Reverend Albert Sykes

Reverend Albert Sykes, founder of the Coal Creek Church of the Holy Ghost Sanctified, gives the novel’s rural religious life both its communal rituals and its uneasy limits. His own survival underground became the church’s defining testimony, while his dealings with Emma Russell and her grandson Arvin Eugene Russell show a preacher who can admire religious fervor without insisting that it be forced on the young.

The mine collapse and the founding story

Sykes started the church in 1924, soon after a coal-mine collapse trapped him underground with two other men, both killed instantly. His legs were broken in several places. In the account he tells the congregation, hunger and darkness mark the ordeal: he reached a pack of Five Brothers chewing tobacco in a dead man’s pocket but could not reach the sandwich he believed another miner carried. On the third night, he said, he felt touched by the Spirit. By then, he had accepted that he would soon die beside the men. Rescuers broke through while he was asleep, and for a moment he believed their light was the face of the Lord.

The story is more than a private recollection; it is a piece of church tradition, repeated often enough that Willard Russell has heard it many times. Sykes’s legs still bear the history of the collapse, and he limps before the pulpit as he tells it. At the story’s familiar conclusion, he raises the empty tobacco packet toward the ceiling, cradled in his hands. Women in Coal Creek treat the packet as a religious relic, kissing it when they can. One woman, Mary Ellen Thompson, asked for it on her deathbed instead of a doctor. A discarded packet thus becomes the material focus of a shared account of danger, faith, and rescue.

A preacher in a poor congregation

The church’s services are intimate and improvised. With no bell to summon worshippers, Sykes goes to the open door and calls in those still outside. During one evening of the annual revival, the small choir—two men and three women—sings before he begins preaching. He counts the congregation twice and finds fifty-eight people on the benches. The arithmetic has practical weight: he hopes the collection will bring in three or four dollars, while he and his wife have been living on hardtack and squirrel meat.

Sykes’s preaching joins heat and hardship to the prospect of divine judgment. Wiping his brow, he jokes that the weather is hot and warns that it is bound to get hotter for those who are not right with the Lord. The humor does not erase the sermon’s seriousness, but it belongs to the same modest world as the worn benches, smoky lanterns, and uncertain offering. His authority rests not on institutional grandeur but on repeated testimony, familiar ritual, and a congregation that answers him aloud.

Fervor, spectacle, and its limits

When Roy Laferty stages a display involving spiders at the revival, Sykes tries to restore order as frightened worshippers scramble toward the narrow door. The spectacle has moved beyond his control: people cry out, children panic, and Emma tries to guide Helen Laferty out of the church. Sykes’s response is practical rather than triumphant; the scene exposes how little a preacher can command once theatrical religious fervor turns into public alarm.

His own attitude toward such intensity is more complicated than simple disapproval. Years later, after Willard Russell’s suicide, Sykes admits that the sight of the animals Willard and Arvin had hung around their prayer place had secretly impressed him. He reasons that famous Christians were often fanatical, but accepts Emma’s view that this is no way to introduce a young person to the Lord. The distinction matters: Sykes can recognize the force of a desperate, extreme form of belief while also agreeing that it should not be imposed on Arvin.

Emma Russell, Willard Russell, and Arvin Eugene Russell

Sykes remembers Willard as a man who had been saved and calls him one of the best men he knew. When he makes an ill-judged comparison while discussing how to approach Arvin, Emma challenges him. Sykes realizes what he has implied, flushes with embarrassment, apologizes, and clarifies his regard for her son. Emma does not want praise for the dead; she wants Sykes to leave the boy alone. He accepts her boundary rather than turning the exchange into a defense of his own authority.

After Willard Russell’s death, Arvin is sent to live with Emma in Coal Creek. She takes him to church but does not require him to pray, sing, or kneel at the altar, and she asks Sykes not to press him. Knowing that the preacher can be zealous in drawing newcomers into the faith, she tells him that Arvin must approach belief in his own time. Sykes agrees that the boy should not be pushed. His restraint is especially pointed beside Willard’s blood-soaked prayer ritual: the novel places Sykes within the same religious community, but shows him accepting a limit on how faith should be transmitted.

Illness and narrative significance

Sykes is himself aging and unwell. On a September morning, he sits on the church steps peeling a bruised apple while waiting for Clifford Odell to drive him to a doctor in Lewisburg. His chest has been hurting, and he looks forward to meeting a physician said to have spent six years in college, believing such education might cure anything. The passage offers no medical outcome; instead, it sets his hope in professional treatment beside the older account through which his congregation understands survival as divine deliverance.

As a character, Sykes connects communal worship to the novel’s more troubling scenes of private devotion. His mine-collapse testimony makes faith a story of endurance and rescue; the relic gives that story a tangible presence; and his response to Arvin demonstrates that pastoral care can include not demanding belief. He is neither a simple opponent of religious extremity nor its uncritical champion. His importance lies in that tension: he reveres the signs of fervor, yet listens when Emma insists that her grandson must be allowed to find his own way.