The Devil All the Time

1

IT WAS A WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON in the fall of 1945, not long after the war had ended. The Greyhound made its regular stop in Meade, Ohio, a little paper-mill town an hour south of Columbus that smelled like rotten eggs. Strangers complained about the stench, but the locals liked to brag that it was the sweet smell of money. The bus driver, a soft, sawed-off man who wore elevated shoes and a limp bow tie, pulled in the alley beside the depot and announced a forty-minute break. He wished he could have a cup of coffee, but his ulcer was acting up again. He yawned and took a swig from a bottle of pink medicine he kept on the dashboard. The smokestack across town, by far the tallest structure in this part of the state, belched forth another dirty brown cloud. You could see it for miles, puffing like a volcano about to blow its skinny top.

Leaning back in his seat, the bus driver pulled his leather cap down over his eyes. He lived right outside of Philadelphia, and he thought that if he ever had to live in a place like Meade, Ohio, he’d go ahead and shoot himself. You couldn’t even find a bowl of lettuce in this town. All that people seemed to eat here was grease and more grease. He’d be dead in two months eating the slop they did. His wife told her friends that he was delicate, but there was something about the tone of her voice that sometimes made him wonder if she was really being sympathetic. If it hadn’t been for the ulcer, he would have gone off to fight with the rest of the men. He’d have slaughtered a whole platoon of Germans and shown her just how goddamn delicate he was. The biggest regret was all the medals he’d missed out on. His old man once got a certificate from the railroad for not missing a single day of work in twenty years, and had pointed it out to his sickly son every time he’d seen him for the next twenty. When the old man finally croaked, the bus driver tried to talk his mother into sticking the certificate in the casket with the body so he wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. But she insisted on leaving it displayed in the living room as an example of what a person could attain in this life if he didn’t let a little indigestion get in his way. The funeral, an event the bus driver had looked forward to for a long time, had nearly been ruined by all the arguing over that crummy scrap of paper. He would be glad when all the discharged soldiers finally reached their destinations so he wouldn’t have to look at the dumb bastards anymore. It wore on you after a while, other people’s accomplishments.

Private Willard Russell had been drinking in the back of the bus with two sailors from Georgia, but one had passed out and the other had puked in their last jug. He kept thinking that if he ever got home, he’d never leave Coal Creek, West Virginia, again. He’d seen some hard things growing up in the hills, but they didn’t hold a candle to what he’d witnessed in the South Pacific. On one of the Solomons, he and a couple of other men from his outfit had run across a marine skinned alive by the Japanese and nailed to a cross made out of two palm trees. The raw, bloody body was covered with black flies. They could still see the man’s heart beating in his chest. His dog tags were hanging from what remained of one of his big toes: Gunnery Sergeant Miller Jones. Unable to offer anything but a little mercy, Willard shot the marine behind the ear, and they took him down and covered him with rocks at the foot of the cross. The inside of Willard’s head hadn’t been the same since.

When he heard the tubby bus driver yell something about a break, Willard stood up and started toward the door, disgusted with the two sailors. In his opinion, the navy was one branch of the military that should never be allowed to drink. In the three years he’d served in the army, he hadn’t met a single swabby who could hold his liquor. Someone had told him that it was because of the saltpeter they were fed to keep them from going crazy and fucking each other when they were out to sea. He wandered outside the bus depot and saw a little restaurant across the street called the Wooden Spoon. There was a piece of white cardboard stuck in the window advertising a meat loaf special for thirty-five cents. His mother had fixed him a meat loaf the day before he left for the army, and he considered that a good sign. In a booth by the window, he sat down and lit a cigarette. A shelf ran around the room, lined with old bottles and antique kitchenware and cracked black-and-white photographs for the dust to collect on. Tacked to the wall by the booth was a faded newspaper account of a Meade police officer who’d been gunned down by a bank robber in front of the bus depot. Willard looked closer, saw that it was dated February 11, 1936. That would have been four days before his twelfth birthday, he calculated. An old man, the only other customer in the diner, was bent over at a table in the middle of the room slurping a bowl of green soup. His false teeth rested on top of a stick of butter in front of him.

Willard finished the cigarette and was just getting ready to leave when a dark-haired waitress finally stepped out of the kitchen. She grabbed a menu from a stack by the cash register and handed it to him. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t hear you come in.” Looking at her high cheekbones and full lips and long, slender legs, Willard discovered, when she asked him what he wanted to eat, that the spit had dried in his mouth. He could barely speak. That had never happened to him before, not even in the middle of the worst fighting on Bougainville. While she went to put the order in and get him a cup of coffee, the thought went through his head that just a couple of months ago he was certain that his life was going to end on some steamy, worthless rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; and now here he was, still sucking air and just a few hours from home, being waited on by a woman who looked like a live version of one of those pinup movie angels. As best as Willard could ever tell, that was when he fell in love. It didn’t matter that the meat loaf was dry and the green beans were mushy and the roll as hard as a lump of #5 coal. As far as he was concerned, she served him the best meal he ever had in his life. And after he finished it, he got back on the bus without even knowing Charlotte Willoughby’s name.

Across the river in Huntington, he found a liquor store when the bus made another stop, and bought five pints of bonded whiskey that he stuck away in his pack. He sat in the front now, right behind the driver, thinking about the girl in the diner and looking for some indication that he was getting close to home. He was still a little drunk. Out of the blue, the bus driver said, “Bringing any medals back?” He glanced at Willard in the rearview mirror.

Willard shook his head. “Just this skinny old carcass I’m walking around in.”

“I wanted to go, but they wouldn’t take me.”

“You’re lucky,” Willard said. The day they’d come across the marine, the fighting on the island was nearly over, and the sergeant had sent them out looking for some water fit to drink. A couple of hours after they buried Miller Jones’s flayed body, four starving Japanese soldiers with fresh bloodstains on their machetes came out of the rocks with their hands up in the air and surrendered. When Willard and his two buddies started to lead them back to the location of the cross, the soldiers dropped to their knees and started begging or apologizing, he didn’t know which. “They tried to escape,” Willard lied to the sergeant later in the camp. “We didn’t have no choice.” After they had executed the Japs, one of the men with him, a Louisiana boy who wore a swamp rat’s foot around his neck to ward off slant-eyed bullets, cut their ears off with a straight razor. He had a cigar box full of ones he’d already dried. His plan was to sell the trophies for five bucks apiece once they got back to civilization.

“I got an ulcer,” the bus driver said.

“You didn’t miss nothing.”

“I don’t know,” the bus driver said. “I sure would have liked to got me a medal. Maybe a couple of them. I figure I could have killed enough of those Kraut bastards for two anyway. I’m pretty quick with my hands.”

Looking at the back of the bus driver’s head, Willard thought about the conversation he’d had with the gloomy young priest on board the ship after he confessed that he’d shot the marine to put him out of his misery. The priest was sick of all the death he’d seen, all the prayers he’d said over rows of dead soldiers and piles of body parts. He told Willard that if even half of history was true, then the only thing this depraved and corrupt world was good for was preparing you for the next. “Did you know,” Willard said to the driver, “that the Romans used to gut donkeys and sew Christians up alive inside the carcasses and leave them out in the sun to rot?” The priest had been full of such stories.

“What the hell’s that got to do with a medal?”

“Just think about it. You’re trussed up like a turkey in a pan with just your head sticking out a dead donkey’s ass; and then the maggots eating away at you until you see the glory.”

The bus driver frowned, gripped the steering wheel a little tighter. “Friend, I don’t see what you’re getting at. I was talking about coming home with a big medal pinned to your chest. Did these Roman fellers give out medals to them people before they stuck ’em in the donkeys? Is that what you mean?”

Willard didn’t know what he meant. According to the priest, only God could figure out the ways of men. He licked his dry lips, thought about the whiskey in his pack. “What I’m saying is that when it comes right down to it, everybody suffers in the end,” Willard said.

“Well,” the bus driver said, “I’d liked to have my medal before then. Heck, I got a wife at home who goes nuts every time she sees one. Talk about suffering. I worry myself sick anytime I’m out on the road she’s gonna take off with a purple heart.”

Willard leaned forward and the driver felt the soldier’s hot breath on the back of his fat neck, smelled the whiskey fumes and the stale traces of a cheap lunch. “You think Miller Jones would give a shit if his old lady was out fucking around on him?” Willard said. “Buddy, he’d trade places with you any goddamn day.”

“Who the hell is Miller Jones?”

Willard looked out the window as the hazy top of Greenbrier Mountain started to appear in the distance. His hands were trembling, his brow shiny with sweat. “Just some poor bastard who went and fought in that war they cheated you out of, that’s all.”

WILLARD WAS JUST GETTING READY to break down and crack open one of the pints when his uncle Earskell pulled up in his rattly Ford in front of the Greyhound station in Lewisburg at the corner of Washington and Court. He had been sitting on a bench outside for almost three hours, nursing a cold coffee in a paper cup and watching people walk by the Pioneer Drugstore. He was ashamed of the way he’d talked to the bus driver, sorry that he’d brought up the marine’s name like he did; and he vowed that, though he would never forget him, he’d never mention Gunnery Sergeant Miller Jones to anyone again. Once they were on the road, he reached into his duffel and handed Earskell one of the pints along with a German Luger. He’d traded a Japanese ceremonial sword for the pistol at the base in Maryland right before he got discharged. “That’s supposed to be the gun Hitler used to blow his brains out,” Willard said, trying to hold back a grin.

“Bullshit,” Earskell said.

Willard laughed. “What? You think the guy lied to me?”

“Ha!” the old man said. He twisted the cap off the bottle, took a long pull, then shuddered. “Lord, this is good stuff.”

“Drink up. I got three more in my kit.” Willard opened another pint and lit a cigarette. He stuck his arm out the window. “How’s my mother doing?”

“Well, I gotta say, when they sent Junior Carver’s body back, she went a little off in the head there for a while. But she seems pretty good now.” Earskell took another hit off the pint and set it between his legs. “She just been worried about you, that’s all.”

They climbed slowly into the hills toward Coal Creek. Earskell wanted to hear some war stories, but the only thing his nephew talked about for the next hour was some woman he’d met in Ohio. It was the most he’d ever heard Willard talk in his life. He wanted to ask if it was true that the Japs ate their own dead, like the newspaper said, but he figured that could wait. Besides, he needed to pay attention to his driving. The whiskey was going down awful smooth, and his eyes weren’t as good as they used to be. Emma had been waiting on her son to return home for a long time, and it would be a shame if he wrecked and killed them both before she got to see him. Earskell chuckled a little to himself at the thought of that. His sister was one of the most God-fearing people he’d ever met, but she’d follow him straight into hell to make him pay for that one.

“WELL, WHAT IS IT EXACTLY you like about this girl?” Emma Russell asked Willard. It had been near midnight when he and Earskell parked the Ford at the bottom of the hill and climbed the path to the small log house. When he came through the door, she carried on for quite a while, grabbing onto him and soaking the front of his uniform with her tears. He watched over her shoulder as his uncle slipped into the kitchen. Her hair had turned gray since Willard had seen her last. “I’d ask you to get down with me and thank Jesus,” she said, wiping the tears from her face with the hem of her apron, “but I can smell liquor on your breath.”

Willard nodded. He’d been brought up to believe that you never talked to God when you were under the influence. A man needed to be sincere with the Master at all times in case he was ever really in need. Even Willard’s father, Tom Russell, a moonshiner who’d been hounded by bad luck and trouble right up to the day he died of a diseased liver in a Parkersburg jail, ascribed to that belief. No matter how desperate the situation — and his old man had been caught in plenty of those — he wouldn’t ask for help from on High if he had even a spoonful in him.

“Well, come on back to the kitchen,” Emma said. “You can eat and I’ll put on some coffee. I made you a meat loaf.”

By three in the morning, he and Earskell had killed four pints along with a cupful of shine and were working on the last bottle of store-bought. Willard’s head was fuzzy, and he was having a hard time putting his words together, though evidently he’d mentioned to his mother the waitress he’d seen in the diner. “What was that you asked me?” he said to her.

“That girl you was talkin’ about,” she said. “What is it you like about her?” She was pouring him another cup of boiling coffee from a pan. Though his tongue was numb, he was sure he’d already burned it more than once. A kerosene lamp hanging from a beam in the ceiling lit the room. His mother’s wide shadow wavered on the wall. He spilled some coffee on the oilcloth that covered the table. Emma shook her head and reached behind her for a dishrag.

“Everything,” he said. “You should see her.”

Emma figured it was just the whiskey talking, but her son’s announcement that he’d met a woman still made her uneasy. Mildred Carver, as good a Christian woman as ever there was in Coal Creek, had prayed for her Junior every day, but they’d still sent him home in a box. Right after she heard that the pallbearers doubted that there was even anything in the casket, as light as it was, Emma started looking for a sign that would tell her what to do to guarantee Willard’s safety. She was still searching when Helen Hatton’s family burned up in a house fire, leaving the poor girl all alone. Two days later, after much deliberation, Emma got down on her knees and promised God that if He would bring her son home alive, she’d make sure that he married Helen and took care of her. But now, standing in the kitchen looking at his dark, wavy hair and chiseled features, she realized she’d been crazy to ever pledge such a thing. Helen wore a dirty bonnet tied under her square chin, and her long, horsey face was the spitting image of her grandmother Rachel’s, considered by many the homeliest woman who ever walked the ridges of Greenbrier County. At the time, Emma hadn’t considered what might happen if she couldn’t keep her promise. If only she had been blessed with an ugly son, she thought. God had some funny ideas when it came to letting people know He was displeased.

“Looks ain’t everything,” Emma said.

“Who says?”

“Shut up, Earskell,” Emma said. “What’s that girl’s name again?”

Willard shrugged. He squinted at the picture of Jesus carrying the cross that hung above the door. Ever since entering the kitchen, he had avoided looking at it, for fear of ruining his homecoming with more thoughts of Miller Jones. But now, just for a moment, he gave himself over to the image. The picture had been there as long as he could remember, spotty with age in a cheap wooden frame. It seemed almost alive in the flickering light from the lantern. He could almost hear the cracks of the whips, the taunts of Pilate’s soldiers. He glanced down at the German Luger lying on the table by Earskell’s plate.

“What? You don’t even know her name?”

“Didn’t ask,” Willard said. “I left her a dollar tip, though.”

“She won’t forget that,” Earskell said.

“Well, maybe you ought to pray about it before you go traipsing back up to Ohio,” Emma said. “That’s a long ways off.” All her life, she had believed that people should follow the Lord’s will and not their own. A person had to trust that everything turns out just as it’s supposed to in this world. But then Emma had lost that faith, ended up trying to barter with God like He was nothing more than a horse trader with a plug of chew in his jaw or a ragged tinker out peddling dented wares along the road. Now, no matter how it turned out, she had to at least make an effort to uphold her part of the bargain. After that, she would leave it up to Him. “I don’t think that would hurt none, do you? If you prayed on it?” She turned and started covering what was left of the meat loaf with a clean towel.

Willard blew on his coffee, then took a sip and grimaced. He thought about the waitress, the tiny, barely visible scar above her left eyebrow. Two weeks, he figured, and then he’d drive up and talk to her. He glanced over at his uncle trying to roll a cigarette. Earskell’s hands were gnarled and twisted with arthritis, the knuckles big around as quarters. “No,” Willard said, pouring a little whiskey into his cup, “that never hurt none at all.”

2

WILLARD WAS HUNGOVER and shaky and sitting by himself on one of the back benches in the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified. It was nearly seven thirty on a Thursday evening, but the service hadn’t started yet. It was the fourth night of the church’s annual weeklong revival, aimed mostly at backsliders and those who hadn’t been saved yet. Willard had been home over a week, and this was the first day he’d drawn a sober breath. Last night he and Earskell had gone to the Lewis Theater to see John Wayne in Back to Bataan. He walked out halfway through the movie, disgusted with the phoniness of it all, ended up in a fight at the pool hall down the street. He roused himself and looked around, flexed his sore hand. Emma was still up front visiting. Smoky lanterns hung along the walls; a dented wood stove sat halfway down the aisle off to the right. The pine benches were worn smooth by over twenty years of worship. Though the church was the same humble place it had always been, Willard was afraid that he had changed quite a bit since he had been overseas.

Reverend Albert Sykes had started the church in 1924, shortly after a coal mine collapsed and trapped him in the dark with two other men who’d been killed instantly. Both of his legs had been broken in several places. He managed to reach a pack of Five Brothers chewing tobacco in Phil Drury’s pocket, but he couldn’t stretch far enough to grab hold of the butter and jam sandwich he knew Burl Meadows was carrying in his coat. He said he was touched by the Spirit on the third night. He realized he was going to soon join the men beside him, already putrid with the smell of death, but it didn’t matter anymore. A few hours later, the rescuers broke through the rubble while he was asleep. For a moment, he was convinced that the light they shined in his eyes was the face of the Lord. It was a good story to tell in church, and there were always a lot of Hallelujahs when he came to that part. Willard figured he’d heard the old preacher tell it a hundred times over the years, limping back and forth in front of the varnished pulpit. At the end of the story, he always pulled the empty Five Brothers pack out of his threadbare suit coat, held it up toward the ceiling cradled in the palms of his hands. He carried it with him everywhere. Many of the women around Coal Creek, especially those who still had husbands and sons in the mines, treated it like a religious relic, kissing it whenever they got a chance. It was a fact that Mary Ellen Thompson, on her deathbed, had asked for it to be brought to her instead of the doctor.

Willard watched his mother talking to a thin woman wearing wire-rim glasses set crooked on her long, slender face, a faded blue bonnet tied under her pointy chin. After a couple of minutes, Emma grabbed the woman’s hand and led her back to where Willard was sitting. “I asked Helen to sit with us,” Emma told her son. He stood up and let them in, and as the girl passed by him, the odor of old sweat made his eyes water. She carried a worn leather Bible, kept her head down when Emma introduced her. Now he understood why his mother had been going on for the last few days about why good looks were not all that important. He would agree that was true in most cases, that the spirit was more important than the flesh, but hell, even his uncle Earskell washed his armpits once in a while.

Because the church had no bell, Reverend Sykes went to the open door when it was time for the service to start and shouted to those still loitering outside with their cigarettes and gossip and doubts. A small choir, two men and three women, stood up and sang “Sinner, You’d Better Get Ready.” Then Sykes went to the pulpit. He looked out over the crowd, wiped the sweat off his brow with a white handkerchief. There were fifty-eight people sitting on the benches. He’d counted twice. The reverend wasn’t a greedy man, but he was hoping on the basket bringing in maybe three or four dollars tonight. He and his wife had been eating nothing but hardtack and warbled squirrel meat for the past week. “Whew, it’s hot,” he said with a grin. “But it’s bound to get hotter, ain’t that right? Especially for them that ain’t right with the Lord.”

“Amen,” someone said.

“Surely is,” said another.

“Well,” Sykes went on, “we gonna take care of that shortly. They’s two boys from over around Topperville gonna lead the service tonight, and from what everyone tells me, they got a good message.” He glanced at the two strangers sitting in the shadows off to the side of the altar, hidden from the congregation by a frayed black curtain. “Brother Roy and Brother Theodore, get on over here and help us save some lost souls,” he said, motioning them forward with his hand.

A tall, skinny man stood up and pushed the other, a fat boy in a squeaky wheelchair, out from behind the curtain and near the center of the altar. The one with the good legs wore a baggy black suit and a pair of heavy, broken-down brogans. His brown hair was slicked back with oil, his sunken cheeks pitted and scarred purple from acne. “My name is Roy Laferty,” he said in a quiet voice, “and this here is my cousin, Theodore Daniels.” The cripple nodded and smiled at the crowd. He held a banged-up guitar in his lap and sported a soup-bowl haircut. His overalls were mended with patches cut from a feed sack, and his thin legs were twisted up under him at sharp angles. He had on a dirty white shirt and a brightly flowered tie. Later, Willard said that one looked like the Prince of Darkness and the other like a clown down on his luck.

In silence Brother Theodore finished tuning a string on his flattop. A few people yawned, and others began whispering among themselves, already fidgety with what seemed to be the beginning of a boring service by a couple of shy and wasted newcomers. Willard wished he’d slipped out to the parking lot and found someone with a jug before things got started. He had never felt comfortable worshipping God around strangers packed together inside a building. “We ain’t passing no basket tonight, folks,” Brother Roy finally said after the cripple nodded that he was ready. “Don’t want no money for doing the Lord’s work. Me and Theodore can get by on the sweetness of the air if we have to, and, believe me, we’ve done it a many a time. Savin’ souls ain’t about the filthy dollar.” Roy looked to the old preacher, who managed a sick smile and nodded in reluctant agreement. “Now we gonna summon the Holy Ghost to this little church tonight, or, I swear to you all, we gonna die trying.” And with that, the fat boy hit a lick on the guitar and Brother Roy leaned back and let out a high, awful wail that sounded as if he was trying to shake the very gates of heaven loose. Half the congregation nearly jumped out of their seats. Willard chuckled when he felt his mother jerk against him.

The young preacher started pacing up and down the center of the aisle asking people in a loud voice, “Now what is it you most afraid of?” He waved his arms and described the loathsomeness of hell — the filth, horror, and despair — and the eternity that stretches out in front of everyone forever and ever without end. “If your worst fear is rats, then Satan will make sure you get your fill of ’em. Brothers and sisters, they’ll chew your face off while you lay there unable to lift a single finger against them, and it won’t ever cease. A million years in eternity ain’t even an afternoon here in Coal Creek. Don’t even try and figure that up. Ain’t no human head big enough to calculate misery like that. Remember that family over in Millersburg got murdered in their beds last year? The ones had their eyes cut out by that lunatic? Imagine that for a trillion years — that’s a million million, people, I looked it up — being tortured like that, but never dying. Having your peepers plucked out of your head with a bloody ol’ knife over and over again, forever. I hope them poor people was right with the Lord when that maniac slipped in their window, I surely do. And really, brothers and sisters, we can’t even picture the ways the Devil’s got to torment us, ain’t no man ever been evil enough, not even that Hitler feller, to come up with the ways Satan is gonna make the sinners pay come the Judgment Day.”

While Brother Roy preached, Theodore kept up a rhythm on the guitar that matched the flow of the words, his eyes following the other’s every movement. Roy was his cousin on his mother’s side, but sometimes the fat boy wished they weren’t so closely related. Though he was satisfied with just being able to spread the Gospel with him, he’d had feelings for a long time that he couldn’t pray away. He knew what the Bible said, but he couldn’t accept that the Lord thought such a thing a sin. Love was love, the way Theodore saw it. Heck, hadn’t he proved that, showed God that he loved him more than anyone? Taking that poison until he wound up a cripple, showing the Lord that he had the faith, even though sometimes now he couldn’t help thinking that maybe he’d been a little too enthusiastic. But for now, he had God and he had Roy and he had his guitar, and that was all he needed to get by in this world, even if he never did get to stand up straight again. And if Theodore had to prove to Roy how much he loved him, he’d gladly do that, too, anything he asked. God was Love; and He was everywhere, in everything.

Then Roy hopped back up on the altar, reached under Brother Theodore’s wheelchair, and brought out a gallon jar. Everyone leaned forward a bit on the benches. A dark mass seemed to be boiling inside it. Someone called out, “Praise God,” and Brother Roy said, “That’s right, my friend, that’s right.” He held up the jar and gave it a violent shake. “People, let me tell you something,” he went on. “Before I found the Holy Ghost, I was scared plumb to death of spiders. Ain’t that right, Theodore? Ever since I was a little runt hiding under my mother’s long skirts. Spiders crawled through my dreams and laid eggs in my nightmares, and I couldn’t even go to the outhouse without someone holding my hand. They was hanging in their webs everywhere waiting on me. It was an awful way to live, in fear all the time, awake or asleep, it didn’t matter. And that’s what hell is like, brothers and sisters. I never got no rest from them eight-legged devils. Not until I found the Lord.”

Then Roy dropped to his knees and gave the jar another jiggle before he twisted the lid off. Theodore slowed the music down until all that was left was a sad, ominous dirge that chilled the room, raised the short hairs on the backs of necks. Holding the jar above him, Roy looked out over the crowd and took a deep breath and turned it over. A variegated mass of spiders, brown ones and black ones and orange-and-yellow-striped ones, fell on top of his head and shoulders. Then a shiver ran through his body like an electric current, and he stood up and slammed the jar to the floor, sending shards of glass flying everywhere. He let out that awful screech again, and began shaking his arms and legs, the spiders falling off onto the floor and scurrying away in all directions. Some lady wrapped in a knitted shawl jumped up and hurried toward the door and several more screamed, and in the midst of the commotion, Roy stepped forward, a few spiders still clinging to his sweaty face, and yelled, “Mark my word, people, the Lord, He’ll take away all your fears if you let Him. Look what He’s done for me.” Then he gagged a little, spit something black out of his mouth.

Another woman started beating at her dress, crying out that she’d been bit, and a couple of children started blubbering. Reverend Sykes ran back and forth attempting to restore some order, but by then people were scrambling toward the narrow door in a panic. Emma took Helen by the arm, trying to lead her out of the church. But the girl shook her off and turned and walked into the aisle. She held her Bible against her flat chest as she stared at Brother Roy. Still strumming his guitar, Theodore watched his cousin nonchalantly brush a spider off his ear, then smile at the frail, plain-looking girl. He didn’t stop playing until he saw Roy beckon the bitch forward with his hands.

ON THE DRIVE HOME, WILLARD SAID, “Boy, them spiders was a nice touch.” He slipped his right hand over and began moving his fingers lightly up his mother’s fat, jiggly arm.

She squealed and swatted at him. “Quit that. I won’t be able to sleep tonight as it is.”

“You ever heard that boy preach before?”

“No, but they do some crazy stuff at that church over in Topperville. I’ll bet Reverend Sykes is regrettin’ he ever invited them. That one in the wheelchair drank too much strychnine or antifreeze or something is why he can’t walk. It’s just pitiful. Testing their faith, they call it. But that’s taking things a little bit too far, the way I see it.” She sighed and leaned her head back against the seat. “I wish Helen had come with us.”

“Well, wasn’t nobody slept through that sermon, I’ll give him that.”

“You know,” Emma said, “she might have if you’d paid a little more attention to her.”

“Oh, the way it looked to me, Brother Roy’s gonna give her about as much of that as she can handle.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Emma said.

“Mother, I’m going back up to Ohio in a day or two. You know that.”

Emma ignored him. “She’d make someone a good wife, Helen would.”

SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER WILLARD LEFT for Ohio to find out about the waitress, Helen knocked on Emma’s door. It was early in the afternoon on a warm November day. The old woman was sitting in her parlor listening to the radio and reading again the letter she’d received that morning. Willard and the waitress had gotten married a week ago. They were going to stay in Ohio, at least for now. He’d gotten a job at a meatpacking plant, said he had never seen so many hogs in his life. The man on the radio was blaming the unseasonable weather on the fallout from the atomic bombs unleashed to win the war.

“I wanted to tell you first because I know you been worried about me,” Helen said. It was the first time Emma had ever seen her without a bonnet on her head.

“Tell me what, Helen?”

“Roy asked me to marry him,” she said. “He said God give him a sign we was meant for each other.”

Standing in the doorway with Willard’s letter in her hand, Emma thought about the promise she’d been unable to keep. She’d been dreading a violent accident, or some horrible disease, but this was good news. Maybe things were going to turn out all right after all. She felt her eyes start to blur with tears. “Where you all going to live?” she asked, unable to think of anything else to say.

“Oh, Roy’s got a place behind the gas station in Topperville,” Helen said. “Theodore, he’ll be staying with us. At least for a little while.”

“That’s the one in the wheelchair?”

“Yes’m,” Helen said. “They been together a long time.”

Emma stepped out onto the porch and hugged the girl. She smelled faintly of Ivory soap, as if she’d had a bath recently. “You want to come in and sit for a while?”

“No, I got to go,” Helen said. “Roy’s waiting on me.” Emma looked past her down over the hill. A dung-colored car shaped like a turtle was sitting in the pull-off behind Earskell’s old Ford. “He’s preaching over in Millersburg tonight, where them people got their eyes carved out. We been out gathering spiders all morning. Thank God, with the way this weather’s been, they’re still pretty easy to find.”

“You be careful, Helen,” Emma said.

“Oh, don’t worry,” the girl said, as she started down off the porch, “they ain’t too bad once you get used to them.”

3

IN THE SPRING OF 1948, Emma got word from Ohio that she was finally a grandmother; Willard’s wife had given birth to a healthy baby boy named Arvin Eugene. By then, the old woman was satisfied that God had forgiven her for her brief loss of trust. It had been nearly three years, and nothing bad had happened. A month later, she was still thanking the Lord that her grandson hadn’t been born blind and pinheaded like Edith Maxwell’s three children over on Spud Run when Helen showed up at her door with an announcement of her own. It was one of the few times Emma had seen her since the girl married Roy and switched to the church over in Topperville. “I wanted to stop by and let you know,” Helen said. Her arms and legs were pale and thin, but her belly was swollen big with a baby.

“My goodness gracious,” Emma said, opening the screen door. “Come on in, honey, and rest awhile.” It was late in the day, and gray-blue shadows covered the weedy yard. A chicken clucked quietly under the porch.

“I can’t right now.”

“Oh, don’t be in such a hurry. Let me fix you something to eat,” the old woman said. “We haven’t talked in ages.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Russell, but maybe some other time. I got to get back.”

“Is Roy preaching tonight?”

“No,” Helen said. “He ain’t preached in a couple of months now. Didn’t you hear? One of them spiders bit him real bad. His head puffed up big as a pumpkin. It was awful. He couldn’t open his eyes for a week or better.”

“Well,” the old woman said, “maybe he can get on with the power company. Someone said they was hiring. They supposed to be running the electric through here before long.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Helen said. “Roy ain’t give up preaching, he’s just waiting for a message.”

“A message?”

“He ain’t sent one in a while, and it’s got Roy worried.”

“Who ain’t sent one?”

“Why, the Lord, Mrs. Russell,” Helen said. “He’s the only one Roy listens to.” She started to step down off the porch.

“Helen?”

The girl stopped and turned around. “Yes’m?”

Emma hesitated, not quite knowing what to say. She looked past the girl, down the hill at the dung-colored car. She could see a dark figure sitting behind the steering wheel. “You’ll make a good mother,” she said.

AFTER THE SPIDER BITE, Roy stayed shut up in the bedroom closet most of the time waiting on a sign. He was convinced that the Lord had slowed him down in order to prepare him for something bigger. As far as Theodore was concerned, Roy knocking the bitch up was the last straw. He began drinking and staying out all night, playing in private clubs and illegal joints hid back in the sticks. He learned dozens of sinful songs about cheating spouses and cold-blooded murders and lives wasted behind prison bars. Whoever he ended up with usually just dumped him drunk and piss-stained in front of the house; and Helen would have to go out at dawn and help him inside while he cursed her and his ruined legs and that pretend preacher she was fucking. She soon grew afraid of them both, and she traded Theodore rooms, let him sleep in the big bed beside Roy’s closet.

One afternoon a few months after the baby was born, a little girl they named Lenora, Roy walked out of the bedroom convinced that he could raise the dead. “Shit, you’re just a loony,” Theodore said. He was drinking a can of warm beer to settle his stomach. A small metal file and a Craftsman screwdriver lay in his lap. The night before, he’d played for eight hours straight at a birthday party over on Hungry Holler for ten dollars and a fifth of Russian vodka. Some bastard had made fun of his affliction, tried to pull him up out of his wheelchair and make him dance. Theodore set the beer down and started working on the head of the screwdriver again. He hated the whole goddamn world. The next time someone fucked with him like that, the sonofabitch was going to end up with a hole in his guts. “You ain’t got it no more, Roy. The Lord done left you, just like He left me.”

“No, Theodore, no,” Roy said. “That ain’t true. I just talked to Him. He was sitting right in there with me a minute ago. And He don’t look like the pictures say, either. Ain’t got no beard for one thing.”

“Loony as hell,” Theodore said.

“I can prove it!”

“How you gonna do that?”

Roy paced back and forth a couple of minutes, moving his hands around like he was trying to stir inspiration up out of the air. “We’ll go kill us a cat,” he said, “and I’ll show you I can bring it back.” Next to spiders, cats were Roy’s biggest fear. His mother had always claimed that she caught one trying to suck his breath away when he was a baby. He and Theodore had slaughtered dozens of them over the years.

“You’re kidding me, right?” Theodore said. “A fuckin’ cat?” He laughed. “No, you gonna have to get a little more serious than that before I’ll believe you now.” He pressed his thumb against the end of the screwdriver. It was sharp.

Roy wiped the sweat from his face with one of the baby’s dirty diapers. “What then?”

Theodore glanced out the window. Helen was standing in the yard with the pink-faced brat in her arms. She’d gotten huffy with him again this morning, said she was getting tired of him waking the baby up. She had been bitching a lot lately, too damn much in his opinion. Hell, if it wasn’t for the money he brought home, they’d all starve to death. He gave Roy a sly look. “How about you bring Helen back to life? Then we’ll know for sure you ain’t just talkin’ crazy.”

Roy shook his head violently. “No, no, I can’t do that.”

Theodore smirked, picked up the can of beer. “See? I knew you was full of shit. You always have been. You ain’t no more a preacher than them drunks I play for every night.”

“Don’t say that, Theodore,” Roy said. “Why you want to say things like that?”

“Because we had it good, goddamn it, and then you had to go and get married. It’s drained the light right out of you, and you too dumb to see it. Show me you got it back, and we’ll start spreading the Gospel again.”

Roy recalled the conversation he’d had in the closet, God’s voice clear as a bell in his head. He looked out the window at his wife standing by the mailbox singing softly to the baby. Maybe Theodore was onto something. After all, he told himself, Helen was right with the Lord, and always had been as far as he knew. That could only help matters when it came to a resurrection. Still, he’d like to try it out on a cat first. “I’ll have to think on it.”

“Can’t be no tricks,” Theodore said.

“Only the Devil needs them.” Roy took a sip of water from the kitchen sink, just enough to wet his lips. Refreshed, he decided to pray some more, and started toward the bedroom.

“If you can pull this off, Roy,” Theodore said, “there won’t be a church in West Virginia big enough to hold all the people that will want to hear you preach. Shit, you’ll be more famous than Billy Sunday.”

A few days later, Roy asked Helen to leave the baby with her friend, the Russell woman, while they took a drive. “Just to get out of the stinking house for a while,” he explained. “I promise you, I’m done with that closet.” Helen was relieved; Roy had suddenly started acting like his old self again, was talking about getting back into preaching. Not only that, Theodore had quit going out at night, was practicing some new religious songs and sticking to coffee. He even held the baby for a few minutes, something he had never done before.

After they dropped off Lenora at Emma’s house, they drove thirty minutes to a woods a few miles east of Coal Creek. Roy parked the car and asked Helen to go for a walk with him. Theodore was in the backseat pretending to be asleep. After going just a few yards, he said, “Maybe we ought to pray first.” He and Theodore had argued about this, Roy saying he wanted it to be a private moment between just him and his wife while the cripple insisted that he needed to see the Spirit leave her firsthand to make sure they weren’t faking it. When they knelt down under a beech tree, Roy pulled Theodore’s screwdriver from beneath his baggy shirt. He put his arm around Helen’s shoulder and gripped her close. Thinking he was being affectionate, she turned to kiss him just as he plunged the sharp point deep into the side of her neck. He let go of her and she fell sideways, then rose up, grabbing frantically for the screwdriver. When she jerked it out of her neck, blood sprayed from the hole and covered the front of Roy’s shirt. Theodore watched out the window as she tried to crawl away. She went only a few feet before falling forward into the leaves and flopping about for a minute or two. He heard her call out Lenora’s name several times. He lit a cigarette and waited a few minutes before he hauled himself out of the car.

Three hours later, Theodore said, “It ain’t gonna happen, Roy.” He sat in his wheelchair a few feet from Helen’s body holding the screwdriver. Roy was down on his knees beside his wife, holding her hand, still trying to coax her back to life. At first his supplications had rung through the woods with faith and fervor, but the longer he went without even a twitch from her cold body, the more garbled and deranged they had become. Theodore could feel the onslaught of a headache. He wished he had brought something to drink.

Roy looked up at his crippled cousin with tears running down his face. “Jesus, I think I killed her.”

Theodore pushed himself closer and pressed the back of his dirty hand against her face. “She’s dead, all right.”

“Don’t you touch her,” Roy yelled.

“I’m just trying to help.”

Roy struck the ground with his fist. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

“I hate to say it, but if they catch you for this, them ol’ boys in Moundsville will fry you like bacon.”

Roy shook his head, wiped the snot from his face with his shirtsleeve. “I don’t know what went wrong. I thought for sure …” His voice dwindled away, and he let go of her hand.

“Shit, you just miscalculated, that’s all,” Theodore said. “Anybody could have done that.”

“What the hell am I gonna do now?” Roy said.

“You could always run,” Theodore said. “That’s the only smart thing to do in a situation like this. I mean, fuck, what you got to lose?”

“Run where?”

“I been sitting here thinking on it, and I figure that old car would probably make it to Florida if you babied it.”

“I don’t know,” Roy said.

“Sure you do,” Theodore said. “Look, once we get there, we sell the car and start preaching again. That’s what we should have been doing all along.” He looked down at pale, bloody Helen. Her whining days were over with. He almost wished he had killed her himself. She had ruined everything. By now, they might have had their own church, maybe even been on the radio.

“We?”

“Well, yeah,” Theodore said, “you gonna need a guitar player, ain’t you?” For a long time he had dreamed of going to Florida, living by the ocean. It was hard to live the crippled life surrounded by all these lousy hills and trees.

“But what about her?” Roy said, pointing at Helen’s body.

“You gonna have to bury her deep, brother,” Theodore said. “I put a shovel in the boot just in case things didn’t turn out like you expected.”

“And Lenora?”

“Believe me, that baby will be better off with the old lady,” Theodore said. “You don’t want your kid growing up running from the law, do you?” He looked up through the trees. The sun had disappeared behind a wall of dark clouds, and the sky had turned the color of ash. The damp smell of rain was in the air. From over around Rocky Gap came a slow, faint rumble of thunder. “Now you better start digging before we get soaked.”

WHEN EARSKELL CAME IN THAT NIGHT, Emma was sitting in a chair by the window rocking Lenora. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and the storm was just starting to ease off. “Helen told me they wouldn’t be gone but a couple hours,” the old woman said. “She only left one bottle of milk.”

“Aw, you know them preachers,” Earskell said. “They probably went out and got on a good one. Hell, from what I hear, that crippled boy could drink me under the table.”

Emma shook her head. “I wish we had a phone. There’s something about this just don’t feel right to me.”

The old man peered down at the sleeping infant. “Poor little thing,” he said. “She looks just like her mother, don’t she?”

4

WHEN ARVIN WAS FOUR YEARS OLD, Willard decided that he didn’t want his son growing up in Meade around all the degenerates. They had been living in Charlotte’s old apartment above the dry cleaners ever since they had gotten married. It seemed to him as if every pervert in southern Ohio was located in Meade. Lately, the newspaper was filled with their sick shenanigans. Just two days ago a man named Calvin Claytor had been arrested in the Sears and Roebuck with a foot of Polish sausage tied to his thigh. According to the Meade Gazette, the suspect, dressed only in ripped coveralls, was caught brushing up against elderly women in what the reporter described as a “lewd and aggressive manner.” As far as Willard was concerned, that Claytor sonofabitch was even worse than the retired state representative the sheriff caught parked along the highway on the outskirts of town with a chicken stuck to his privates, a Rhode Island Red that he’d purchased for fifty cents from a nearby farm. They’d had to take him to the hospital to cut it off. People said that the deputy, out of respect for the other patients or maybe the victim, had covered the hen with his uniform jacket when they marched the man into the ER. “That’s somebody’s mother the bastard was doing that to,” Willard told Charlotte.

“Which one?” she asked. She was standing at the stove stirring a pot of spaghetti.

“Jesus, Charlotte, the sausage man,” he said. “They oughta cram that thing down his throat.”

“I don’t know,” his wife said. “I don’t see that being as bad as someone messing with animals.”

He looked over at Arvin, sitting on the floor rolling a toy truck back and forth. From all indications, the country was going to hell in a hurry. Two months ago, his mother had written him that they had finally found Helen Laferty’s body, what little was left of it anyway, buried in the woods a few miles from Coal Creek. He had read the letter every night for a week. Charlotte had noticed that Willard started becoming increasingly upset about the news in the paper right after that. Though Roy and Theodore were the prime suspects, there hadn’t been a sign of them anywhere for almost three years, so the sheriff still couldn’t rule out that they might have also been murdered and dumped elsewhere. “We don’t know, could have been the same one butchered them people in Millersburg that time,” the sheriff told Emma when he came with the news that Helen’s grave had been found by a couple of ginseng hunters. “He might have killed the girl, then cut them boys up and scattered them. The one in the wheelchair would have been easy pickings, and everybody knows that other one didn’t have sense enough to pour piss out of a boot.”

Regardless of what the law said, Emma was convinced that the two were alive and guilty, and she wouldn’t rest easy until they were locked up or dead. She told Willard she was raising the little girl as best she could. He had sent her a hundred dollars to help pay for a proper burial. Sitting there watching his son, Willard suddenly had an intense desire to pray. Though he hadn’t talked to God in years, not a single petition or word of praise since he’d come across the crucified marine during the war, he could feel it welling up inside him now, the urge to get right with his Maker before something bad happened to his family. But looking around the cramped apartment, he knew he couldn’t get in touch with God here, no more than he’d ever been able to in a church. He was going to need some woods to worship his way. “We got to get out of this place,” he told Charlotte, laying the newspaper down on the coffee table.

THEY RENTED THE FARMHOUSE on top of the Mitchell Flats for thirty dollars a month from Henry Delano Dunlap, a plump, girlish lawyer with shiny, immaculate fingernails who lived over by the Meade Country Club and dabbled in real estate as a hobby. Though at first Charlotte had been against it, she soon fell in love with the leaky, run-down house. She didn’t even mind pumping her water from the well. Within a few weeks after they moved in, she was talking about someday buying it. Her father had died of tuberculosis when she was just five years old, and her mother had succumbed to a blood infection just after Charlotte entered the ninth grade. All her life, she’d lived in gloomy, roach-infested apartments rented by the week or month. The only family member she still had living was her sister, Phyllis, but Charlotte didn’t even know where she was anymore. One day six years ago, Phyllis had walked into the Wooden Spoon wearing a new hat and handed Charlotte her key to the three rooms they shared above the dry cleaners on Walnut Street. “Well, Sis,” she said, “I got you raised and now it’s my turn,” and out the door she went. Owning the farmhouse would finally mean some stability in her life, something she craved more than anything, especially now that she was a mother. “Arvin needs to have somewhere he can always call home,” she told Willard. “I never did have that.” Every month they struggled to put another thirty dollars away for a down payment. “You just wait and see,” she said. “This place will be ours someday.”

They discovered, however, that dealing with their landlord about anything was no easy matter. Willard had always heard that most lawyers were crooked, conniving pricks, but Henry Dunlap proved to be first-class in that regard. As soon as he found out that the Russells were interested in buying the house, he started playing games, raising the price one month, reducing it the next, then turning around and hinting that he wasn’t sure he wanted to sell at all. Too, whenever Willard turned in the rent money at the office, money he’d worked his ass off for at the slaughterhouse, the lawyer liked to tell him exactly what he was going to spend it on. For whatever reason, the rich man felt the need to make the poor man understand that those few wadded-up dollars didn’t mean a thing to him. He’d grin at Willard with his liver-colored lips and blow off about how it barely covered the cost of a couple of nice cuts of meat for Sunday dinner, or ice cream for his son’s pals at the tennis club. The years passed by, but Henry never tired of taunting his renter; every month there was a new insult, another reason for Willard to kick the fat man’s ass. The only thing that held him back was thinking about Charlotte, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, waiting nervously for him to return home without getting them evicted. As she reminded him time and time again, it didn’t really matter what the windbag said. Rich people always thought you wanted what they had, though that wasn’t true, at least not in Willard’s case. As he sat across from the lawyer at the big oak desk and listened to him prattle on, Willard thought about the prayer log he’d fixed up in the woods, about the peace and calm it would bring him once he got home and ate supper and made his way over there. Sometimes he even rehearsed in his head a prayer he always said at the log after his monthly visit to the office: “Thank you, God, for giving me the strength to keep my hands off Henry Dunlap’s fat fucking neck. And let the sonofabitch have everything he wants in this life, though I got to confess, Lord, I sure wouldn’t mind seeing him choke on it someday.”

WHAT WILLARD DIDN’T KNOW was that Henry Dunlap used his big talk to hide the fact that his life was a shameful, cowardly mess. In 1943, right out of law school, he’d married a woman who, he discovered not too long after their wedding night, couldn’t get enough of strange men. Edith had fucked around on him for years — paper boys, auto mechanics, salesmen, milkmen, friends, clients, his former partner — the list went on and on. He’d put up with it, had even grown to accept it; but not too long ago, he’d hired a colored man to take care of the lawn, a replacement for the white teenager whom she’d been screwing, believing that even she wouldn’t stoop that low. But within a week, he’d come home in the middle of the day without warning and saw her bent over the couch in the family room with her ass up in the air and the tall, skinny gardener pounding it for all it was worth. She was making sounds that he’d never heard before. After watching for a couple of minutes, he slipped quietly away and returned to his office, where he finished off a bottle of scotch and ran the scene over and over in his head. He pulled a silver-plated derringer out of his desk and contemplated it for a long time, then put it back in the drawer. He thought it best first to consider other ways to solve his problem. No sense in blowing his brains out if he didn’t have to. After practicing law in Meade for nearly fifteen years, he’d made the acquaintance of several men in southern Ohio who probably knew people who would get rid of Edith for as little as a few hundred dollars, but there wasn’t one of them he felt could be trusted. “Don’t get in a hurry now, Henry,” he told himself. “That’s when people fuck up.”

A couple of days later, he hired the black man full-time, even gave him a quarter raise on the hour. He was assigning him a list of jobs to do when Edith pulled in the driveway in her new Cadillac. They both stood in the yard and watched her get out of the car with some shopping bags and walk into the house. She was wearing a tight pair of black slacks and a pink sweater that showed off her big, floppy tits. The gardener looked over at the lawyer with a sly smile on his flat, pocked face. After a moment, Henry smiled back.

“DUMB AS GOATS,” Henry told his golfing buddies. Dick Taylor had asked him about his renters out in Knockemstiff again. Other than listening to Henry brag and make a fool of himself, the other rich men around Meade didn’t have much use for him. He was the biggest joke in the country club. Every single one of them had fucked his wife at one time or another. Edith couldn’t even swim in the pool anymore without some woman trying to scratch her eyes out. Rumor had it she was after the black meat now. Before long, they joked, she and Dunlap would probably move up to White Heaven, the colored section on the west side of town. “I swear,” Henry went on, “I think that ol’ boy married his own goddamn sister, the way they favor each other. By God, you should see her, though. She wouldn’t be half bad if you cleaned her up some. They ever get behind in the rent, maybe I’ll take it out in trade.”

“What would you do to her?” Elliot Smitt asked, winking at Dick Taylor.

“Shit, I’d bend that sweet little thing over, and I’d …”

“Ha!” Bernie Hill said. “You ol’ dog, I bet you’ve already busted it open.”

Henry picked a club from his bag. He sighed and looked dreamily down the fairway, placing one hand over his heart. “Boys, I promised her I wouldn’t tell.”

Later, after they’d returned to the clubhouse, a man named Carter Oxley walked up to the fat, sweating lawyer in the bar and said, “You might want to watch what you say about that woman.”

Henry turned and frowned. Oxley was a new man at the Meade Country Club, an engineer who had worked himself up to the #2 position at the paper mill. Bernie Hill had brought him along to be part of their foursome. He hadn’t said two words the entire game. “What woman?” Henry said.

“You were talking about a man named Willard Russell out there, right?”

“Yeah, Russell’s his name. So?”

“Buddy, it’s no skin off my back, but he damn near killed a man with his fists last fall for talking trash about his wife. The one he beat up still ain’t right, sits around with a coffee can hanging from his neck to catch his slobbers. You might want to think about that.”

“You sure we’re talking about the same guy? The one I know wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.”

Oxley shrugged. “Maybe he’s just the quiet type. Those are the ones you got to watch.”

“How do you know all this?”

“You’re not the only one who owns land out in Knockemstiff.”

Henry pulled a gold cigarette case from his pocket and offered the new man a smoke. “What else do you know about him?” he asked. That morning Edith had told him that she thought they should buy the gardener a pickup truck. She was standing at the kitchen window eating a fluffy pastry. Henry couldn’t help noticing that the top of it was covered with chocolate icing. How appropriate, he thought, the fucking whore. He was glad, though, to see that she was putting on weight. Before long, her ass would be as wide as an ax handle. Let the grass-cutting bastard pound it then. “It doesn’t have to be a new one,” she told him. “Just something he can get around in. Willie’s feet are too big for him to be walking to work all the time.” She reached in the bag for another pastry. “My God, Henry, they’re twice as long as yours.”

5

EVER SINCE THE FIRST OF THE YEAR, Charlotte’s insides had been giving her fits. She kept telling herself it was just the flux, maybe indigestion. Her mother had suffered greatly from ulcers, and Charlotte remembered the woman eating nothing but plain toast and rice pudding the last few years of her life. She cut back on the grease and pepper, but it didn’t seem to help. Then in April, she began bleeding a little. She spent hours lying on top of the bed when Arvin and Willard were gone, and the cramps eased considerably if she curled up on her side and stayed still. Worried about hospital bills and spending all the money they had saved for the house, she kept her pain a secret, foolishly hoping that whatever ailed her would go away, heal itself. After all, she was only thirty years old, too young for it to be anything serious. But by the middle of May, the spotty bleeding had become a steady trickle, and to dull the pain she’d taken to sneaking drinks from the gallon of Old Crow that Willard kept under the kitchen sink. Near the end of that month, right before school let out for the summer, Arvin found her passed out on the kitchen floor in a puddle of watery blood. A pan of biscuits was burning in the oven. They didn’t have a phone, so he propped her head up with a pillow and cleaned up the mess as best he could. Sitting down on the floor beside her, he listened to her shallow breathing and prayed it wouldn’t stop. She was still unconscious when his father came home from work that evening. As the doctor told Willard a couple of days later, it was too late by that time. Someone was always dying somewhere, and in the summer of 1958, the year that Arvin Eugene Russell counted himself ten years old, it was his mother’s turn.

AFTER TWO WEEKS IN THE HOSPITAL, Charlotte raised up in her bed and said to Willard, “I think I had a dream.”

“A good one?”

“Yeah,” she said. She reached out and squeezed his hand a little. She glanced over at the white cloth partition that separated her from the woman in the next bed, then lowered her voice. “I know it sounds crazy, but I want to go home and pretend we own the house for a while.”

“How you gonna do that?”

“With this stuff they got me on,” she said, “they could tell me I was the Queen of Sheba and I wouldn’t know any different. Besides, you heard what the doctor said. I sure as hell don’t want to spend what’s left of my time in this place.”

“Is that what the dream was about?”

She gave him a puzzled look. “What dream?” she said.

Two hours later, they were pulling out of the hospital parking lot. As they headed out Route 50 toward home, Willard stopped and bought her a milk shake, but she couldn’t keep it down. He carried her into the back bedroom and made her comfortable, then gave her some morphine. Her eyes glazed over and she went to sleep within a minute or so. “You stay here with your mother,” he told Arvin. “I’ll be back in a little bit.” He walked across the field, a cool breeze against his face. He knelt down at the prayer log and listened to the small, peaceful sounds of the evening woods. Several hours passed while he stared at the cross. He viewed their misfortune from every conceivable angle, searching for a solution, but always ended up with the same answer. As far as the doctors were concerned, Charlotte’s case was hopeless. They had given her five, maybe six weeks at the most. There were no other options left. It was up to him and God now.

By the time he returned to the house, it was turning dark. Charlotte was still sleeping and Arvin was sitting beside her bed in a straight-backed chair. He could tell the boy had been crying. “Did she ever wake up?” Willard asked, in a low voice.

“Yeah,” Arvin said, “but, Dad, why don’t she know who I am?”

“It’s just the medicine they got her on. She’s gonna be fine in a few days.”

The boy looked over at Charlotte. Just a couple of months ago, she was the prettiest woman he had ever seen, but most of the pretty was gone now. He wondered what she would look like by the time she got well.

“Maybe we better eat something,” Willard said.

He fixed egg sandwiches for him and Arvin, then heated up a can of broth for Charlotte. She threw it up, and Willard cleaned up the mess and held her in his arms, feeling her heart beat rapidly against him. He turned out the light and moved to the chair beside her bed. Sometime during the night he dozed off, but woke up in a sweat dreaming of Miller Jones, the way the man’s heart had kept on throbbing as he hung on those palm trees skinned alive. Willard held the alarm clock close to his face, saw that it was nearly four in the morning. He didn’t go back to sleep.

A few hours later, he poured all his whiskey out on the ground and went to the barn and got some tools: an ax, a rake, a scythe. He spent the rest of the day expanding the clearing around the prayer log, hacking away at the briers and smaller trees, raking the ground smooth. He began tearing boards off the barn the next day, had Arvin help him carry them to the prayer log. Working into the night, they erected eight more crosses around the clearing, all the same height as the original. “Them doctors can’t do your mom any good,” he told Arvin, as they made their way back to the house in the dark. “But I got hopes we can save her if we try hard enough.”

“Is she gonna die?” Arvin said.

Willard thought a second before he answered. “The Lord can do anything if you ask Him right.”

“How we do that?”

“I’ll start showing you first thing in the morning. It won’t be easy, but there ain’t no other choice.”

Willard took a leave of absence from work, told the foreman that his wife was sick, but that she’d soon be better. He and Arvin spent hours praying at the log every day. Every time they started across the field toward the woods, Willard explained again that their voices had to reach heaven, and that the only way that would happen was if they were absolutely sincere with their pleas. As Charlotte grew weaker, the prayers grew louder and began to carry down the hill and across the holler. The people of Knockemstiff woke up to the sound of their entreaties every morning and went to bed with them every night. Sometimes, when Charlotte was having a particularly bad spell, Willard accused his son of not wanting her to get better. He’d strike and kick the boy, and then later sink into remorse. Sometimes it seemed to Arvin as if his father apologized to him every day. After a while, he stopped paying attention and accepted the blows and harsh words and subsequent regrets as just part of the life they were living now. At night, they would go on praying until their voices gave out, then stumble back to the house and drink warm water from the well bucket on the kitchen counter and fall into bed exhausted. In the morning, they’d start all over again. Still, Charlotte grew thinner, closer to death. Whenever she came out of the morphine slumber, she begged Willard to stop this nonsense, just let her go in peace. But he wasn’t about to give up. If it required everything that was in him, then so be it. Any moment, he expected the spirit of God to come down and heal her; and as the second week of July came to an end, he could take a little comfort in the fact that she’d already lasted longer than the doctors had predicted.

It was the first week of August and Charlotte was out of her head most of the time now. While he was trying to cool her off with wet cloths one sweltering evening, it occurred to Willard that maybe something more was expected of him than just prayers and sincerity. The next afternoon he came back from the stockyards in town with a lamb in the bed of the pickup. It had a bad leg and cost only five dollars. Arvin jumped off the porch and ran out into the yard. “Can I give it a name?” he asked as his father brought the truck to a stop in front of the barn.

“Jesus Christ, this ain’t no goddamn pet,” Willard yelled. “Get in the house with your mother.” He backed the truck into the barn and got out and hurriedly tied the animal’s hind legs with a rope, then hoisted the lamb in the air upside down with a pulley attached to one of the wooden beams that supported the hayloft. He moved the truck a few feet forward. Then he lowered the terrified animal until its nose was a couple of feet from the ground. With a butcher knife, he slit its throat and caught the blood in a five-gallon feed bucket. He sat on a bale of straw and waited until the wound stopped dripping. Then he carried the bucket to the prayer log and carefully poured the sacrifice over it. That night, after Arvin went to bed, he hauled the furry carcass to the edge of the field and shoved it off into a ravine.

A couple of days later, Willard began picking up animals killed along the road: dogs, cats, raccoons, possums, groundhogs, deer. The corpses that were too stiff and too far gone to bleed out, he hung from the crosses and the tree limbs around the prayer log. The heat and humidity rotted them quickly. The stench made Arvin and him choke back vomit as they knelt and called out for the Savior’s mercy. Maggots dripped from the trees and crosses like squirming drops of white fat. The ground around the log stayed muddy with blood. The number of insects swarming around them multiplied every day. Both were covered with bites from the flies and mosquitoes and fleas. Despite it being August, Arvin took to wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt and a pair of work gloves and a handkerchief over his face. Neither of them bathed anymore. They lived on lunch meat and crackers bought at Maude’s store. Willard’s eyes grew hard and wild, and it seemed to his son that his matted beard turned gray almost overnight.

“This is what death is like,” Willard said somberly one evening as he and Arvin knelt at the putrid, blood-soaked log. “You want such as this for your mother?”

“No, sir,” the boy said.

Willard struck the top of the log with his fist. “Then pray, goddamn it!”

Arvin pulled the filthy handkerchief from his face and breathed deeply of the rot. From then on, he quit trying to avoid the mess, the endless prayers, the spoiled blood, the rotten carcasses. But still, his mother kept fading. Everything smelled of death now, even the hallway leading back to her sickroom. Willard started locking her door, told Arvin not to disturb her. “She needs her rest,” he said.

6

AS HENRY DUNLAP WAS GETTING READY to leave the office one afternoon, Willard showed up, over a week late on the rent. For the last few weeks, the lawyer had been slipping home in the middle of the day for a few minutes and watching his wife and her black lover go at it. He had a feeling that it was an indication of some kind of sickness on his part, but he couldn’t help himself. His hope, though, was that he could somehow pin Edith’s murder on the man. God knows the bastard deserved it, fucking his white employer’s wife. By then, sled-footed Willie was getting cocky, reporting for work in the mornings smelling of Henry’s private stock of imported cognac and his French aftershave. The lawn looked like hell. He was going to have to hire a eunuch just to get the grass cut. Edith was still pestering him about buying the sonofabitch a vehicle.

“Jesus Christ, man, you don’t look so good,” Henry said to Willard when the secretary let him in.

Willard pulled out his wallet and laid thirty dollars on the desk. “Neither do you, for that matter,” he said.

“Well, I’ve had a lot of things on my mind lately,” the lawyer said. “Grab a chair, sit down a minute.”

“I don’t need none of your shit today,” Willard said. “Just a receipt.”

“Oh, come on,” Henry said, “let’s have a drink. You look like you could use one.”

Willard stood staring at Henry for a moment, not sure he had heard him right. It was the first time Dunlap had ever offered him a drink, or acted the least bit civil since right after he’d signed the lease six years ago. He had come in ready for the lawyer to give him hell about being late with the rent money, had already made up his mind to knock the fuck out of him today if he got too mouthy. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Charlotte needed another prescription filled, but the drugstore was open until six. “Yeah, I reckon I could,” Willard said. He sat down in the wooden chair across from the lawyer’s soft leather one while Henry got two glasses and a bottle of scotch from a cabinet. He poured the drinks, handed the renter one.

Taking a sip from his drink, the lawyer leaned back in his chair and gazed at the money lying on top of the desk in front of Willard. Henry’s stomach was sour from worrying about his wife. He’d been thinking for several weeks about what the golfer had told him about his renter beating the fuck out of that man. “You still interested in buying the house?” Henry asked.

“Ain’t no way I can come up with that kind of money now,” Willard said. “My wife’s sick.”

“I hate to hear that,” the lawyer said. “About your wife, I mean. How bad is it?” He pushed the bottle toward Willard. “Go ahead, help yourself.”

Willard poured two fingers from the bottle. “Cancer,” he said.

“My mother died from it in her lungs,” Henry said, “but that was a long time ago. They’ve come a long way with treating it since then.”

“About that receipt,” Willard said.

“There’s damn near forty acres goes with that place,” Henry said.

“Like I said, I can’t get the money right now.”

The lawyer turned in his chair and looked at the wall away from Willard. The only sound was a fan swiveling back and forth in the corner, blowing hot air around the room. He took another drink. “A while back I caught my wife cheating on me,” he said. “I ain’t been worth a shit since.” Admitting to this hillbilly that he was a cuckold was harder than he thought.

Willard studied the fat man’s profile, watched a trickle of sweat run down his forehead and drip off the end of his lumpy nose onto his white shirt. It didn’t surprise him, what the lawyer said. After all, what sort of woman would marry a man like that? A car went by in the alley. Willard picked up the bottle and poured his glass full. He reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “Yeah, that would be hard to take,” he said. He didn’t give a damn about Dunlap’s marital problems, but he hadn’t had a good drink since he’d brought Charlotte home, and the lawyer’s whiskey was top shelf.

The lawyer looked down into his glass. “I’d just go ahead and divorce her, but, goddamn it, the man she’s fucking is black as the ace of spades,” he said. He looked over at Willard then. “For my boy’s sake, I’d rather the town didn’t know about that.”

“Hell, man, what about kicking his ass?” Willard suggested. “Take a shovel to the bastard’s head, he’ll get the message.” Jesus, Willard thought, rich people did fine and dandy as long as things were going their way, but the minute the shit hit the fan, they fell apart like paper dolls left out in the rain.

Dunlap shook his head. “That won’t do any good. She’d just get her another one,” he said. “My wife’s a whore, been one all her life.” The lawyer pulled a cigarette from the case lying on the desk and lit it. “Oh, well, that’s enough of that shit.” He blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Now about that house again. I’ve been thinking. What if I told you there was a way you could own that place free and clear?”

“Ain’t nothing free,” Willard said.

The lawyer smiled slightly. “There’s some truth to that, I guess. But still, would you be interested?” He set his glass on the desk.

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“Well, neither am I,” Dunlap said, “but how about you call me next week here at the office and maybe we can talk about it. I should have things worked out by then.”

Willard stood up and drained his glass. “That depends,” he said. “I’ll have to see how my wife’s doing.”

Dunlap pointed at the money Willard had laid on the desk. “Go ahead and take that with you,” he said. “Sounds like you might need it.”

“No,” Willard said, “that’s yours. I still want that receipt, though.”

THEY KEPT PRAYING AND SPILLING BLOOD on the log and hanging up twisted, mashed roadkill. All the while, Willard was considering the conversation he’d had with the fat-ass landlord. He’d run it through his head a hundred times, figured Dunlap probably wanted him to kill the black man or the wife or maybe both of them. There wasn’t anything else in the world he could think of that would be worth signing over the land and the house. But he also couldn’t help but wonder why Dunlap would think that he would do something like that; and the only thing Willard could come up with was that the lawyer considered him stupid, was playing him for a fool. He’d make sure his renter’s ass was sitting in jail before the bodies cooled off. For a brief spell, he had thought after talking to Dunlap that maybe there was a chance he could fulfill Charlotte’s dream. But there wasn’t any way they were ever going to own the house. He could see that now.

One day in the middle of August, Charlotte seemed to rally, even ate a bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup and held it down. She wanted to sit on the porch that evening, the first time she’d been out in the fresh air for weeks. Willard took a bath and trimmed his beard and combed his hair, while Arvin heated some popcorn on the stove. A breeze blew in from the west and cooled things off a bit. They drank cold 7-Up and watched the stars slowly cross the sky. Arvin sat on the floor next to her rocking chair. “It’s been a rough summer, hasn’t it, Arvin?” Charlotte said, running her bony hand through his dark hair. He was such a sweet, gentle boy. She hoped Willard would realize that when she was gone. That was something they needed to talk about, she reminded herself again. The medicine made her so forgetful.

“But now you’re getting better,” he said. He stuck another handful of popcorn in his mouth. He hadn’t had a hot meal in weeks.

“Yeah, I feel pretty good for a change,” she said, smiling at him.

She finally went to sleep in the rocker around midnight and Willard carried her to bed. In the middle of the night, she woke up thrashing around with the cancer eating another hole through her. He sat beside her until morning, her long fingernails digging deeper and deeper into the meat of his hand with each new wave of the pain. It was her worst episode yet. “Don’t worry,” he kept telling her. “Everything’s going to get better soon.”

He spent several hours the next morning driving along the back roads searching in the ditches for new sacrifices, but came up empty. That afternoon, he went to the stockyards, reluctantly bought another lamb. But even he had to admit, they didn’t seem to be working. On his way out of town, already in a foul mood, he passed by Dunlap’s office. He was still thinking about that sonofabitch when he suddenly jerked the truck over and stopped along the berm of Western Avenue. Cars drove by honking their horns, but he didn’t hear them. There was one thing that he hadn’t tried yet. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t thought of it earlier.

“I’D ALMOST GIVEN UP ON YOU,” Dunlap said.

“I been busy,” Willard said. “Look, if you still want to talk, how about you meet me at your office at ten o’clock tonight?” He was standing in a phone booth in Dusty’s Bar on Water Street, just a couple of blocks north of the lawyer’s office. According to the clock on the wall, it was almost five. He’d told Arvin to stay in the sickroom with Charlotte, said he might be getting in late. He’d made the boy a pallet on the floor at the foot of her bed.

“Ten o’clock?” the lawyer said.

“That’s as early as I can get there,” Willard said. “It’s up to you.”

“Okay,” the lawyer said. “I’ll see you then.”

Willard bought a pint of whiskey from the bartender and drove around for the next couple of hours listening to the radio. He passed by the Wooden Spoon as it was closing, saw some skinny teenage girl walking out the door with the bowlegged old cook, the same one who had been working the grill there when Charlotte was waiting tables. He probably still couldn’t fix a meat loaf worth a shit, Willard thought. He stopped and filled the truck with gas, then went to the Tecumseh Lounge on the other side of town. Sitting at the bar, he drank a couple of beers, watched a guy wearing thick glasses and a dirty yellow hard hat run the pool table four times in a row. When he walked back out into the gravel lot, the sun was starting to go down behind the paper mill smokestack.

At nine thirty, he was sitting in his truck on Second Street, a block east of the lawyer’s office. A few minutes later, he watched Dunlap park in front of the old brick building and go inside. Willard drove around to the alley, backed up against the building. He took a few deep breaths before getting out of the truck. Reaching behind the seat, he got a hammer and stuffed the handle down his pants, pulled his shirt over it. He looked up and down the alley, then went to the rear door and knocked. After a minute or so, the lawyer opened the door. He was wearing a wrinkled blue shirt and a pair of baggy gray slacks held up by red suspenders. “That’s smart, coming in the back like that,” Dunlap said. He had a glass of whiskey in his hand and his bloodshot eyes indicated that he’d already had a few. As he turned toward his desk, he staggered a bit and farted. “Sorry about that,” he said, just before Willard struck him in the temple with the hammer, a sickening crack filling the room. Dunlap fell forward without a sound, knocking over a bookcase. The glass he’d been holding shattered on the floor. Willard bent over the body and hit him again. When he was sure the man was dead, he leaned against the wall and listened carefully for a while. A couple of cars drove by on the street out front and then nothing.

Willard put on a pair of work gloves he had in his back pocket and dragged the lawyer’s heavy body to the door. He straightened up the bookcase and picked up the broken glass and wiped up the spilled whiskey with the sport coat that was slung over the back of the lawyer’s chair. He checked the lawyer’s pants pockets, found a set of keys and over two hundred dollars in his wallet. He put the money in a desk drawer, stuck the keys in his overalls.

Opening the office door, he stepped into the small reception room and checked the front door to make sure it was locked. He went into the lavatory and ran some water on Dunlap’s jacket and went back to wipe the blood off the floor. Surprisingly, there wasn’t that much. After tossing the sport coat on top of the body, he sat down at the desk. He looked around for something that might have his name on it, but found nothing. He took a pull from the bottle of scotch on the desk, then capped it and stuck it in another drawer. On the desk was a photo in a gold frame of a chubby teenage boy, the spitting image of Dunlap, holding a tennis racket. The one of the wife was gone.

Turning out the lights in the office, Willard stepped into the alley and laid the jacket and the hammer in the front seat of the truck. Then he let the tailgate down and started the truck and backed it up to the open doorway. It took only a minute to drag the lawyer into the bed of the truck and cover him with a tarp, weigh the corners down with cement blocks. He shoved the clutch in on the truck and coasted a couple of feet, then got out and shut the office door. As he drove out Route 50, he passed by a sheriff’s cruiser parked in the empty store lot at Slate Mills. He watched in the rearview and held his breath until the illuminated Texaco sign faded from view. At Schott’s Bridge, he stopped and tossed the hammer into Paint Creek. By three AM, he was finishing up.

The next morning when Willard and Arvin got to the prayer log, fresh blood was still dripping off the sides into the rancid dirt. “This wasn’t here yesterday,” Arvin said.

“I run over a groundhog last night,” Willard said. “Went ahead and bled him out when I got home.”

“A groundhog? Boy, he must have been a big one.”

Willard grinned as he dropped to his knees. “Yeah, he was. He was a big fat bastard.”

7

EVEN WITH THE SACRIFICE OF THE LAWYER, Charlotte’s bones began breaking a couple of weeks later, little sickening pops that made her scream and claw gashes in her arms. She passed out from the pain whenever Willard tried to move her. A festering bedsore on her backside spread until it was the size of a plate. Her room smelled as rank and fetid as the prayer log. It hadn’t rained in a month, and there was no letup from the heat. Willard purchased more lambs at the stockyard, poured buckets of blood around the log until their shoes sank over the tops in the muddy slop. One morning while he was out, a lame and starving mutt with soft white fur ventured up to the porch timidly with its tail between its legs. Arvin fed it some scraps from the refrigerator, had already named it Jack by the time his father got home. Without a word, Willard walked into the house and came back out with his rifle. He shoved Arvin away from the dog, then shot it between the eyes while the boy begged him not to do it. He dragged it into the woods and nailed it to one of the crosses. Arvin stopped speaking to him after that. He listened to the moans of his mother while Willard drove around looking for more sacrifices. School was getting ready to start again, and he hadn’t been off the hill a single time all summer. He found himself wishing that his mother would die.

A few nights later, Willard rushed into Arvin’s bedroom and jerked him awake. “Get over to the log now,” he said. The boy sat up, looked around with a confused look. The hall light was on. He could hear his mother gasping and wheezing for breath in the room across the hall. Willard shook him again. “Don’t you quit praying until I come and get you. Make Him hear you, you understand?” Arvin threw on his clothes and started jogging across the field. He thought about wishing her dead, his own mother. He ran faster.

By three in the morning, his throat was raw and blistered. His father came once and dumped a bucket of water on his head, implored him to keep praying. But though Arvin kept screaming for the Lord’s mercy, he didn’t feel anything and none came. Some of the people down in Knockemstiff closed their windows, even with the heat. Others kept a light on the rest of the night, offered prayers of their own. Snook Haskins’s sister, Agnes, sat in her chair listening to that pitiful voice and thinking of the ghost husbands that she had buried in her head. Arvin looked up at the dead hound, its vacant eyes staring across the dark woods, its belly bloated and near bursting. “Can you hear me, Jack?” he said.

Right before dawn, Willard covered his dead wife with a clean white sheet and walked across the field, numb with loss and despair. He slipped up behind Arvin silently, listened to the boy’s prayers for a minute or two, barely a choked whisper now. He looked down, realized with disgust that he was gripping his open penknife in his hand. He shook his head and put it away. “Come on, Arvin,” he said, his voice gentle with his son for the first time in weeks. “It’s over. Your mom’s gone.”

Charlotte was buried two days later in the little cemetery outside of Bourneville. On the way home from the funeral, Willard said, “I’m thinking we might take us a little trip. Go down and visit your grandma in Coal Creek. Maybe stay for a while. You can meet Uncle Earskell, and that girl they got living with them would be just a little younger than you. You’ll like it there.” Arvin didn’t say anything. He still hadn’t gotten over the dog, and he was certain there was no way to get over his mother. All along, Willard had promised that if they prayed hard enough, she would be all right. When they arrived home, they found a blueberry pie wrapped in newspaper on the porch by the door. Willard wandered off into the field behind the house. Arvin went inside and took off his good clothes and lay down on the bed.

When he woke several hours later, Willard was still gone, which suited the boy fine. Arvin ate half the pie and put the rest in the icebox. He went out on the porch and sat in his mother’s rocking chair and watched the evening sun sink behind the row of evergreens west of the house. He thought about her first night under the ground. How dark it must be there. He’d overheard an old man standing off under a tree leaning on a shovel telling Willard that death was either a long journey or a long sleep, and though his father had scowled and turned away, Arvin thought that sounded all right. He hoped for his mother’s sake that it was a little of both. There had been only a handful of people at the funeral: a woman his mother used to work with at the Wooden Spoon, and a couple of old ladies from the church in Knockemstiff. There was supposed to be a sister somewhere out west, but Willard didn’t know how to get in touch with her. Arvin had never been to a funeral before, but he had a feeling that it hadn’t been much of one.

As the darkness spread across the overgrown yard, Arvin got up and walked around the side of the house and called out for his father several times. He waited a few minutes, thought about just going back to bed. But then he went inside and got the flashlight from the kitchen drawer. After looking in the barn, he started toward the prayer log. Neither of them had been there in the three days since his mother had passed. The night was coming on quick now. Bats swooped after insects in the field, a nightingale watched him from its nest beneath a bower of honeysuckle. He hesitated, then entered the woods and followed the path. Stopping at the edge of the clearing, he shined the light around. He could see Willard kneeling at the log. The rotten stench hit him, and he thought he might get sick. He could taste the pie starting to come up in his throat. “I’m not doing that no more,” he told his father in a loud voice. He knew it was bound to cause trouble, but he didn’t care. “I ain’t praying.”

He waited a minute or so for a reply, and then said, “You hear me?” He stepped closer to the log, kept the light shining on Willard’s kneeling form. Then he touched his father’s shoulder and the penknife dropped to the ground. Willard’s head lolled to one side and exposed the bloody gash he’d cut from ear to ear across his throat. Blood ran down the side of the log and dripped onto his suit pants. A slight breeze blew down over the hill and cooled the sweat on the back of Arvin’s neck. Branches creaked overhead. A tuft of white fur floated through the air. Some of the bones hanging from the wires and nails gently tapped against one another, sounding like some sad, hollow music.

Through the trees, Arvin could see a few lights glimmering in Knockemstiff. He heard a car door slam somewhere down there, then a single horseshoe clang against a metal peg. He stood waiting for the next pitch, but none came. It seemed like a thousand years had passed since the morning the two hunters had come up behind Willard and him here. He felt guilty and ashamed that he wasn’t crying, but there were no tears left. His mother’s long dying had left him dry. Not knowing what else to do, he stepped around Willard’s body and pointed the flashlight ahead of him. He began making his way down through the woods.

8

AT EXACTLY NINE O’CLOCK THAT EVENING, Hank Bell stuck the CLOSED sign in the front window of Maude’s store and turned off the lights. He went behind the counter and got a six-pack of beer from the bottom of the meat case, then stepped out the back door. In his front shirt pocket was a little transistor radio. He sat down in a lawn chair and opened a beer and lit a cigarette. He had lived in a camper behind the concrete-block building for four years now. Reaching into his pocket, he turned the radio on just as the announcer reported that the Reds were down by three runs in the sixth inning. They were playing out on the West Coast. Hank estimated it was just after five o’clock there. The way time worked, that was a funny thing, he thought.

He looked over at the little cigar tree he’d planted the first year he worked at the store. It had grown nearly five feet since then. It was a start he’d gotten from the tree that stood in the front yard of the house he and his mother had lived in before she passed, and he lost the place to the bank. He wasn’t sure why he’d planted it. A couple more years at the most, and he was planning on leaving Knockemstiff. He talked about it to any customer who would listen. Every week, he saved back a little bit from the thirty dollars Maude paid him. Some days he thought he’d move up north, and other times he decided the South might be best. But there was plenty of time to decide where to go. He was still a young man.

He watched a silvery-gray mist a couple of feet high move slowly up from Black Run Creek and cover the flat, rocky field behind the store, part of Clarence Myers’s cow pasture. It was his favorite part of the day, right after the sun went down and right before the long shadows disappeared. He could hear some boys whooping and yelling on the concrete bridge out in front of the store whenever a car drove by. A few of them hung there almost every night, regardless of the weather. Poor as snakes, every one of them. All they desired out of life was a car that would run and a hot piece of ass. He thought that sounded nice in a way, just going through your entire life with no more expectations than that. Sometimes he wished he weren’t so ambitious.

The praying on top of the hill had finally stopped three nights ago. Hank tried not to think about the poor woman dying up there, closed up in that room, like people were saying, while the Russell man and his boy went half insane. Hell, they’d damn near driven the entire holler crazy at times, the way they went on every morning and every evening for hours. From what he’d heard, it sounded more like they were practicing some sort of voodoo instead of anything Christian. Two of the Lynch boys had come across some dead animals hanging in the trees up there a couple of weeks ago; and then one of their hounds turned up missing. Lord, the world was getting to be an awful place. Just yesterday, he’d read in the newspaper that Henry Dunlap’s wife and her black lover had been arrested on suspicion of killing him. The law had yet to find the body, but Hank thought her lying with a Negro was damn near proof that they’d done it. Everybody knew the lawyer; he owned land all over Ross County, used to stop in the store once in a while sniffing around for moonshine to impress some of his big-shot friends. From what Hank had seen of the man, he probably deserved killing, but why didn’t the woman just get a divorce and move up to White Heaven with the coloreds? People didn’t use their brains anymore. It’s a wonder the lawyer didn’t have her killed first, that is, if he knew about the boyfriend. Nobody would have blamed him for that, but now he was dead and probably better off. It would have been a hell of a thing to have to live with, everyone knowing your wife ran around with a black man.

The Reds came up to bat, and Hank began thinking about Cincinnati. Sometime soon, he was going to drive down to the River City and see a doubleheader. His plan was to buy a good seat, drink beer, stuff himself with their hot dogs. He’d heard wieners tasted better in a ballpark, and he wanted to find out for himself. Cincinnati was just ninety miles or so on the other side of the Mitchell Flats, a straight shot down Route 50, but he’d never been there, hadn’t been any farther west than Hillsboro his entire twenty-two years. Hank had the feeling that his life would really begin once he made that trip. He didn’t have the details all figured out yet, but he also wanted to buy a whore after the games were over, some pretty girl who would treat him nice. He’d pay her extra to undress him, pull off his pants and shoes. He was going to buy a new shirt for the occasion, stop in at Bainbridge on his way down and get a decent haircut. He’d remove her clothes slowly, take his time with each little button or whatever it was that whores fastened their clothes with. He’d spill some whiskey on her titties and lick it off, like he heard some of the men talk about when they came in the store after having a few up at the Bull Pen. When he finally got inside her, she’d tell him to take it easy, that she wasn’t used to being with a man his size. She wouldn’t be anything like that loudmouth Mildred McDonald, the only woman he’d ever been with so far.

“One little pop,” Mildred had told everyone at the Bull Pen, “and then nothing but smoke.” That had been over three years ago, and people still razzed him about it. The whore in Cincinnati would insist that he keep his money after he finished with her, ask him for his phone number, maybe even beg him to take her away. He figured he’d probably come back home a different person, just like Slim Gleason had when he returned from the Korean War. Before he left Knockemstiff for good, Hank thought he might even stop in at the Bull Pen and buy some of the boys a farewell beer, just to show there weren’t any hard feelings about all the jokes. In a way, he supposed, Mildred had done him a favor; he’d put away a lot of money since he’d quit going up there.

He was half listening to the game and thinking about the dirty way Mildred had done him when he noticed someone with a flashlight walking up through Clarence’s pasture. He saw the small figure bend down and slip through the barbwire fence and head toward him. It was nearly dark now, but as the person got closer, Hank realized it was the Russell boy. He’d never seen the boy off the hill by himself before, heard his father wouldn’t allow it. But they’d buried his mother just this afternoon, and maybe that had changed things, softened the Russell man’s heart a little. The boy was wearing a white shirt and a pair of new overalls. “Hey there,” Hank said as Arvin got closer. The boy’s face was gaunt and sweaty and pale. He didn’t look good, not good at all. It looked like he had blood or something smeared on his face and clothes.

Arvin stopped a few feet from the storekeeper and turned off the flashlight. “The store’s closed,” Hank said, “but if you need something, I can open back up.”

“How would a person go about getting hold of the law?”

“Well, either cause some trouble or call them on the telephone, I reckon,” Hank said.

“Could you call ’em for me? I ain’t never used a telephone before.”

Hank reached in his pocket and turned the radio off. The Reds were getting clobbered anyway. “What do you want with the sheriff, son?”

“He’s dead,” the boy said.

“Who is?”

“My dad,” Arvin said.

“You mean your mom, don’t you?”

A confused look came over the boy’s face for a moment, then he shook his head. “No, my mom’s been dead three days. I’m talking about my dad.”

Hank stood up and reached in his pants for the keys to the back door of the store. He wondered if maybe the boy had gone simple with grief. Hank remembered the rough time he’d gone through when his own mother passed. It was something a person never really got over, he knew that. He still thought about her every day. “Come on inside. You look thirsty.”

“I ain’t got no money,” Arvin said.

“That’s all right,” Hank said. “You can owe me.”

They went inside and the storekeeper slid the top of the metal pop cooler open. “What kind you like?”

The boy shrugged.

“Here’s a root beer,” Hank said. “That’s the kind I used to drink.” He handed the boy the bottle of pop and scratched at his day-old beard. “Now your name’s Arvin, ain’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy said. He set his flashlight down on the counter and took a long drink and then another.

“Okay, so what makes you think there’s something wrong with your daddy?”

“His neck,” Arvin said. “He cut himself.”

“That ain’t blood you got on you, is it?”

Arvin looked down at his shirt and his hands. “No,” he said. “It’s pie.”

“Where is your dad?”

“A little ways from the house,” the boy said. “In the woods.”

Hank reached under the counter for the phone book. “Now look,” he said, “I don’t mind calling the law for you, but don’t be fooling with me, okay? They don’t take kindly to wild-goose chases.” Just a couple of days ago, Marlene Williams had him call and report another window peeper. It was the fifth time in just two months. The dispatcher had hung up on him.

“Why would I do that?”

“No,” Hank said. “I guess you wouldn’t.”

After he made the call, he and Arvin went out the back door and Hank picked up his beers. They walked around and sat down on the bench in front of the store. A cloud of moths fluttered around the security light that stood over the gas pumps. Hank thought about the beating the boy’s daddy had given Lucas Hayburn last year. Not that he probably didn’t deserve it, but Lucas hadn’t been right since. Just yesterday, he had sat on this bench all morning bent over with a gob of spit hanging from his mouth. Hank opened another beer and lit a smoke. He hesitated a second, then offered the boy one from his pack.

Arvin shook his head and took another drink of the pop. “They ain’t pitching horseshoes tonight,” he said after a couple of minutes.

Hank looked up the holler, saw the lights on at the Bull Pen. Four or five cars were parked in the yard. “Must be taking a break,” the storekeeper said, leaning back against the wall of the store and stretching his legs out. He and Mildred had gone to the hog barn over at Platter’s Pasture. She said she liked the rich smell of the pig manure, liked to imagine things a little different than most girls.

“What is it you like to imagine?” Hank had asked her, a little worry in his voice. For years, he had listened to boys and men talk about getting laid, but not once had any of them said anything about hog shit.

“That ain’t none of your business what’s in my head,” she told him. Her chin was sharp as a hatchet, her eyes like lusterless gray marbles. Her only redeeming feature was the thing between her legs, which some had said reminded them of a snapping turtle.

“Okay,” Hank said.

“Let’s see what you got,” Mildred said, tugging at his zipper and pulling him down in the dirty straw.

After his miserable performance, she shoved him off and said, “Jesus Christ, I should have just played with myself.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You just had me worked up. It’ll be better next time.”

“Ha! I doubt very much they’ll be a next time, Bub,” she said.

“Well, don’t you at least want a ride home?” he’d asked as he was leaving. It was nearly midnight. The two-room shack she lived in with her parents over in Nipgen was a couple of hours away if she walked it.

“No, I’m gonna hang around here awhile,” she said. “Maybe someone worth a shit will show up.”

Hank flipped his cigarette into the gravel lot and took another drink of beer. He liked to tell himself that things had turned out for the best in the end. Although he wasn’t a spiteful person, not at all, he had to admit that he got some satisfaction out of knowing that Mildred was now hooked up with a big-bellied boy named Jimmy Jack who rode an old Harley and kept her penned up on his back porch in a plywood doghouse when he wasn’t selling her ass out behind one of the bars in town. People said she’d do anything you could think of for fifty cents. Hank had seen her in Meade this past Fourth of July, standing by the door outside Dusty’s Bar with a black eye, holding the biker’s leather helmet. The best years of Mildred’s life were behind her now, and his own were just getting ready to begin. The woman he was going to pick up in Cincinnati would be a hundred times finer than any old Mildred McDonald. A year or two after he moved away from here, he probably wouldn’t even be able to recall her name. He rubbed a hand over his face and looked over, saw the Russell boy watching him. “Damn, was I talking to myself?” he asked the boy.

“Not really,” Arvin said.

“Hard to tell when that deputy will show up,” Hank said. “They don’t much like to come out here.”

“Who’s Mildred?” Arvin asked.

9

LEE BODECKER’S SHIFT WAS NEARLY OVER when the call came through on the radio. Another twenty minutes and he would have been picking up his girlfriend and heading out Bridge Street to Johnny’s Drive-in. He was starving. Every night, after he got off, he and Florence drove to either Johnny’s or the White Cow or the Sugar Shack. He liked to go all day without eating, then wolf down cheeseburgers and fries and milk shakes; and finish things off with a couple of ice-cold beers down along the River Road, leaned back in his seat while Florence jacked him off into her empty Pepsi cup. She had a grip like an Amish milk maiden. The entire summer had been a succession of almost perfect nights. She was saving the good stuff for the honeymoon, which suited Bodecker just fine. At twenty-one years old, he was just six months out of the peacetime army, and in no hurry to be tied down with a family. Although he had been a deputy only four months, he could already see a lot of advantages to being the law in a place as backward as Ross County, Ohio. There was money to be made if a man was careful and not get the big head, like his boss had done. Nowadays, Sheriff Hen Matthews had a picture of his round, stupid puss on the front page of the Meade Gazette three or four times a week, often for no conceivable reason. Citizens were starting to joke about it. Bodecker was already planning his campaign strategy. All he had to do was get some dirt on Matthews before the next election, and he could move Florence into one of the new houses they were building on Brewer Heights when they finally tied the knot. He had heard that every single one of them had two bathrooms.

He turned the cruiser around on Paint Street near the paper mill and headed out Huntington Pike toward Knockemstiff. Three miles out of town, he passed by the little house in Brownsville where he lived with his sister and mother. A light was on in the living room. He shook his head and reached in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. He was paying most of the bills right now, but he had made it clear to them when he came back from the service that they couldn’t depend on him much longer. His father had left them years ago, just went off to the shoe factory one morning and never returned. Recently, they had heard a rumor that he was living in Kansas City, working in a pool room, which made sense if you had ever known Johnny Bodecker. The only time the man ever smiled was when he was busting a rack of balls or running a table. The news had been a big disappointment to his son; nothing would have made Bodecker happier than discovering that the fucker was still earning his keep somewhere stitching soles onto loafers in a dingy red-brick building lined with high, dirty windows. Occasionally, when he was driving around on patrol and things were quiet, Bodecker imagined his father returning to Meade for a visit. In his fantasy, he followed the old man out into the country away from any witnesses and arrested him on a phony charge. Then he beat the shit out of him with a nightstick or the butt of his revolver before taking him to Schott’s Bridge and pushing him over the rail. It was always a day or so after a heavy rain and Paint Creek would be up, the water swift and deep on its way east to the Scioto River. Sometimes he let him drown; other times he allowed him to swim to the muddy bank. It was a good way to pass the time.

He took a drag off the cigarette as his thoughts drifted from his father to his sister, Sandy. Though she had just turned sixteen, Bodecker had already found her a job waiting tables in the evening at the Wooden Spoon. He had pulled over the owner of the diner a few weeks ago for driving drunk, the man’s third time in a year, and one thing had led to another. Before he knew it, he was a hundred dollars richer and Sandy had work. She was as bashful and anxious around people as a possum caught out in daylight, always had been, and Bodecker didn’t doubt that learning to deal with customers those first couple of weeks had been torture for her, but the owner had told him yesterday morning that she seemed to be getting the hang of it now. On nights when he couldn’t pick her up after work, the cook, a thickset man with sleepy blue eyes who liked to draw risqué pictures of cartoon characters on his white paper chef’s hat, had been giving her a ride home, and that worried him a little, mostly because Sandy was inclined to go along with whatever anyone asked her to do. Not once had Bodecker ever heard her speak up for herself, and like a lot of things, he blamed their father for that. But still, he told himself, it was time she began learning how to make her own way in the world. She couldn’t hide in her room and daydream the rest of her life; and the sooner she started bringing in some money, the sooner he could get out. A few days ago, he had gone so far as to suggest to his mother that she let Sandy quit school and work full-time, but the old lady wouldn’t hear of it. “Why not?” he asked. “Once someone finds out how easy she is, she’s bound to get knocked up anyway, so what does it matter if she knows algebra or not?” She didn’t offer a reason, but now that he had planted the seed, he knew he just had to wait a day or two before bringing it up again. It might take a while, but Lee Bodecker always got what he wanted.

Lee made a right onto Black Run Road and drove to Maude’s grocery. The storekeeper was sitting on the bench out front drinking a beer and talking to some young boy. Bodecker got out of the cruiser with his flashlight. The storekeeper was a sad, worn-out-looking fucker, even though the deputy figured they were roughly the same age. Some people were born just so they could be buried; his mother was like that, and he’d always figured that’s why the old man had left, though he hadn’t been any great prize himself. “Well, what we got this time?” Bodecker asked. “I hope it ain’t another one of those goddamn window peepers you keep calling about.”

Hank leaned over and spit on the ground. “I wish it was,” he said, “but no, it’s about this boy’s daddy.”

Bodecker trained the flashlight on the skinny, dark-haired boy. “Well, what is it, son?” he said.

“He’s dead,” Arvin said, putting a hand up to block the light shining in his face.

“And they just buried his poor mother today,” Hank said. “It’s a damn shame, it is.”

“So your daddy’s dead, is he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that blood you got on your face?”

“No,” Arvin said. “Somebody gave us a pie.”

“This ain’t some joke, is it? You know I’ll take you to jail if it is.”

“Why you all think I’m lying?” Arvin said.

Bodecker looked at the storekeeper. Hank shrugged and turned his beer up and drained it. “They live at the top of Baum Hill,” he said. “Arvin here, he can show you.” Then he stood up and belched and headed around the side of the store.

“I might have some questions for you later on,” Bodecker called out.

“It’s a goddamn shame, that’s all I can tell you,” he heard Hank say.

Bodecker put Arvin in the front seat of the cruiser and drove up Baum Hill. At the top, he turned down a narrow dirt lane lined with trees that the boy pointed out. He slowed the car down to a crawl. “I never been back this way before,” the deputy said. He reached down and quietly unsnapped his holster.

“Ain’t nobody new been back here in a long time,” Arvin said. Looking out the side window into the dark woods, he realized that he’d left his light in the store. He hoped the storekeeper didn’t sell it before he got back down there. He glanced over at the brightly lit instrument panel. “You gonna turn the siren on?”

“No sense in scaring someone.”

“There’s nobody left to scare,” Arvin said.

“So this where you live?” Bodecker asked as they pulled up to the small, square house. There were no lights on, no sign that anyone lived here at all except for a rocking chair on the porch. The grass was at least a foot high in the yard. Off to the left was an old barn. Bodecker parked behind a rusted-out pickup. Just your typical hillbilly trash, he thought. Hard to tell what kind of mess he was getting into. His empty stomach gurgled like a broken commode.

Arvin got out without answering and stood in front of the cruiser waiting for the deputy. “This way,” he said. He turned and started around the corner of the house.

“How far is it?” Bodecker asked.

“Not too far. Maybe ten minutes.”

Bodecker flipped on his flashlight and followed behind the boy along the edge of an overgrown field. They entered the woods and went several hundred feet down a well-worn path. The boy suddenly stopped and pointed ahead into the darkness. “He’s right there,” Arvin said.

The deputy trained his light on a man, dressed in a white shirt and dress pants, crumpled loosely over a log. He took a few steps closer, could make out a gash in the man’s neck. The front of his shirt was soaked in blood. He sniffed the air and gagged. “My God, how long he been laying here like this?”

Arvin shrugged. “Not long. I fell asleep for a little while and there he was.”

Bodecker pinched his nostrils together, tried to breathe through his mouth. “What the hell is that smell then?”

“That’s them up there,” Arvin said, pointing into the trees.

Bodecker lifted his flashlight. Animals in various states of decay hung all around them, some in the branches and others from tall wooden crosses. A dead dog with a leather collar around its neck was nailed up high to one of the crosses like some kind of hideous Christlike figure. The head of a deer lay at the foot of another. Bodecker fumbled with his gun. “Goddamn it, boy, what the hell is this?” he said, turning the light back on Arvin just as a white, squirming maggot dropped onto the boy’s shoulder. He brushed it off as casually as someone would a leaf or a seed. Bodecker waved his revolver around as he started to back away.

“It’s a prayer log,” Arvin said, his voice barely a whisper now.

“What? A prayer log?”

Arvin nodded, staring at his father’s body. “But it don’t work,” he said.