The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [19]
“A good one?”
“Yeah,” she said. She reached out and squeezed his hand a little. She glanced over at the white cloth partition that separated her from the woman in the next bed, then lowered her voice. “I know it sounds crazy, but I want to go home and pretend we own the house for a while.”
“How you gonna do that?”
“With this stuff they got me on,” she said, “they could tell me I was the Queen of Sheba and I wouldn’t know any different. Besides, you heard what the doctor said. I sure as hell don’t want to spend what’s left of my time in this place.”
“Is that what the dream was about?”
She gave him a puzzled look. “What dream?” she said.
Two hours later, they were pulling out of the hospital parking lot. As they headed out Route 50 toward home, Willard stopped and bought her a milk shake, but she couldn’t keep it down. He carried her into the back bedroom and made her comfortable, then gave her some morphine. Her eyes glazed over and she went to sleep within a minute or so. “You stay here with your mother,” he told Arvin. “I’ll be back in a little bit.” He walked across the field, a cool breeze against his face. He knelt down at the prayer log and listened to the small, peaceful sounds of the evening woods. Several hours passed while he stared at the cross. He viewed their misfortune from every conceivable angle, searching for a solution, but always ended up with the same answer. As far as the doctors were concerned, Charlotte’s case was hopeless. They had given her five, maybe six weeks at the most. There were no other options left. It was up to him and God now.
By the time he returned to the house, it was turning dark. Charlotte was still sleeping and Arvin was sitting beside her bed in a straight-backed chair. He could tell the boy had been crying. “Did she ever wake up?” Willard asked, in a low voice.
“Yeah,” Arvin said, “but, Dad, why don’t she know who I am?”
“It’s just the medicine they got her on. She’s gonna be fine in a few days.”
The boy looked over at Charlotte. Just a couple of months ago, she was the prettiest woman he had ever seen, but most of the pretty was gone now. He wondered what she would look like by the time she got well.
“Maybe we better eat something,” Willard said.
He fixed egg sandwiches for him and Arvin, then heated up a can of broth for Charlotte. She threw it up, and Willard cleaned up the mess and held her in his arms, feeling her heart beat rapidly against him. He turned out the light and moved to the chair beside her bed. Sometime during the night he dozed off, but woke up in a sweat dreaming of Miller Jones, the way the man’s heart had kept on throbbing as he hung on those palm trees skinned alive. Willard held the alarm clock close to his face, saw that it was nearly four in the morning. He didn’t go back to sleep.
A few hours later, he poured all his whiskey out on the ground and went to the barn and got some tools: an ax, a rake, a scythe. He spent the rest of the day expanding the clearing around the prayer log, hacking away at the briers and smaller trees, raking the ground smooth. He began tearing boards off the barn the next day, had Arvin help him carry them to the prayer log. Working into the night, they erected eight more crosses around the clearing, all the same height as the original. “Them doctors can’t do your mom any good,” he told Arvin, as they made their way back to the house in the dark. “But I got hopes we can save her if we try hard enough.”
“Is she gonna die?” Arvin said.
Willard thought a second before he answered. “The Lord can do anything if you ask Him right.”
“How we do that?”
“I’ll start showing you first thing in the morning. It won’t be easy, but there ain’t no other choice.”
Willard took a leave of absence from work, told the foreman that his wife was sick, but that she’d soon be better. He and Arvin spent hours praying at the log every day. Every time they started across the field toward the woods, Willard explained again that their voices had to reach heaven, and that the only way