Soul Catcher by Michael C. White

benefit of the softening effects of maternal influence. After all, they would someday be called upon to take themselves a wife and become responsible fathers and respected members of their communities, and such regular and dutiful patterns of behavior would be expected of them. Mr. Cain, a hardworking, driven man, was someone who extolled the virtues of order and routine and hard work. So rain or shine, he would hitch up the wagon to his best team of Morgans (he was not averse to parading what material success he had attained), and he'd instruct Lila, their Negro housekeeper, to get the boys looking presentable as the sons of a modestly successful Virginia planter ought to be when going to church. Lila would scrub their faces until they shone and see to it that their good clothes were clean, their coats brushed, their hair combed. "Ain't gone to church lookin' like a coupla ragamuffins," she'd tell them. Then the three of them would get in the wagon and ride the five miles to the Methodist Church in Nottoway Chase, a small town in the western piedmont of Virginia, within sight of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
    On their way, they rode in silence past the cemetery where Cain's mother and younger brother who'd died in infancy were buried, never once stopping there. If the subject of their mother's grave chanced to come up, Mr. Cain would turn inward, grim-faced, his eyes filled with a fierce gleam Cain could never tell was sadness or anger. He'd pass on to church without a word. Yet his father never seemed a particularly religious man to Cain's way of thinking. Church was just something he did, the way he might walk his fields of an evening, surveying the progress of his crops or overseeing the hog-butchering, or the way he might attend the meeting of the International Union of Tobacco Growers in town. Or the way he'd taken a wife or fathered sons--something that was part of the business of life.
    Besides, the weekly ride into town served a highly pragmatic function as well, for his father was, above all else, a pragmatic man who kept his eye on the main chance. While there, he would use the time profitably to buy feed or supplies or a new bridle, perhaps get the Richmond paper to see what prime-quality burley was expected to fetch in the fall, or pick up the new farming supply catalog he'd ordered from MacKenzie and Sons, direct from Glasgow, Scotland. Or once a month, with the same grim pragmatism, Cain's father would visit a certain buxom, blond woman who lived in Cowart's boardinghouse down near the railroad tracks. Cain had spied her once in the second-story window of Cowart's as they rode out of town. Their father would give Cain and his brother two bits each and tell them he'd meet them at a specified time over at the general store. Such an impulse of their father's for this woman was, Cain suspected, of the same species of emotion as that of a bull mounting a heifer, something to be acknowledged and rectified, so that he was then able to move on with the more important affairs of business.
    Cain could remember his mother saying grace before meals and teaching him to offer up his prayers at bedtime or reading to him from the Bible. His father, though, had always considered "Sabbath" duties more than adequate religion, that saying prayers and grace and all that nonsense throughout the week was an excessive show, almost as bad as the damn Baptists. He thought their mother would make his boys soft with her continual praying and her reading of books. If his boys wanted to read anything at bedtime, he would give them a book on animal husbandry, which was, after all, their destined future.
    Cain was the elder of two boys. His brother, Tiberius Julius, a name mercifully shortened to TJ, was two years his junior. There had been a third brother, Claudius Nero, who'd been carried off by a fever at six months, and his passing seemed the last nail in his mother's coffin. His father, whose only reading besides ledger books and husbandry