The Devil All the Time (6 page)

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 at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, waiting nervously for him to return home without getting them evicted. As she reminded him time and time again, it didn’t really matter what the windbag said. Rich people always thought you wanted what they had, though that wasn’t true, at least not in Willard’s case. As he sat across from the lawyer at the big oak desk and listened to him prattle on, Willard thought about the prayer log he’d fixed up in the woods, about the peace and calm it would bring him once he got home and ate supper and made his way over there. Sometimes he even rehearsed in his head a prayer he always said at the log after his monthly visit to the office: “Thank you, God, for giving me the strength to keep my hands off Henry Dunlap’s fat fucking neck. And let the sonofabitch have everything he wants in this life, though I got to confess, Lord, I sure wouldn’t mind seeing him choke on it someday.”

WHAT WILLARD DIDN’T KNOW
was that Henry Dunlap used his big talk to hide the fact that his life was a shameful, cowardly mess. In 1943, right out of law school, he’d married a woman who, he discovered not too long after their wedding night, couldn’t get enough of strange men. Edith had fucked around on him for years—paper boys, auto mechanics, salesmen, milkmen, friends, clients, his former partner—the list went on and on. He’d put up with it, had even grown to accept it; but not too long ago, he’d hired a colored man to take care of the lawn, a replacement for the white teenager whom she’d been screwing, believing that even she wouldn’t stoop that low. But within a week, he’d come home in the middle of the day without warning and saw her bent over the couch in the family room with her ass up in the air and the tall, skinny gardener pounding it for all it was worth. She was making sounds that he’d never heard before. After watching for a couple of minutes, he slipped quietly away and returned to his office, where he finished off a bottle of scotch and ran the scene over and over in his head. He pulled a silver-plated derringer out of his desk and contemplated it for a long time, then put it back in the drawer. He thought it best first to consider other ways to solve his problem.
No sense in blowing his brains out if he didn’t have to. After practicing law in Meade for nearly fifteen years, he’d made the acquaintance of several men in southern Ohio who probably knew people who would get rid of Edith for as little as a few hundred dollars, but there wasn’t one of them he felt could be trusted. “Don’t get in a hurry now, Henry,” he told himself. “That’s when people fuck up.”

A couple of days later, he hired the black man full-time, even gave him a quarter raise on the hour. He was assigning him a list of jobs to do when Edith pulled in the driveway in her new Cadillac. They both stood in the yard and watched her get out of the car with some shopping bags and walk into the house. She was wearing a tight pair of black slacks and a pink sweater that showed off her big, floppy tits. The gardener looked over at the lawyer with a sly smile on his flat, pocked face. After a moment, Henry smiled back.

“DUMB AS GOATS,”
Henry told his golfing buddies. Dick Taylor had asked him about his renters out in Knockemstiff again. Other than listening to Henry brag and make a fool of himself, the other rich men around Meade didn’t have much use for him. He was the biggest joke in the country club. Every single one of them had fucked his wife at one time or another. Edith couldn’t even swim in the pool anymore without some woman trying to scratch her eyes out. Rumor had it she was after the black meat now. Before long, they joked, she and Dunlap would probably move up to White Heaven, the colored section on the west side of town. “I swear,” Henry went on, “I think that ol’ boy married his own goddamn sister, the way they favor each other. By God, you should see her, though. She wouldn’t be half bad if you cleaned her up some. They ever get behind in the rent, maybe I’ll take it out in trade.”

“What would you do to her?” Elliot Smitt asked, winking at Dick Taylor.

“Shit, I’d bend that sweet little thing over, and I’d …”

“Ha!” Bernie Hill said. “You ol’ dog, I bet you’ve already busted it open.”

Henry picked a club from his bag. He sighed and looked dreamily
down the fairway, placing one hand over his heart. “Boys, I promised her I wouldn’t tell.”

Later, after they’d returned to the clubhouse, a man named Carter Oxley walked up to the fat, sweating lawyer in the bar and said, “You might want to watch what you say about that woman.”

Henry turned and frowned. Oxley was a new man at the Meade Country Club, an engineer who had worked himself up to the #2 position at the paper mill. Bernie Hill had brought him along to be part of their foursome. He hadn’t said two words the entire game. “What woman?” Henry said.

“You were talking about a man named Willard Russell out there, right?”

“Yeah, Russell’s his name. So?”

“Buddy, it’s no skin off my back, but he damn near killed a man with his fists last fall for talking trash about his wife. The one he beat up still ain’t right, sits around with a coffee can hanging from his neck to catch his slobbers. You might want to think about that.”

“You sure we’re talking about the same guy? The one I know wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.”

Oxley shrugged. “Maybe he’s just the quiet type. Those are the ones you got to watch.”

“How do you know all this?”

“You’re not the only one who owns land out in Knockemstiff.”

Henry pulled a gold cigarette case from his pocket and offered the new man a smoke. “What else do you know about him?” he asked. That morning Edith had told him that she thought they should buy the gardener a pickup truck. She was standing at the kitchen window eating a fluffy pastry. Henry couldn’t help noticing that the top of it was covered with chocolate icing. How appropriate, he thought, the fucking whore. He was glad, though, to see that she was putting on weight. Before long, her ass would be as wide as an ax handle. Let the grass-cutting bastard pound it then. “It doesn’t have to be a new one,” she told him. “Just something he can get around in. Willie’s feet are too big for him to be walking to work all the time.” She reached in the bag for another pastry. “My God, Henry, they’re twice as long as yours.”

5

EVER SINCE THE FIRST OF THE YEAR
, Charlotte’s insides had been giving her fits. She kept telling herself it was just the flux, maybe indigestion. Her mother had suffered greatly from ulcers, and Charlotte remembered the woman eating nothing but plain toast and rice pudding the last few years of her life. She cut back on the grease and pepper, but it didn’t seem to help. Then in April, she began bleeding a little. She spent hours lying on top of the bed when Arvin and Willard were gone, and the cramps eased considerably if she curled up on her side and stayed still. Worried about hospital bills and spending all the money they had saved for the house, she kept her pain a secret, foolishly hoping that whatever ailed her would go away, heal itself. After all, she was only thirty years old, too young for it to be anything serious. But by the middle of May, the spotty bleeding had become a steady trickle, and to dull the pain she’d taken to sneaking drinks from the gallon of Old Crow that Willard kept under the kitchen sink. Near the end of that month, right before school let out for the summer, Arvin found her passed out on the kitchen floor in a puddle of watery blood. A pan of biscuits was burning in the oven. They didn’t have a phone, so he propped her head up with a pillow and cleaned up the mess as best he could. Sitting down on the floor beside her, he listened to her shallow breathing and prayed it wouldn’t stop. She was still unconscious when his father came home from work that evening. As the doctor told Willard a couple of days later, it was too late by that time. Someone was always dying somewhere, and in the summer of 1958, the year that Arvin Eugene Russell counted himself ten years old, it was his mother’s turn.

AFTER TWO WEEKS IN THE HOSPITAL
, Charlotte raised up in her bed and said to Willard, “I think I had a dream.”

“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 that would happen was if they were absolutely sincere with their pleas. As Charlotte grew weaker,
the prayers grew louder and began to carry down the hill and across the holler. The people of Knockemstiff woke up to the sound of their entreaties every morning and went to bed with them every night. Sometimes, when Charlotte was having a particularly bad spell, Willard accused his son of not wanting her to get better. He’d strike and kick the boy, and then later sink into remorse. Sometimes it seemed to Arvin as if his father apologized to him every day. After a while, he stopped paying attention and accepted the blows and harsh words and subsequent regrets as just part of the life they were living now. At night, they would go on praying until their voices gave out, then stumble back to the house and drink warm water from the well bucket on the kitchen counter and fall into bed exhausted. In the morning, they’d start all over again. Still, Charlotte grew thinner, closer to death. Whenever she came out of the morphine slumber, she begged Willard to stop this nonsense, just let her go in peace. But he wasn’t about to give up. If it required everything that was in him, then so be it. Any moment, he expected the spirit of God to come down and heal her; and as the second week of July came to an end, he could take a little comfort in the fact that she’d already lasted longer than the doctors had predicted.