“Don’t you think it’s funny how we both ended up orphans and living in the same house like we do?” Lenora had said after they entered the cemetery. She set her Bible down on a nearby tombstone and loosened her bonnet a bit and pulled it back. “It’s almost like everything happened so we’d meet each other.” She was standing next to her mother’s place looking down at the square marker lying flat to the ground: HELEN HATTON LAFERTY 1926–1948. A small winged but faceless angel was carved into each top corner. Arvin had pushed spit between his teeth and glanced around at the dead remains of last year’s flowers on the other graves, the clumps of grass and rusty wire fence that surrounded the cemetery. It made him uneasy when Lenora talked like that, and she had been doing it a lot more since she’d turned sixteen. They might not have been blood relation, but it made him squeamish to think of her any other way than as his sister. Though he realized the odds weren’t good, he kept hoping she might find a boyfriend before she said something really stupid.
He weaved a little as he moved from the edge of the porch over to Earskell’s rocking chair and sat down. He started thinking about his parents, and his throat got tight and dry all of the sudden. He loved whiskey, but sometimes it brought on a deep sadness that only sleep would erase. He felt like crying, but lifted the bottle and took another drink instead. A dog barked somewhere over the next knob, and his thoughts wandered to Jack, the poor harmless mutt that his father had killed just for some more lousy blood. That had been one of the worst days of that summer, the way he remembered it, almost as bad as the night his mother died. Soon, Arvin promised himself, he was going to go back to the prayer log and see if the dog’s bones were still there. He wanted to bury them proper, do what he could to make up for some of what his crazy father had done. If he lived to be a hundred, he vowed, he would never forget Jack.
Sometimes he wondered if perhaps he was just envious that Lenora’s father might still be alive while his was dead. He had read all the faded newspaper accounts, had even gone out combing the woods where Helen’s corpse had been found, hoping to discover some piece of evidence that would prove everybody wrong: a shallow pit with two skeletons slowly rising side by side up through the earth, or a rusty wheelchair pocked with bullet holes hidden deep in an overlooked gully. But the only things he’d ever come across were two spent shotgun shells and a Spearmint gum wrapper. As Lenora ignored his questions that morning about her father and kept on blabbing about fate and star-crossed lovers and all that other romance shit she read about in books checked out from the school library, he’d realized that he should have stayed home and worked on the Bel Air. It hadn’t run right since the day he bought it.
“Damn it, Lenora, stop talking that nonsense,” Arvin had told her. “Besides, you might not even be an orphan. As far as everyone around here’s concerned, you daddy’s still alive and kicking. Hell, he might pop over the hill any day now dancing a jig.”
“I hope so,” she’d said. “I pray every day that he will.”
“Even if it meant he killed your mother?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I’ve already forgiven him. We could start all over.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not. What about your father?”
“What about him?”
“Well, if he could come back—”
“Girl, just shut up about it.” Arvin started toward the cemetery gate. “We both know that ain’t gonna happen.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice breaking into a sob.
Taking a deep breath, Arvin stopped and turned around. Sometimes it seemed as if she spent half of her life crying. He held his car keys in his hand. “Look, if you want a ride, come on.”
When he got home, he cleaned the Bel Air’s carburetor with a wire brush dipped in gasoline, then left again right after supper to pick up Hobart and Daryl. He had been down all week, thinking about Mary Jane Turner, and he felt the need to get good and sloshed. Her father hadn’t taken long to decide that life in the merchant marine was a hell of a lot easier than plowing rocks and worrying about whether it rained enough or not, and so he had packed his family up and headed for Baltimore and a new ship the previous Sunday morning. Though Arvin had kept after her from their first date, he was glad now that Mary hadn’t let him in her pants. Saying goodbye had been hard enough as it was. “Please,” he’d asked as they stood at her front door the night before she left; and she had smiled and stood on her tiptoes and one last time whispered dirty words in his ear. He and Hobart and Daryl had pooled their money together for the bottle and a twelve-pack and a couple of packs of Pall Malls and a tank of gas. Then they drove up and down the dull streets of Lewisburg until midnight listening to the radio fade in and out and blowing off about what they were going to do after high school, until their voices turned as rough as gravel from all the smoke and whiskey and grandiose plans for the future.
Leaning back in the rocker, Arvin wondered who was living in his old house now, wondered if the storekeeper still stayed by himself in that little camper and if Janey Wagner was knocked up by now. “Stink finger,” he muttered to himself. He thought again about the way the deputy named Bodecker had locked him in the back of the patrol car after he had led him to the prayer log, like the lawman was afraid of him, a ten-year-old kid with blueberry pie on his face. They had put him in an empty cell that night, not knowing what else to do with him, and the welfare lady had showed up the next afternoon with some of his clothes and his grandmother’s address. Holding the bottle up, he saw that there was maybe two inches left in the bottom. He stuck it under the chair for Earskell in the morning.
23
REVEREND SYKES COUGHED A LITTLE, and the congregation of the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified watched a trickle of bright blood run down his chin and drip onto his shirt. He kept preaching, though, gave the people a decent sermon about helping your neighbor; but then at the end he announced that he was stepping down. “Temporary,” he said. “Just till I get to feeling better.” He said that his wife had a nephew down in Tennessee who had just graduated from one of those Bible colleges. “He claims he wants to work with poor people,” Sykes went on. “I figure he must be a Democrat.” He grinned, hoping for a laugh to lighten the mood a little, but the only sound he heard was a couple of women in the back near the door crying with his wife. He realized now that he should have made her stay home today.
Taking a careful breath, he cleared his throat. “I ain’t seen him since he was a boy, but his mother says he’s all right. Him and his wife should be here in two weeks, and like I said, he’s just gonna help out for a while. I know he ain’t from around here, but try to make him feel welcome anyway.” Sykes started to weave a bit and grabbed hold of the pulpit to steady himself. He pulled the empty Five Brothers pack from his pocket and held it up. “Just in case any of you need it, I’m gonna hand this over to him.” A hacking fit came over him then, bent him double, but this time he managed to cover his mouth with his handkerchief and hide the blood. When he got his breath back, he rose up and looked around, his face red and sweaty with the strain of it all. He was too embarrassed to tell them that he was dying. The black lung that he’d been fighting for years had finally gotten the better of him. Within the next few weeks or months, according to the doctor, he’d be meeting his Maker. Sykes couldn’t honestly say that he was actually looking forward to it, but he knew that he’d had a better life than most men. After all, hadn’t he lived forty-two years longer than those poor wretches who had died in the mine cave-in that had pointed him toward his calling? Yes, he’d been a lucky man. He wiped a tear from his eye and shoved the bloody rag in his pants pocket. “Well,” he said, “no sense keeping you folks any longer. That’s all I got.”