The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [16]
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