Charley Bryce laughed softly. He’d picked up the deck of cards again, and he riffled them softly, as softly as he had laughed, and asked, «Like this?»
That was when I started to get scared.
Gram just sniffed again, though. She said, «Yes, like that. And if you gentlemen will excuse me— And you, Johnny, you better not stay up much longer.»
She went upstairs.
The salesman chuckled and riffled the cards again. Louder, this time. I don’t know whether it was the rustling sound they made or the thirteen pieces of silver, exactly, or what, but I was scared. I wasn’t standing behind the salesman any more; I’d walked around the table. He saw my face and grinned at me. He said, «Son, you look like you believe in the devil, and think I’m him. Do you?»
I said «No, sir,» but I must not have said it very convincingly. Gramp laughed out loud, and he wasn’t a man that laughed out loud very often.
Gramp said, «I’m surprised at you, Johnny. Darned if you don’t sound like you do believe it!» And he was off laughing again.
Charley Bryce looked at Gramp. There was a twinkle in his eye. He asked, «Don’t you believe it?»
Gramp quit laughing. He said, «Cut it out, Charley. Giving the boy silly ideas.» He looked around to be sure Gram had left. «I don’t want him to grow up superstitious.»
«Everybody’s superstitious, more or less,» Charley Bryce said.
Gramp shook his head. «Not me.»
Bryce said, «You don’t think you are, but if it came to a showdown, I’d bet you are.»
Gramp frowned. «You’d bet what, and how?»
The salesman riffled the deck of cards once more and then put them down. He picked up the stack of cartwheels and counted them again. He said, «I’ll bet thirteen dollars to your one dollar. Thirteen pieces of silver says you’d be afraid to prove you don’t believe in the devil.»
Gramp had put away his folding money but he took his wallet out again and took a dollar bill out of it. He put the bill on the table between them. He said, «Charley Bryce, you’re covered.»
Charley Bryce put the pile of silver dollars beside it, and took a fountain pen out of his pocket, the one Gramp had signed the seed order with. I remember the pen because it was one of the first fountain pens I’d ever seen and I’d been interested in it.
Charley Bryce handed Gramp the fountain pen and took a clean seed order blank out of his pocket and put it on the table in front of Gramp, the unprinted side up.
He said, «You write ‘For thirteen dollars I sell my soul,’ and then sign it.»
Gramp laughed and picked up the fountain pen. He started to write, fast, and then his hand moved slower and slower and he stopped; I couldn’t see how far he’d written.
He looked across the table at Charley Bryce. He said, «What if—?» Then he looked down at the paper a while more and then at the money in the middle of the table; the fourteen dollars, one paper and thirteen silver.
Then he grinned, but it was a kind of sick grin.
He said, «Take the bet, Charley. You win, I guess.»
That was all there was to it. The salesman chuckled and picked up the money, and Gramp walked with him to the railroad station.
But Gramp wasn’t ever exactly the same after that. Oh, he kept on playing poker; he never did change about that. Not even after he started going to church with Gram every Sunday regularly, and even after he finally let them make him a vestryman he kept on playing cards, and Gram kept on nagging him about it. He taught me how to play, too, in spite of Gram.
We never saw Charley Bryce again; he must have been transferred to a different route or changed jobs. And it wasn’t until the day of Gramp’s funeral in 1913 that I learned that Gram had heard the conversation and the bet that night; she’d been straightening things in the linen closet in the hall and hadn’t gone upstairs yet. She told me on the way home from the funeral, ten years later.
I asked her, I remember, whether she would have come in and stopped Gramp if he’d been going to sign, and she smiled. She said, «He wouldn’t have, Johnny. And it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. If there really is a devil, God wouldn’t let him wander around tempting people like that, in disguise.»
«Would you have signed, Gram?» I asked her.
«Thirteen dollars for writing something silly on a piece of paper, Johnny? Of course I would. Wouldn’t you?»
I said, «I don’t know.» And it’s been a long time since then, but I still don’t.
IMAGINE
Imagine ghosts, gods and devils.
Imagine hells and heavens, cities floating in the sky and cities sunken in the sea.
Unicorns and centaurs. Witches, warlocks, jinns and banshees.
Angels and harpies. Charms and incantations. Elementals, familiars, demons.
Easy to imagine, all of those things: mankind has been imagining them for thousands of years.
Imagine spaceships and the future.
Easy to imagine; the future is really coming and there’ll be spaceships in it.
Is there then anything that’s hard to imagine?
Of course there is.
Imagine a piece of matter and yourself inside it, yourself aware, thinking and therefore knowing you exist, able to move that piece of matter that you’re in, to make it sleep or wake, make love or walk uphill.
Imagine a universe—infinite or not, as you wish to picture it—with a billion, billion, billion suns in it.
Imagine a blob of mud whirling madly around one of those suns.
Imagine yourself standing on that blob of mud, whirling with it, whirling through time and space to an unknown destination.
Imagine!