Nobody likes dying, but Randy was as ready as a man can be. And it showed on his face, the one Pastor David’s wife saw in the waiting room, behind and underneath those cheap black sunglasses. He’d been having the heart attack all day, but he never realized it. No one ever knew any more than that Randy had brought Melanie to the hospital, because the only ones who could tell about it were off this earth, across the great chasm that looks greater from the other side. That’s what I imagine, anyway, and I have what seem to me to be very good reasons.

“Boy, you just don’t know. I’d have killed them both. Should have. And I’m going to split your throat open with this here ax and drink your blood. That’s what I do. It’s what I am.”

Jesse hated both himself and his father Bruce as he pulled down the gravel and dirt driveway of that farmhouse. For the first time since last Wednesday he vaguely wished he had killed himself after leaving the office that afternoon. He turned his rental car off, clenched his back teeth, and gave himself a few seconds to decide how much he really wanted to do this. And then his heart stopped as his dead father came out the old farmhouse’s front door and looked at him, square in the eyes, standing on that rotten front porch as silent and shadowed as ever.

Jesse was pretty good with directions, so within three of “Country’s latest hits” (according to the radio station in his rental car that he didn’t have the will to change) he was pulling up to the house where all the evil Bruce had hid in the 1950s and 1960s was still just waiting to be discovered. 

The day Bruce Henderson left home in 1966 he made it four miles on foot to Belmont, just across the Ohio River from nothing but a million acres of trees and the Beech Grove United Brethren Cemetery. He’d left the wallet underneath a stone about a hundred yards away from Riverview Drive. Then he walked across the road to the gas station. Once inside he avoided eye contact with the attendant to his right and made his way to the bathroom. 

He was able to get some of the blood off of his back and shoulder blades, but the mirror was cracked and foggy. It was hard. 

“There are three ways to enter a police station: Like you did something, like something was done to you, or like you’re on a field trip. We’re going with option number three. Which means I need to do the talking. You look like you just got done shaking off a bad high in a bus station bathroom.”

“Right,” Jesse said, and nodded.

I have to start over. I wish I could leave him behind. Let it go. But I can’t. Not all the way. I don’t know if we’ll kill each other someday, but I know we’ll both end up in Hell. That’s the only way this ends. I’m sorry I ever knew you, but not sorry I loved you. Goodbye, June.

Bruce

The last time was a Tuesday. 1966. The darkest hours of a summer night drowning under thick rain. If you’d have been standing on that old road in front of the house, you’d have heard the one scream, right as it started, before the thunder drowned it out. That was just before 2:30 in the morning, at least according to the old clock in the farmhouse kitchen.

That last one was the hardest for Bruce.

Jesse liked that these guys didn’t nervously tiptoe around the edges of their Christianity on his account. He didn’t buy any of it, but to a guy trying to figure out if his dead dad was a serial killer and ready to Google “divorce attorneys” when he got back home, there was something comforting about knowing exactly who you were lounging around a living room with.

“‘I just found out she’d had an abortion towards the end. I called her last night, really upset about it. I’m not sure if it was the right move, but-‘ Randy stuck his chin out, then rubbed his temples a half-inch under his dark black hairline. He closed his eyes and breathed in deep. ‘I never knew I was a father.’”

“My dad was a liar who ran away from home after doing something terrible he kept a secret his whole life. He just died and I want to know what it was so I can never think about him again. Plus, I just got fired and my wife and I are getting divorced.” Jesse felt the blood flush to his cheeks and scalp, and he was still conscious enough to know that that was the first time in his life he’d strung that many words together about what was inside him at any given moment.

Evil is in that house. Raw, ugly, God-hating. And evil is never disembodied. It isn’t a mere force or idea. Evil always nests itself in a person, flows out of a heart and a will and a mind. The wickedness that afflicts this scene out here in West Virginia, miles from town, is bound to a set of hands and a pair of eyes and the smell of cigarettes and sweat.”

Sixteen years old, running from some thing he’d done or seen, something he’d never talk about again, leaving family forever. Why leave a trail?

“Her dress was plain and her hair was just straight and light brown and she looked like a normal woman. But then it hit me and I tried to wake up. I tried real hard as she started to walk towards me and I heard some dead leaves and a stick crunch underneath her feet as she took her steps towards me. Because I was still seeing the back of her head. Her head was on backwards.”

Joe waited a full five seconds, and Jesse became uncomfortable with the silence. There wasn’t a clock ticking or an air conditioner running or anything. Just unsettling quiet. “Real bad. I mean evil. And she thought he either did it or had it done to him. But he never talked about it to her.”

Jesse was grieving, he was still confused by what he’d seen between Randy and his father the day his father eventually died, and he was obsessed with understanding what he’d found in his father’s closet.