LIFE HADN’T ALWAYS been so hard for Pearl Jewett. At one time, he’d had a farm of his own back in North Carolina, just a few acres, but big enough for a man to get by on if he was willing to bust his ass. Life was as good as an illiterate farmer with no birthright could hope for in those days, and Pearl made sure to give the Almighty credit for that. He’d been quite a drinker and hell-raiser in his youth, but he turned over a new leaf when he met Lucille, and the only times he fell off the wagon after they married were whenever she went into labor. Hence, the rather odd names bestowed upon his sons didn’t signify anything of great importance, but were simply the result of what happens when a man who’s been off the sauce for a while consumes too much whiskey and then insists on having his way. With Cane, he had drawn his inspiration from a walking stick that someone had beaten him over the head with in a rowdy tavern; in the case of Cob, it turned out to be a half-eaten roasting ear he discovered in his back pocket after coming to under the porch of a boardinghouse called the Rebel Inn; while in regard to Chimney, it was a stovepipe that he was fairly certain he had helped a neighbor fashion from a sheet of tin in return for a cup of liquor that tasted like muddy kerosene and left him without any feeling in his fingers and toes for several days. And though Lucille would have preferred Christian names such as John and Luke and Adam, she figured the damage could have been worse, and she just counted her blessings that he was back home and walking a straight line again. He sacrificed much, even giving up tobacco, to pay for a pew in the First Baptist Church of Righteous Revelation in nearby Hazelwood, and every Sunday morning for the next few years, no matter what the weather, he and his young family walked the three miles there to worship. Pearl was especially proud that his wife was one of the few people in the congregation besides the minister who could read the lessons, and so, despite the fact that Lucille’s shyness sometimes made it hard for her to look even him in the eye, he had quickly volunteered her after the last lay reader, a silken-voiced, holier-than-thou man named Sorghum Simmons, backslid and ran off with a deacon’s wife and a business partner’s money. Every week he had to coax her into walking to the front of the church, telling himself it was for her own good. Thus, when she first started staying in bed on the Sabbath, complaining of feeling weak and light-headed, he couldn’t help but think she was faking it, and several months passed before he realized she really was sick.
By that time, Lucille had lost a considerable amount of weight, and her sagging skin had turned the dreary gray color of a rain cloud. Taking out a lien against the land, Pearl sent for doctors. One of them bled her and another prescribed expensive tonics while a third put her on a diet of curds and raw onions, but nothing seemed to help. Then the money ran out and all he could do was watch her slowly wither away. What struck her down remained a mystery until the night of her wake. As he sat alone keeping company with her corpse in the dim, flickering light of a single candle, Pearl noticed that the tip of her tongue was sticking out from between her lips. Leaning over to set it right, he saw a slight movement. My God, he thought, his heart quickening, can it be that she’s still alive? “Lord Jesus,” he started to pray, just before a worm, no wider than a ring finger and no thicker than a few sheets of paper, pushed forward several inches out of her mouth. Pearl lurched back and knocked the chair over in his rush to get away from the bed, but managed to stop himself at the doorway. He stood listening to the soft breathing of his sons sleeping in the next room while trying to still the frantic pounding in his chest. With a shudder, he thought of some of the words he had heard Lucille read the last time she was well enough to do the lessons: “Where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” Though he couldn’t recall any more of the passage, he was certain that Reverend Hornsby had explained in his sermon that it was an apt description of hell. He debated what to do. To bury his wife with that thing still inside her was out of the question, but he had no idea how to go about removing it other than to cut her open, and he couldn’t bear the thought of doing something like that. Stepping forward, he saw another two inches of the worm emerge, and the blind head rise up and move back and forth as if trying to get a bearing on this new world it was about to enter. Pearl paced around the room, fighting the urge to crush it with his hands. For the first time in several years, he craved a drink. The only thing to do, he finally decided, was to wait it out, and so he sat back down and spent the next several hours watching the creature slowly work its way out of her.
Not long after sunrise, the last of the worm slid from Lucille’s mouth and dropped onto her chest with a soft, almost imperceptible plop. Pearl looked out the window and beyond the yard to his fields barren of crops and overgrown with weeds. Lucille’s dying had begun in the spring and taken up the entire summer. Soon the man from the bank would be coming for his money, and Pearl didn’t have it. He stood and repeated the lesson words aloud: “Where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.” He studied on this for a while, then turned to the bed and gathered up the worm like a spool of wet rope and carried it outside. Unrolling it along the ground in front of the house, he pinned each pulsing end of it down with rocks he took from the border of one of Lucille’s flower beds. Two peahens, all that remained of his livestock, darted out from around the house and began pecking furiously at it. He grabbed them up, one in each hand, and bashed their heads bloody against a porch post. Then he went back inside and drank a cold cup of coffee before shaking his sons awake. Later that morning, he and Cane carried Lucille out of the house and buried her in the shady spot under a magnolia tree where she used to sit and shell beans and read her Bible. For the next several days, the boys gnawed on chicken bones and decorated the grave with whatever pretty things they could find while Pearl sat silently watching the scalding Carolina sun turn the worm into a silver, leathery strip. When he was finally satisfied with the cure, he stuffed the remains into an empty coffee-bean sack along with some of the peahen feathers and sewed it shut like a shroud. Ever since then, and that had been nearly fourteen years ago, he had used it to rest his head on at night, and to remind him, lest he ever forget, that nothing is certain in this earthly life except the end of it.
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