The Devil All the Time - Donald Ray Pollock [83]
Tick put his hat back on. “Look, here’s the way I see it,” he said. “Ain’t nobody has to know about this but you, me, and Dudley, and he won’t say nothing, I guarantee it. So we’ll just keep it quiet for now. How does that sound?”
Swiping at his eyes again, Arvin nodded. “I’d appreciate that,” he said. “It’s been bad enough everyone knowing what she did to herself. Hell, we couldn’t even get that new preacher to—” His face suddenly grew dark, and he looked away toward Muddy Creek Mountain in the distance.
“What is it, son?”
“Ah, nothing,” Arvin said, looking back at the sheriff. “We couldn’t get him to say no words at the funeral, that’s all.”
“Well, some people have strong views on things like that.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“So you got no idea who she might have been messing with?”
“Lenora stayed to herself mostly,” the boy said. “Besides, what could you do about it anyway?”
Tick shrugged. “Not much, I expect. Maybe I shouldn’t have said nothing.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean no disrespect,” Arvin said. “And I’m glad you told me. At least now I know why she did it.” He stuck the rag back in his pocket and shook Tick’s hand. “And thanks for thinking about my grandma, too.”
He watched the sheriff pull away, then got in his car and drove the fifteen miles back to Coal Creek. He played the radio as loud as it would go and stopped at the bootlegger’s shack in Hungry Holler and bought two pints of whiskey. When he got home, he went in and checked on Emma. She hadn’t been out of bed all week as far as he knew. She was starting to smell bad. He got her a glass of water and made her drink a little. “Look, Grandma,” he said to her, “I expect you to get out of bed in the morning and fix me and Earskell breakfast, okay?”
“Just let me lay here,” she said. She rolled over on her side, closed her eyes.
“One more day, that’s it,” he told her. “I’m not kidding around.” He went in the kitchen and fried some potatoes, fixed bologna sandwiches for him and Earskell. After they ate, Arvin washed up the skillet and plates and looked in on Emma again. Then he took the two pints out on the porch and handed one to the old man. He sat down in a chair and finally allowed himself to consider what the sheriff had told him. Three months along. For sure, it hadn’t been some boy from around here got Lenora pregnant. Arvin knew everybody, and he knew what they thought about her. The only place she liked to go was church. He thought back to when the new preacher first arrived. That would have been April, a little over four months ago. He recalled the way Teagardin got all excited when the two Reaster girls walked in the night of the potluck. Other than himself, nobody had seemed to notice except the young wife. Lenora had even put her bonnets away not long after Teagardin showed up. He had thought she was finally sick of being made fun of at school, but maybe she had another reason.
He shook two cigarettes out of his pack and lit them, handed one to Earskell. The day before the funeral, Teagardin told some of the church members that he didn’t feel comfortable preaching over a suicide. Instead, he asked his poor sick uncle to say a few words in his place. Two men had carried Albert in on a wooden kitchen chair. It was the hottest day of the year, and the church was like a furnace, but the old man had risen to the occasion. A couple of hours later, Arvin went out driving around on the back roads, which was what he always did now when things didn’t make any sense. He passed by Teagardin’s house, saw the preacher walking to the outhouse in a pair of bedroom slippers and a floppy, pink hat like a woman might wear. His wife was sunbathing in a bikini, stretched out on a blanket in the weedy, overgrown yard.
“Damn, it’s hot,” Earskell said.
“Yeah,” Arvin said after a minute or two. “Maybe we ought to sleep out here tonight.”
“I don’t see how Emma stands it in that bedroom. It’s like an oven back there.”
“She’s gonna get up in the morning, fix us breakfast.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Arvin said, “really.”
And she did, biscuits and eggs and sawmill gravy,