Carnal Innocence

bartering salvation for social security checks.
    After he’d come home from fishing with Jim the day before, he’d followed the sound of organ music and hallelujahs through the kitchen and into the front room, where his mother stared glassy-eyed at the screen. It had scared him more than a little, because for a minute—just a minute—the face of the TV preacher had become his father’s face, and his father’s all-seeing eyes had stared right at him.
    “Got hair between your legs and evil thoughts in your mind,” his father had accused. “The next step is fornication.
Fornication!
It’s Satan’s tool between your legs, boy.”
    As he walked along the dusty verge of the road, Cyadjusted Satan’s tool, which seemed to have shriveled up in memory of his father’s voice.
    His father couldn’t see him, Cy reminded himself, and swiped his forearm over his sweaty brow. He was in jail and would likely stay there for a while. Just like A.J., who had gone from shoplifting packs of cigarettes and Mars Bars to grand theft auto. The minute the cell doors had clanged shut behind his oldest brother, his father had said he’d no longer had a son named Austin Joseph. Now that his father was in the same kind of pickle, Cy wondered if that meant he no longer had a father.
    The sweet relief of that possibility had another flash of guilt slicing through his gut.
    He wasn’t going to think of his father. He was going to think of getting this job. Cy knew his mother would have forbidden him to set foot on Sweetwater. That pale, pasty look would have come over her face—the look she got when his daddy decided she needed punishment.
    What sins had his mother committed? Cy asked himself as his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. What sins that needed to be washed away in her own blood?
    And when black eyes or split lips or bruised ribs had saved her from Satan, she would tell the neighbors how she’d fallen. If the sheriff came by, she would get that horrible, terrified smile on her face and insist, over and over, that she’d taken a tumble down the porch steps.
    No matter how often or how viciously those thick fists rained down on her, his ma would stay at his daddy’s side.
    So Cy knew she would have forbidden him to go to Sweetwater. That was why he hadn’t told her.
    She noticed so little these days, outside her television world and those whining calls to the lawyer, that Cy had had no problem slipping out of the house that morning. He hadn’t even hurried down the hardpack, knowing if she looked out and saw him walking down the road, her eyes would flick over him, then flick back to the screen.
    After three miles on the hardpack, he’d hit thegravel on Gooseneck Road, and had been lucky enough to catch a ride for two miles with old Hartford Pruett in the cab of his Chevy pick-up. That left a four-mile walk to Sweetwater.
    He’d worked up a powerful thirst by the time he reached the crushed mailbox and splintered pole at the McNair place. He could feel the heat beating up through the soles of his shoes. His throat was dry as a picked bone. Through the morning silence he could hear Jim’s daddy singing about the sweet by and by.
    The longing rushed through him so fast he could only stand helpless. He knew—because Jim had told him—that his friend had felt his daddy’s big, callused hand across his butt. He knew that once when Jim had been four and had wandered off into the swamp, his daddy had found him and had laid a switch across his legs that had made the young Jim dance a jig all the way home.
    But Jim’s father had never come wheeling down with his fists or locked Jim in his room for two full days with nothing but bread and water. According to him, his daddy had never once, not once, raised a hand to his ma.
    And he had seen for himself the way Toby’s hand could come down to lay gently, and somehow proudly, on Jim’s shoulder. The way they would walk off together with fishing rods over their shoulders. And even though they weren’t touching, you could tell they were.
    His throat ached miserably, and Cy fought back an urge to walk down the lane to watch Jim and his daddy slap paint on the boards of Miss Edith’s place. He knew Toby would turn and smile, his teeth white as the moon against his dark skin—skin scarred by Cy’s own father nearly twenty years before.
    “Look who’s here, Jim,” he would say. “Looks to me like that boy’s ready to paint. We got us some nice tomato sandwiches