Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

Lenora didn’t say another word. She looked at the wooden cross hanging on the wall behind the altar, then stood up. Teagardin unlocked the door and held it open, a scowl etched on his face, and she walked past him with her head down. She heard the door quickly close behind her. Though she felt faint, she managed to walk a couple hundred yards before she collapsed under a tree a few feet from the edge of the gravel road. She could still see the church, the one she had gone to all her life. She had felt the presence of God there many times, but not once, it occurred to her now, since the new preacher had arrived. A few minutes later, she watched Pamela Reaster come up the other end of the road and go inside, a look of happiness spread across her pretty face.

That evening, after supper, Arvin drove Emma to the church for the Thursday night service. Lenora had pleaded sick, said her head felt like it was splitting open. She hadn’t touched her food. “Well, you don’t look good, that’s for sure,” Emma said, feeling the girl’s cheek for fever. “You go ahead and stay home tonight. I’ll have ’em say a prayer for you.” Lenora waited in her bedroom until she heard Arvin’s car start up, then made sure Earskell was still asleep in his rocker on the porch. She went out to the smokehouse and opened the door. She stood and waited until her eyes adjusted to the gloom. She found a length of rope coiled in a corner behind some minnow traps and tied a crude noose on one end. Then she moved an empty lard bucket over to the center of the small shed. She stepped up on it and wrapped the other end of the rope seven or eight times around one of the support beams. Then she hopped off the bucket and closed the door. It was dark in the shed now.

Stepping back up on the metal bucket, she put the noose around her neck and tightened it. A trickle of sweat ran down her face, and she caught herself thinking that she should do this out in the sunlight, in the warm summer air, maybe even wait another day or two. Perhaps Preston would change his mind. That’s what she would do, she thought. He couldn’t have meant what he said. He was upset, that’s all. She started to loosen the noose and the lard bucket began to wobble. Then her foot slipped and the bucket rolled away and left her dangling in the air. She had dropped only a few inches, not nearly enough to break her neck clean. She could almost touch her toes to the floor, just another inch or so. Kicking her legs, she grabbed hold of the rope, tried her best to raise herself up to the beam, but she didn’t have enough strength. She tried to yell out, but the choking sounds wouldn’t carry beyond the shed door. As the rope slowly squeezed her windpipe shut, she became more frantic, clawing at her neck with her fingernails. Her face turned purple. She was vaguely aware of urine running down her legs. The blood vessels in her eyes began to burst, and everything got darker and darker. No, she thought, no. I can have this baby, God. I can just leave this place, go away like my daddy did. I can just disappear.

A WEEK OR SO AFTER THE FUNERAL, Tick Thompson, the new sheriff of Greenbrier County, was waiting at Arvin’s car when the boy got off work. “I need to talk to you, Arvin,” the lawman said. “It’s about Lenora.” He had been one of the men who helped carry her body out of the smokehouse after Earskell saw the door unlatched and found her. He’d been called to a few suicides over the years, mostly men, though, blowing their brains out over some woman or a bad business deal, never a young girl hanging herself. When he’d asked, right after the ambulance pulled away that evening, Emma and the boy both said she had actually seemed happier lately. There was something about it that didn’t add up. He hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep all week.

Arvin tossed his lunch bucket in the front seat of the Bel Air. “What about her?”

“I figured it might be best to tell you instead of your grandmother. From what I hear, she’s not taking things too good.”

“Tell me what?”

The sheriff took his hat off, held it in his hands. He waited until a couple of other men walked by and got in their vehicles, then cleared his throat. “Well, hell, I don’t know how to say it, Arvin, other than just say it. Did you know Lenora was carrying a baby?”

Arvin stared at him for a long minute, a puzzled look on his face. “That’s bullshit,” he finally said. “Some sonofabitch is lying.”

“I know how you must feel, I really do, but I just came from the coroner’s office. Though ol’ Dudley might be a drunk, he ain’t no liar. Near as he can figure it, she was about three months along.”

The boy turned away from the sheriff and reached in his back pocket for a dirty rag, wiped his eyes. “Jesus,” he said, struggling to keep his upper lip from quivering.

“Do you think your grandmother knew?”

Shaking his head, Arvin took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, then said, “Sheriff, my grandma would die if she heard that.”

“Well, did Lenora have a boyfriend, someone she was seeing?” the sheriff asked.

Arvin thought about the night, just a few weeks ago, when Emma had asked that same question. “None that I know of. Hell, she was the most religious person I ever seen.”

Tick put his hat back on. “Look, here’s the way I see it,” he said. “Ain’t nobody has to know about this but you, me, and Dudley, and he won’t say nothing, I guarantee it. So we’ll just keep it quiet for now. How does that sound?”

Swiping at his eyes again, Arvin nodded. “I’d appreciate that,” he said. “It’s been bad enough everyone knowing what she did to herself. Hell, we couldn’t even get that new preacher to—” His face suddenly grew dark, and he looked away toward Muddy Creek Mountain in the distance.

“What is it, son?”

“Ah, nothing,” Arvin said, looking back at the sheriff. “We couldn’t get him to say no words at the funeral, that’s all.”

“Well, some people have strong views on things like that.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So you got no idea who she might have been messing with?”

“Lenora stayed to herself mostly,” the boy said. “Besides, what could you do about it anyway?”

Tick shrugged. “Not much, I expect. Maybe I shouldn’t have said nothing.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean no disrespect,” Arvin said. “And I’m glad you told me. At least now I know why she did it.” He stuck the rag back in his pocket and shook Tick’s hand. “And thanks for thinking about my grandma, too.”

He watched the sheriff pull away, then got in his car and drove the fifteen miles back to Coal Creek. He played the radio as loud as it would go and stopped at the bootlegger’s shack in Hungry Holler and bought two pints of whiskey. When he got home, he went in and checked on Emma. She hadn’t been out of bed all week as far as he knew. She was starting to smell bad. He got her a glass of water and made her drink a little. “Look, Grandma,” he said to her, “I expect you to get out of bed in the morning and fix me and Earskell breakfast, okay?”

“Just let me lay here,” she said. She rolled over on her side, closed her eyes.

“One more day, that’s it,” he told her. “I’m not kidding around.” He went in the kitchen and fried some potatoes, fixed bologna sandwiches for him and Earskell. After they ate, Arvin washed up the skillet and plates and looked in on Emma again. Then he took the two pints out on the porch and handed one to the old man. He sat down in a chair and finally allowed himself to consider what the sheriff had told him. Three months along. For sure, it hadn’t been some boy from around here got Lenora pregnant. Arvin knew everybody, and he knew what they thought about her. The only place she liked to go was church. He thought back to when the new preacher first arrived. That would have been April, a little over four months ago. He recalled the way Teagardin got all excited when the two Reaster girls walked in the night of the potluck. Other than himself, nobody had seemed to notice except the young wife. Lenora had even put her bonnets away not long after Teagardin showed up. He had thought she was finally sick of being made fun of at school, but maybe she had another reason.