of the leaky roof, then remembered how wet his feet
were and pulled off his boots and poured the water
from them out an open window. He carried the
lantern over to the large bed—it had an iron frame—
and was about to bunk down when he saw the stains
large as a pair of dinner plates. He held the light
closer. Bloodstains. He pulled back the blankets and
saw the stains had soaked into the tick mattress. It
made him feel a tad uncomfortable to think about ly-
ing down on a bloodstained bed and so he went out
again into the main room and chose one of the small
cots and lay down on it.
He’d checked out the first three stops the ticket-
master back in Bismarck had written down for him—
Bent Fork, Tulip, and Grand Rock. Just shitholes of
places and no Clara. The next place on his list was a
burg called Sweet Sorrow. The good news was, so far
there hadn’t been any law on his trail for the stolen
horse.
The night rain seduced his mind to thinking back
when he was a boy. It seemed like another lifetime.
Like it wasn’t him but someone else, a story he’d read
about a boy.
One thought led to another and eventually it all led
to his daddy. The old man had been a preacher back
there in Kentucky, would ride the circuit on a mule
back up in the hollows preaching to folks where there
wasn’t any church except the sky and the trees. When
he wasn’t preaching he was a sawyer and Fallon never
did conclude how the two went together. The old
man would be gone from Saturday night till Monday
morning and come home with chickens, eggs, butter,
and jams, all in a poke sack to go along with the little
bit of money he earned from his preaching; enough
food and money to keep the Monroe family—Fallon,
his ma, and his siblings—from starving. The old man
was hard and stern, seemed to be smoldering inside
all the time, hardly ever smiled.
One time he caught Fallon looking at a deck of
playing cards with sultry renderings of women on
them he’d gotten from a boy in town for a nickel. The
boy said he stole them off a gambler. The old man
belt-whipped him over it, saying how he was going to
“beat the devil out of him” and pretty much did.
But then one day a woman from the hollows
showed up with her young daughter—a girl not much
older than Fallon, fourteen or fifteen—both women
barefoot and looking like scarecrows except for the
daughter’s round belly. The older woman came right
up to the house and yelled for him to come out—
“Preacher Monroe! Y’all better get on out here now!”
This, on a Good Friday when they’d all just sat
down to a nice chicken dinner with the old man giv-
ing his usual long prayer before eating.
And when the old man came out of the house to
confront the crone, so, too, did the rest of the Mon-
roes and stood there on the porch behind the old man
as the hollow woman announced about how the old
man had put his seed in the girl and it was plain as
hell looking at her that somebody sure had.
“What you gone do about it, Preacher?”
“I had no hand in it,” the old man said with a
wobbling voice, for Fallon’s ma and his siblings were
all staring at him; the wattle on his neck quivered.
“It ain’t a goddamn hand that caused this—it was
your straying and unholy pecker!” the woman decried.
Fallon remembered looking up at the sky thinking
it was going to split in half. The old man run the hol-
low woman and her child off by invoking the wrath of
God on her for such false accusations, telling her she
would burn in a lake of fire and so on and so forth,
raining brimstone from the heavens on her, and if that
didn’t by god work he’d get his gun, until she shrank
and fell back, then turned running up the road, the
girl in tow screaming, “The Devil! The Devil”
It made for a long hard rest of the day, the old man
about half wild and Fallon’s ma equally so, for the
truth could not be denied no matter how much the
old man tried denying it. It was the most terrible event
that could have befallen them all—the hollow woman
and her pregnant child.
Late that evening the old man said, “I’m going to
prove to you, Hettie, I didn’t have a thing to do with
that girl getting knocked up,” and went out and came
back with a big timber rattlesnake long as his arm and
stood in the yard with the red sky behind him invok-
ing the name of Jesus and Jehovah, shouting “Lord, if
I have sinned then let this serpent strike me dead.”
And that’s exactly what happened. The snake struck
him twice in the face. The old man lingered through
the night but was dead by dawn, his face swollen and
red like a rotted melon. It didn’t even look like him
when they buried him.
Fallon heard his ma telling the girls: “The wages of
sin is death. Your pa thought he could kiss and fool
with that girl and get away with it the same as he
thought he could kiss and fool with that old snake
and get away with it, but he couldn’t.”
It was a week later that Fallon found the same deck
