The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [0]
Knockemstiff
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Donald Ray Pollock
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada
by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
A portion of this work previously appeared in slightly different form in the Washington Square Review.
Jacket photographs: Dog © Christie’s Images/SuperStock/Getty Images;
Logs © Mark Hooper/UpperCut Images/Getty Images;
Car © Jena Ardell/Flickr/Getty Images
Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Pollock, Donald Ray
The devil all the time / Donald Ray Pollock. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Ohio—Rural conditions—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3616.O5694D48 2011
813′.6—dc22
2010053322
eISBN: 978-0-385-53505-2
v3.1
ONCE AGAIN
FOR
PATSY
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One - Sacrifice
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two - On the Hunt
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Three - Orphans and Ghosts
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Part Four - Winter
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Part Five - Preacher
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part Six - Serpents
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Part Seven - Ohio
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
ON A DISMAL MORNING near the end of a wet October, Arvin Eugene Russell hurried behind his father, Willard, along the edge of a pasture that overlooked a long and rocky holler in southern Ohio called Knockemstiff. Willard was tall and raw-boned, and Arvin had a hard time keeping up with him. The field was overgrown with brier patches and fading clumps of chickweed and thistle, and ground fog, thick as the gray clouds above, reached to the nine-year-old boy’s knees. After a few minutes, they veered off into the woods and followed a narrow deer path down the hill until they came to a log lying in a small clearing, the remains of a big red oak that had fallen many years ago. A weathered cross, fitted together out of boards pried from the back of the ramshackle barn behind their farmhouse, leaned a little eastward in the soft ground a few yards below them.
Willard eased himself down on the high side of the log and motioned for his son to kneel beside him in the dead, soggy leaves. Unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn’t know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time. Arvin shivered a little with the damp, pulled his coat tighter. He wished he were still in bed. Even school, with all its miseries, was better than this, but it was a Saturday and there was no way to get around it.
Through the mostly bare trees beyond the cross, Arvin could see wisps of smoke rising from a few chimneys half a mile away. Four hundred or so people lived in Knockemstiff in 1957, nearly all of them connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another, be it lust or