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him now, kneading hard against his breast. His heart raced. The air was shrinking. He could not breathe.
    And there was the thumping in his breast, and God’s hand in his throat. And there was his soul against his ribs. Outside, the trains let out their bellows, and in one sick lurch, he spit the evil yolk out onto the butcher paper. Eli hacked and wheezed and felt air crack deep into his core. The man stood him up and wrapped up the paper around the yolk, tucking the yellow mass into one of his dusty jars.

    FOR YEARS, ELI WENT TO see the root man, drinking his potions and huffing powders from his mason jars. In the afternoons, he helped him hunt through the thatches of johnsongrass outside the rail yard. The old man squatted down among the weeds, his desiccated hands searching through the loose soft soil. He plucked mushrooms from the cold black ground and tucked their caps inside his cheek. He’d hold them there for hours before spitting the runny mash across an Indian head penny. All the plants he could name by touch, the grittiness of the leaves, the firmness of the stalks against his fingers. Sorghum and boneset and chase-devil. He’d take a spade and dig down, prying up long tangles of blood root, and John the conqueror and the musky dripping vines called devil’s shoestrings.
    Folks would come from miles around—as far away as Prichard and Mobile and Tillmans Corner. The line would stretch out the door and Eli would watch them, their slack and tired faces, the nervous hands. Eli listened as the root man dispensed his advice: mashed-up snake root and grooveburr in a sachet under your bed. A strip of yellow cloth and powdered anise seed inside a flannel pouch. There were tricks for money and tricks for love and tricks to turn the Devil from your door. There were mojo hands and evil eyes and black cat bones. And all around was the invisible world, Eli realized, each of us caught in its strange currents. If he shut his eyes, he could almost hear it—the thump of blood. The driving noise. The deep and ancient undertows.
    The first trick he ever laid, Eli made a wish and rubbed a piece of lodestone to a purple kerchief. He buried the rock underneath a linden tree and burned the kerchief, setting the ashes into the wind. In time the universe would answer. When he was thirteen, a man came to his grandma’s house. He was tall and dark and slim with a mouth full of gold and he told the boy that he was his father. With him, he’d brought an old pine-top upright piano. The man said he had a job selling them all over the country. When Eli’s grandma found that man inside her house, she ran him off with a meat cleaver. She chased him clear out of town before he could recover his piano.
    For hours every night Eli would sit at the box, studying the keys. He’d pry open the top panel and watch the wooden hammers rise and fall across the long raking cables. He taught himself, and in time the piano became almost second nature. He liked the way his arms spread its length, the way the sound gave underneath his fingers. It became a conduit of his will. Anger and joy and sadness swooping out of his soul and into the air.
    And yet when he sat himself at the bench, when the fall board lifted away to reveal the peninsula of glowing keys, he could not say he was entirely himself. The hands were not his hands. They moved without his moving them, tensing into claws, doing their jitter jump. The chords rose like a heat above the keys and the thought occurred to him that maybe it was not his will that drove his hands, that spanned his arms, that struck and stroked and stomped his feet against the ground.

    ELI LEFT HOME WITH HIS mojo bag, a deck of cards, and a head full of humming. He spent years on the chitlin circuit—playing at the Queen City Hotel, Po’ Monkey’s Lounge, Doke’s Barbershop, and in the tiny jukes up and down Chrisman Street. He earned himself a name as a demon on an