“Amen,” the congregation repeated. Some looked confused, while others, those who had brought some of the good meat, grinned happily. A few glanced at Emma, who stood near the back of the line with Lenora. When she felt their eyes on her, she started to swoon and the girl grabbed her by the elbow. Arvin rushed forward from where he was standing in the open doorway and helped her outside. He sat her down in a grassy spot under a tree, and Lenora brought her a glass of water. The old woman took a sip and started to cry. Arvin patted her on the shoulder. “Now, now,” he said, “don’t you worry about that pus-gutted blowhard. He probably don’t have two nickels to rub together. You want me to talk to him?”
She dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her good dress. “I never been so embarrassed in my whole life,” she said. “I could have crawled under the table.”
“You want me to take you home?”
She sniffled some more, then sighed. “I don’t know what to do.” She looked toward the door of the church. “He sure ain’t the preacher I was hoping for.”
“Hell, Grandma, that fool ain’t no preacher,” Arvin said. “He’s bad as them they got on the radio begging for money.”
“Arvin, you shouldn’t talk like that,” Lenora said. “Preacher Teagardin wouldn’t be here if the Lord hadn’t sent him.”
“Yeah, right.” He started to help his grandmother up. “You see the way he was gobbling them livers down,” he joked, trying to get her to smile. “Heck, that boy probably ain’t had nothing that good to eat in a coon’s age. That’s why he wanted them all for his own self.”
33
PRESTON TEAGARDIN WAS LYING ON THE COUCH reading his old college psychology book in the house the congregation had rented for his wife and him. It was a little square box with four dirty windows and an outhouse surrounded by weeping willows at the end of a dirt path. The leaky gas stove was full of mummified mice, and the cast-off furniture they had provided smelled like dog or cat or some other dirty creature. My God, with the way the people around here lived he wouldn’t have been surprised if it wasn’t hog. Though he’d been in Coal Creek only two weeks, he already despised the place. He kept trying to look upon his assignment in this outpost in the sticks as some sort of spiritual test coming directly from the Lord, but it was more his mother’s doing than anything else. Oh, yes, she had fucked him royally, shoved it right up his ass, the old shrew. Not a penny more allowance until he showed his mettle, she had said after finally finding out — the same week she was getting ready to attend the graduation ceremony — that he had dropped out of Heavenly Reach Bible College at the end of his first semester. And then, just a day or so later, her sister had called and told her that Albert was sick. What perfect timing. She’d volunteered her son without even asking him.
The psychology course he’d taken with Dr. Phillips was the only good thing that came out of his college experience. What the hell did a degree from a place like Heavenly Reach mean in a world of Ohio Universities and Harvard Colleges anyway? Might as well have purchased a diploma through one of those mail-order places advertised in the backs of comic books. He’d wanted to go to a regular university and study law, but no, not with her money. She wanted him to be a humble preacher, like her brother-in-law, Albert. She was afraid she’d spoiled him, she said. She said all kinds of shit, insane shit, but what she really wanted, Preston understood, was to keep him dependent on her, tied to her apron strings, so he’d always have to kiss her ass. He had always been good at figuring people out, their petty wants and desires, especially teenage girls.
Cynthia was one of his first major successes. She was only fifteen years old when he helped one of his teachers at Heavenly Reach dunk her in Flat Fish Creek during a baptism service. That same evening, he fucked her dainty little ass under some rosebushes on the college grounds, and within a year he had married her so that he could work on her without her parents sticking their noses in. In the last three years, he’d taught her all the things he imagined a man might be able to do with a woman. He couldn’t begin to add up the hours it had taken him, but she was trained as well as any dog now. All he had to do was snap his fingers and her mouth would start watering for what he liked to refer to as his “staff.”
He looked over at her in her underwear, curled up in the greasy easy chair that had come with the dump, her silky-haired gash pressed tight against the thin yellow material. She was squinting at an article about the Dave Clark Five in a Hit Parader magazine, trying to sound out the words. Someday, he thought, if he kept her, he would have to teach her how to read. He had discovered lately that he could last twice as long if one of his young conquests read from the Good Book while he nailed her from behind. Preston loved the way they panted holy passages, the way they began to stutter and arch their backs and struggle not to lose their place — for he could become very upset when they got the words wrong — right before his staff exploded. But Cynthia? Shit, a brain-damaged second-grader from the darkest holler in Appalachia could read better. Whenever his mother mentioned that her son, Preston Teagardin, with four years of high school Latin under his belt, had ended up married to an illiterate from Hohenwald, she nearly had another breakdown.
So it was debatable, keeping Cynthia. Sometimes he would glance over at her and, for a second or two, not even be able to recall her name. Gaped open and numb from his many experiments, what had once been fresh and tight was a faded memory now, and so, too, was the excitement she used to arouse in him. His biggest problem with Cynthia, though, was that she no longer believed in Jesus. Preston could abide just about anything but not that. He needed for a woman to believe that she was doing wrong when she lay with him, that she was in imminent danger of going to hell. How could he get turned on by someone who didn’t understand the desperate battle raging between good and evil, purity and lust? Every time he fucked some young girl, Preston felt guilty, felt as if he was drowning in it, at least for a long minute or two. To him, such emotion proved that he still had a chance of going to heaven, regardless of how corrupt and cruel he might be, that is, if he repented his wretched, whoring ways before he took his last breath. It all came down to a matter of timing, which, of course, made things all that much more exciting. Cynthia, though, didn’t seem to care one way or another. Nowadays, fucking her was like sticking his staff in a greasy, soulless doughnut.
But you take that Laferty girl, Preston thought, turning another page in the psychology book and rubbing his half-hard cock through his pajamas, Lord, that girl was a believer. He’d been watching her closely in church the past two Sundays. True, she wasn’t much to look at, but he’d had worse down in Nashville when he volunteered that month at the poor house. He reached over and took a saltine from a pack on the coffee table, crammed it in his mouth. He let it lie on his tongue like a host and melt, turn into a soggy, tasteless glob. Yes, Miss Lenora Laferty would do for now, at least until he could get his hands on one of the Reaster girls. He’d put a smile on that sad, crimped face of hers once he got that faded dress off. According to the church gossips, at one time her father had been a preacher around this county, but then — at least the way they told it — he’d murdered the girl’s mother and disappeared. Left poor little Lenora just a babe with the old lady who’d gotten so tore up about those chicken livers. This girl, he predicted, was going to be so easy.