"The River" Summary

A babysitter is picking up a young boy of four or at six o'clock in the morning. The boy's father helps him into his plaid coat while his alcoholic mother sleeps in the adjacent bedroom. The sitter notices the full ashtrays and says she would have a problem babysitting the child in that place. The father pays her and she tells him they may be late that night because they are going to a healing service at the river, conducted by an evangelist named Bevel Summers. The little boy tells the sitter his name is Bevel, too, but it really isn't.

The boy and the sitter reach her home and on the porch waiting are her three boys and one young daughter. The boys trick Bevel into removing a board from the bottom of a fence that keeps hogs...