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    When at last he was finished, Minister Tilton had collected twenty dollars on account toward the first year’s tithe to the Land of Dreams Tabernacle. And the church’s two newest members, Violet and Willis
    Flagg, signed some important papers their new pastor happened to have with him, pressed inside a Holy Bible with a red leather cover. They signed where it said “Tenant.”
    After scratching his name to Zebediah Tilton’s lease, Willis rose angrily from his chair, tearing himself ' away from Violet’s grip on his shirt. He stood towering over the pastor. The resignation in his eyes gave J way to rage. His hands, made thick and hard from his work with shovels and stone and earth, clenched into dark fists.
    Violet thrilled to the sight of her husband’s anger. | She closed her eyes and silently prayed, Oh, La, won’t you bless all poor black men for what little arrogance they dare show the world?
    Willis, his voice sounding as if it was a thousand years old, said to Tilton, “I ain’t an educated man, and I ain’t well spoken like you. But it don’t mean I’m simple. Because I sure can figure you just done something crooked here. I’m going to think hard on this, long as it takes. I’m going to figure some way to bring you down for what you done to me and Vi— and most likely other poor folks beside.”
    Minister Tilton smiled. Then he stood up, his chunky physique no match for the tall, lean Willis Flagg. He folded the lease into his red Bible and said, “No need for being vexatious. I know you’re a troubled man this day, and I’m sorry for you. Truly I am. But you’d best not be threatening your landlord, hear? There’s plenty other tenants would love to be in a cottage as nice as you made this one.”
    Minister Tilton put on his hat. He waited for Willis to say something by way of an apology, but Willis maintained a silence that was now as threatening as his clenched fists. Tilton looked to Violet, finding no comfort in her cold glare.
    “You’d best not take an adversary’s tone against a man who knows the mysteries,” he said, turning back to Willis. “You understand what I mean, don’t you, Brother?”
    Willis understood. Since boyhood he had been warned of the abilities and powers of a master voudou: how he could call forth the dead from beyond, and serpents from the rivers and the sea; how he could “fix” an enemy, how his power came from the hearts and fangs and claws of God’s most ferocious creatures.
    And Willis felt something cold on his neck, something like a wet breeze.
    Minister Tilton smiled again at the discomfort he saw in Willis. Then he left the Flagg home. Violet watched him as he stepped over to where Miss Hassie sat, and said something to her. Hassie and Tilton looked up once or twice and noticed how the neighbors were watching from their windows. So they went inside Hassie’s place, where Tilton stayed for a half hour. Then he came back outside and drove off in his Packard.
    Later in the night, silent save for the skitterings of spiders and chameleons on the window screens, Willis awoke from a nightmare. He had a violent fever, and pains that shot through his chest and neck.
    That was the start of it.
    Convinced that mortal danger lay waiting for him in the alleyway—in the form of water moccasins or copperheads or cottonmouths, slithery agents of the demons—Willis began a new daily protective ritual. He would mix up a batch of quicklime and cayenne pepper into the boiling water left over from scrubbing the front steps. He then poured this potion in two Parallel lines along the inside of the fence enclosing his garden. One of the voudouiennes assured him he would now be safe, backyard as well as front.
    He started drinking several evenings a week at Shug’s, and told anybody who would listen to him that Zeb Tilton had slicked him somehow, that something ought to be done about it. But the only thing that ever came of all Willis’s boozy complaints