Regardless of what the law said, Emma was convinced that the two were alive and guilty, and she wouldn’t rest easy until they were locked up or dead. She told Willard she was raising the little girl as best she could. He had sent her a hundred dollars to help pay for a proper burial. Sitting there watching his son, Willard suddenly had an intense desire to pray. Though he hadn’t talked to God in years, not a single petition or word of praise since he’d come across the crucified marine during the war, he could feel it welling up inside him now, the urge to get right with his Maker before something bad happened to his family. But looking around the cramped apartment, he knew he couldn’t get in touch with God here, no more than he’d ever been able to in a church. He was going to need some woods to worship his way. “We got to get out of this place,” he told Charlotte, laying the newspaper down on the coffee table.
THEY RENTED THE FARMHOUSE on top of the Mitchell Flats for thirty dollars a month from Henry Delano Dunlap, a plump, girlish lawyer with shiny, immaculate fingernails who lived over by the Meade Country Club and dabbled in real estate as a hobby. Though at first Charlotte had been against it, she soon fell in love with the leaky, run-down house. She didn’t even mind pumping her water from the well. Within a few weeks after they moved in, she was talking about someday buying it. Her father had died of tuberculosis when she was just five years old, and her mother had succumbed to a blood infection just after Charlotte entered the ninth grade. All her life, she’d lived in gloomy, roach-infested apartments rented by the week or month. The only family member she still had living was her sister, Phyllis, but Charlotte didn’t even know where she was anymore. One day six years ago, Phyllis had walked into the Wooden Spoon wearing a new hat and handed Charlotte her key to the three rooms they shared above the dry cleaners on Walnut Street. “Well, Sis,” she said, “I got you raised and now it’s my turn,” and out the door she went. Owning the farmhouse would finally mean some stability in her life, something she craved more than anything, especially now that she was a mother. “Arvin needs to have somewhere he can always call home,” she told Willard. “I never did have that.” Every month they struggled to put another thirty dollars away for a down payment. “You just wait and see,” she said. “This place will be ours someday.”
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.”