The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
2
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.”
While Brother Roy preached, Theodore kept up a rhythm on the guitar that matched the flow of the words, his eyes following the other’s every movement. Roy was his cousin on his mother’s side, but sometimes the fat boy wished they weren’t so closely related. Though he was satisfied with just being able to spread the Gospel with him, he
Then Roy hopped back up on the altar, reached under Brother Theodore’s wheelchair, and brought out a gallon jar. Everyone leaned forward a bit on the benches. A dark mass seemed to be boiling inside it. Someone called out, “Praise God,” and Brother Roy said, “That’s right, my friend, that’s right.” He held up the jar and gave it a violent shake. “People, let me tell you something,” he went on. “Before I found the Holy Ghost, I was scared plumb to death of spiders. Ain’t that right, Theodore? Ever since I was a little runt hiding under my mother’s long skirts. Spiders crawled through my dreams and laid eggs in my nightmares, and I couldn’t even go to the outhouse without someone holding my hand. They was hanging in their webs everywhere waiting on me. It was an awful way to live, in fear all the time, awake or asleep, it didn’t matter. And that’s what hell is like, brothers and sisters. I never got no rest from them eight-legged devils. Not until I found the Lord.”
Then Roy dropped to his knees and gave the jar another jiggle before he twisted the lid off. Theodore slowed the music down until all that was left was a sad, ominous dirge that chilled the room, raised the short hairs on the backs of necks. Holding the jar above him, Roy looked out over the crowd and took a deep breath and turned it over. A variegated mass of spiders, brown ones and black ones and orange-and-yellow-striped ones, fell on top of his head and shoulders. Then a shiver ran through his body like an electric current, and he stood up and slammed the jar to the floor, sending shards of glass flying everywhere. He let out that awful screech again, and began shaking his arms and legs, the spiders falling off onto the floor and scurrying away in all directions. Some lady wrapped in a knitted shawl jumped up and hurried toward the door and several more screamed, and in the midst of the commotion, Roy stepped forward, a few spiders still clinging to his sweaty face, and yelled, “Mark my word, people, the Lord, He’ll take away all your fears if you let Him. Look what He’s done for me.” Then he gagged a little, spit something black out of his mouth.
Another woman started beating at her dress, crying out that she’d been bit, and a couple of children started blubbering. Reverend Sykes ran back and forth attempting to restore some order, but by then people were scrambling toward the narrow door in a panic. Emma took Helen by the arm, trying to lead her out of the church. But the girl shook her off and turned and walked into the aisle. She held her Bible against her flat chest as she stared at Brother Roy. Still strumming his guitar, Theodore watched his cousin nonchalantly brush a spider off his ear, then smile at the frail, plain-looking girl. He didn’t stop playing until he saw Roy beckon the bitch forward with his hands.
ON THE DRIVE HOME, WILLARD SAID, “Boy, them spiders was a nice touch.” He slipped his right hand over and began moving his fingers lightly up his mother’s fat, jiggly arm.
She squealed and swatted at him. “Quit that. I won’t be able to sleep tonight as it is.”
“You ever heard that boy preach before?”
“No, but they do some crazy stuff at that church over in Topperville. I’ll bet Reverend Sykes is regrettin’ he ever invited them. That one in the wheelchair drank too much strychnine or antifreeze or something is why he can’t walk. It’s just pitiful. Testing their faith, they call it. But that’s taking things a little bit too far, the way I see it.” She sighed and leaned her head back against the seat. “I wish Helen had come with us.”
“Well, wasn’t nobody slept through that sermon, I’ll give him that.”
“You know,” Emma said, “she might have if you’d paid a little more attention to her.”
“Oh, the way it looked to me, Brother Roy’s gonna give her about as much of that as she can handle.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Emma said.
“Mother, I’m going back up to Ohio in a day or two. You know that.”
Emma ignored him. “She’d make someone a good wife, Helen would.”
SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER WILLARD LEFT for Ohio to find out about the waitress, Helen knocked on Emma’s door. It was early in the afternoon on a warm November day. The old woman was sitting in her parlor listening to the radio and reading again the letter she’d received that morning. Willard and the waitress had gotten married a week ago. They were going to stay in Ohio, at least for now. He’d gotten a job at a meatpacking plant, said he had never seen so many hogs in his life. The man on the radio was blaming the unseasonable weather on the fallout from the atomic bombs unleashed to win the war.
“I wanted to tell you first because I know you been worried about me,” Helen said. It was the first time Emma had ever seen her without a bonnet on her head.
“Tell me what, Helen?”
“Roy asked me to marry him,” she said. “He said God give him a sign we was meant for each other.”
Standing in the doorway with Willard’s letter in her hand, Emma thought about the promise she’d been unable to keep. She’d been dreading a violent accident, or some horrible disease, but this was good news. Maybe things were going to turn out all right after all. She felt her eyes start to blur with tears. “Where you all going to live?” she asked, unable to think of anything else to say.
“Oh, Roy’s got a place behind the gas station in Topperville,” Helen said. “Theodore, he’ll be staying with us. At least for a little while.”
“That’s the one in the wheelchair?”
“Yes’m,” Helen said. “They been together a long time.”
Emma stepped out onto the porch and hugged the girl. She smelled faintly of Ivory soap, as if she’d had a bath recently. “You want to come in and sit for a while?”
“No, I got to go,” Helen said. “Roy’s waiting on me.” Emma looked past her down over the hill. A dung-colored car shaped like a turtle was sitting in the pull-off behind Earskell’s old Ford. “He’s preaching over in Millersburg tonight, where them people got their eyes carved out. We been out gathering spiders all morning. Thank God, with the way this weather’s been, they’re still pretty easy to find.”
“You be careful, Helen,” Emma said.
“Oh, don’t worry,” the girl said, as she started down off the porch, “they ain’t too bad once you get used to them.”
3
IN THE SPRING OF 1948, Emma got word from Ohio that she was finally a grandmother; Willard’s wife had given birth to a healthy baby boy named Arvin Eugene. By then, the old woman was satisfied that God had forgiven her for her brief loss of trust. It had been nearly three years, and nothing bad had happened. A month later, she was still thanking the Lord that her grandson hadn’t been born blind and pinheaded like Edith Maxwell’s three children over on Spud Run when Helen showed up at her door with an announcement of her own. It was one of the few times Emma had seen her since the girl married Roy and switched to the church over in Topperville. “I wanted to stop by and let you know,” Helen said. Her arms and legs were pale and thin, but her belly was swollen big with a baby.
“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.”
&
“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.