Preston Teagardin

Preston Teagardin is a preacher whose polished religious performance conceals a predatory use of authority. Sent to Coal Creek to help his sick uncle, Reverend Albert Sykes, he treats the congregation less as a community than as a place to find vulnerable young women. His exploitation of Lenora Laferty ends in her pregnancy and in Arvin Russell’s decision to kill him; that killing becomes a decisive turn in Arvin’s flight and reckoning with his past.

Identity and Background

Teagardin arrives at the church in Coal Creek as a substitute for a relative who can no longer serve: his uncle Albert is ill, and Teagardin’s mother volunteers him to help. The assignment is not, as he privately imagines it, a spiritual test freely chosen. He resents his mother for controlling his future and withholding his allowance after learning that he had left Heavenly Reach Bible College during his first semester. He had wanted to attend a conventional university and study law, but his mother wanted him to become a humble preacher like Albert. Her decision to send him to Coal Creek therefore extends a family conflict he already interprets as a struggle for independence.

He regards the town and his living arrangements with contempt. The rented house is a cramped, neglected place with dirty windows, a leaky stove, and an outhouse; after only two weeks, he already despises the area. He tries to recast the posting as a spiritual trial, but his own account makes clear how little his public calling aligns with his private resentment. The rural poverty around him becomes, in his mind, another reason to feel superior rather than a condition calling for care.

His preparation for preaching has been more theatrical than theological. His mother taught him scripture, kept him in clean clothes, and made him practice facial expressions; he can cry on cue and recite Revelation. Those skills help him perform the appearance of a persuasive preacher, but the novel places them beside his private calculation of how to gain access to girls. His religious fluency supplies both a respectable public identity and a vocabulary he uses to manipulate other people’s beliefs.

Preaching and Exploitation

At a church gathering, Teagardin presents himself with practiced friendliness, repeatedly introducing himself to congregants. His appearance is carefully conspicuous: slicked-back blond hair, a large ring, tight powder-blue trousers, boots, and a ruffled shirt already damp with sweat in the cool spring weather. He introduces his young wife, Cynthia, as his righteous bride. The scene establishes the distance between the respectable role he displays and the appetite that governs his attention: he watches teenage visitors, Beth Ann and Pamela Sue Reaster, with particular interest.

Teagardin’s private thoughts expose a pattern rather than an isolated lapse. He believes that guilt and religious belief make women more attractive to him, because he can frame their relationships with him as a conflict between sin and salvation. He interprets his own brief feelings of guilt as evidence that he might still be saved if he repents before death. That reasoning does not restrain his conduct; it helps him preserve a self-image in which wrongdoing can be managed through future repentance. His faith becomes an instrument for excusing himself while making others feel morally endangered.

He selects Lenora, an orphan raised by her grandmother, Emma Russell, after watching her at church. He assumes she will be easy to exploit and treats her sadness and circumstances as openings rather than reasons for compassion. Gossip at the church says that Lenora’s father had been a preacher who murdered her mother and disappeared; this is reported as local rumor, not established fact. Teagardin nevertheless uses the story as part of his private appraisal of Lenora, reducing a vulnerable young person to a target he believes he can control.

Lenora’s Pregnancy and His Exposure

By the middle of August, Lenora has missed her period twice, and the dress Arvin bought for her no longer fits as it did. Teagardin has already ended their meetings, explaining that his wife or the congregation might discover them. When Lenora finds him at the church and tells him she is carrying his child, he immediately considers the danger to himself. Rather than accept her account or offer support, he closes the church door and tries to persuade her that she is imagining the pregnancy because of guilt and distress. He invokes supposed cases of people who became deluded, warning that they could end up in an institution.

The scene shows how he turns the language of religion and mental illness against someone with less power. His response is shaped by fear of exposure and punishment, not concern for Lenora. The preacher who presents himself as a guide to sin and salvation uses his authority to make her doubt her own understanding. The evidence here supports his attempt to discredit her claim; it does not make his accusation true. His conduct also links his pursuit of Lenora to the wider pattern of attention he directs toward the Reaster girls.

Confrontation and Death

Teagardin’s conduct brings Arvin into direct conflict with him. After watching the preacher with a Reaster girl, Arvin confronts him beside his car with a pistol and warns him not to start it. Teagardin has little familiarity with guns and recognizes that the encounter has become dangerous, but the confrontation offers no route back to the authority he has exercised over Lenora. Arvin shoots him while he is seated in the car and leaves the scene. The shot kills the preacher; Arvin removes a bullet fragment, scatters the concealment materials he had brought, and drives away.

The killing is both an act of retaliation and the beginning of a new danger for Arvin. He has not planned beyond getting away, and the transmission of his 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air fails on the road. Later, while waiting in a motel, he understands that leaving Coal Creek so abruptly has made him conspicuous and that the killing may follow him for the rest of his life. He nevertheless cannot bring himself to leave Ohio without returning to the old house and prayer log, because he believes he must confront what remains unresolved about his father.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

News of the preacher’s murder reaches Sheriff Lee Bodecker through a telephone call from another sheriff. The report identifies the victim as a preacher shot in his car and names Arvin as the boy suspected of the killing. The caller says Arvin had lived in the Coal Creek area, is eighteen, and drove a blue 1954 Chevrolet Bel Air; he also notes that Arvin was known to have a German Luger brought back from the war by his father. Another local man, who has known Arvin for a long time, says the preacher may have deserved to die because he was pursuing young girls, while still acknowledging that this does not make the killing right. The exchange makes the moral tension explicit without turning it into a legal justification.

A newspaper later identifies Teagardin’s death as a murder, and Arvin recognizes Lee Bodecker in an accompanying photograph as the officer on duty when Arvin’s father died. The case therefore draws Arvin into the orbit of a lawman connected to his family history as well as to the current pursuit. Teagardin’s role in the novel is brief but consequential: his abuse of a religious office precipitates Lenora’s crisis and Arvin’s violence, while the consequences of that violence propel Arvin back toward the places and memories he has tried to leave behind. His outward signs of piety and carefully cultivated manner sharpen the contrast between religious authority as a public performance and the selfish actions hidden beneath it.