Everything's Eventual

behind, I saw. Where his feet had touched—or seemed to touch— there was not a single broken twig, crushed leaf, or trampled shoeshape.

   Even before he reached me, I recognized the aroma baking up from the skin under the suit—the smell of burned matches. The smell of sulfur. The man in the black suit was the Devil. He had walked out of the deep woods between Motton and Kashwakamak, and now he was standing here beside me. From the corner of one eye I could see a hand as pale as the hand of a store window dummy. The fingers were hideously long.

   He hunkered beside me on his hams, his knees popping just as the knees of any normal man might, but when he moved his hands so they dangled between his knees, I saw that each of those long fingers ended in what was not a fingernail but a long yellow claw.

   'You didn't answer my question, fisherboy,' he said in his mellow voice. It was, now that I think of it, like the voice of one of those radio announcers on the big-band shows years later, the ones that would sell Geritol and Serutan and Ovaltine and Dr. Grabow pipes. 'Are we well-met?'

   'Please don't hurt me,' I whispered, in a voice so low I could barely hear it. I was more afraid than I could ever write down, more afraid than I want to remember . . . but I do. I do. It never even crossed my mind to hope I was having a dream, although I might have, I suppose, if I had been older. But I wasn't older; I was nine, and I knew the truth when it squatted down on its hunkers beside me. I knew a hawk from a handsaw, as my father would have said. The man who had come out of the woods on that Saturday afternoon in midsummer was the Devil, and inside the empty holes of his eyes, his brains were burning.

   'Oh, do I smell something?' he asked, as if he hadn't heard me . . . although I knew he had. 'Do I smell something . . . wet?'

   He leaned forward toward me with his nose stuck out, like some

one who means to smell a flower. And I noticed an awful thing; as the shadow of his head travelled over the bank, the grass beneath it turned yellow and died. He lowered his head toward my pants and sniffed. His glaring eyes half-closed, as if he had inhaled some sublime aroma and wanted to concentrate on nothing but that.

   'Oh, bad!' he cried. 'Lovely-bad!' And then he chanted: 'Opal! Diamond! Sapphire! Jade! I smell Gary's lemonade!' Then he threw himself on his back in the little flat place and laughed wildly. It was the sound of a lunatic.

   I thought about running, but my legs seemed two counties away from my brain. I wasn't crying, though; I had wet my pants like a baby, but I wasn't crying. I was too scared to cry. I suddenly knew that I was going to die, and probably painfully, but the worst of it was that that might not be the worst of it.

   The worst of it might come later. After I was dead.

   He sat up suddenly, the smell of burnt matches fluffing out from his suit and making me feel all gaggy in my throat. He looked at me solemnly from his narrow white face and burning eyes, but there was a sense of laughter about him, too. There was always that sense of laughter about him.

   'Sad news, fisherboy,' he said. 'I've come with sad news.'

   I could only look at him—the black suit, the fine black shoes, the long white fingers that ended not in nails but in talons.

   'Your mother is dead.'

   'No!' I cried. I thought of her making bread, of the curl lying across her forehead and just touching her eyebrow, standing there in the strong morning sunlight, and the terror swept over me again . . . but not for myself this time. Then I thought of how she'd looked when I set off with my fishing pole, standing in the kitchen doorway with her hand shading her eyes, and how she had looked to me in that moment like a photograph of someone you expected to see again but never did. 'No, you lie!' I screamed.

   He smiled—the sadly patient smile of a man who has often been accused falsely. 'I'm afraid not,' he said. 'It was the same thing that happened to your brother, Gary. It was a bee.'

   'No, that's not true,' I said, and now I did begin to cry. 'She's old, she's thirty-five, if a bee-sting could kill her the way it did Danny she would have died a long time ago and you're a lying bastard!'

   I had called the Devil a lying bastard. On some level I was aware of this, but the entire front of my mind was taken up by the enormity of what he'd said. My mother dead? He might as well have told me that there was a new ocean where the Rockies had been. But I believed him. On some level I believed him completely, as we always believe, on some level, the worst thing our hearts can imagine.

   'I understand your grief, little fisherboy, but that particular argument just doesn't hold water, I'm afraid.' He spoke in a tone of bogus comfort that was horrible, maddening, without remorse or pity. 'A man can go his whole life without seeing a mockingbird, you know, but does that mean mockingbirds don't exist? Your mother —'

   A fish jumped below us. The man in the black suit frowned, then pointed a finger at it. The trout convulsed in the air, its body bending so strenuously that for a split-second it appeared to be snapping at its own tail, and when it fell back into Castle Stream it was floating lifelessly, dead. It struck the big gray rock where the waters divided, spun around twice in the whirlpool eddy that formed there, and then floated off in the direction of Castle Rock. Meanwhile, the terrible stranger turned his burning eyes on me again, his thin lips pulled back from tiny rows of sharp teeth in a cannibal smile.

   'Your mother simply went through her entire life without being stung by a bee,' he said. 'But then—less than an hour ago, actually— one flew in through the kitchen window while she was taking the bread out of the oven and putting it on the counter to cool.'

   'No, I won't hear this, I won't hear this, I won't!'

   I raised my hands and clapped them over my ears. He pursed his lips as if to whistle and blew at me gently. It was only a little breath, but the stench was foul beyond belief—clogged sewers, outhouses that have never known a single sprinkle of lime, dead chickens after a flood.

   My hands fell away from the sides of my face.

   'Good,' he said. 'You need to hear this, Gary; you need to hear

this, my little fisherboy. It was your mother who passed that fatal weakness on to your brother Dan; you got some of it, but you also got a protection from your father that poor Dan somehow missed.' He pursed his lips again, only this time, he made a cruelly comic little tsktsk sound instead of blowing his nasty breath at me. 'So, although I don't like to speak ill of the dead, it's almost a case of poetic justice, isn't it? After all, she killed your brother Dan as surely as if she had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.'

   'No,' I whispered. 'No, it isn't true.'

   'I assure you it is,' he said. 'The bee flew in the window and lit on her neck. She slapped at it before she even knew what she was doing—you were wiser than that, weren't you, Gary?—and the bee stung her. She felt her throat start to close up at once. That's what happens, you know, to people who are allergic to bee-venom. Their throats close and they drown in the open air. That's why Dan's face was so swollen and purple. That's why your father covered it with his shirt.'

   I stared at him, now incapable of speech. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I didn't want to believe him, and knew from my church schooling that the devil is the father of lies, but I did believe him, just the same. I believed he had been standing there in our dooryard, looking in the kitchen window, as my mother fell to her knees, clutching at her swollen throat while Candy Bill danced around her, barking shrilly.

   'She made the most wonderfully awful noises,' the man in the black suit said reflectively, 'and she scratched her face quite badly, I'm afraid. Her eyes bulged out like a frog's eyes. She wept.' He paused, then added: 'She wept as she died, isn't that sweet? And here's the most beautiful thing of all. After she was dead . . . after she had been lying on the floor for fifteen minutes or so with no sound but the stove ticking and with that little stick of a bee- stinger still poking out of the side of her neck—so small, so small—do you know what Candy Bill did? That little rascal licked away her tears. First on one side . . . and then on the other.'

   He looked out at the stream for a moment, his face sad and thoughtful. Then he turned back to me and his expression of bereavement disappeared like a dream. His face was as slack and avid as the face of a corpse that has died hungry. His eyes blazed. I could see his sharp little teeth between his pale lips.