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CW: Alcoholism, Infidelity, Internalized homophobia, Internalized shame, Period-typical racism, period-typical homophobia, mentions of chattal slavery, generational trauma, grief, poverty, illegal activity, interracial relationship under anti-miscegenation laws, segregation.

Critique questions at the bottom.

The Devil's Breath | A Baptized in Gasoline Character Study

1

Pigeonberry, West Virginia—1945

Stokely come awake slow, like a man dragged up from the deep dark of a well he ain't got no business bein' in.

He lay there in the gray fore-dawn, starin' up at them ceiling boards he oughta re-nail fore winter, and what was left of that dream clung to him the way woodsmoke do—don't matter how many times you wash, it find a way to stay. Reverend Adkins. Ephraim. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened 'em again like maybe the second time'd be different. Weren't. Weren't never gonna be.

Seven years. Lord God Almighty, seven years of that man. And here was the dream of him, thick and shameful, arrived in the very bed where Patience lay breathin' beside him, her belly swole up hard and round wit' Samuel, her blonde hair gone loose cross the pillow, her whole body give over to the keepin' of his child.

He felt sick wit' hisself. All the way down to the bone of him.

He knowed what he was. Knowed it like a man know where the bruise is—don't gotta press it to remember it's there, but you always end up pressin' it anyway. He was the nail, and Ephraim were the hammer, and Stokely, God hep him, kept puttin' hisself right back under that thing, every time, like a fool what can't learn nothin' from pain 'cept to want it worser.

He moved careful, the way you do when you ain't worthy of the sleep you disturbin'. Eased hisself up off the mattress, set on the edge wit' his elbows on his big knees and his hands hangin' down between 'em like they belonged to somebody else. Floor was cold. Room was cold. Good. He wanted it cold. He wanted somethin' in the world to feel the way a thing oughta feel.

He reached up under the bed where he kept the jug—his own batch, clean and clear, none of that cheap sorghum mess what made a man blind—and he pulled it out and uncorked it and took one long swallow. Just the one. Or close to the one. The shine spread warm through his belly and the tightness in his chest give a little, like a rope workin' loose at the knot, and he thought: here it is again. The other thing he couldn't quit. The man or the jug—pick one, Stokely Kitchen. Pick one and be ashamed of it. He stoppered it and shoved it back under.

He dressed in the dark. Overalls, flannel shirt he'd wore yesterday and probably the day fore that. Boots he left half-laced. He weren't goin' nowheres yet—just needed to feel like Stokely Kitchen again. The man what drove a truck and kept bees and knowed every copper fitt'in from Morgantown to Beckley by touch alone. Not whatever it was he'd been in that dream.

He went down the hall to the washroom and lit the lamp and poured water from the pitcher into the basin and put his whole face in it. Cold enough to ache. He come up gaspin' and gripped the edges of that basin and made hisself look.

What he seen weren't surprisin'. Big face, rough face, thirty-two years old and already lookin' like forty of 'em had been the ornery kind. Deep lines round his mouth. Weatherin' round his eyes. Beard thick and wild cause he ain't got round to it in near a week. His daddy Solomon had a face like that—worked down to what was necessary, nothin' soft left that didn't need to be there.

His daddy.

Stokely stood there a spell longer than he shoulda, water drippin' off his jaw, lamp flickerin'. Solomon Kitchen. Ninety-five years old. Born into bondage in 1850 and walked out of it at fifteen and kept walkin' for eighty more years without hardly stoppin' to complain about none of it. Had buried Stokely's mama—Eunice, dead of the flu in nineteen and nineteen, twenty-two years old, gone so fast she near about took baby Stokely wit' her. Solomon had raised him alone after that. Raised him hard and raised him right and here Stokely stood, a bootlegger and a drunkard and a man what was sneakin' around with a married one, a man of God at that. He tried to imagine what his daddy's face would look like if he knowed. Couldn't do it. Couldn't get his mind to make that picture.

He dried his face and blew out the lamp and didn't let hisself think on it no more.

The kitchen was cold, stove gone to ash overnight. Stokely got it goin'—old habit, didn't have to think—stuffed it wit' kindlin' and got the fatwood catchin' and laid a couple splits of hickory over top. While it come up he filled the percolator at the pump and set it on, then pulled the bacon out the icebox and got the lard can down from the shelf and the corn flour and the buttermilk from the crock.

He cooked the way he done most things: big and imprecise and mostly right. Got the skillet good and hot and laid the bacon in and while it sizzled he mixed up the cornbread batter in the big crockery bowl—flour and meal and salt and buttermilk and an egg from the basket by the door, mashed it all together wit' his hand cause the wooden spoon weren't where it oughta be and he didn't feel like huntin' it. Patience'd have somethin' to say about that when she come down.

He heard the old man before he seen him. That shuffle-and-drag, slow and deliberate, comin' down the back hall from Solomon's room. The sound of a man what moved like he was provin' a point to somebody.

"Daddy," Stokely said, without turnin' around. "You want coffee?"

"What I look like, boy." It weren't a question.

Solomon Kitchen come into the kitchen the way he always did: slow, wit' that short length of hickory stick he used, dressed already in his suspenders and his heavy wool shirt even in the early dark, cause Solomon Kitchen had been gettin' dressed fore sunup since he was six years old and he weren't about to stop now on account of bein' ninety-five. He was a small man—had always been small, Stokely got his size from some other branch of the tree—small and thin as fence wire and old in a way that went past just years. His face was a history. You looked at Solomon Kitchen's face and you seen things you couldn't rightly name but you felt 'em in your chest anyway.

He eased hisself down into his chair at the corner of the table. The chair wit' the extra cushion that Patience had put there without sayin' nothin' about it, just done it one mornin' and never mentioned it. He set his stick against the wall and folded his hands on the tabletop.

"Bacon gonna burn."

Stokely flipped the bacon.

"Coffee be ready directly," he said.

Solomon didn't say nothin' to that. He had a particular kind of quiet, the old man did. Weren't hostile in it and weren't soft in it neither. It was just—present. Like he'd lived long enough that silence didn't unsettle him none and he didn't feel no need to stuff it full of words. Stokely had spent most of his life uncomfortable in that quiet. Still was. He poured out the grease and poured the cornbread batter into the hot skillet and it come up hissin' and smellin' right, and he set two cups of coffee on the table and pushed one toward his father and wrapped both his big hands around his own and drank it too hot and let it scald him a little on the way down.

Solomon watched him do it.

"You sleep?" the old man asked.

"Some."

"Mm."

That mm could mean near about anything when it come from Solomon. This mornin' it felt like it meant: I know somethin' is wrong wit' you, boy, and I ain't gonna ask you what it is, but I want you to know I know it. Solomon Kitchen could pack more into a sound than most men could fit in a sermon. Stokely had always figured that was what come of a life where you learned early that sayin' the wrong thing out loud could cost you somethin' you couldn't get back.

Stokely kept his back to the room and cooked.

He heard Peach first—always heard Peach first, cause Peach made sure of it. She come runnin' down them stairs wit' her bare feet thump-thumpin' and her hair still every which-away from sleepin', four years old and already actin' like the day was somethin' she might miss out on if she didn't come at it hard.

"Daddy!"

"Hush, girl," he said, but he was already crouchin' down, and she hit him like a little warm cannonball, and he caught her up and stood wit' her in his arms, and somethin' in him—somethin' real and not got from a jug—come loose and give way. The solid weight of this child. Her arms round his neck. Her face pressed up into his beard, nose wrinklin'.

"You scratchy."

"I is."

"You smell like the still house."

"Yeh."

She pulled back and looked at him wit' them green eyes, Patience's eyes, serious as a circuit judge. "Is breakfast ready?"

"Nearabout."

She squirmed down and went straight to Solomon and climbed up onto his knee without askin', which was the only way you could do it wit' Solomon—he weren't gonna invite you, but once you was up there he'd put that big-knuckled old hand on your back and hold you steady. Peach leaned against his chest and started in jawin' at him about a cat what had got into the barn and upset the rabbits, and Solomon listened wit' his eyes half-closed and his coffee cup in his free hand like a man hearin' a weather report he'd already accounted for.

Moses come down slower, way he always did. Two years old and already had that watchful, inventory-takin' way about him—stood in the kitchen doorway in his nightshirt and looked around the whole room fore he committed to comin' in. Dark eyes. Serious little face. Built more like Stokely than Peach was, broader through the chest already. Stokely waved him over and Moses toddled across the floor and grabbed onto his daddy's leg and stood there like he was plantin' a flag in new territory.

"Mornin', Mo."

Moses didn't say nothin'. Just held on.

Stokely put his hand on top of his son's head, all that coarse dark hair, and stood there a minute wit' the spatula in his other hand and the cornbread cracklin' in the skillet and his father at the table wit' Peach on his knee and the weak early light just now startin' to come gray through the window over the sink, and he thought—

It oughta be enough. That was what he couldn't square wit' hisself, couldn't do it no matter how many times he come at it. This right here oughta be the whole of it. This oughta fill him up so full there weren't no room left for anything else. And on most days it near about did. On most days he could look at these children and this house and this life and feel somethin' close enough to right that he didn't look too hard at the rest of it. But then there was days like this one, or nights like the one just gone, and he'd wake up wit' Ephraim Adkins somewhere in him like a coal still hot from the night before—like a thing that oughta be burnt out and done but weren't, weren't ever quite done, and all the shine in the county wouldn't put it out, and all the right livin' in the world wouldn't neither.

He knowed how it'd go. Knowed it the way you know a road you walked so many times the ruts is wore down to bedrock. Come Sunday Ephraim'd stand up in that pulpit in his pressed black suit and read from Romans and his voice'd fill up that little church like water fillin' a vessel, and Stokely, if he was there, would set in the back row and look at his hands and feel the whole weight of it—the joke of it, the pure black comedy of a man like him in a pew, listenin' to a man like Ephraim preach on sin.

And he would be there. Same as always. Same as everybody in Pigeonberry was there, Black and white together in the same pews, which was a thing that did not happen in near about any other church in the whole of West Virginia. Weren't no colored church in Pigeonberry—never had been, on account of there only ever bein' the one church, Ephraim's church, and Ephraim had made it plain from the day he took the pulpit that every soul in his congregation was equal under God and he weren't seatin' 'em otherwise.

Half them white congregants had gone to him private about it over the years—Stokely knowed it for a fact, had heard it from more than one mouth—told him straight it weren't right and it weren't natural and it were gonna bring trouble down on all of 'em before it was done. And Ephraim had told every last one of 'em that segregation were the devil's own architecture, and he weren't buildin' nothin' to the devil's blueprint inside his house of God. Just like that. Calm and final as a door closin'. Hadn't moved an inch in ten years, not for nobody.

That were the thing about Ephraim what Stokely could not get shed of, no matter how hard he tried or how much shine he poured on top of it. The man was a hypocrite from his collar to his boot soles—had a wife he didn't deserve and a secret he'd carry to his grave—but he had that one true thing in him too, that one place where he didn't bend, didn't bargain, didn't look for the easier road. Stokely had turned it over in his mind so many times it was smooth as river rock. A man who'd stand up fore his own congregation and tell 'em plain that their hate weren't welcome at his altar—what did you do wit' a man like that? What did you call what you felt for him? Stokely didn't have a word for it. Probably weren't one.

Life was a joke. He'd decided that some time ago. He just hadn't figured out yet whether that made it better or worser.

He plated the bacon. Turned the cornbread out and cut it into wedges and set it all on the table. And then he heard Patience's step above him, slow and deliberate, the careful walk of a woman eight months gone navigatin' stairs in the early mornin', and he turned toward the sound of her without thinkin', the way a thing turn toward what it's fixed to. She come in and paused in the doorway, a big woman but carryin' it easy the way she did everythin', her hair plaited back tight and her green eyes takin' in the room the way Moses had done, makin' sure everythin' was still in its place. She looked at Stokely and he looked back and he couldn't say what she seen on his face or what she knew or didn't know, but she come to the table and sat and reached for the coffee and said, "Cornbread's a mite overdone."

"Reckon I got distracted."

"Mm."

That mm was different than Solomon's mm. That was a woman's mm, which meant I know you're carryin' somethin' heavy this mornin' and I'll wait for you to lay it down your own self, but I won't let you forget it's there. Patience Hershberger had come out of an Amish community up in Pennsylvania, and she still had some of that way about her—held her counsel, spoke plain when she spoke, didn't waste nothin', not words nor food nor affection neither.

What I need

Prose & Voice

- Consistency of dialect—whether the phonetic spellings and dropped letters feel earned throughout or become strained in places.

- Rhythm and sentence length variation—whether the long, comma-linked sentences sustain their momentum or anywhere lose the reader.

- Whether the vernacular ever tips into performance or caricature.

Character & Psychology

- Whether Stokely's internal conflict (Ephraim, the jug, the family) is balanced or whether one strand crowds the others.

- Whether his self-awareness feels authentic for the character and period or reads as too literary.

- Solomon—whether he's doing enough on the page or functioning mainly as symbolic weight.

Structure & Pacing

- Whether the opening dream/waking sequence earns its length before the domestic scene begins.

- Whether the Ephraim backstory lands as revelation or interrupts the scene's momentum.

- The transition from interiority to the children arriving—whether it earns the tonal shift.

Setting & Period

- Whether 1945 rural West Virginia feels specific enough, or whether the period detail is thin.

- Whether the integrated church, a key detail, is sufficiently grounded in the historical record.

Thematic Architecture

- Whether 'it oughta be enough' is doing too much explicit thematic work.

- Whether the piece earns its final image (Patience's mm) or whether it arrives too neatly.

Other notes

- This is written in Appalachian English. I happen to be fluent in this dialect because I am from West Virginia. I'm not interested in writing this in plain English because the dialect is integral to the voice.

- Pigeonberry is a made up town. It's based on my hometown of Leon, WV and has a population of about 100 at the time this story is set.

- This is a prequel to the main story in this universe that follows Stokely's grandson, Silas, in a bildungsroman style story.

- It's not that NSFW but due to the themes, I marked it NSFW to be safe.

- Main inspirations for this project are Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, Outer Dark and Child of God by Cormac McCarthy, Joe, Fay by Larry Brown, Serena, One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash, Beloved and Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, The Color of Water, The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx, The Hours (2002), Mudbound (2017), William Faulkner and the Southern Gothic genre in general. Make of that what you will.