Donald Pollock: The Devil All the Time

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.”

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.”