Dear Satan,
I have really mixed feelings about writing you. On the one hand—the right hand, I guess—I don’t want to believe in you if only because I am not a theistic Satanist. I don’t think you’re down there with two black horns or three green heads perpetually eating Judas and whoever the other two are, because that is just not a version of creation I want to believe in. On the other hand, the old adage is “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” So maybe I’m doing myself a favor, in that way, by acknowledging you’re down there, ready to reach up for my casket and drag me down to Hell, to your flaming jamboree. Maybe, at least now, I’ll be ready.
I don’t know much about life. I haven’t been able to travel much, and if I ever did get too far away from home something would come pulling me back. Cassie’s suicide attempt. Mom stealing Grandma’s glass eye and smashing it under her heel. Dad being Dad.
But I’ve learned a lot about death recently. Everything and nothing. I guess you can’t learn anything about death if you’re not dead. That’s the thing that always made it so terrifying to me. It can’t be communicated to anybody. It’s incommunicable, I guess you’d say.
So let’s go with this instead: I’ve learned a lot about dying. Thirteen out of the past fourteen nights I’ve fallen asleep holding my mother’s hand, her gray, cold hand, veins slithering through like blue worms. And if I’m not sleeping, I’m either changing her drip or her pee bag like that nurse showed me to, or reading Plath and Dickinson to her—two terrible choices for the occasion, at least, that’s what I think, the more I read of them. Especially after I learned you shoved Sylvia’s head in the oven. You probably also kicked the chair out from under Cassie, now that I think about it.
But, as they say, to arrive to my main point, when I’m not reading or going to the bathroom or changing out these weird potions flowing through my Mom, I have to listen to her ramble or weep or curse. If she isn’t trying to get me to call ICE on the Limas, the nice Colombian family that moved in down the street, she is rambling on about how Cassie hated her, how he only wanted to hurt her by throwing away what she suffered so much to give him. Or about all the other women Dad came home smelling like. Or she just cries about how all her children have abandoned her. Never mind that I am sitting right beside her.
This might be stupid, but, maybe even in spite of that, I am asking you telling you to leave her alone. She is going to be with you momentarily anyway, so I am telling you to unwrap your icy fingers from around her heart. Just give her some peace for now, please.
Hopefully-not-yours,
Enoch.
. . .
Dear Satan,
I did not expect to be doing this again, and I don’t know why I’m doing it now, but truth be told, I felt kind of dumb signing off my name in my last letter. No one calls me Enoch. There will be days when I’m just going about my life, and I’ll be sitting down watching TV, or walking over to the bridge to stare at the flowing water in the creek, and then Enoch will poke me in the side and I’ll jolt, remembering that’s my name. I guess it jolted me then, or at least, the hand that held the pen.
Sure, it’s on my birth certificate, but that has got to be one of the most meaningless documents anyone ever thought of making. No one goes by that name. It’s a formality. Does a mother need to write down what she calls the human being that just came out of her, ripping her apart as it came, more often than not? Of course she doesn’t. That’s just stupid.
That’s how it was with most of the Blackwood men. My dad knocked Grandma on her ass, as the old woman would always say, for two and a half days before he finally came screaming into this world—screaming, not crying, which is something Grandma always used to remind us of, as if it weren’t the millionth time we were hearing it. Dad’s brother, Uncle John, almost killed Grandma, and himself. Took nearly a quart of blood with him, after getting all turned around in her womb, and came out with a noose around his neck. I was a c-section. They saw something wrong going on with my heartbeat and decided to get me the hell out of there. It turned out I was just worried about—who the hell knows?—because my heart rate went right down. That was another thing Mom never failed to hold over my head. Even now it hovers, like a kestrel.
The only easy birth we’ve ever had, that I’ve heard of, was Cassie. Of course, easy for a birth. Sure, I bet it still hurt like hell, but only in the ways doctors hope and expect a birth to.
Sorry, as smarter people then me say, I digress. I mentioned it earlier, but what got me thinking about the births of the Blackwoods was my name, Enoch. For all my life people have called me TJ. I’m not even sure why. Probably it was some dumb thing Dad came up with. He saw my full name, Enoch James Blackwood, and thought EJ Blackwood, and then probably thought huh, sounds like BJ. But of course they couldn’t call their son BJ. I swear, he was the only genuine cretin I ever met. But I don’t mind TJ, it sounds like a fairly normal name, maybe a little jockey for me, but it sounds for the most part like the name of a normal guy, who comes from a normal family, and has normal interactions with others. But Enoch? What am I, a troglodytic sorcerer? Which led me to the thought that you were probably there with her, in the hospital room. God knows it wasn’t Dad holding her hand, stuck in traffic, as the old excuse goes. But you were probably there for all the Blackwood births—maybe even Cassie’s, if we think about that aforementioned adage. Trying to lure Mom into a false sense of safety.
But why do you follow us around so much? From the moment we come crawling out of the womb to the moment we’re found in a roadside ditch or the bathroom of a closed Waffle House, you’ve been hanging around us for a while now. I can feel you in the nooks and crannies of this room, even, like dust I haven’t gotten around to cleaning.
I would ask you what the Blackwoods have done to deserve your due diligence. But my ancestors were just poor as shit Irish who when they came to Upstate New York continued to be poor as shit. The only real difference was they could get their hands on potatoes here. It’s that old story of a lot of white people around here. So, in light of that, the Irish being a generally unoffensive people, compared to, say, the English, I would ask you if there was a witch a great-great-great-great-great grandfather had maybe knocked up and left, and in her anger she had set you on us for eternity. It would make sense why we’ve had such trouble being born.
But I’m not going to ask you any of that, because if you only went after people who deserved it, you wouldn’t be The Devil. The question still stands, though: why are you so goddamn interested in us?
Get back to me, or don’t, I don’t know which I’d prefer.
Enoch.
. . .
Dear Satan,
In case you couldn’t tell from “troglodytic sorcerer,” I’ve taken to reading the dictionary sometimes. Not in any real way, like how I’ve been reading Plath and Dickinson. I’m not a complete nut. But sometimes I’ll peruse the pages and see if a word catches my eye. “Troglodytic” was one. It means a cave dweller, and it made me think of hunched, lonely things skulking in the dark. (Believe it or not, I already knew skulk.) And then it made me think of you, being underground among magma and stalagmites and stalactites and all. (Which ones hang from the ceiling again?)
It has never occurred to me that you get lonely down there. And if that’s the case, you should know by now us Blackwoods are not really good company.
Don’t let these letters fool you,
Enoch.
. . .
Dear Satan,
If you exist, have you been getting these? I don’t know where to send them, or how, which is strange because I’ve got a pretty good idea of how to get to Hell. But at night when the corners of the windows freeze over Mom claims she can see her breath in the living room. Starts yelling and hollering about how I’m letting her freeze to death, how I’m trying to kill her, how I’ve always resented her. There’s only any truth in one of those theories. But anyway, I fire up the woodstove, and just keep the logs smoldering, the fire and heat undulating across the wood like nacreous red light. And then I’ll reach for the notepad and rip off my letter and crumple it up and watch it be crumpled again as it turns into a flame. Mom will ask What the hell are you doing? And I’ll say, Sending letters to Satan. And she’ll have some witty remark, like Ask him how Dad’s doing, or, Telling him to hurry and get me?
Last I knew, Dad’s still alive. Unless you claimed him finally took him down with you. I crossed that out because you laid your claim on him long before I met him. Was he ever a good man, or even a halfway decent kid? Cassie and I used to wonder all the time why Mom married him. It wasn’t that he knocked her up, at least not with one of us, which is the most straightforward explanation. (I heard that was called Occam’s Razor somewhere. I hope Cassie doesn’t learn that there are philosophical razors—he might just try and slit his wrists with those too, somehow.) I guess it’s even more fucked up than that. I’ve thought a lot about this as I sit looking at my mother in her troubled sleep. It’s when she doesn’t talk that I can pity her for marrying into the curse she did, among plenty else.
I think my father, Damian Blackwood, is still a boy. Cassie’s like him in that way, except Cassie’s hatred for the world he turns back onto himself.
The old story goes that he was playing in some bar that isn’t there anymore. I think it was in Ovid—one of these Upstate towns whose incomprehensibly classical name turns into a joke against their random location and pathetic size. It’s like if someone got into the habit of giving houses at the end of cul-de-sacs post offices and calling them towns. But anyway, my mother was doomed from the start, like any teenaged girl would be. My dad had long hair that concealed his eyes, smoked cigarettes, played guitar, and was (and definitely still is) just completely fucked up in his head. Or his soul. So of course, Mom, the wildest place she’d ever been being Ithaca, was going to fall in love with him. We’ve gathered from Mom’s winedrunk lamentations against him, plus with some things she mutters in sleep and the delirium of near-death, that it was like a first, forbidden love, in terms of the intensity that they would go at it.
I bet my dad loved it, like any man in is low twenties would. Not just the sex, because he could’ve gotten almost any woman into his bed, and still does, which is Mom’s main gripe with him. I bet for him, the real joy in it was seeing himself fill her eyes, which really were windows to the soul. He’s like you in that way: addicted to the rush of claiming a soul. Because you can sleep with any-body, as he well knows. But only a few will give you their soul. That’s the only explanation there could be for their catastrophe of a union: Mom was drunk on him, and Dad was intoxicated by the knowledge Mom would completely negate herself anytime he asked her to. The only condition was that he get a job. Mom was going to inherit the house of her father, this drafty, rickety place with dark corners and musty cabinets that we’re in now, so they’d have a place to live. Dad agreed, I guess because a living soul is more addicting a drug than anything my dad managed to shoot up his fucking arm. He started working odd jobs, and selling weed and heroin on the side. Apart from the occasional visits Dad got from his supplier who would beat the shit out of him and take all his money, legal or not, they seemed like happy, young, irresponsible newlyweds. At least, that’s the picture they’ve painted, or rather, the one we’ve assembled from the few puzzle pieces they were willing to drop over these scattered years.
Then he got Mom pregnant with me, and that’s when all their troubles began, according to Mom. He had no use for me, who used to cry and cry all the time. (Probably it was the normal amount for any baby.) And he had no use for Mom, who was actually concerned with at least keeping me alive. So he started sleeping with other women. Mom would throw herself at him, alternating between cursing him out of the house and clutching his knees begging him to come back. Why he didn’t stay away, only probably you know. You’re the one driving him back.
I saw him the other day. Mom had fallen into one of her deep, drugged sleeps, and there was nothing for me to do but wait and listen to what fragments of consciousness bubbled out of her and I’d had enough of that for a little while. So I decided to go out for a walk, breathe something in besides the still, dying air of my house and my mother. If she started dying, she could page me, or just do it by herself. I don’t think either of us would mind that too terribly.
But I wandered over to the park to go sit and stare at the waterfall for a while. I’ve heard it said there are two things a man could watch forever: fire and falling water. And I think that might be true. I do this sometimes, and when I’m done it feels like my mind has been cleaned out, that my skull is empty in a good way.
I was walking back across the bridge that arches over the creek when I saw him. It was fitting. That bridge, all cobble stone and damp moss, looks like it would harbors trolls beneath it.
So there he was, sitting on the side of the bridge with his feet dangling over the water, cigarette smoke trailing up. He’s a grotesque sight. By now, he’s got a few teeth missing, and when I saw him that day his sickly white hair was down past his shoulders. He could age with grace, fade into uselessness like plenty old men. But no. He still sits like he snuck out for his cigarette, sometimes pulls his hair back into an awful bun, unless he cuts it. His hairline is already halfway up his head by now.
I didn’t want to talk to him. I only paused on the bridge because I considered you put the thought of pushing him off in my mind. It probably wouldn’t kill him unless he landed on his neck, but it would’ve fucked him up for good. Kept him in one place for a while. But then the ripe stink of that stupid leather jacket he’s never once washed in his life crushed my nose and I kept going.
I guess he must’ve looked over his shoulder because, for some reason, probably you again, I felt I should stop and turn around. Maybe it was just what they call morbid curiosity. But I turned around, and he looked at me, or maybe he was looking past me, up the hill, at a deer or something he found way more interesting, I don’t know what goes on in that sorry excuse for a mind, and then he turned around and kept smoking.
I stood there for a momentsecond. Then I said, She’s dying, you know. The cigarette paused in front of his lips. That was all I needed to see, so I headed back home. When I got in, I heard her moaning and hollering in her sleep, pieces of words and stories and thoughts. Nothing coherent I could string together. She said Cassie’s name, then Dad’s. Then Louetta. That was her mom.
I walked over and saw her tossing and turning, face shining silver as her sweat reflected the light of the overcast day outside. Usually I have to wait until she either settles down or wakes herself up. I can’t really read when she does this, because I can’t focus, so most of the time I just get out the dictionary and write down new words. And as I’m settling into the lazy boy to do exactly that there’s a knock on the door. I scowled in the door’s direction, like it had purposely brought the man behind it.
I opened it, and there he was. There was a new cigarette, but it was between his fingers, smoke blown into nothingness by the draft. He started to come in. What do you want? I asked him, stepping in the opening. Can’t I see my own wife? I couldn’t believe it. Satan, you almost had me right there, because I’ve never been closer to killing a man in my life. I wanted to smash his head repeatedly against the corner of the steps outside. You have some fucking nerve, I told him. But he just stood there. Put out your fucking cigarette, I told him. He just dropped it on the stoop. That was the best I was going to get. I let him in.
He saw her howling weakly, turning around in her damp sheets which I’d have to change. He put his hand on her head, like he was reaching out to pick up a scared bird. And then he started humming something, not just aimless noise, but something with a real melody, a song I didn’t recognize, and then suddenly I knew, somehow, it was a song he had written for her, back before he pawned off his vintage Martin acoustic, I think to avoid getting another rib broken by his then-supplier. She started to quiet down until she stopped speaking altogether. I thought she went back to sleep, and she did after a while. But for a minute there at least, she was actually listening to him hum. Then he looked over at me, said nothing, and left.
Hurry up and take him already,
Enoch.
. . .
Dear Satan,
Some things need to be cleared up, for whenever it is you and God or whoever it is come down and decide which of you get what souls. I feel like my last letter may have given you the wrong impression.
My father is not a gentle man. It often happened that I would have to lock Mom in the bathroom with me and brace against the locked door when they fought, which was whenever he visited. Soon, Cassie started bracing it with me, and when we couldn’t reach the door, we would take turns distracting him and absorbing the violence of his infuriated, drug-addled mind. Cassie and I, and eventually Mom and this house, were the manifestations of his age. We were the injustices done to him in this life. And that’s all anything ever is to him, anything that doesn’t get down on its knees and suck his dick right away, or tuck him in at night and tell him everything’s going to be okay and nothing’s his fault. He’s a bad person, just about the worst you could get.
Hope this cleared things up for you,
Enoch.
. . .
Dear Satan,
When I woke up today, I saw that I was holding Mom’s hand. She was dead.
Maybe her last act was to reach out for whoever was there.
I called the number the hospice people gave me, and they came and took her to the crematorium. She wants her ashes to be thrown over the Glen, into the water, the air and the trees and the ferns.
I know I’ve painted a picture of a bitter woman so bogged down by regret and resentment she can’t but drag a little on those around her. And that’s true. I could’ve had a better mom, a kinder one. It would’ve been nice to hear “I love you” every once in a while. But she was the mom I got, and she could’ve been a whole lot worse. So I’m telling you, just like I did in the first letter, to back off. She has no business with you now; she’s free of the Blackwood curse. I’m not sure any of God’s angels will come down and get her, but she sure as shit doesn’t deserve to be in the same place my jackass cretin of a father is going. So stay away from her, or else I might tie my belt in a loop and come after you myself.
Can’t say it was nice, but it wasn’t altogether unpleasant.
Enoch.
P.S. I think I figured out why I started writing you. I started when Cassie made the phone call, or shortly after. He hadn’t been able to get his hands on any liquor or beer or wine and was found mouth foaming, body shaking on some street corner or back alley in Syracuse. Anyway, he woke up in the hospital and as they were wheeling him out, he saw Mom in one of the rooms. Her door had been propped open. He started waving his arms around, telling them to stop wheeling him out, screaming that that woman was his mother. It took a while for him to convince them all, because when she checked herself in she listed no next of kin, no relatives to speak of. He never told me where in her body it had started, but there was cancer in her lymph nodes, clogging her kidneys, a tumor in her brain even. He said that she told the doctors she wanted to do hospice but there was no one who would bother to take care of her, and she wasn’t remotely comfortable with even the possibility that the nurse who’d come into her home would be anything other than white and Christian. Of course, when he called, and told me all this, I knew he was asking me to come back here and do it. We both knew he couldn’t right now, so it was the right thing to do. My boss and all my coworkers were really nice about it. Gave me paid time off, and some of the guys even threw in a few bucks to help with whatever. They won’t be seeing you when they die, I don’t think.
But back to the phone call: after Cassie had asked me without asking to help Mom die, and I told him I’d do it, there was a huge silence on the phone. It was so wide I thought it would spill out of the receiver and swallow me whole. I knew, because he’s my brother, that Cassie had to tell me something. What is it, Cassie? I asked him. He sighed, then he laughed, chuckling at himself, because he thought that I would think whatever he was going to say was stupid. But then he said, He’s after me, TJ. Who? I asked. He said, The Devil, TJ, who else? He’s been following me around all my life. More to reassure him than blow him off, I said, Cassie that is the biggest load of bullshit I think I ever heard. And he said, No, TJ. At AA they teach you to believe in a power higher than yourself. And that’s why we Blackwoods are cursed. We’ve forsaken everything greater than ourselves. Obviously, I didn’t know what the fuck to make of that, so I didn’t say anything. Then Cassie said, Just thought I should warn you, and hanged up. I meant to ask him about it, but by the time I got to the hospital, he was gone.