Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

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.

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.