How to Tell a Devil

There is one character, named Octavia, in the script for How to Tell a Devil.   She speaks from an old barn in the moonlight.  She asks “ the boys” if they know how to tell a Devil.   She says she knows and she knows what boys want.  She says there is something in the barn, that she hears whispering, and she points to an old hammock that also whispers.  She says she stopped going to church because she heard them whispering about how hard she took her little brother’s  death.  The voices in her head say that her little brother wanted her to run off with him, but she was scared her Daddy would find them and beat them, so her little brother enlisted and went off to the war in France where he drowned crossing a river.  Her father and two older brothers all had her and were surprised when her daughter had thick black curly hair, a big nose, and a deep olive complexion, the spitting image of the gypsy feller who ran the house of mirrors when the carnival was in town.  Her father and brothers said they ook the baby across the county line and left it on somebody’s doorstep.  But she later learned that they had killed the baby and buried it in the woods.  Then her brothers disappeared and she tells her father that she will make him some of the beef stew she made for her brothers before they left..But she put rat poison in the stew and the stew she made for her father was from their bodies.  She showed him the bones and the two heads she had hung from the rafters and used for batting practice.   Father started vomiting so she hit him over the head with the baseball bat, put the shotgun is his mouth and pulled the trigger.  She says she will show the boys the heads after they finish their stew.  She says  her Daddy taught her how to tell a Devil.  You put your hand between its legs and if you feel a snake there, it’s the Devil.