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VINTAGE
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Copyright © Donald Ray Pollock 2016
Cover photograph © Dave Walsh/Millenium Images, UK

Donald Ray Pollock has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Harvill Secker in 2016
First published in the United States by Doubleday in 2016

penguin.co.uk/vintage

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

1

IN 1917, JUST as another hellish August was starting to come to an end along the border that divides Georgia and Alabama, Pearl Jewett awakened his sons before dawn one morning with a guttural bark that sounded more animal than man. The three young men arose silently from their particular corners of the one-room shack and pulled on their filthy clothes, still damp with the sweat of yesterday’s labors. A mangy rat covered with scabs scuttled up the rock chimney, knocking bits of mortar into the cold grate. Moonlight funneled through gaps in the chinked log walls and lay in thin milky ribbons across the red dirt floor. With their heads nearly touching the low ceiling, they gathered around the center of the room for breakfast, and Pearl handed them each a bland wad of flour and water fried last night in a dollop of leftover fat. There would be no more to eat until evening, when they would all get a share of the sick hog they had butchered in the spring, along with a mash of boiled spuds and wild greens scooped onto dented tin plates with a hand that was never clean from a pot that was never washed. Except for the occasional rain, every day was the same.

“I seen me two of them niggers again last night,” Pearl said, staring out the rough-cut opening that served as the only window. “Out there a-sittin’ in the tulip tree, singin’ their songs. They was really goin’ at it.” According to the owner of the land, Major Thaddeus Tardweller, the last tenants of the shack, an extended family of mulattoes from Louisiana, had all died of the fever several years ago, and were buried out back in the weeds along the perimeter of the now-empty hog pen. Due to fears of the sickness lingering on in a place where black and white had mixed, he hadn’t been able to convince anyone to live there until the old man and his boys came along last fall, half starved and looking for work. Lately, Pearl had been seeing their ghosts everywhere. The morning before, he’d counted five of them. Gaunt and grizzled, with his mouth hanging open and the front of his trousers stained yellow from a leaky bladder, he felt as if he might join them on the other side any minute. He bit into his biscuit, then asked, “Did ye hear ’em?”

“No, Pap,” Cane, the oldest, said, “I don’t think so.” At twenty-three, Cane was as close to being handsome as any sharecropper’s son could hope to get, having inherited the best of both parents: his father’s tall, sinewy frame and his mother’s well-defined features and thick, dark hair; but the harsh, hopeless way they lived was already starting to crinkle his face with fine lines and pepper his beard with gray. He was the only one in the family who could read, having been old enough before his mother passed for her to teach him from her Bible and an old McGuffey borrowed from a neighbor; and strangers usually viewed him as the only one of the bunch who had any promise, or, for that matter, any sense. He looked down at the greasy glob in his hand, saw a curly white hair pressed into the dough with a dirty thumbprint. This morning’s ration was smaller than usual, but then he remembered telling Pearl yesterday that they had to cut back if they wanted the sack of flour to last until fall. Pinching the hair loose from his breakfast, he watched it float to the floor before he took his first bite.

“Only thing I heard was that ol’ rat runnin’ around,” Cob said. He was the middle one, short and heavyset, with a head round as a chickpea and watery green eyes that always appeared a little out of focus, as if he had just been clobbered with a two-by-four. Though as stout as any two men put together, Cob had always been a bit on the slow side, and he got along mainly by following Cane’s lead and not complaining too much, no matter how deep the shit, how small the biscuit. Even telling time was beyond his comprehension. He was, to put it bluntly, what people usually referred to in those days as a dummy. You might come across such a man almost anywhere, sitting on his haunches around some town pump, hoping for a friendly howdy or handout from some good citizen passing by, someone with enough compassion to realize that but for the grace of God, it could just as easily be himself sitting there in that sad, ragged loneliness. Truth be told, if it hadn’t been for Cane looking out for him, that’s probably how Cob would have ended up, living out his days on a street corner, begging for scraps and the occasional coin with a rusty bean can.

The old man waited a moment for the youngest to respond, then said, “What about you, Chimney? Did ye hear ’em?”

Chimney stood with a dazed look on his pimply, dirt-streaked face. He was still thinking about the splay-toothed floozy with the fat tits that the old man’s raspy squawk had chased away a few minutes ago. Last night, as with most evenings whenever Pearl passed out on his blanket before it got too dark to see, Cane had read aloud to his brothers from The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, a crumbling, water-stained dime novel that glorified the criminal exploits of an ex-Confederate soldier turned bank robber cutting a swath of terror throughout the Old West. Consequently, Chimney had spent the last few hours dreaming of gun fights on scorched desert plains and poontang that tasted like honey. He glanced over at his brothers, yawning and scratching like a couple of dogs, eating what might as well have been lumps of clay and listening to that nutty bastard prattle on about his black buddies in the spirit world. Of course, he could understand Cob buying Pearl’s bullshit; there weren’t enough brains in his head to fill a teaspoon. But why did Cane continue to play along? It didn’t make any sense. Hell, he was smarter than any of them. Being loyal to any old mother or father was fine up to a point, Chimney reckoned, no matter how crazy or senile they had become, but what about their own selves? When did they get to start living?

“I’m talkin’ to you, boy,” Pearl said.

Chimney looked down at the shelf of greenish-gray mold growing along the bottom of the cabin walls. A simple yes or no wasn’t going to cut it, not this morning. Perhaps because he was the runt of the family, rebelliousness had always been the bigger part of his nature, and whenever he was in one of his defiant or pissed-off moods, the seventeen-year-old was liable to say or do anything, regardless of the consequences. He thought again about the juicy wench in his dream, her dimpled ass and sultry voice already fading away, soon to be extinguished completely by the backbreaking misery of swinging an ax in another hundred-degree day. “Don’t sound like no bad deal to me,” he finally said to Pearl. “Layin’ around pickin’ your teeth and playin’ music. Christ, why is it they get to have all the fun?”

“What’s that?”

“I said the way things is goin’ around this goddamn place, I’d trade even up with a dead darkie any day.”

The room went quiet as the old man pulled his slumped shoulders back and tightened his mouth into a grim leer. Clenching his fists, Pearl’s first thought was to knock the boy to the floor, but by the time he turned away from the window, he’d already changed his mind. It was too early in the morning to be drawing blood, even if it was justified. Instead, he stepped closer to Chimney and studied his thin, triangular face and cold, insolent eyes. Sometimes the old man almost found it hard to believe the boy was one of his own. Of course, Cob had always been a disappointment, but at least he had a good heart and did what he was told, and Cane, well, only a fool would find fault with him. Chimney, on the other hand, was impossible to figure out. He might work like a dog one day and then refuse to hit a lick the next, no matter how much Pearl threatened him. Or he might give Cob his share of the evening meal, then turn around and shit in his shoes while he was eating it. It was as if he couldn’t make up his mind between being good or evil, and so he tried his best to be both. Not only that, he was woman-crazy, too, had been ever since he first found out his pecker would get hard. And he didn’t give a damn who knew it, either; you could hear him jerking it over there in his blanket two or three times every night, especially if Cane had read to him again from that goddamn book they treasured like a holy relic. Pearl thought about something he had once heard an auctioneer say at a livestock sale, about how when the stud gets older, the litters get weaker, not only in the body, but in the head, too. “Don’t just go for your animals, either,” the man said. “Had an old boy back home caught him a young wife and decided at fifty-nine he wanted to bring one more of his own into the world before he dried up for good. Poor thing was born one of them maniacs like they got locked up in the nuthouse over in Memphis.”

“What happened to it?” Pearl had asked.

“Sold it to some banana man down in South America who collects such things,” the auctioneer replied. Back then, Pearl had dismissed the notion as part of some sales pitch to run the bidding up on a pair of young bulls, but now he realized there might be some truth in it. Though he hated to admit it, from the looks of things, his seed had already lost some of its vigor when he and Lucille made Cob, and by the time he shot Chimney into the oven, it had gone from slightly tepid to downright sour.

Even so, perhaps because he was the youngest or had yet to grow the scraggly beard his brothers wore, Chimney was still the one that reminded Pearl of his dead wife the most. He leaned closer and stared into the boy’s eyes even more intently, as if he were peering into a smoky portal to the past. Chimney looked over at his brothers again, took the last bite of his biscuit. The old man’s breath reeked of stomach gas and rancid drippings. A solitary bird began to twitter from somewhere close by, and suddenly Pearl was recalling a long-ago night when he had walked Lucille home from a barn dance just a few weeks before they married. The autumn sky was glittering with stars, and a faint smell of honeysuckle still hung in the cool air. He could hear the gravel crunching beneath their feet. Her face appeared before him, as young and pretty as the first time he ever saw her, but just as he was getting ready to reach out and touch her cheek, Chimney shattered the spell. “Hell, yes,” he said, “maybe we should ask them niggers if they’d be a-willin’ to—”

Without any warning, Pearl’s hand whipped out and caught the boy by the throat. “Spit it out,” he growled. “Spit it out.” Chimney tried to break away, but the old man’s grip, seasoned by years of plowing and chopping and picking, was tight as a vise. With his windpipe squeezed shut, he soon ceased struggling and managed to spew a few wet crumbs from his mouth that stuck to the hairs on Pearl’s wrist.

“Pap, he didn’t mean nothing,” Cane said, moving toward the two. “Let him go.” Though he figured his brother probably deserved getting the shit choked out of him, if for no other reason than being a constant aggravation, Cane also knew that getting their father too upset this early in the morning meant that he would push them twice as hard in the field today, and it was tough enough working a slow pace when you had but one biscuit to run on.

“I’m sick of his mouth,” Pearl said through clenched teeth. Then he snorted some air and tightened his hold even more, seemingly resolved on shutting the boy up forever.

“I said let him go, goddamn it,” Cane repeated, just before he grabbed the old man’s other arm and wrenched it behind his back with a violent twist that filled the room with a loud pop. Pearl let out a piercing howl as he jerked free of Cane and shoved Chimney away. The boy coughed and spat out the rest of his biscuit onto the floor, and they all watched in the gloomy half-light as the old man ground it into the dirt with his shoe while working the hurt out of his shoulder. Nothing else was said. Even Chimney was temporarily out of words.

When Pearl was done, they all followed him out of the shack single-file. Cob stopped at the well and drew a pail of water, and they carried it, together with their tools—three double-headed axes and a couple of machetes and a rusty saber with a broken tip—along the edge of a long green cotton field. As the sun crested the hills to the east, looking like the bloodshot eye of a hungover barfly, they came to a swampy piece of acreage they were clearing for Major Tardweller. He had promised them a bonus of ten laying hens if they finished the job in six weeks, and Cane figured they might just make it at the rate they were going. He peeled off his ragged shirt and draped it over the top of the canvas bucket to keep the gnats and mosquitoes out, and another day of work began. By afternoon, with nothing but warm water sloshing around in their guts, all they could think about was that sick hog hanging in the smokehouse.

2

THAT SAME MORNING, several hundred miles away in southern Ohio, a farmer by the name of Ellsworth Fiddler went to wake his son and discovered he was already up and gone. He stood for a moment looking at Eddie’s empty bed, then walked to the barn on the slim chance that he might be there, but there was no sign of him. Going back to the house, he checked to make sure Eula, his wife, was still asleep, then slipped down into the cellar beneath the kitchen. Just as he feared, there were at least two more jars of his blackberry wine missing. “I never should have let him have that first taste,” he mumbled to himself, thinking back to last Christmas. The holiday had been a gloomy one, mostly because Ellsworth had lost his and Eula’s life savings to a con man in a checkered suit the previous September, and he thought that sharing a drink with Eddie might brighten things up a bit for the boy. Ellsworth’s own father had allowed him a glass every night from the time he was twelve, and he’d turned out all right, hadn’t he? Looking back on it, though, he should have known better. Eddie was already prone to daydreaming and telling fibs and shirking his chores, and even a little hard cider sometimes did strange things to people like that. And sure enough, ever since that first sip, down in the cellar listening to Eula moving around in the kitchen above them while she stuffed the Christmas bird, a tough, stringy Tom that he’d traded Roy Cox some old harness for, the boy had become, on top of everything else, a regular boozehound.

He was just emerging from the cellar when Eula came into the kitchen. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Lookin’ for Eddie,” Ellsworth said nervously. “He ain’t in his bed.”

“You mean he’s gone?”

“Well, I can’t find him.”

“But even if ye can’t, why would you think he’d be down there at six o’clock in the morning?”

“I don’t know,” Ellsworth said. “I just—”

Shaking her head, Eula walked to the boy’s room to look for herself. Ellsworth waited on her to say something when she came back, but instead she lit the kindling in the cookstove, then dipped some water from a bucket into a pan for coffee. He went back out to the barn and fed the mule; and a few minutes later, she called him to the table and he sat down to a couple of eggs and a bowl of gummy, tasteless oatmeal. Jesus, he thought, this time last year there would have been sausage and gravy, maybe even pork chops. Though sick and tired of thinking about the swindle, the tiniest things reminded him of it all over again, even his breakfast. It was an ache inside him that never let up, something he figured would probably gnaw at him the rest of his days. A man riding a red sorrel mare had stopped him and Eddie along the road one bright afternoon toward the end of September last year, and casually asked if he might know someone who’d be interested in buying fifty Guernsey cows at twenty dollars a head. “Why so cheap?” Ellsworth had asked suspiciously. He knew for a fact that Henry Robbins had paid over twice that just a couple of weeks ago for some Holstein calves.

“Well, to tell ye the truth,” the man said, “I’m up against it. My wife’s took sick and the doctor says she won’t last another six months if’n I don’t get her to warmer weather.”

“Oh,” Ellsworth said, “I hate to hear that.”

“Consumption,” the man went on. “Nolie never was in any good shape, not even back when I married her damn near twenty years ago, but I didn’t care. And I still don’t. Wasn’t her fault she was born sickly. I’d gladly make a deal with ol’ Beelzebub just so she might draw one more breath. The way I see it, a man that don’t do everything he can to uphold his marriage vows ain’t much of a man.” He pulled a soiled handkerchief from his coat and patted his eyes with it. “Anyway, that’s why I’m in a hurry to sell.”

Ellsworth was impressed with the man’s speech; he felt much the same way about Eula, though he wasn’t sure he’d go so far as to trade around with the Devil, no matter how bad things got. “How much would them cows figure up to altogether?” he had asked, unable to calculate such a high number on his own.

“A thousand dollars,” Eddie spoke up.

“That’s right,” the man said. “Boy’s got a good head on his shoulders, don’t he?”

“I reckon,” Ellsworth murmured, looking past the man at a yellow finch that had just landed a few yards away in a crabapple tree. He and Eula had a thousand dollars put back, but it was all the money they had in the world, and it had taken them years to save it. Still, if he could convince her to go along with this, he’d own more cattle than anybody else in the township. And if he didn’t buy them, somebody else surely would before the day was out. It was just too good a deal to pass up. He took a deep breath. “I’d have to talk this over with my wife first,” he said.

“I know exactly what you mean,” the man said. “I don’t spend a dime without talkin’ it over with Nolie.”

The man had followed them home, waited in the front yard while Ellsworth went inside the house. He found Eula sitting at the kitchen table having her afternoon cup of coffee. Pacing back and forth, he explained the situation twenty different ways in increasingly glowing terms, occasionally stopping to remind her that he knew as much about cattle as Henry Robbins, and then some. “We could have one of the best dairy farms around,” he told her. “Or, we could just take ’em to auction and double our money. Either way, it’s the chance of a lifetime.” Of course, she had been resistant, as he had known she would be, but after an hour of his going on about it with no sign of a letup, she reluctantly gave in. She went into the bedroom and returned with the money jar she kept hidden under a loose board behind the dresser. “You look those cows over good before you go to handin’ him this,” she said.

Three hours later, he and Eddie and the man passed through a wide, sturdy gate to a large farm set between some wooded hills in Pike County. Ellsworth looked about admiringly at the rolling green pastures and acres of corn and hay and the freshly painted barn and scattered outbuildings and the brick two-story house set back among some tall oaks. “Quite a place ye got here,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” the man said. “The Lord’s been good to me.”

Ellsworth had wondered what was going to happen to the land, but he hated to ask. After all, the old boy was already taking a beating on his livestock. He remembered later that he’d been a little surprised at how soft the man’s hand seemed when he shook it to finalize the transaction. And then there was the checkered suit coat and pants that he wore, another warning sign that Ellsworth, in what he later shamefully realized was his hurry to take advantage of someone else’s misfortune, chose to ignore. “Well, I hope your wife gets to feelin’ better,” he’d said, as he watched the man stuff the money in his pocket without even bothering to count it, then scribble out a receipt on the back of an old envelope with a pencil stub.

“So do I,” the man answered. “I don’t know what I’d do without her.” His voice had actually quavered when he said that, and whenever Ellsworth replayed the incident in his head, that was the thing that enraged him most of all. Sometimes he imagined the slimy scoundrel in a smoky dive, flush with the thousand dollars, bragging to his lowlife buddies in between hee-haws and buying rounds for the house exactly how he had weaved the tight web around the country hick, one slick and deceitful strand at a time. Because, as it turned out, the man never had any claim to the cattle in the first place.

But that was to come later, learning that he’d been rooked. Over the next two days, he and Eddie drove nearly half the herd the seven miles back to their place, four or five head at a time. Then, on the third morning, just as they started through the gate with another bunch, the real owner of the farm showed up, after being away at a family gathering in Yellow Springs for the past week. Fortunately, Abe McAdams was a reasonable man. Though the law was sent for and a shotgun calmly directed at Ellsworth’s head while they waited, it could have been worse. Nobody would have blamed McAdams if he had killed them both. The constable finally arrived in a Model T with a white star painted on the door. By that time, McAdams really didn’t believe the pair intentionally meant to steal from him, but Constable Sykes, a man who’d heard enough false cries of innocence to blow the roof off a concert hall, insisted that they be taken into custody just the same, at least until he had made some inquiries. Neither of them had ridden in an automobile before, and Ellsworth, already sick over being duped, splattered the running boards with vomit several times before they got to the Pike County jailhouse. Everyone, from the toothless wife-beater in the next cell to the crowd of curious citizens who gathered outside their barred window, wondered how the farmer could have been so dumb. More than a few offered to sell him things: a mansion on a hill for fifty cents, a genuine lock of Jesus’s hair for two stogies, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad for a dozen brown eggs. Listening to their jokes was bad enough, but even worse had been watching Eddie, who hadn’t said a word since they’d been arrested, curl up on a bunk and turn away to face the wall, as if he couldn’t bear to look at him. Finally, an hour or so before sundown, they were released. “What about the man who stole my money?” Ellsworth asked on his way out.

The constable shrugged. “I wouldn’t hardly get my hopes up. I’ll keep my eye out, but I figure that ol’ boy’s long gone by now. You just make sure you get those cattle back to their rightful owner.”

Going back to face Eula that night was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. If only she had beat him with her fists, screamed curses at him, spit in his face. But no; except for a barely audible gasp when she realized what he was telling her, she said nothing. For weeks afterward, she walked about in a stupor, not eating or sleeping or barely, it seemed at times, even breathing. He began to fear she might do herself in. Every afternoon, he came into the house from the fields or the barn filled with dread at what he might find. But then one November morning, two months after the swindle, he overheard her say to herself, “Just have to start over, that’s all.” She was standing at the stove fixing breakfast, and she pursed her lips and nodded her head, as if she were agreeing with something someone else had said. After that, she began to come around, and although he knew she might never forgive him for being so reckless and stupid, at least he no longer had to worry about her going cuckoo or choking down a cupful of rat poison.

He scraped the last of the oatmeal from the bowl and stood up. Eula hadn’t said a word while he was eating, just sat there staring out the window sipping her coffee. “Well,” Ellsworth told her, “when he gets home, you tell him to meet me at the field across from Mrs. Chester’s place. And to bring a hoe.”

“And what if he don’t show up?”

“By God, he better,” Ellsworth said. “The weeds have damn near taken over.”

3

LIFE HADN’T ALWAYS been so hard for Pearl Jewett. At one time, he’d had a farm of his own back in North Carolina, just a few acres, but big enough for a man to get by on if he was willing to bust his ass. Life was as good as an illiterate farmer with no birthright could hope for in those days, and Pearl made sure to give the Almighty credit for that. He’d been quite a drinker and hell-raiser in his youth, but he turned over a new leaf when he met Lucille, and the only times he fell off the wagon after they married were whenever she went into labor. Hence, the rather odd names bestowed upon his sons didn’t signify anything of great importance, but were simply the result of what happens when a man who’s been off the sauce for a while consumes too much whiskey and then insists on having his way. With Cane, he had drawn his inspiration from a walking stick that someone had beaten him over the head with in a rowdy tavern; in the case of Cob, it turned out to be a half-eaten roasting ear he discovered in his back pocket after coming to under the porch of a boardinghouse called the Rebel Inn; while in regard to Chimney, it was a stovepipe that he was fairly certain he had helped a neighbor fashion from a sheet of tin in return for a cup of liquor that tasted like muddy kerosene and left him without any feeling in his fingers and toes for several days. And though Lucille would have preferred Christian names such as John and Luke and Adam, she figured the damage could have been worse, and she just counted her blessings that he was back home and walking a straight line again. He sacrificed much, even giving up tobacco, to pay for a pew in the First Baptist Church of Righteous Revelation in nearby Hazelwood, and every Sunday morning for the next few years, no matter what the weather, he and his young family walked the three miles there to worship. Pearl was especially proud that his wife was one of the few people in the congregation besides the minister who could read the lessons, and so, despite the fact that Lucille’s shyness sometimes made it hard for her to look even him in the eye, he had quickly volunteered her after the last lay reader, a silken-voiced, holier-than-thou man named Sorghum Simmons, backslid and ran off with a deacon’s wife and a business partner’s money. Every week he had to coax her into walking to the front of the church, telling himself it was for her own good. Thus, when she first started staying in bed on the Sabbath, complaining of feeling weak and light-headed, he couldn’t help but think she was faking it, and several months passed before he realized she really was sick.

By that time, Lucille had lost a considerable amount of weight, and her sagging skin had turned the dreary gray color of a rain cloud. Taking out a lien against the land, Pearl sent for doctors. One of them bled her and another prescribed expensive tonics while a third put her on a diet of curds and raw onions, but nothing seemed to help. Then the money ran out and all he could do was watch her slowly wither away. What struck her down remained a mystery until the night of her wake. As he sat alone keeping company with her corpse in the dim, flickering light of a single candle, Pearl noticed that the tip of her tongue was sticking out from between her lips. Leaning over to set it right, he saw a slight movement. My God, he thought, his heart quickening, can it be that she’s still alive? “Lord Jesus,” he started to pray, just before a worm, no wider than a ring finger and no thicker than a few sheets of paper, pushed forward several inches out of her mouth. Pearl lurched back and knocked the chair over in his rush to get away from the bed, but managed to stop himself at the doorway. He stood listening to the soft breathing of his sons sleeping in the next room while trying to still the frantic pounding in his chest. With a shudder, he thought of some of the words he had heard Lucille read the last time she was well enough to do the lessons: “Where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” Though he couldn’t recall any more of the passage, he was certain that Reverend Hornsby had explained in his sermon that it was an apt description of hell. He debated what to do. To bury his wife with that thing still inside her was out of the question, but he had no idea how to go about removing it other than to cut her open, and he couldn’t bear the thought of doing something like that. Stepping forward, he saw another two inches of the worm emerge, and the blind head rise up and move back and forth as if trying to get a bearing on this new world it was about to enter. Pearl paced around the room, fighting the urge to crush it with his hands. For the first time in several years, he craved a drink. The only thing to do, he finally decided, was to wait it out, and so he sat back down and spent the next several hours watching the creature slowly work its way out of her.

Not long after sunrise, the last of the worm slid from Lucille’s mouth and dropped onto her chest with a soft, almost imperceptible plop. Pearl looked out the window and beyond the yard to his fields barren of crops and overgrown with weeds. Lucille’s dying had begun in the spring and taken up the entire summer. Soon the man from the bank would be coming for his money, and Pearl didn’t have it. He stood and repeated the lesson words aloud: “Where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” He studied on this for a while, then turned to the bed and gathered up the worm like a spool of wet rope and carried it outside. Unrolling it along the ground in front of the house, he pinned each pulsing end of it down with rocks he took from the border of one of Lucille’s flower beds. Two peahens, all that remained of his livestock, darted out from around the house and began pecking furiously at it. He grabbed them up, one in each hand, and bashed their heads bloody against a porch post. Then he went back inside and drank a cold cup of coffee before shaking his sons awake. Later that morning, he and Cane carried Lucille out of the house and buried her in the shady spot under a magnolia tree where she used to sit and shell beans and read her Bible. For the next several days, the boys gnawed on chicken bones and decorated the grave with whatever pretty things they could find while Pearl sat silently watching the scalding Carolina sun turn the worm into a silver, leathery strip. When he was finally satisfied with the cure, he stuffed the remains into an empty coffee-bean sack along with some of the peahen feathers and sewed it shut like a shroud. Ever since then, and that had been nearly fourteen years ago, he had used it to rest his head on at night, and to remind him, lest he ever forget, that nothing is certain in this earthly life except the end of it.

4

WHEN EDDIE DIDN’T return home by suppertime that evening, Ellsworth knew something was amiss. The boy never stayed away this long, no matter how shit-faced he got. The farmer stood on the porch puffing on his cob pipe and listening to Eula bang around in the kitchen. He prayed to God the fool hadn’t gotten drunk and drowned in a pond, or made his way over the hill and caught a dose of the syph off one of those Slab Holler girls that the men who loitered over at Parker’s store were always warning the young bucks about. What a mess. Though he had always tried his best to hide the extent of Eddie’s screwups from Eula, it was getting harder and harder to come up with excuses. He didn’t even know why he kept doing it, other than to save her from the worries. For just a second, he wondered which would be worse, finding him floating facedown in somebody’s mud hole or watching him go blind and crazy from a sick peter.

“I can’t figure it out,” he said when he finally mustered up the courage to go in the house. “Think maybe he went fishin’ with those Hess boys?” Without bothering to reply, Eula wiped her red hands on the front of her apron and went back to the stove. Ellsworth sat down and nervously drummed his fingers on the table. Looking about the room, he noticed that she had rearranged the two faded pictures on the far wall, tropical island scenes cut from a magazine that Eddie had brought home one Friday from school when he was ten, explaining that Mr. Slater, the teacher, had tossed it in the trash. The first time he ever caught him in a lie, Ellsworth recalled. He had met Slater on the road the next afternoon, on his way to question Eddie about the National Geographic that had turned up missing from his desk drawer. Another student claimed he had seen him with it. “I don’t know if he’s the one who took it, Mr. Fiddler,” Slater said, “but—”

“It was him,” Ellsworth said, his face turning crimson from embarrassment.

“Oh,” the teacher said, “so you knew he stole it?”

“No, but I do now,” Ellsworth answered. And what had he done? Nothing. Handed Slater a quarter for the goddamn magazine and kept it a secret from Eula, thinking she would be better off not knowing. Just like he’d been doing with the wine.

A few minutes later Eula put out his supper, a meatless stew that she had been serving every Tuesday and Friday since last fall, and sat down across from him. Except for a rather prominent overbite, she had been almost pretty when they married, with her bright blue eyes and smooth, milky complexion, and her looks had held up well over the years, but it was clear that the last year had been hard on her. Although she had rallied in most ways after the loss of the money, she no longer seemed to care about her appearance. Her thin cotton dress was stained with various splatters, and her hair was just a greasy brown ball pinned atop her head. Even from the other end of the table, it was hard for him to ignore the strong odor of her sweat. “Ain’t you gonna eat?” he said, as he began buttering a slice of bread.

“You need to dump that wine,” Eula said, her voice calm but definite. “What’s left of it anyway.” Her mind was made up. Something had to be done about Eddie before it was too late. Just two weeks ago, after spending the morning in his bedroom supposedly nursing another one of his bellyaches, he had slipped out of the house with the shotgun and blown a hole through Pickles, the cat that had been her closest companion for the past ten years. Of course, he swore right off it was an accident, and though she was fairly sure that was true, she’d still felt he needed to be taught a lesson. But all Ellsworth had done was get more inventive with the allowances he made for the boy. Looking back on it, she didn’t know why she had expected anything else. He had always been too softhearted and trusting for his own good, and Eddie had learned over the years to take advantage of that good nature any chance he got.

Laying the bread down, Ellsworth looked away as he took a drink of buttermilk. At age fifty-two, he had a friendly, somewhat meek face, and thinning gray hair that Eula kept trimmed with a pair of sewing scissors. He could still outwork most men in the township, though sometimes now he woke up in the morning wondering how long he could keep it up. Since the embarrassment suffered last fall, he had grown heavier in the belly and jowls, even with Eula’s rationing, and had recently developed a slight stoop that often made him look as if he were searching the ground for a nail that had dropped out of his pocket, or the clue to a mystery he was forever trying to solve. In many ways, the con man had stolen more than just money from them.

On the afternoon that he came in from the fields and Eula told him Pickles had been shot, he went straight to Eddie’s room. When he flung the door open, the boy jumped up from his bed, and a book lying beside him fell to the floor. He had just finished digging the cat’s grave a few minutes before, and was still shiny with sweat. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Ellsworth had yelled.

“It was an accident, I swear,” Eddie said.

“An accident? How could such a thing be an accident?”

“I tripped and the gun went off. I didn’t mean to do it.” To an extent, anyway, Eddie was telling the truth. After spending the morning secretly sipping on some of his father’s wine and searching fruitlessly through a tattered book called Tom Jones for the juicy parts that Corky Routt had promised were in it, he had grown bored and decided to sneak the shotgun out of the closet and go blast a couple of birds. He was staggering across the backyard with Pickles sashaying along a few feet in front of him when he stumbled and fell. The gun, which had a loose trigger, went off when it hit the ground, and he lay there cursing for a minute before he raised up and saw that the blast had split the cat nearly in half.

“You been drinking again, ain’t ye?” Ellsworth said, looking at the boy’s bloodshot eyes.

“No,” Eddie answered nervously, “but with the way Mom carried on, I almost wish I had been.”

Ellsworth shook his head. Though he tried his best to love his son and accept him for who he was, he found himself wishing yet again that he was more like Tom Taylor’s boy, Tuck, big and rawboned and shoeing mules by the time he was ten years old. He felt guilty whenever he had such thoughts, but he had been waiting years for the boy to straighten up and be of some use. Not once had he ever given Eddie a proper thrashing, and though he had no stomach for any kind of cruelty—be it kicking dogs or whipping horses or drowning kittens or beating children—he regretted his soft touch now. Farming fifty acres by himself was hard work, and he wasn’t getting any younger. Now he was beginning to wonder if Eddie, with his lazy ways and thin wrists and that shaggy mop of blondish hair always hanging in his eyes, might have been better off a girl. At least then there might have been a chance of landing a stout son-in-law who could help out. But everything was a trade-off, and so whatever a man did, he usually ended up wishing he had done the other. “What’s that book you got there?” he asked.

“Uh, well,” Eddie stammered, “it’s about a guy who—”

“I don’t give a hoot what it’s about. Where’d ye get it?”

“Corky loaned it to me.”

“Well, you go on over to his house right now and give it back.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I mean it,” Ellsworth said. “Won’t be no more readin’ around here till you straighten up.” Eula had insisted that Eddie finish the sixth grade before he was allowed to quit school, and the farmer was convinced that a big part of the boy’s problem had to do with his education. In other words, he had gotten just enough of it to fuck him up for the real world. Ellsworth had seen it happen before, mostly to flighty types like horny spinsters and weak-eyed store clerks with a lot of time to kill. They would stick their noses in a book and then all of a sudden Ross County, Ohio, wasn’t good enough for them. The next thing you knew, they either got caught up in some perversion, like the old Wilkins woman who somehow managed to split herself open on a bedpost, or they lit out for some big city like Dayton or Toledo, in search of their “destiny.” Sometimes the line that divided those two impulses blurred until they amounted to pretty much the same thing, as in the case of the Fletcher boy the police found butchered in a hotel room in Cincinnati with a woman’s wig glued to his head and his pecker tossed under the bed like a cast-off shoe.

Ellsworth could sense his wife staring at him from across the table, waiting on an answer about the wine. He set his glass down and cleared his throat. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with Eddie takin’ off,” he finally said.

“Your side of the family’s always been too partial to drink, you know that,” Eula pointed out.

“That ain’t true. Uncle Peanut was fine until his woman ran off with that tinker.”

“Fine? My God, Ells, you’re talkin’ about a man who once ate a dog turd at Jack Eliot’s fish fry for a pint of moonshine, and that happened long before he ever hooked up with Jolene Carter. No, I mean it. Eddie might turn out to be a drunkard, but it’s not going to be with our help. Get rid of that wine and that will be the end of it.”

The buttermilk rose back up into his throat like hot lava, and Ellsworth had to swallow several times to keep it down. All the work he had put into it, his finest batch, and her making it sound as if dumping those barrels was no bigger deal than emptying grandma’s piss pot. He knew she had a right to be upset, but, Jesus Lord, there had to be another way. The two cups he drank in the evening were the only thing he had left to look forward to most days. He looked over at the cellar door cut into the floor in the corner of the kitchen. “What if I was to put a lock on it?” he asked, after he was fairly sure he wasn’t going to upchuck buttermilk all over the table.

“A lock? On what?”

“On the cellar door,” he explained quickly. “That would keep him out of it. Parker’s got some over at the store. Padlocks.”

Eula noted the slight tremor of desperation in his voice, and, for a moment, she started to weaken. Maybe something like that would work, she thought, rubbing her forehead. She was right on the verge of giving in when she glanced out the window and her eyes landed on Pickles’s grave in the backyard. The boy was drunk when he shot her; she didn’t doubt that for a minute. She knew it was partly her fault, too; perhaps if she had spoken up sooner, Pickles would still be alive. But still, if Ellsworth had wanted to save his wine, he should have considered something like a lock long before now. “No,” she said, “I’m not changing my mind.”

“Why not?”

She sighed and said, “Because it’s our boy we’re talking about. Just do it and get it over with.” Taking a sip of coffee, she looked over at the mostly bare shelves where she kept her staples. “But now that you mentioned the store—”

“Yeah?”

“Well, you did remind me of something.”

“What’s that?”

“We’re nearly out of sugar and salt,” she said, “and I got to get ready for the canning. The way things is looking, that garden might be the only thing that keeps us alive this winter.” She stood and started out of the kitchen. “You might as well go over to Parker’s tomorrow and take care of it.”

“But what about Eddie?” Ellsworth asked. “Don’t ye figure I should go out lookin’ for him?”

Eula stopped and put her hand against the doorway. She leaned there for a moment with her back turned, feeling dizzy. A wave of intense emotion ran through her body, and she began to tremble. Her son had disappeared and her cat was dead, and on top of that, it suddenly occurred to her that the sugar and salt would take what little money they had left. To think that this time last year they had a thousand dollars put aside. She bit her lip and fought the urge to cry out.

From where he sat, Ellsworth watched her narrow shoulders start to shake. An awkward silence filled the room, and he wondered if he should get up and hold her. But just as he was scooting his chair back, she wiped at her eyes and said, “I reckon Eddie will come home when he’s ready. He’s probably just out playin’ around.” Then she continued on into the bedroom. For a long time, Ellsworth sat staring at the stew congealing on his plate, and when he finally figured she was asleep, he slipped down into the cellar with the lantern. He looked about and found five empty jugs, then removed the wooden tops from the two wine barrels. After he filled them, he carried the jugs out to the barn and hid them in the loft. Then he went back to the cellar again. There were at least three or four gallons left. He dipped out a cup and drank it fast, then sat down at the bottom of the stairs with another.

5

AFTER HE LOST his wife and the bank took the farm, Pearl and his sons wandered aimlessly like nomads across a harsh, impoverished South still broken by a war that even he was too young to remember. They encountered corruption and decay at every turn, and their luck shifted from bad to worse. He prayed to God to smooth the way a bit, but no matter how hard they worked, their pockets remained empty and the best the four of them could do was stay one step ahead of starvation. He couldn’t understand it. Sitting by the fire in whatever meager camp they had made for the night, Pearl supped on parched corn and moldy bread and went back over his life, trying to recall something he might have done to deserve such a fate. He knew that he had sinned on occasion, yet no more than most, and certainly not as much as some. Pride had always been his biggest defect, and he knew that forcing Lucille to read those church lessons had been a vain and selfish act, but still, wasn’t God supposed to forgive? If not for him, then at least for his sons? And so, doubts began to creep into his mind, and that worried him even more than where their next meal was coming from.

By the time Pearl met the hermit along the Foggy River, Lucille had been gone ten years and the worm that killed her had turned to powder in his pillow. He was sitting on the bank in a daze that afternoon while the boys fished the water with their hands. They hadn’t eaten anything in several days, but he didn’t have the strength to help them. An occasional sparking sound that had started up in his head a few months ago had recently turned into an unrelenting sizzle, as if his brains were being sautéed in a frying pan, and he hadn’t slept more than a minute or two at a time in weeks.

The man came out of the woods and sat down beside Pearl without a word, as if they had known each other for years. Suddenly aware of