The Habit of Art: Best Stories from the Indiana University Fiction Workshop

All Saints Day

ANGELA PNEUMAN [312] All Saints Day ANGELA PNEUMAN Word was that the missionary kid had a demon, though no one was supposed to know. The Boyd family was visiting East Winder only for the weekend, and already eight-year-old Prudence had heard it from her younger sister, Grace, who heard it from her new friend, Anna, whose father was going to cast it out. Prudence figured that a cast-out demon would look like a puddle of split pea soup the size of a welcome mat, and that it would move around the room, bloblike , trying to absorb its way into people. Her own father, the Reverend Yancey Boyd, didn’t believe in demons or in talking about demons except to say he didn’t believe in them, end of discussion. “The demon made Ryan Kitter paint himself purple all over,” Grace said. “All over?” Prudence asked, “even his privates?” “That’s how they found him,” Grace said. She was six. “The paint dried up and he was crying because it hurt him to pee.” The girls stood in front of the mirror in the spare room at the Moberly’s house. It was the afternoon of November first, and that night there was an All Saints Day party for kids at the First United Methodist, where the Reverend Yancey Boyd might be the new min- ALL SAINTS DAY [313] ister. Prudence was busy cutting a slit for Grace’s head in a piece of old brown sheet. Everyone had to go as someone from the Bible, so she was turning Grace into John the Baptist with his head on a platter. “There’s no such thing as demons,” Prudence said, only because she hadn’t been the one to hear the story first. She hacked at the sheet with scissors, the blades dull as butter knives. When she managed a hole, she threw the sheet over Grace’s head. Ryan Kitter’s whole family were missionaries. They had returned from Africa ahead of schedule, due to the demon, and were camping in the church basement until they found a house. They got to cook on hot plates and take sponge baths. Prudence thought that if anyone deserved to camp in the church basement it was her own family, since her father was the one who might be the minister. He’d been ordained in three states. At the Moberly’s house, the girls were stuck in a dark, damp room that smelled like motor oil. Before the Moberlys had done it over for their daughter, who was grown, it had been a garage, and twice already Prudence had seen centipedes, one rippling into a crack between cement blocks, one behind the framed picture of Jesus over the bed. “Ryan likes to be in a dark room,” Grace said, pushing her head through the hole in the sheet. “And he doesn’t talk to anyone except his mother.” “Well, maybe he doesn’t have anything to say,” said Prudence, regarding her with a frown. Grace still looked like herself, only in a brown sheet, now, blond hair coming out of her braid, and nothing like John the Baptist. In the picture over the bed Jesus wore a robe with billowing sleeves and a rope belt, and Prudence needed something to tie around Grace’s waist. She rummaged through the cardboard box of odds and ends that Mrs. Moberly had provided. At home in North Carolina , their mother kept old towels and drapes in a trunk, and a drapery cord would have done the trick. But at home they would ANGELA PNEUMAN [314] not be dressing like Bible characters for a party; instead they would have already gone trick-or-treating the night before. They would have worn last year’s outfits switched around—Prudence as a floor lamp, Grace as a blue crayon—since their mother wasn’t in any kind of shape to make new ones. Here in East Winder, Kentucky, no one was of a mind to trick-or-treat, because Halloween was pagan. “Ryan’s father thinks he has a demon and his mother isn’t sure,” Grace said. “They took him to doctors, but a doctor can’t do anything against a demon. Anna saw a man with a demon swallow a sword in Tennessee. She saw another demon bend a man in half when her dad tried to cast it out...