On his way back home, he stopped at the cemetery. They had buried Lenora beside her mother. The monument man hadn’t put the stone up yet. He stood looking down at the dry, brown dirt that marked her place, remembering the last time he’d come here with her to see Helen’s grave. He could vaguely recall how she had tried, in her own awkward way, to flirt with him that afternoon, talking about orphans and star-crossed lovers, and he had gotten aggravated with her. If only he had paid a little more attention, he thought, if only people hadn’t made fun of her so much, maybe things wouldn’t have turned out like they did.
The next morning, he left the house at the usual time, acting as if he was going to work. Though he was certain in his gut that Teagardin was the one, he had to be sure. He began keeping track of the preacher’s every movement. Within a week, he had watched the bastard fuck Pamela Reaster three times in an old farm lane just off Ragged Ridge Road. She walked through the fields from her parents’ house to meet him there, every other day at exactly noon. Teagardin sat in his sports car and studied himself in the mirror until she arrived. After the third time he saw them meet there, Arvin spent an afternoon piling up deadwood and horseweeds to make a blind just a few yards from where the preacher parked under the shade of a tall oak tree. It was Teagardin’s custom to hustle the girl away as soon as he was finished with her. He liked to dawdle a bit alone under the tree, relieving his bladder and listening to bubble gum music on the car radio. Occasionally, Arvin heard him talking to himself, but he could never make out the words. After twenty or thirty minutes, the car would start up, and Teagardin would turn around at the end of the lane and go home.
The next week, the preacher added Pamela’s younger sister to his roster, but the meetings with Beth Ann took place inside the church. By then, Arvin had no doubts, and when he woke up Sunday morning to the sound of the church bells tolling across the holler, he decided the time had come. If he waited any longer, he was afraid he would lose his nerve. He knew Teagardin always met the older girl on Mondays. At least the horny sonofabitch was regular in his habits.
Arvin counted the money he had managed to put back over the last couple of years. He had $315 in the coffee can under his bed. He drove over to Slot Machine’s after Sunday dinner and bought a fifth of whiskey, spent the evening drinking with Earskell on the porch. “You sure are good to me, boy,” the old man said. Arvin had to swallow several times to keep from crying. He thought about tomorrow. This was the last time they would ever share a bottle.
It was a beautiful evening, cooler than it had been for several months. He went inside and got Emma, and she sat with them for a while with her Bible and a glass of ice tea. She hadn’t been back to the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified since the night that Lenora died. “I think fall’s going to come early this year,” she said, marking her place in the book with a bony finger and gazing out across the road at the leaves already beginning to turn rust-colored. “We’re going to have to start thinking about getting some wood in before long, ain’t we, Arvin?”
He looked over at her. She was still staring at the trees on the hillside. “Yeah,” he said. “Be cold before you know it.” He hated himself for deceiving her, pretending everything was going to be all right. He wanted so much to be able to tell them goodbye, but they would be better off not knowing anything if the law came hunting for him. That night, after they went to bed, he packed some clothes in a gym bag and put it in the trunk of his car. He leaned on the porch railing and listened to the faint rumble of a coal train over the next swath of hills heading north. Going back inside, he stuck a hundred dollars in the tin box that Emma kept her needles and thread in. He didn’t sleep any that night, and in the morning he just drank some coffee for breakfast.
He had been sitting in the blind for two hours when the Reaster girl came hurrying across the field, maybe fifteen minutes early. She appeared worried, kept looking at her wristwatch. When Teagardin showed up, easing his car down the rutted road slowly, she didn’t jump in like she had always done in the past. Instead, she stood a few feet away and waited for him to shut the engine off. “Well, get in, honey,” Arvin heard the preacher say. “I got a full sack for you.”
“I ain’t staying,” she said. “We got problems.”
“What do you mean?”
“You were supposed to keep your hands off my sister,” the girl said.
“Oh, shit, Pamela, that didn’t mean anything.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “She told Mother about it.”
“When?”
“About an hour ago. I didn’t think I was going to be able to get away.”
“That little bitch,” Teagardin cursed. “I hardly touched her.”
“That ain’t the way she tells it,” Pamela said. She looked toward the road nervously.
“What did she say exactly?”
“Believe me, Preston, she told everything. She got scared because the bleeding won’t stop.” The girl pointed her finger at him. “You better hope you didn’t do something so she can’t have kids.”
“Shit,” Teagardin said. He got out of the car and paced back and forth for several minutes, his hands clasped behind his back like a general in his tent planning a counterattack. He took a silk handkerchief out of his pants pocket and patted his mouth. “What do you think your old lady will do?” he finally said.
“Well, knowing her, after she takes Beth Ann to the hospital, the first thing she’ll do is call the fucking sheriff. And just so you know, he’s my mom’s cousin.”
Teagardin placed his hands on the girl’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. “But you haven’t said anything about us, right?”
“You think I’m crazy? I’d rather die first.”
Teagardin let go of her and leaned against the car. He looked out over the field before them. He wondered why nobody was farming it anymore. He imagined an old two-story house in ruins, some rusted pieces of antique machinery sitting in the weeds, maybe a hand-dug well of cool, clean water, covered over with rotten boards. Just for a moment, he pictured himself fixing the place back up, settling down to a simple life, preaching on Sundays and working the farm with callused hands through the week, reading good books out on the porch in the evenings after a nice supper, some tender babes playing in the shaded yard. He heard the girl say she was leaving, and when he finally turned to look, she was gone. Then he considered the possibility that perhaps Pamela was lying to him, trying to scare him into keeping off her little sister. He wouldn’t put anything past her, but if what she said was true, he had only an hour or two at best to pack and get out of Greenbrier County. He was just getting ready to start the car when he heard a voice say, “You ain’t much of a preacher, are you?”
Teagardin looked up and saw the Russell boy standing right outside the door of the car pointing a pistol of some kind at him. He’d never owned a gun, and the only thing he knew about them was that they usually caused trouble. The boy looked bigger up close. Not an ounce of fat on him, he noticed, dark hair, green eyes. He wondered what Cynthia would think of him. Though he knew it was ridiculous, with all the young pussy he was getting, he felt a pang of jealousy just then. It was sad to realize that he’d never look anything like this boy. “What the hell are you doing?” the preacher said.