned the wagon, its colored driver, and his two brown mules in a storm of dust.
Billy Dean jammed the Stetson tight on his head, reared back in his seat, and mashed the accelerator flat to the floor. The truck, propelled as much by gravity as by gasoline, sailed down Redeemer’s Hill, the final belly-dropping descent from the bluffs to the flatter-than-flat Delta. There was nothing ahead now but miles and miles of cotton plants studded with pink-and-white blossoms.
Billy Dean’s uncle pulled up in his seat again. Furman was a big man with a nose that resembled raw hamburger. “You driving like a blue-assed fly,” he said, “Ain’t gone live long enough to win no ’lection.” He reached down to the floorboard for the fruit jar.
Billy Dean tipped back his Stetson with his thumb. He knew better. The bargain had already been struck. That primary was his for the taking. Senator told him that it didn’t matter that Billy Dean hadn’t yet had his twenty-first birthday: “In this county, I decide how old folks are. Why, when it comes to the voting, I get to decide if they’re dead are not.” Even the election flyers they were posting today were a waste of time, yet the Senator had insisted they make a good show of it.
“Where’s the next stop at?”
With two fingers pressed against his lips, the old man turned to the window and spit, finessing a brown trail of tobacco juice clear of the rear fender. “You gone take a right about a mile up ahead.” Furman unscrewed the top of the jar, took a sip, and swallowed hard. “Hodamighty!”
Billy Dean took his turn at the jar while keeping an eye on a horizon that never seemed to get any closer no matter how fast he went. He hadn’t known how big Hopalachie County was until he decided he was going to be sheriff over all of it. Then it got mighty big.
There was this, the Delta part, with its thousands of look-alike acres of nothing but cotton hiding tiny crossroads settlements built around gins and country stores. Farther west there were the swamps and bayous with little clusters of cabins and fishing shacks raised up on stilts. At their backs, where Billy Dean and his uncle had just come from, were the bluffs.
Perched up there in those bluffs was the uppity little town of Delphi, looking down like an old powdered woman on the whole shebang. That’s where Billy Dean was going to settle when the devil paid him his due. He was going to be high sheriff and move to town and live in a big white house with the rich folks. The same ones that had shamed his daddy and their kind ever since Noah. They’d soon be calling him “sir.” All he had to do to make that happen was to marry the ugliest girl in Hopalachie County. Billy Dean took another drink.
The gravel had nearly given out, and the road became like a ribbed washboard. They were coming up on the Hopalachie River. Shaking wildly, the truck began to drift off in a sideways direction. Uncle Furman reached down for where a door handle once was and then crossed his arms over his face instead. “Boy, what’s got into you?” he shouted with a mouth full of chambray. “You tempting the devil?”
Maybe he was. But at that moment, Billy Dean’s future seemed to be laid out before him as sure and straight as one of these Delta plantation roads.
The Senator and him had shook on it. The next day Billy Dean went to Delphi and bought himself a Stetson and a pair of hand-tooled cowboy boots, the kind he had dreamed about since he was a barefooted boy of ten.
Pointing on down the road, Uncle Furman shouted over the rattle of the truck, “There it is. Slow down, you hear?”
The general store sat on a bare island of packed dirt surrounded by cotton plants that lapped right up to the back door. According to the thermometer nailed to the front of the store, the temperature had already hit ninety-three in the shade, and it was still early
