The Maid's Version by Daniel Woodrell Page A

asked, “What kind of fish is that for?”
    “I might want to eat meat.”
    “Why bother with the fish, then?”
    “See you.”
    He returned in three days, clean-shaven, wearing new clothes, with no fish and no meat. During the coming weeks his personality began to warp and erode; behavior she’d become accustomed to from him was now unconvincing or gone, his regular good cheer replaced by pacing about with a narrowing face and glancing from the windows. Her singing irritated him at any hour and he’d bark he wanted more gravy on his potatoes from now on and other days bark for not so much. He let the children climb onto him and play but did not join the play, seemed not to note them on his lap or clung to his leg or otherwise seeking his attention. He quit football on Saturdays and ate less. His sleep had stories in it that he mumbled in jags until certain scenes shouted him upright. After his death, she found among his personal effects inside a bottom drawer a folded edition of the
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reporting the big news that a dead man had been discovered in a clearing at Saunders Camp, beside the Twin Forks River. The victim had been shot until his face scattered beyond identification, the only clue to his name or origins a brim hat with a tag inside that read, Selz Fine Clothing, Carr Street, St. Louis, Mo.

    Mr. Isaiah Willard was a jackleg preacher, a man of hard convictions walked up from Little Rock after he’d walked from several places before that. His preaching was not deeply rooted in the styling of any single church and had a rough angry tone, accusatory subject matter, sparks and ash flying from his mouth. He cast out plenty who had blackened spots on their souls and argued or would not tithe. He offered an unforgiving response to those who failed to accept his rendering of Scripture into a parched syllabus of sacrifice and toil, pain at unpredictable intervals but guaranteed, then death in the ground and a life eternal above if you’d minded his teachings to the end, hell if you hadn’t.
    His church changed names and angles as he’d walked the nation, and here it was known simply as the Tree of Christ, housed in a small white storage shed at the southern edge of town. There were still a few tools leaning in a corner, half a sack of feed and a torn washtub, but he attracted a flock of seven who liked to be chastised by a stranger and raked across the coals. As his influence over the seven grew his preaching ranged about and added features that some would call vindictive, purely and simply, once they thought it over, but his flock doubled as these ranting subplots attracted those locals who dearly craved wrath.
    There were so many acts or thoughts or mere thoughts of acts that could plant rot in a person and choke the flow of the blessed spirit until the soul became wizened and shrunken and fell away from the body, useless as a dry booger, and a soulless body was but a hospitable husk soon become filled by a demon. The soul of the damned was now a dry booger on the ground somewhere and the newly resident demon shielded behind the face of the husk laughed and laughed, threw stones at stained-glass windows, made babies sick, mothers die, pestilence abound. Preacher Willard accepted the Ten Commandments as a halfhearted start but kept adding amendments until the number of sins he couldn’t countenance was beyond memorization. He appeared to be adding new ones shaped to your own reported shortcomings until you were tailored appropriately for a residence in hell, and nowhere else, but a complete and prostrate begging of God and an increased tithe might, just might, earn you one more chance at heaven, who knows, give it a try, it’s only money.
    Among the easiest portals to the soul through which demons might enter was that opened by dancing feet. Evil music, evil feet, salacious sliding and the disgusting embraces dancing excused provided an avenue of damnation that could be readily seen and blockaded. Through the