With the Devil's Help Read online

  To Mom, Uncle Doodle, my sisters and brother, 38 first cousins, and thousands of other kinfolk on the mountain.

  INTRODUCTION

  In the fall of 1983, after graduating from Sylvania High School, I was attending Northeast Alabama Community College in Rainsville, only twelve miles from my parents’ home. I was working at the Shell gas station on Main Street, Fort Payne, a block from the city park and within walking distance of Fort Payne Church of Christ.

  One Sunday morning, while staring out the window wishing I was anywhere but at work, an old man walked over from the church. His slow gait told me that time had caught up with him years ago. His few remaining strands of white hair were trimmed close and circled his mostly bald head like a horseshoe. He walked in with his index finger tugging at his tie like it was a noose. “I snuck out of Sunday school to come get some candy. Don’t tell my wife.”

  I smiled as he grabbed a handful of Peanut Logs. As he stood there savoring the sugar-laden treats out of his wife’s sight—and God’s—he struck up a conversation.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Neal Wooten.”

  He seemed curious. “Wooten, huh? Where are you from?”

  “Blake.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was enough information. It’s such a tiny place, some valley folks don’t know about it, even though it’s the first community atop Sand Mountain from the north end of town. Just drive up Sylvania Gap Road, a narrow, steep, winding, asphalt artery traversing through a sea of green vines and leaves where the DeKalb County Road Department has been waging a never-ending war against the burgeoning kudzu.

  I always imagined that centuries after humans no longer inhabit Earth, the planet will become a huge ball of kudzu drifting through space.

  Anyway, that’s how you get to Blake. You can’t really miss it… unless you blink. The only two upholders testifying to Blake’s existence at all are the volunteer fire department and the small sign pointing the way to the Blake Community Center, where the elementary school once stood. The school closed just before I started kindergarten and burned down a few years later. Yes, I have an alibi.

  That’s why I began school at Sylvania, the closest real town to Blake on the mountain. The word Sylvania means “wooded area,” so the town was aptly named. The town boasted a population of 1,900, but I think they might have counted the cows as well.

  “That’s where my parents lived,” the old fellow said. “You didn’t know a Pete Wooten, did you?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, he was my grandfather.”

  “Oh my. He was the fastest runner I ever saw.” He went on to give me accounts of my grandfather’s speed, the same old stories I had heard many times growing up, only retold differently each time. Frankly, I had written them off as exaggerated folklore. Hearing older people from the mountain talk about it, you’d think my grandfather was supernatural. Then, the old man’s face took on a solemn expression. “That was before he got in that trouble. Do you know about that?”

  “Yes, sir.” I had only known about it for five years. For some reason, I wasn’t trusted with this information until I was thirteen. That’s when the big secret of the family was revealed, and suddenly, all the little puzzles fell into place.

  What I’ve learned in my life is this—and it took me five-and-a-half decades to fully appreciate: there is no normal. Behind the door of every family lurks a mystery we will never understand or be privy to. The only normal we will ever know comes from the perceptions created by our own experiences in our own little worlds.

  Blake, Alabama, was my entire world. For me, it was an idyllic place to grow up with sprawling farms, rock churches, dirt roads, and great fishing holes. It hasn’t changed much in a century. The area itself offers up perhaps the only fond memories of my childhood.

  Growing up in a small rural area in the Deep South is no different from growing up on the West Coast or in New York City. Every location has its own idiosyncrasies that are just as foreign to those not from around there. The people could certainly be described as “backwoods,” “hillbilly,” or “redneck,” and no one would care because those terms are not offensive here. But this story isn’t about that. I do not write this from my “hillbilly” perspective, only from the perspective of a child’s memory—a child not unlike every other in the world.

  Sure, we had odd pronunciations: every two-syllable word that ended in ow came out sounding like it ended in er. (See that feller in the yeller shirt? He lives in the holler near the shaller part of the crick and fishes with minners.) We said “far” for “fire” and “mater” for “tomato” and “cheer” for “chair” to name a few others, but to focus on those things would be to distract from the story itself. I will keep the word “y’all” because, dang it, that’s just proper.

  I wrote this book to tell a story that will be lost forever once my mother and I are gone. It is the story of my grandfather, Pete Wooten, and my father, Travis Wooten—two men who shared the same struggles and battled the same demons in life. Each of these incredible men had uncanny physical ability, above-average mental acuity, and a mean streak more than a mile wide.

  It is also the story of those who loved and feared them and the effects these men had on them, especially me. Both of these men spent their lives searching for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the one big score that would make them a huge success in life. That success was something they forever craved but were never able to make a reality. They had intelligence, vision, and drive, but there was always something missing, something damaged about their psyche, a stray link in their DNA, or something just “off” to keep this goal just out of reach. I can’t say for sure what was missing, because I was born without it too.

  And, so, here I stand at the threshold of my childhood with the door swung wide open for you to come on inside and have a peek.

  CHAPTER ONE THE MEN IN BLACK SUITS

  1969

  Knock. Knock.

  I jumped. We had been in our brand-new house less than a year, but we never got visitors, except our cousins who lived just up the little dirt road a piece from us—and they never knocked.

  Mama’s brother, Doodle Jackson, and his family lived the closest to us. Beyond them, closer to the paved road, was Mama’s mother, Lela Jackson. We lived on Jackson Road. Actually, we lived well beyond the end of Jackson Road, down in the woods where the mailman and school bus wouldn’t go.

  Mama and my two sisters, Julene and Neenah, were in the kitchen preparing dinner. That’s the midday meal on Sand Mountain. Mountain folks have three daily meals: breakfast, dinner, and supper.

  I hopped off the couch and ran to the door. It almost felt like Christmas morning as I struggled to turn that old knob. The house was new; the door was ancient. The door finally opened, and there at the base of several cinderblocks we used for steps stood those two men, tall, slender, and mysterious. Like statues they stood, rigid, intimidating, their hands crossed in front of their waists. The light coming around them made it look like that scene from War of the Worlds. Maybe they were robots.

  The odd thing was, neither their clothes nor themselves gave off any odor. Daddy always smelled of cheap aftershave, sweat, and Camel cigarettes—not independently, but his scent was always a medley of all three. Quite the contrast to my uncles on my mama’s side, who reeked of Red Man chewing tobacco and Miller High Life.

  In the yard behind them, I saw the long black car, the same one they always seemed to be driving. I really wasn’t sure if it was the same car or if, in fact, the two men were always the same either. But the suits were always the same: black dress pants, black dress jackets, and black ties. They dressed like they were always heading to or coming from a funeral. Maybe that’s why they wore sad faces. If
I knew as many jokes as Daddy, I could have cheered them up.

  But I knew something was off. I stared up at them in disbelief, not so much because they normally just watched us from a distance but because it was ninety degrees in the shade and they still wore those jackets. I wasn’t well educated in the ways of the world. I was, after all, only four years old. But as I stood there waiting and staring, I thought, surely, they were supposed to say something.

  “Who is it?” Mama asked, walking into the living room. Her face turned pale as she saw it was our old friends. Her eyes squinted through her glasses, which came to a point on each side. Mama was all of four-feet-eleven-inches tall and, as far as I knew, had always worn glasses. Her wavy medium-brown hair never grew far past her shoulders. Her belly protruded slightly, and I knew I would soon have another sister or perhaps a brother. “What do y’all want?” Her tone had zero anger but tinged with a touch of worry.

  “Where’s your husband?” one of the men asked, his tone completely indifferent.

  By now, Neenah, who was six, and Julene, who was eight, stood on each side of Mama. Neenah had Daddy’s features: black hair and dark brown eyes. Julene had blue eyes like Mama and me, but her hair was blond. Daddy made jokes often about the milkman, but I didn’t get the joke. We never had a milkman.

  “He’s getting tomatoes from the garden. He’ll be back any minute. If you don’t want to wait, the garden is behind the house.” With that, she guided Neenah and Julene back into the kitchen.

  I just stood there holding the doorknob. I didn’t know the proper protocol. Sweat trickled down my brow and dripped onto my bare chest. I never wore a shirt in the summer, and my bony knees protruded through holes in my hand-me-down jeans, the bell-bottom of each leg ending just above my flat feet. Getting hand-me-downs from two sisters was a nightmare, especially considering the clothes were purchased used to begin with. I learned about my feet earlier in the summer when walking behind my cousin who lived up the road. I noticed the weird prints his feet left in the sand: round spots formed from his heel and ball of his feet, connected with a thin strip on the outside, and five little round impressions at the top.

  “How do you make prints like that?” I had asked.

  When he turned and saw my full prints on the ground, he burst out laughing. “You got flat feet.”

  Of course, I was the weird one.

  My sweating too was a genetic gift from Daddy. I rarely saw him not perspiring profusely.

  “What the hell do y’all want?” I jumped again when I heard his voice… like always. Daddy was a little more direct than Mama.

  The visitors didn’t answer.

  Daddy walked up to them so fast, they instinctively took a step backward. He handed me a small basket of tomatoes. “Give these to your mama,” he snapped as he slammed the door shut.

  I carried the basket to the kitchen, set it on the table, and then hurried back to stand at the door and listen.

  “We know you know where he is,” one of the men said. “Why don’t you tell us and save yourself a lot of trouble?”

  Daddy laughed. “What trouble? If you had anything on me, you’d have done something already.”

  “We’re going to find him, and when he goes back to prison, you’re going with him.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “You’re damn right it is, and a promise.”

  “Well, here’s a promise for you. If you don’t have a warrant, get the hell off my property, or I will kick both your asses right here and right now.”

  I strained to listen, but there was only silence. Then, I heard the car start, so I quickly took my seat on the couch again.

  When Daddy walked in and shut the door, his face was redder than normal, his buttoned-up shirt clung to his torso almost to his beltline with sweat. He removed that shirt and his undershirt, using it as a sweat towel, and sat in his chair.

  Travis O’Neal Wooten, whom I was named after (but, in a breach of etiquette, I was appended with a “II” instead of a “Junior”), was an intimidating presence by all accounts. He was only five-feet-nine-inches tall but still had massive shoulders, chest, and arms. His fingers looked like Polish sausages, and his palms were two inches thick. What made him even more daunting was his incredible speed, strength, coordination, and unrivaled temper.

  “You ready for a sandwich and some soup?” Mama called out from the kitchen.

  “Bring me some ice water.” Daddy was still steaming, and it wasn’t just the heat. He was perhaps the only man in the South who hated sweet tea. Well, besides me. He looked at the television and quickly over to me.

  I understood. He was not a fan of Saturday morning cartoons. I rushed over and grabbed the little pliers that we kept beside the television set and changed the channels until I found a baseball game. Daddy had warned me and my sisters not to change the channel too fast or we would break the plastic knob. He was right. Hence the pliers. Television—and electricity—was a new experience for us, so we had yet to figure out all the proper procedures.

  Our television was a huge twenty-five-inch console set with speakers on each side of the screen. It had a dark walnut wood cabinet and was, by far, the fanciest thing in our home, much too fancy to serve solely as a stand. It had been given to us by relatives and had never worked since we had it. I’m not sure if Daddy actually expected to fix it some day or if it was intended for its current capacity, as a support for the working television, a thirteen-inch black-and-white model.

  All of our furniture was passed down from relatives who had upgraded. The couch, chair, and coffee table were made of matching orange vinyl. The coffee table had a fake wood top and served as a storage unit as well. I used to wonder how it must have looked when it was new. It couldn’t have been much more appealing. How did a salesman even manage to sell something like this?

  Mama brought Daddy a large Mason jar filled with water and ice cubes. He preferred his water to be ice cold and made circular motions with his right hand, making the water slosh around in an attempt to make it colder faster. Daddy knew all the little tricks.

  Ice was a luxury we didn’t always have. We had one of those refrigerators that required electricity, and the company that provided the electricity preferred the payments to be made every single month. That obviously seemed excessive to Daddy. We only had it a few months in our rental house. This was the first time we had electricity in our new house, and I was hoping it would last, because it was pretty neat.

  Looking around the living room, you could see the places where the kerosene lamps were positioned during our normal blackouts. Dark smoke stains decorated the light gray fake wood paneling walls like tornadoes rising to the ceiling, where the large, cloudlike black stains hovered.

  Other than the stains, the only other thing on our walls was a huge framed print behind our couch. It was a painting by Paul Detlefsen of a blacksmith shop with two kids whose wheel had come off their wagon. I often stared at it for hours. The man seemed so happy to help those kids. We had no family pictures or other décor at all.

  Mama’s father, Harley Jackson, had given Mama and Daddy thirty acres of wooded land in Blake, Alabama, on Sand Mountain, and Daddy had built this house in a few days. Daddy was an expert carpenter, but patience was not one of his virtues. I’m not sure if he had any virtues at all. What did he need with patience when he knew a magic word he could conjure up like an incantation to speed up the process? If you know this word, you really never need a square, tape measure, or level. The word was “close-ter-nuff.”

  The living room and kitchen were the only rooms in the house that actually had wall panels on both the outside and inside. All the back rooms just had outside walls, and you could see the four-by-four framework. The studs were true four-by-fours, rough, unfinished, seconds bought directly from a sawmill.

  We moved in while there were still a few tiny projects left to complete, like interior walls in the bedrooms, any interior doors, any type of flooring over the subflooring anywhere, and a room
that most people had in their homes called a bathroom.

  My bedroom didn’t even have a ceiling, so I could see through the joists all the way to the inside of the roof, the knots and grainlines in the flimsy plywood making monstrous faces that would scare me to sleep. But I finally made friends with them, named them even, once I learned that real-life monsters were far more dangerous and unpredictable.

  “Neal, come eat,” Mama said.

  I didn’t move. I was still worried about creating any ripples in the invisible tension in the room. I didn’t understand who the men in the black suits were or why they bothered Daddy so much, but it seemed normal. When you’re a kid, you never really know anything beyond your own little circle. I just assumed that every family in America dealt with them as well.

  Daddy turned up the jar, downed half the water, and then went back to his sloshing as he watched the game. But it was clear the game was not smoothing things over. He drained the rest of the liquid in a second gulp and held the jar out toward me. “Get me some more water.”

  I obeyed. I always obeyed. I took the glass into the kitchen and set it on the table. I picked up a jug from the floor and began filling the jar. Even when we had electricity, we didn’t have a well, so every day, my sisters and I walked through the woods down into the hollow where a spring surfaced with the cleanest water you can imagine. We filled our milk jugs there. That was how we got water into the house for drinking, cooking, and bathing. I was very small, even for my age, but could already carry two jugs in each hand while my sisters struggled to carry one.

  I took back the full jar and handed it to my daddy. In my mind, I can clearly see it was his fault. He was not paying attention. I definitely saw his hand knock the glass from my hand. That point, however, was moot. The jar hit the particle-board floor with a crash, and ice, water, and pieces of broken glass went everywhere.

  There was only one second of silence as my daddy stared at me. I wanted to apologize, but my fear kept the words from forming. It’s like when you wake from a nightmare and want to scream, but nothing comes out. The difference is, in the nightmare scenario, you suddenly realize the worst is behind you. Here, the worst was yet to come.