Free The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock

Willard and Arvin got to the prayer log, fresh blood was still dripping off the sides into the rancid dirt. “This wasn’t here yesterday,” Arvin said.
    “I run over a groundhog last night,” Willard said. “Went ahead and bled him out when I got home.”
    “A groundhog? Boy, he must have been a big one.”
    Willard grinned as he dropped to his knees. “Yeah, he was. He was a big fat bastard.”

7
    EVEN WITH THE SACRIFICE OF THE LAWYER , Charlotte’s bones began breaking a couple of weeks later, little sickening pops that made her scream and claw gashes in her arms. She passed out from the pain whenever Willard tried to move her. A festering bedsore on her backside spread until it was the size of a plate. Her room smelled as rank and fetid as the prayer log. It hadn’t rained in a month, and there was no letup from the heat. Willard purchased more lambs at the stockyard, poured buckets of blood around the log until their shoes sank over the tops in the muddy slop. One morning while he was out, a lame and starving mutt with soft white fur ventured up to the porch timidly with its tail between its legs. Arvin fed it some scraps from the refrigerator, had already named it Jack by the time his father got home. Without a word, Willard walked into the house and came back out with his rifle. He shoved Arvin away from the dog, then shot it between the eyes while the boy begged him not to do it. He dragged it into the woods and nailed it to one of the crosses. Arvin stopped speaking to him after that. He listened to the moans of his mother while Willard drove around looking for more sacrifices. School was getting ready to start again, and he hadn’t been off the hill a single time all summer. He found himself wishing that his mother would die.
    A few nights later, Willard rushed into Arvin’s bedroom and jerked him awake. “Get over to the log now,” he said. The boy sat up, looked around with a confused look. The hall light was on. He could hear his mother gasping and wheezing for breath in the room across the hall. Willard shook him again. “Don’t you quit praying until I come and get you. Make Him hear you, you understand?” Arvin threw on his clothes and started jogging across the field. He thought about wishing her dead, his own mother. He ran faster.
    By three in the morning, his throat was raw and blistered. His father came once and dumped a bucket of water on his head, implored him to keep praying. But though Arvin kept screaming for the Lord’s mercy, he didn’t feel anything and none came. Some of the people down in Knockemstiff closed their windows, even with the heat. Others kept a light on the rest of the night, offered prayers of their own. Snook Haskins’s sister, Agnes, sat in her chair listening to that pitiful voice and thinking of the ghost husbands that she had buried in her head. Arvin looked up at the dead hound, its vacant eyes staring across the dark woods, its belly bloated and near bursting. “Can you hear me, Jack?” he said.
    Right before dawn, Willard covered his dead wife with a clean white sheet and walked across the field, numb with loss and despair. He slipped up behind Arvin silently, listened to the boy’s prayers for a minute or two, barely a choked whisper now. He looked down, realized with disgust that he was gripping his open penknife in his hand. He shook his head and put it away. “Come on, Arvin,” he said, his voice gentle with his son for the first time in weeks. “It’s over. Your mom’s gone.”
    Charlotte was buried two days later in the little cemetery outside of Bourneville. On the way home from the funeral, Willard said, “I’m thinking we might take us a little trip. Go down and visit your grandma in Coal Creek. Maybe stay for a while. You can meet Uncle Earskell, and that girl they got living with them would be just a little younger than you. You’ll like it there.” Arvin didn’t say anything. He still hadn’t gotten over the dog, and he was