The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [2]
As soon as Willard finished eating, he pushed back his chair and went outside with a dark look on his face. He hadn’t said a word since he’d finished his prayers. Charlotte got up from the table with her coffee and stepped over to the window. She watched him stomp across the yard and go into the barn. She considered the possibility that he had an extra bottle hid out there. The one he kept under the sink hadn’t been touched in several weeks. She turned and looked at Arvin. “Your daddy mad at you for something?”
Arvin shook his head. “I didn’t do nothing.”
“That ain’t what I asked you,” Charlotte said, leaning against the counter. “We both know how he can get.”
For a moment, Arvin considered telling his mother what had happened at the prayer log, but the shame was too great. It made him sick to think that his father would listen to a man talk about her that way and just ignore it. “Had a little revival meeting, that’s all,” he said.
“Revival meeting?” Charlotte said. “Where did you get that from?”
“I don’t know, just heard it somewhere.” Then he got up and walked down the hallway to his bedroom. He closed the door and lay down on the bed, pulling the top blanket over him. Turning on his side, he stared at the framed picture of the crucified Jesus that Willard had hung above the scratched and battered chest of drawers. Similar pictures of the Savior’s execution could be found in every room of the house except the kitchen. Charlotte had drawn the line there, the same as she’d done when he started taking Arvin over to the woods to pray. “Only on the weekends, Willard, that’s it,” she’d said. The way she saw it, too much religion could be as bad as too little, maybe even worse; but moderation was just not in her husband’s nature.
An hour or so later, Arvin was awakened by his father’s voice in the kitchen. He jumped off the bed and smoothed the wrinkles out of the wool blanket, then went to the door and pressed his ear against it. He heard Willard ask Charlotte if she needed anything from the store. “I got to gas up the truck for work,” he told her. When he heard his father’s footsteps in the hall, Arvin moved quickly away from the door and across the room. He was standing by the window pretending to study an arrowhead he’d picked up from the small collection of treasures he had lying on the sill. The door opened. “Let’s take a ride,” Willard said. “No sense you sitting in here like a house cat all day.”
As they walked out the front door, Charlotte yelled from the kitchen, “Don’t forget the sugar.” They got in the pickup and drove out to the end of their rutted lane and then turned down Baum Hill Road. At the stop sign, Willard made a left onto the stretch of paved road that cut through the middle of Knockemstiff. Though the trip to Maude’s store never took more than five minutes, it always seemed to Arvin as if he had entered another country when they came off the Flats. At the Patterson place, a group of boys, some younger than himself, stood in the open doorway of a dilapidated garage passing cigarettes back and forth and taking turns punching a gutted deer carcass that hung from a joist. One of the boys whooped and took a couple of swings at the chilly air as they drove past, and Arvin scooted down in his seat a little. In front of Janey Wagner’s house, a pink baby crawled around in the yard under a maple tree. Janey was standing on the sagging porch pointing at the baby and yelling through a broken window patched with cardboard at someone inside. She was wearing the same outfit she wore to school every day, a red plaid skirt and a frayed white blouse. Though she was only a grade ahead of Arvin in school, Janey always sat in the rear of the bus with the older boys on the way home. He’d heard some of the other girls say that they allowed her back there because she’d spread her legs and let them play stink finger with her snatch. He hoped that maybe someday, when he was a little older, he would find out