Black Bottle Man
by Craig Russel
Great Plains Publications,2010
176 Pages
Young Adult
This American Gothic is a short 175 pages, but it is tension-filled boiler. The story moves at a different pace, written slowly and deliberately to reflect the times of the depression era, (1928-1938) and this backdrop is a key component of the narrative. It is a story painted with emotive places where hobos wander, deep prose, and a thick description of the landscape of the depression. Riding the rails adds to the despair we are immersed in.
Rembrandt is just a boy in the beginning, a boy who just wants to help his Aunt Annie, who cannot conceive. It eats at her from inside. Ultimately, she turns to the only place left to her, because she wants a child… more than her soul itself.
So it was on that well-lit morning, after a night when the moon was not at her post to see the things Aunt Annie (and Aunt Emma) had done, that Uncle Billy discovered strange lines and signs drawn on places where they should not have been.
Uncle Billy left three farms when he discovered what his wife and her sister had done. Five weeks later, the man who sent the black bottle filled with special elixir showed up to collect. But he makes a deal. The Pact: both women will have their children, untainted. The women’s souls now belong to the Black Bottle Man, they did witchcraft. But Pa puts up his own and Uncle Thompson’s souls as well if the men can’t find a champion to beat him in their lifetimes. It is agreed, but: the men can’t stay in any one town longer than twelve days, and… “I want a third soul on the velvet.”
So Rembrandt must also fight against the Devil. He has ninety years plus thirty days to find a champion, and each must agree to put their soul up for the Devil to keep if they fail. The boy sets off with Uncle Thompson to seek out a champion. Soon, they discover by accident, that hobo symbols can do magic. Just “good fishin” at first, but then when Rembrandt’s arm is mangled working in a cannery, Uncle Thompson uses symbols to conjure a “good doctor,” and Rembrandt is healed. Are the symbols an evil spell or a gift from above? They seem the obvious weapon in their fight, but no champion can make the symbols fast enough.
We meet Gail, a woman obsessed with numbers, always counting. Her 3-5-9 rule, say it one hundred times and nothing bad will happen. Decades before OCD was diagnosed, it had become her way of coping with trauma.
Years pass. On his journey, Rembrandt finds love in Leona Evans; finds the warmth of a loving home, a welcoming family. Everything he has always wanted, for twelve days. But it’s a world he can never belong to.
When things look darkest, he travels all the way North to Montreal to find his family, his mother and grandfather, and of course his two aunts are all there. Along with Aunt Anna’s black bottle daughter Bridget, Aunt Emma’s daughter Germaine. But Anna takes out her guilt on Rembrandt.
Then Rembrandt’s journey comes full circle when he encounters Uncle Billy. Billy puts up a good fight.
His hand slipped inside the frock coat and extracted one of the pages missing from Ma’s family bible. The text of Leviticus held the center of the sheet like an infantry square, but a more important story was told in the margin notes. Around the edges in rust-tinged ink wound the Devil’s copperplate hand, like a legal ouroboros, a worm of words seeking to swallow itself.
You might be wondering why Rembrandt himself hasn’t taken up the gauntlet himself by this point. Well, he can’t. His soul is already in the pot. In fact, every champion’s soul gets added to Old Scratch’s list as they try to match him. They all fail. Each new champion is just another empty promise of hope. The number of eternal souls on the line grows and grows. “Wish I had a hundred of you, boy.”
We can see who the final champion must be, the only one who possibly could best the Devil, someone wounded by an act of love, given a gift seen by anyone else in that era as the kind of malady you just don’t speak of, she is the one who must brave the final stand against the darkness.
The book explores how a boy fits into family relationships as he grows into a man, facing the challenges of responsibility, alcohol, betrayal, and love, all under the shadow of a fate worse than death, and learning what you would go through to protect even the smallest of it. It asks, whose soul isn’t already in the pot?
Black Bottle Man is not the usual young adult fare. Bringing the tensions of an era to life through the dark alleys of history, it is a truly unique and memorable experience with the taste of a classic.
