The Demon of My Granny's Bible

Every secret I’ve ever learned that kept me awake at night and staring into the dark was learned at the hands of a red lettered book of god. I know not if it’s a familial lack of intelligence or rather a custom that was brought about by times of necessity that continued to plague the branches of our namesake tree, but I often wondered why a person would keep their most private secrets folded among the scriptures. At first, I concluded that it must be some sort of personal attempt at atonement of one’s sins, stuffing them like that in the passages that burst with red verse as a way to absolve them. I then realized that in this wild and thorned part of the world that there were two things most people carried with them at all times. A gun and a bible. In these parts before the invention of technological ways of keeping up with the turning world, there was only the bible. Dates, important births, etc. It was simply an unfortunate habit picked up by god-fearing people in wagons, I suppose.

In the big house on the farm, carved into a valley between two mountain ridges, generations of them are wrapped in tissue paper and stuffed in the bottom of an octagonal side table draped in lace. Great-Uncle Perry’s revealed that he should have lived a different life if times were different—kinder. A tattered photograph of him, wide smile and crisp naval officer suit, wrapped around a figure very much the same—broad shouldered and swoop of black hair. A photo of Cary Grant marked the book of Psalms.

His wife Wilhelmina’s contained a photo of their wedding day, where she was dead in her eyes and there was a standard pencil length between the two of them. “My one and only love,” scrawled on the back in obnoxious looping letters. I winced and carefully tucked it back.

My Papaw’s had little tick marks on it that counted the days until the man that killed his son got out of prison and he intended to return the favor. The clippings from the papers were folded and stuffed in the stiff spine. He never touched it much but to count down the days after that night. But my Granny’s bible was where I first read about the demon that stalked her. The owl at twilight. She drew about it in the front pages and cross hatched over the birthdays and family trees with writings about the winged beast. It gave me chills as I flipped quickly through them, and at night I felt like it whispered through the halls from under the lace.

There was a quiet in that house once the sun went down that turned it from home to fortress. It was so dark that when you held your fingers up to your face, even right against your eyeball itself, there was nothing to be seen but that darkness so dark it swallowed you. You were not in a bed, or a house, or a fortress; you were hanging in an abyss. You and an unremitting black. There were sounds in those woods and the fields and that darkness that let you know you were not alone as you laid in the void. In that darkness I dreamt of that dead-eyed barn owl that she scribbled of in the crevices of her bible. I thought she had dreamt it, maybe. Got into the hooch cabinet when my Papaw raised his voice and had an apparition from which she never recovered. My mamma and her brothers would talk about it, low behind her back when she’d buy another porcelain figure to line up on the mantle. Twenty-some glass owls staring down at you from the thick slab of wood like a Hitchcock film.

Granny told me the story the night the torch was passed; I suppose she felt she owed it to me at that point. My parents had just set my brother and I down at the dinner table that could sit an army of family and farmhands alike. The two of them at the head and John and I sitting across from one another some six chairs down. Divorce. I wasn’t able to compute. I kicked open the back door and ran to the toolshed and slung a hatchet across my back and laid into the Magnolia tree in the backyard. I chopped the shit out of that Magnolia tree until my arms gave way to lethargy, and the tree gave way to rot, and a year later, they had to chop the whole damn thing down. I don’t know…I look back at it now, and as with most things that make it into the ripple of brain reserved for memory, it seems damn near stupid you thought to do it in the first place. But when you’re nearing adulthood and you have a certain vision of yourself and the way things are supposed to go and the parents throw you a curveball, sometimes the best thing to do is run to the woodshed and chop the shit out of a Magnolia tree.

It haunts me though. The slick of that ax in my hands. The sun that was beginning to set, and the Whippoorwills that began to sing, and the Katydids that joined in to show them up as I tore across the back yard and wiped big, fat tears on the back of my hand. Those tears ran hot and free as I laid one whack after the other into the thick bark that puckered and turned red underneath. Clear sap poured out, and suddenly that Magnolia tree and I were one in the same. Sap for sap. The lampposts around the property began to flicker on. They always turned on in some sort of half-assed way on that farm—like they couldn’t quite decide if they wanted to or not. Some did and some didn’t that night, and the ones that did cast an eerie as fuck glow on everything around me.

They puttered on and I kept chopping away at that tree, and the tears kept streaming, and when I reared that hatchet back one last time there was a sound that stripped my soul bare. It was one that struck a primal chord. One that would have had you pounding your chest and upturning dirt in attempts to make yourself seem bigger were it some handful billion years ago. It sounded again and my blood ran cold. I dropped the ax and stumbled back from the tree to squint up and around in the half-darkness.

The tree was leaned over onto one of the old barns as a force of habit. Nature had made it that way, and I was doing nothing to help it. When I laid into that tree and started chopping, her spirit started screaming.

I looked up into the tree and it looked down at me. Its feathers turned over and its eyes bore down from its crooked branch. It opened its mouth to scream again and a gunshot rang out between the mountains and they repeated it to their neighbors. I swore under my breath and my hairs raised all over my body as I seized up on the ground. My granny stood on the back porch with more agility in her joints and those muck covered Hunter boots than I had seen in a long time. The shotgun was cradled in trembling hands; one the size that meant you were about to have a real quick introduction to the big man upstairs or the big man where it’s hotter. That woman had raised four kids—three boys and my mamma—and when that look came across her face and she slung that shotgun in her hand, you knew she meant it.

“You get inside now, Isaac, and leave that tree alone,” she called out over the clearing. “Me and her have some business to tend to. Don’t touch it, now, god damn you!” I reached out for the hatchet and Granny cut me short. “Get in this house, right now.” I scrambled away and as soon as I ducked under the barrel, she fired every bullet she had at that barn owl. It was gunshot, flap of wing, gunshot, flap of wing and then silence. The backyard was covered in smoke from the rifle and my Granny stood panting at the barn as tears streamed down her face.

There was a score to be settled. I had known it from the first time I flipped open that bible. She had raised four children, as I said, and those children were brought up in a home that was full of warmth and laughter and discipline. Four cups, four plates, and she washed them every day after every meal. Her husband tilled the land and that’s what they did. They lived simply and that was enough.

She was washing those four plates one night as the sun hung low over the farm. She hummed her favorite hymn and the grain of the weather crackled from the radio. She reached out slowly for her checkered towel and she looked up to see the big, round eyes of that owl looking right through her soul from the windowsill. She screamed and dropped one of the plates that shattered, forming an almost perfect circle of powdered shards around her. She backed away with her hand to her throat. It looked her dead in the eyes and that owl let out three screams that struck her numb as its wings filled the window and it took off into the night. It rattled her to see it so close to the house. Her mamma and her mamma’s mamma had passed down the stories of those owls that stayed too close to the house. It was an omen, and not the kind you wanted near where you dried your boots.

My granny went about her business, hands trembling as she swept up the plate and dumped it into the bin. She knew that the omen was true. Her soul felt lesser than it had mere moments ago. Those long screeches had meant something. Loss. My granny knew she had lost something precious to her, and it was so profound that it plagued her before she even knew what it was.

She sat rocking by the fire and reading her bible—neat and unburdened then—when there was a knock at the door. Two city police darkened her doorstep with their hats held at their chest. Her baby boy had been plowed down by some son of a bitch with one too many pints in his blood and a loose hand on the wheel. She was down a plate, and she was down a son. Three screeches, one life.

The rest of her days she was haunted by the flutter of a wing. Those screeches rang in her ears when she would swim in the river and rest her head at night. It was her spectral companion and she felt it watch her from the rustling branches around the clearing. She knew it would present itself to her again. Many years later, when lines were more pronounced on her face and her hair had gone white, it appeared. Granny snapped beans on the front porch, and she swallowed hard as a chill ran over her. She looked up and saw the rustle of wings and the demon nestled high in a tree across the field.

“Back again, you old bitch?” Granny called as she snapped and strung those beans. She never wavered, and neither did her companion.

Hours passed and without warning, the owl took flight; three piercing screeches echoed through the twilight as it circled overhead and disappeared from sight. My Granny’s heart stopped to then surge and fling itself against her ribs as she ran into the house and latched the doors and drew the curtains and watched over her husband and rang her children all through the night. The next morning my Papaw dropped dead in the middle of the field; just slumped right over on his tractor. That’s how she found him, keeled over the wheel while the tractor puttered and puffed, and that owl watched her body shake from the eaves of the barn.

The rest of her years passed in torment, waiting for that barn owl to appear to her again, ushering in death. Her ears pricked at every sound. Every twitter from every member of the family Aves that resided in the clearing was a softly spoken incantation. And then she came for me. That night Granny lit fires and candles and put on a pot of coffee. She locked doors and drew the curtains. John stood whispering to Mamma in the doorway and Daddy smoked a cigarette on the front porch, frowning at the sky. My granny called her remaining children and told them of what she had seen and begged them not to leave their homes. My mamma kissed my head and tousled my hair as she looked worriedly at her own before heading off to bed.

“She chose you, boy,” Granny said softly. She looked down at her black coffee and her withered hand moved to cup over mine. “I’m so sorry. There won’t be a day that goes by that you won’t be looking over your shoulder. You’ll feel the devil’s kiss at the base of your neck from here on. We have to pray now that all we love survives this night.” And we sat the night together with the rifle atop the floral kitchen table and Granny never nodded off once. She sipped that black coffee and her fingers drummed on the polished wood and iron of the gun until the sun ran its many fingers through the lace covering the windows.

If the fables ring true, that owl dragged some poor soul to hell that that night, but it wasn’t any relation to us. Sun crept back over the mountains, and as I stepped out onto the front porch it seemed that Mother Earth had spent her night as one of us, heart racing and sweat beading on her skin, and it covered the ground alongside a cool mist. My Daddy sat in a rocking chair damp with the perspiration of night and smoking his last cigarette. He caught my worried glance and stuffed out the Marlboro on the heel of his boot.

“I’m not going to be a part of this family much longer. Maybe the evil son of a bitch took pity on me…” His tired eyes traveled over me and he brushed the back of my cheek with his rough hand. “Don’t let the old wives’ tales keep you up at night. I wouldn’t put much faith in them.”

———

Time slips away and as you grow into your features and a more solidified persona, your childhood tends to blur into a mixture of fable and fact. What was real and what was the flush and fever that comes with the rush of adolescence. What was memory and what was a dream?

Spring still had the chill of winter on her lips as we sat in the graveyard the day they buried my Granny. It was the first time I saw the demon of my Granny’s bible since that night. I bounced my daughter on my knee and my eyes burned as I looked out over the flat and budding graveyard. I felt a chill that coiled up from my soul. The hairs along my arms rose straight up like sewing pins. There she sat in a tree right above the casket. Those eyes that had seen and taken a hundred lives bore right into mine. She made not a sound. That demonic head spun round to look down where white roses rustled on the walnut box before she took off to the sky.

What was memory and what was a dream? I hadn’t walked with Satan’s lips at my neck the way my granny had said, but I knew I was never alone. My granny got lowered into the ground and I went back to the house and lined up the forty-some porcelain false idols of the owl on the fence post and slung that shotgun in the air. My husband put his hands over my daughters’ ears and watched me with concern as that rifle fired and the sharp “Tink!” sounded as the bullets met their mark, over and over. My hands were more steady than my Granny’s had been that night. The smoke cleared and the lawn was littered with the carnage of effigy.

“Daddy, look!” my daughters’ voice rang out and I followed her finger to, where on the eave of the barn, it watched. White in the face and devil in its black pupils, it opened its beak to let out the worst of them by far. Everyone dressed in mourning turned and gasped at the sound. I felt my granny’s hand on my chest. I slung that rifle. Three screeches, one life. Every soul, human, animal, ethereal, seemed to whisper it around me.

"Send her home," I heard my Granny say. The owl flapped its wings on the branch. A second scream rippled over us, our breaths held captive in our throats.

"Isaac..." I heard my husband say softly, worlds away. It was the apex. Memory and fable and present became one and my hands trembled.

"Send her home..."

“Granny would like a word,” I whispered and the second screech fell quiet.