The Devil and His Man

The devil made himself known to Byron when he was on a walk in the woods behind his house, on a day in his thirtieth Summer. Byron didn’t know it was the devil, at first, because it looked like a man molded out of the soft parts of the forest, partially hidden inside of a great gash in a tree. A piece of art. From within the old tree, the devil couldn’t be seen except for his eyes, which glowed white. When Byron came near, the devil slithered into view. He was small, shorter than Byron, who wasn’t tall himself. Cold radiated from his body, which was coated in mud, moss, dead leaves, fungus, and sap. When he spoke, his voice was deep and quiet. An old voice, not young and afraid like Byron expected. Byron recognized him then for what he was.

“You’re late today,” the devil said. “Usually, you pass me when the sun is there, and today the sun is there, instead.” The devil pointed at two places above, a dark place and one where the sunlight broke through. “I thought I’d show myself.”

“Do you live in the tree?” Byron said.

“Yes,” the devil said. “It’s been lonely.”

“I live alone, too.”

“I must get clean,” the devil said. He looked down at himself, at his hands and body, as if he hadn’t noticed the state of himself before.

“Come with me,” Byron said.

Byron had few friends; when he ran into another person, he was sometimes naïve and tender. His mother, before she died, had taught his lessons, printing out worksheets from the internet. He’d never attended school. In the dark, miserable mornings of his childhood, he rose and helped his father with the cows, fed the chickens and gathered eggs, which he brought inside and put into a bowl on the counter. His mother taught him to pray. Prayer never meant much to him. Silly poetry. He recited but didn’t feel it. His parents went to sleep in the early evening, often before sunset, and he was alone, as he had no brothers or sisters. The house he grew up in was now his. He sometimes didn’t bathe or eat right or care for himself. How he hated his tendency to give up! He still kept chickens.

Byron brought the devil to the stream hidden in the woods. Rain had been scarce the past few weeks, but water still trembled along, clear over the rocks. Once, he’d found an old glass Pepsi bottle here stuck in the clay, and when he showed it to his father, it broke in his hand. Weak from age. It popped and cut him. “Haunted,” his father had said.

The devil put his feet in the water first, and they were so caked in forest muck they resembled hooves. It took time for the gentle water to clear the muck away and expose his hairy, but human feet. They sat by the stream and Byron helped him with the rest, taking handfuls of water and letting it fall on the devil’s head and arms and face. As the water cleaned the devil, a bird of panic hatched inside Byron’s body and he froze. The devil didn’t notice. He reached into the water now that he was almost free and pulled it up at himself. He was naked. Byron glanced at the trees to avoid staring. He hadn’t seen another naked body in years, and he wanted it. He’d touch this body without a doubt, still caught details of it when he looked away. When his gaze swept back, the devil’s eyes were on him and they knew. They knew what Byron wanted, and it wasn’t right that his mind had been invaded, but Byron was happy he didn’t have to ask. 

“Now,” the devil said. “I’ll be coming home with you.”

The devil was a young man, like him. The eyes that had appeared menacing from the dark of the tree were kind. He sported the shadow of a beard, and his hair was black and long, still stringy with mud and sap. He would need a hot shower. His skin was an unusual color, almost pale green, and his arms, legs, and crotch were shaggy with hair.

“Home with me?” Byron said, as if surprised, as if he didn’t want it.

“I can’t go back to the tree now,” the devil said.

“No,” Byron said. “But to come home with me?” He knew he should resist the devil, so he tried to. The devil smiled and he possessed two sharp eye teeth.

“There’s no one there, Byron,” the devil said. “No one but you for the longest time. You and the dust and fingernail clippings. You want me to come.”

Eventually, he had no choice but to walk home. The devil wouldn’t leave him. Byron moved away from the trees, no longer pretending. Yes, come with me. Follow me. The devil followed him, lagging.

The first night, the devil sat at the kitchen table and watched Byron fix dinner. Byron boiled rice and cooked a couple of eggs. The devil wore Byron’s clothes. One of the eggs Byron cracked had a blood-yolk, a wobbling red eye. He moved to dispose of it, but the devil stopped him, scooped the egg up with his hands and ate it.

Over the next several weeks, Bryon’s life changed. The house changed. His potted plants withered. Mice emerged from hiding and skittered over the floor, looking, looking, looking! The devil snatched them up and walked around the house with them, and when he grew bored with one, he tossed it at the wall where it exploded in a tiny cloud of dust. Byron hurried to sweep the mouse dust into a pan and throw it away, careful not to inhale.

One night, the devil, who’d been sleeping on the couch, entered Byron’s room in the dark and climbed into bed. Byron woke up as he felt arms go around him from behind and knew it was the devil. He’d never missed what he’d never experienced. Now he knew what it felt like and he was struck by wanting. All of the previous years of solitude rushed through him, as if from the devil and into him, smothering him with yearning. He wept and the devil held him. He hadn’t asked for this.

“I couldn’t wait for you to come to my bed,” the devil said. “I’d have been waiting forever.”

“I want you to leave,” Byron said.

“No, you don’t.”

The devil didn’t leave, and soon it was true, Byron didn’t want him to. Never in his life had he needed anyone. Though he’d been sad when his parents died, he’d begun to love his solitude. Every moment his own. No one telling him anything or needing him. He didn’t care for the new fear of losing the devil, the fear of being left alone again. He stopped thinking of the devil as a guest.

“You’re staying,” he told the devil. “Everything that’s mine is yours.”

He gave the devil gifts. The sweaters his mother had knitted him before his death. The devil wore the sweaters and rotted holes into them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, raising his arms to show Byron the eaten places in a sweater.

“It doesn’t matter,” Byron said. He put his hand into a hole and caressed the devil’s chest and stomach. He pulled the sweater off. He searched the devil’s mouth with his own. Byron loved the taste of his skin, the feeling of the trail of hair on the devil’s stomach when he flattened it with his tongue. He forgot his mother had made the sweater and now it was ruined.

“It was not my intention to love you,” the devil said.

Byron, on his knees, looked up into the devil’s face, “What was your intention?”

The devil didn’t answer.

Every morning, they fed the chickens. The devil watched them from the soft curve of a distant hill. When he came too near, the chickens stiffened and fell onto their sides as if struck dead. Byron bent and picked them up until they revived, then let them go like wind-up toys.

“I’m no help to you, am I?” the devil said.

“You are,” Byron assured him, but it took some doing and some lying. It wasn’t easy to love such an inconvenience, but wasn’t anyone an inconvenience? Even his parents had been inconvenient, though he loved them. Their expectations and rules inconvenienced him. All those math problems and prayers! The cows!

He plucked eggs from the coop and made a pouch from the bottom of his shirt for them. The devil couldn’t touch the eggs, either. When he did, the inside spoiled. One morning, when the devil tried to make breakfast, he’d stunk up the house with the smell of rotten eggs. He’d taken the pan out of the house and had eaten the rot, sitting on the lawn, while Byron threw open the windows.

“You are,” Byron said again. Back at the house, he held the devil close, this creature he’d brought home, and smelled the forest on him, tasted the shape of his ear, his bristly jawline. They pulled each other down to the floor and undressed. To be inside the devil was to seal the disruption of his life story, which he thought he’d written long before the day he found the devil in the tree.

In the village, they were objects of fascination. The devil wanted to see the grocery store, the bookstore, the coffee shop and bakery, to look in the eyes of everyone who passed. The villagers were unaccustomed to seeing Byron with another person. People stared but didn’t approach, not unless the devil had left Byron alone for a moment. A woman from his mother’s church group took Byron by the arm in the grocery store.

“Your mother came to me in a dream last night,” she told him. “She wept and moaned to me. She said her son had taken a terrible path.”

“Why didn’t she come to me herself?” Byron said, certain his mother hadn’t visited this woman.

“You’ve already been lost,” she said. Her grip tightened on him. “She couldn’t risk her eternal spirit.”

He wrenched his arm from her and went searching through the aisles for the devil, who he found filling the cart with sweet cereals Byron had avoided his whole life.

Over the years, they took in cats, who were immune to the devil’s poison. The cats draped themselves on him when he rested. Byron didn’t believe cats were agents of the devil, but they did seem to love him more than they loved Byron.

He and the devil loved each other, fought, reconciled, slept together and apart. They kept a clean house, though it was against Byron’s nature. The devil enjoyed order. He himself trimmed Byron’s beard and pubic hair, scrubbed his back in the tub, and clipped his finger and toenails.

On an autumn night, some years into their life together, a group of villagers came to stand in the yard, all armed with relics from the church. They wanted the devil to come out and face them. Byron recognized some of the faces in the crowd as friends of his parents.

“I could give them all strokes right now,” the devil said. He was soggy from the bath they had taken together, a Friday night routine. He glared out the kitchen window. When they climbed into the tub, Byron always thought of the first day they met, when he’d bathed the devil in the stream.

“Please don’t,” Byron said. “I’ll handle it.”

In the yard, he confronted the group, all of them old and angry.

“May I ask,” Byron said. “What do you think he’s done to you?”

“It’s that he lives,” an old man said. “That’s enough.”

“And he made my goats sick,” someone added. This person held up a cross fashioned out of wood, twine holding it together.

“I promise you, he didn’t make your goats sick,” Byron said. “He’s been with me all the time.”

“Oh Byron,” the old woman from the grocery store said. “You don’t understand.” She stepped apart from the others and hurled a stone, which hit the front door. A single knock. This seemed to Byron like a pagan act, to throw a stone like a curse at their door. It was a powerless attack and meant nothing. The devil opened the door. He wore a pair of Byron’s sweatpants, which were too big for him.

“One knock means an angel has come to visit,” the devil said. He stepped out of the doorway and onto the grass. “In the Bible it says: Knock and it will be opened to you, I think. Doesn’t it? Well, come in. The door is open. Have dinner with us, though there isn’t enough for all of you. You’re welcome, anyway.”

Byron froze. The woman who’d thrown the rock at the door turned and walked away first. She was the strongest and wouldn’t be swayed. The others, Byron knew, struggled to not do what the devil wanted. They wanted to please him the way Byron always did. To love him and give him what he wanted. Come inside. Stay and warm yourself by the fire. Eat popcorn and be our friends. Of course, Byron didn’t know exactly what was going on in their minds, but why should it be any different than what went on in his own when the devil appeared? He almost wanted to join the crowd and say, “I’m one of you. Remember? I don’t know how to free myself!”

After a moment of discussion and argument, they left. Byron watched them disappear as the sun went down. Now and then, someone would turn and look back until one of the others shook them and made them look away.

Byron and the devil sat at the table with the food in front of them.

“Would you really have fed those people?” Byron said.

“No,” the devil said.

While they washed dishes, the devil, with his hands full of soap, stroked Byron’s beard.

“I never want harm to come to you,” he said.

“I don’t think even you have a say,” Byron said.

The next time Byron went to town, the devil stayed home. Soon, the devil haunted only the house and sometimes the fields and paths around the house, usually at dusk or early morning. He would not go into town again. No one asked Byron where his friend had disappeared to, and as years passed, it began to seem as if the devil had never come. When Byron did speak to someone, and mentioned the devil by name, the other person would be silenced.

One winter day, when he was old, forty years after the woman had thrown the rock at their door, Byron went out for his walk. He liked to go alone, as the years together had turned him back into the self he’d once been before the devil came. The devil did not age; his beauty irritated Byron and he needed to escape it, to be out and feel the cold slip down his collar and up his sleeves.

He used a cane the devil carved him and made his way down the frost crackled path toward the chickens, the pond, the forest. He relied on the devil for so much now. Today, the air felt solid and difficult to move through and breathe, the sky a soiled sheet. He preferred the farm in the Spring and Fall, when things were growing or colorful. He’d tried, at some point in his life, to appreciate the winter colors, with no snow on the ground. To love slate and brown, black and gray.

At the edge of the woods, looking at the cold, pointy dark, he fell with his cane and died. He didn’t know the devil was near, following for a while. Quiet and patient.

The devil carried Byron back to the house and placed him in a chair by the fire. Cats loitered there. The devil touched Byron’s cool, bald head. He held Byron’s hand for a moment. He remembered the fingers, when they were smooth, sliding into him, an utterly human experience, and how he’d wanted Byron to stay inside him forever. Remember, you’re a living thing, his body seemed to say when Byron fucked him.

 Time had gone quickly. Here was a husk in a chair. He couldn’t leave the cats with it. He knew them well and what they’d like to do. He picked each one up. One two three four. They transformed into pelts. Heavy, bony, muscular, and then light and empty. Where did the lives go when he banished them? He laid the pelts on himself, over his shoulders. He wanted to leave quickly so it wouldn’t be difficult.

On the way, he stopped at the chicken coop to banish the chickens. He didn’t look inside at them, only thought of their feathers, nothing but feathers, and that’s what they became. Under his feet were impressions in the frozen grass where Byron had walked, alive only an hour ago. His own feet fit inside the prints. Byron always seemed big and powerful to him, but he wasn’t really. A human is an actor.

When the devil reached the forest, he found his way to the tree, still here, still standing, as damaged as when he first met it. He put himself inside of it and it remembered him. Everything that lived inside moved. Insects danced. The wood knocked and creaked against him, and sap dripped onto his head, ran down his face and into his mouth. It wasn’t sweet enough.