CHAPTER 4

Chapter 4 opens with Buck finishing off a glass of whiskey in Aven's only saloon, a "Jim Crow" enterprise with a double ended pine bar that separated the races by means of a thin partition across the middle of the bar and serving its Black customers through a curved slot cut into the flimsy wall which allowed the banjo music from their end of the bar to entertain the saloon's entire crowd.

No matter how intelligent 20 year-old Buck might have been, Aven's corn liquor was guaranteed to help him do something stupid so he had sense enough before beginning his drunken evening to deposit in the saloon's safe the $500 down payment he'd taken to Longshore's house for the mortgage negotiation. As the bartender pours Buck one more for the road, he reminds Buck of how liquor stirs evil passions by paraphrasing a proverb from the Bible, "It stingeth like an adder and biteth like a serpent." This biblical reference may not be the only one in this chapter.

Buck had a lot on his mind. Not only was he going to close on his first mortgage the next day but he was now sitting on a bar stool lost in lust while his mind's eye attempted to recall every detail of Longshore's gorgeous  daughter. There was no way Buck was going to accomplish anything listening to the saloon's banjo music and dreaming about the blonde-headed eye candy he'd just left at Longshore's house. Buck's barroom boredom could easily be eliminated with only a short walk from the saloon through Baptist Bottom to the place where Buck's payday loan customers spent the money they borrowed from him: Mabe's whorehouse. Buck's customers were also the customers of Mabe's girls and on this night Buck decided to get stupid just like the rest of them and to seek satisfaction in the arms of one of Aven's lewd women. As Buck told the bartender before he left the saloon, " I'm a'goin' to Mabe's Place and kiss all the girls and run climb a tree an' wait for them to cut me down."

Like the moon on that night when Buck first walked into Aven sixteen months earlier, the moonlight on this foggy evening filled liquored-up Buck with a sense of the potential power he'd discovered which assured him that he would one day achieve his destiny and make a fortune from Aven's populace but the corn liquor he'd consumed guaranteed that this late night stroll was not going to contribute to his future fortune. Like the maxim "nothing good ever happens after midnight", Buck's evening ramble to Mabe's Place would never fulfill the promises the moonlight was making.

As he walked through muddy Baptist Bottom, a stumbling, drunken Buck encountered a street corner preacher who was just ending the sermon he was preaching to a crowd gathered on the street in front of a honky tonk called the Puddin' House. Buck immediately requests that the reverend "Preach me some hell-fire and alligator teeth."

The Black preacher, an experienced salesman, immediately sizes Buck up and begins a series of questions, each one ending with the preacher calling Buck, apparently a total stranger, the "boss." By calling Buck "boss", the preacher was going through all the motions that showed him to be a "good, humble Negro" while at the same time setting Buck up to purchase "a pair o' fine billy goats, Boss, which'd make mighty pretty pets" for the whores Buck was about to meet at the brothel just beyond Baptist Bottom.

Possibly as an allusion to the bizarre biblical story in Genesis of Judah promising to pay for the services of the Bible's first prostitute with a goat, the author of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD has his protagonist tugging a pair of billy goats into an elaborately decorated den of iniquity. Taking goats inside a whorehouse is a prescription for disaster and the destruction the charging goats' horns made of the bordello's mirrors and vases ends this chapter with the brothel owner telling Buck, "Even a whore has got feelin's and if a fellow can't earn the name of a gentleman in a whorehouse, he won't get it nowhere." 

Stung by the insult, Buck sobers up a little and makes a prophetic statement on this night before he was to sign his first mortgage with Longshore , "There'll be a man out here tomorrow mornin' to fix your place back. I don't give a damn about bein' a gentleman, but, by God, I'll be payin' my debts, till I die."

No doubt that the man who would show up the next morning to repair Buck's damage to Mabe's Place would also be one of his payday loan customers who was paying off part of his debt by doing day labor for Buck. Buck's repair job and his replacement of the broken furniture also had him investing in Mabe's lucrative sex-trade business and subsequent events would show that Buck's attempt to make right his senseless destruction would enhance his reputation with Mabe as well as with the girls who worked for him.