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 jus
t 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.