The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [46]
“What’s that supposed to mean, Albert?” Emma asked.
Sykes glanced up from the apple and saw the hard look the woman was giving him. It took him a moment to realize what he had said, and his wrinkled face flushed red with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Emma,” he sputtered. “I wasn’t talking about Willard, no way. He was a good man. One of the best. Shoot, I still remember the day he got saved.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “No sense buttering up the dead, Albert. I know what my son was like. Just don’t go pestering his boy, that’s all I ask.”
LENORA, ON THE OTHER HAND, couldn’t seem to get enough of her religion. She carried a Bible with her everywhere she went, even to the outhouse, just like Helen had; and each morning, she got up before everyone else and prayed for an hour on her knees on the splintered wooden floor beside her and Emma’s bed. Although she had no memory of either of her parents, the girl directed most of the prayers that she let Emma hear on her murdered mother’s soul and most of her silent ones on some news of her missing father. The old woman had told her time and time again that it would be best to forget about Roy Laferty, but Lenora couldn’t help wondering about him. Nearly every night, she fell asleep with an image of him stepping up on the porch in a new black suit and making everything all right. It gave her a small comfort, and she allowed herself to hope that, with the Lord’s help, her father really would return someday if he was still alive. Several times a week, no matter what the weather, she visited the cemetery and read the Bible out loud, especially the Psalms, while seated on the ground next to her mother’s grave. Emma had once told her that the book of Songs was Helen’s favorite part of the Scriptures, and by the time she finished the sixth grade, Lenora knew them all by heart.
THE SHERIFF HAD LONG SINCE GIVEN UP on finding Roy and Theodore. It was as if they had turned into ghosts. Nobody was able to find a photograph or record of any kind on either of them. “Hell, even the retards up in Hungry Holler got birth certificates,” he offered as an excuse, whenever one of his constituents brought up the two’s disappearance. He didn’t mention to Emma the rumor that he’d heard right after they disappeared, that the cripple was in love with Roy, that there might have been some queer homo thing going on between them before the preacher married Helen. During the initial investigation, several people testified that Theodore had complained bitterly that the woman had taken the edge off Roy’s spiritual message. “It’s ruined many a good man, that ol’ nasty hair pie,” the cripple was heard to say after he’d had a few drinks. “Preacher, shit,” he’d go on, “all he thinks about now is getting his dick wet.” It irked the sheriff to no end that those two sodomite fools might have committed murder in his county and gotten away with it; and so he kept repeating the same old story, that in all likelihood the same maniac that butchered the Millersburg family had also killed Helen and hacked Roy and Theodore to pieces or dumped their bodies in the Greenbrier River. He told it so much that he half believed it himself at times.
THOUGH ARVIN NEVER CAUSED HER any serious trouble, Emma could easily see Willard in him, especially when it came to the fighting. By the time he was fourteen, he had been kicked out of school several times for using his fists. Pick your own time, he remembered his father telling him, and Arvin