Donald Pollock - The Devil All the Time

“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.