Prayers the Devil Answers (15 page)

And I would be no better off than the boys. Henry's attitude made
it plain that we would be living back at the farm on sufferance, an object of charity. The thought of being somebody's “poor relation” made me shudder. I suppose with times being hard and money being tight, Henry had good reason to resent three more mouths to feed. After all, I wasn't blood kin to Albert's brother, and there was no one in my family who could take us in. My folks were dead, and my brothers and sisters were scattered between here and Detroit, none of them prosperous enough to take on extra mouths to feed.

Then there was my dread of sharing the house again with Elva, only this time Elva would be in charge absolutely, and she'd never let me forget it either.

I glanced at my sister-in-law, who was more of a stranger to me than an Eskimo. I never knew what she was thinking, but you could tell from her expression that it wasn't good. Elva was staring up at the ceiling with her arms crossed, her body rigid, and her mouth set in a tight frown. She said nothing, but her disapproval radiated from every pore. Apparently, it had not occurred to her that we might be coming back to the farm. Obviously Henry had not discussed the future plans with her, and knowing Elva, she would spend most of the drive back to the farm expressing her displeasure.

“Since you are my brother's widow, Ellendor, I—that is, we—” he amended with a wary glance at his wife. “
We
think it is our Christian duty to give you a home with us.” Henry's tone of voice made it clear that rather than a family member to share his home with, he considered me and the children his cross to bear. No matter how hard I might try to be useful, no matter how meekly I accepted my position as a “poor relation,” I would never be welcome. It would never be home.

“It is unfortunate that Albert lacked the foresight to provide insurance to support you after his death . . .” Henry was saying. “I would have thought he had more sense than that.”

And suddenly I knew. It wasn't for the sake of Eddie's education
or Georgie's future. It wasn't a reasoned decision, or a careful weighing of pros and cons. It wasn't even a sign of self-confidence on my part, much less ambition. It was just that anything on earth would be better than going back to that farm without Albert, where I would be unwanted and considered a burden. My life there would be an unchanging round of drudgery that would go on and on until I finally ran out of time and joined Albert again.

“We're staying here, Henry. Albert will be buried up the hill in the town cemetery, and we'll keep on living here. I don't know what we'll live on, but one way or another, the boys and I will manage without your charity. So y'all can go home and stop worrying about us. We're not your problem. We'll be fine.”

Henry's smile was grim. “When you are homeless and starving, you can come and apologize to me and Elva for your uncivil attitude, and then, for the sake of Albert's sons, we'll take you in.”

I stood up, finally feeling more angry than tired. Instead of shouting at him, I took a deep breath and motioned them toward the front door. “Don't hold your breath, Henry.”

chapter eight

W
ell, ma'am, first let me say how sorry I am, Mrs. Robbins. Your Albert was a good man, and his loss will be felt by all of us.”

I nodded, wondering if I ought to sit down in the visitor's chair in front of the desk, but I decided against it. This was Mr. Johnson's office; it was only proper to wait until the commissioner invited me to be seated. I stood there, and he must have realized that I was still standing.

“Ma'am, you put me in mind of a child called on the carpet for some bit of mischief and expecting a whipping.” With a faint smile he motioned me toward the chair. “Very formal, you mountain people. Though on the whole that's not a bad thing at all.”

“Thank you for the loan of your umbrella yesterday.” I handed it to him across the desk.

He took it and waved away my awkward attempt to thank him. “I'd have been happy for you to keep it, ma'am.”

The silence stretched on after that, making both of us uneasy, I think. I was still standing, gripping the back of the wooden chair, and trying to think of some casual remark that would continue the conversation with this prosperous-looking gentleman, but I had gone so
long on ragged bits of sleep that my mind could not summon up any suitable words. Finally, for want of anything else to do, I sat down.

I saw him looking at my clothes. I had put on an old black cloth coat over a homemade brown church dress; that was as close to mourning as my wardrobe allowed. I hoped he understood that. I had worn the same outfit to Albert's funeral, not for a lack of grief, but because I thought that buying a black dress for that one occasion would have been a sinful waste of money. Albert might have wanted me to buy some proper mourning clothes, and perhaps a dark suit for Eddie as well so that what we wore would reflect well on his position as a county official. Albert considered the rules of etiquette to be laws that must be obeyed as surely as those on the law books. Even when we were having nothing for supper but soup beans and cornbread, he still expected ironed cloth napkins and serving bowls on the table, because dishing the food straight out of the pot was not
fitten
—a word he used more and more often as he adapted himself to town ways and learned its rules.

Albert had been quick to figure out that the most important laws in life are the unwritten ones.

To please him, I did my best to follow the rules as he saw them, but mostly I didn't really care what people thought. If they judged you by your clothes, I figured they weren't worth knowing. Besides, meeting people's expectations usually meant that you wanted something from them, even if it was only a bit of respect, but I don't think I ever wanted favors from anyone. I already had a husband, a home, and two healthy children, which was all I wanted. Why bother to ingratiate yourself to society people if you didn't want anything from them?

I might have to change my ways now, though, and try to be more sociable like Albert. Pride does not come cheap, and I could no longer afford it.

As for the proper attire befitting a town funeral, now that Albert
was gone I would please myself. Funerals were for the living, because, one way or another, the dead were past caring. Either they were in the hereafter with other things to occupy their minds or they were nowhere, so what they would have wanted no longer mattered. I wouldn't indulge in the foolishness of expensive mourning finery when the rent needed paying and the larder was almost empty.

I would try to do as Albert wished, as long as it was practical, but really I had my own ideas about the rules to be followed after a death in the family. My rules weren't printed in etiquette books; they were born of long tradition, and they had nothing to do with the opinions of town-bred strangers.

First I had to record Albert's death in the family Bible, alongside his name and the date of his birth. Some town people must still do that as well, since many of them set such a store by their bloodlines. Did they also open a window and put a dish of salt on the windowsill? Did they drape a cloth over the mirror? I never heard anyone mention it here, but I didn't think so.

A few hours after Albert took his last breath, I opened the boys' bedroom window, which was on the backside of the house facing the railroad tracks. That way people coming to the house would not see it and want to know why in the chill of early March I had left a window open. The old people up home said that when there was a death in the family someone had to open a window in order for the soul of the departed to leave the house and pass on. The salt on the windowsill was to prevent other spirits from getting in.

If we had kept bees in the yard I would have gone out to the hives to tie a bit of crape on each one and tell them about Albert's death. You must do this if there is a death in the family or else the bees will swarm—leave the hives and go elsewhere. That was true. Every beekeeper I ever knew swore by it, but none of them ever explained how the bees knew or why they cared.

I wasn't sure about needing to put the salt on the windowsill.
I did that mainly because it was an old custom in my family. People do a lot of things not because they believe in them, but because these things had always been done that way—like saying “Bless you” when someone sneezes. I was glad for an excuse to cover the mirror, though, so that I wouldn't catch sight of my own pale, gaunt reflection in it. I looked half-dead myself.

I didn't know if those old-fashioned death rituals would have mattered to Albert or not. He never said anything about it one way or the other. It was just what people did, and that was good enough for him, I suppose. We'd had no reason to talk about the finer points of death customs. We thought we had decades left to settle those things. But if Albert was still lingering on this earth, seeing and hearing what was happening, I wanted him to know that I honored his memory by following the old customs, just in case it mattered. Rituals with salt and mirrors didn't cost anything. Mourning clothes did.

We had buried Albert the day before my meeting with Vernon Johnson, in a biting March wind, beneath a clabbered sky that kept spitting rain. The wet wind battened down the flowers and chilled those of us gathered at the graveside. I had used some of our savings to put a down payment on a burial plot as close to the top of the hill as they had available. Albert would like the thought of having a view of the sky and mountains, like we had up home. The ground would have to settle for six months before they could put in a headstone, and I hoped by then I'd be able to afford one. It was a double burial plot, so that when the time came the boys could lay me to rest there beside their father.

I judged there to be a good half a hundred people there, some of them friends or fellow church members. The doctor had come, and two of the deputies from the jail. But some of those present had been people I knew only by sight, if at all: the bank president, some office people representing the railroad, and an assortment of local officials, all there to pay respects to the sheriff, which I realized was not quite
the same as honoring Albert Robbins for himself. He would have been pleased, though. Some of them had even brought flowers to lay on the mound of bare earth after the service. They were mostly daffodils and crocuses, because it was too early in the spring to get anything else from the gardens.

Vernon Johnson had been there. He had come alone, but I remembered his wife, that nice lady in lavender who had come by the house the day Albert died and offered to help. You could tell just by looking at Mr. Johnson at the graveside that he was someone important. He was standing near the minister, wearing a dark belted raincoat, and scrunched up under a black umbrella to protect his fedora from the rain. When he saw that the boys and I had no protection from the elements, he stepped forward and handed the umbrella to me, silently motioning for me to take it. His black shoes shone like a pond in the moonlight, despite the mud in the burying ground, and the suit just visible under his store-bought black trench coat looked like fine-spun wool. I thought it fit him too well to have been bought sight unseen from the Wish Book, like Albert's was: the one he wore on Sundays, the one that would now go into the ground with him forever.

I stopped thinking back on the funeral. I knew I mustn't dwell on it now, because if I began to cry, Mr. Johnson would be embarrassed. He would probably be so anxious for me to leave that he wouldn't listen to what I had to say. I had to make him listen, because I had decided he was the one person I needed to talk to. The well-meaning condolences of the others might comfort me for the moment, but it was the future that mattered.

Mr. Johnson told me after the service that he had attended the funeral as the representative of the county government. Before he left he shook my hand with his gloved one and murmured his condolences. He shook Eddie's hand, too, and patted Georgie's head, but there were other people waiting to speak to me, and before I had a chance to say anything to him beyond a word of thanks or give him
back his umbrella, he had moved away, edged aside by some of our neighbors from the mountain who had come down for the burying. Then a few people from town patted my shoulder or shook my hand as they left. The minister's wife rushed forward to embrace me, tearfully exclaiming that the ways of the Lord were mysterious indeed, but that she trusted we would understand it all once we arrived in heaven. I nodded, trying to hide my impatience. A few yards away I saw Falcon Wallace talking to the stocky blond woman who had been at the house when all the other ladies had paid their condolence calls. I had wanted to have a word with Falcon, to thank him for his kindness, but I was looking toward the departing commissioner, wishing I could run after him—but as Albert would have said,
“It wouldn't have been fitten.”

Georgie recognized Falcon, and slipped his hand out of mine to go and hug his friend. With a nod at me, Eddie hurried after him, probably as much to see Falcon himself as to tend to his little brother. The two of them surrounded Falcon, Georgie wrapping his little arms around the deputy's legs so that he couldn't escape them if he wanted to, although to give him credit, he gave no sign of being impatient with them. The blond woman, blocked now by the boys, smiled uncertainly and wandered away in my direction. When she noticed me, she stopped and said, “Oh!” as if she hadn't expected to see me, or maybe she didn't know who I was.
A woman in black with two tearful young'uns in tow; who else could I be?

“It's you, Miz Robbins. In all this rain, well . . . anyhow, I'm real sorry about Albert, ma'am.” She had thin blond hair crinkled into tight permanent waves, damp now and frizzing in the mist, and a lot of black eye makeup and red lipstick, like those Kewpie dolls you can win at the sideshow at the fair. She wasn't dressed in a flashy way, though, as far as I could tell; just a plain brown coat with a rabbit-fur collar and clunky high-heel shoes, muddied halfway up the sides.

“Yes.”

“We just thought the world of Albert down at the diner. He used to come in late of an evening for his coffee and pie, and we felt safe just having him sitting there.”

“Why?”

“Well, in case somebody tried to come in and rob the till while we were closing up, I guess. Anyway, he was always a welcome sight for sore eyes. He was a one, that Albert Robbins. Always ready with a smile and a joke.”

When Albert worked in the machine shop at the railroad he used to say that sometimes you could tell when there was something wrong with a machine just by listening to it. Something in the way it ran might be just the least bit off, but if you didn't figure out right then what was wrong with it, it would break down altogether sooner or later. I had that same feeling as the blond woman went on talking to me, but I didn't have the time or the presence of mind to give it any thought then. I just nodded, until more people surged past her to shake my hand and tell me how sorry they were.

“Albert would have been proud to know that you came,” I said—over and over. The stocky blond woman walked away, and I forgot about her.

When I looked back across the field, Vernon Johnson was nowhere to be seen. I had hoped he would come by the house, where Mrs. Thompson presided again over a cold collation for the mourners, cobbled together from the food brought by Sunday's visitors. Henry and Elva had attended the funeral and the graveside service, but when it was over they nodded to me and walked away. They did not come by the house afterward. Mr. Johnson did not appear, either, and I decided I would have to hunt him up in his office, sooner rather than later.

“Is there some way I can help you, Mrs. Robbins?” Vernon Johnson's expression was politely blank, but his eyes were wary, as if he was expecting a bout of hysterics from me, the new widow, and that he
wished me anywhere but in his little courthouse office. He was still standing, perhaps out of courtesy, but also so that he could escort me quickly to the door if I became distraught.

I smiled and tried to look calm and unafraid.

I had given it a lot of thought since the funeral, and finally I remembered meeting Vernon Johnson at the swearing-in ceremony back in January, when Albert, as the newly elected sheriff, had taken the oath with the other incoming officials. As Albert's wife, I was allowed to hold the Bible that he put his left hand on while he took the oath of office. “Just like the president's wife,” he had said later, and I think that little gesture pleased him as much as anything else that day.

Mr. Johnson had worn the same black suit then, watching the ceremony alongside a crowd of other well-dressed, and therefore important, local men. I remembered taking note of what the county officials wore, wondering if Albert would need a suit like that. If so, I knew we'd better start saving up for it then, because it would have cost him a month's pay, at least.

I wasn't worried about my outfit. The ladies present were dressed mostly alike, in below-the-knee wool skirts and matching jackets with shoulder pads in them. They were fashionable these days, but they put me in mind of scarecrows. As a woman, I was interested in seeing their finery, but not envious. And the outfit worn by one of the officials' wives looked too outlandish even for a scarecrow. She was a stringy red-haired lady wearing a dark-green wool suit, pretty much like those the other women wore, but wrapped around her shoulders like a furry shawl was a circle of reddish-brown pelts, about the same color as her hair. I couldn't help it: I kept staring at those little weaselly-looking animals with their glass-eyed heads still attached and their tiny feet dangling. They looked like little pine martens to me, but I think they were minks, though I'd never seen one alive. The ladies' magazines talk about mink coats sometimes, but I'd never heard of this style before. Four or five dead minks were
fastened together to form the wrap: the head of one clamped on the tail of the animal in front of it, and its own tail gripped by the one behind it. At first I thought, despite her red hair, which in any case looked dyed, that the fur-wearing lady was an Indian, but since then I have seen several women wearing pelts that way—a fur stole, they call it—and, remembering the women's magazines, I decided the wrap must be some fashionable city notion, seeing as the news of it had not made it up the mountain to the settlement. Just as well, though. I expect they'd have laughed fit to kill to see such a sight. I had no desire to be encircled by dead weasels, but I would have liked to have the green wool suit with a little gold flower pin on the lapel instead. Such extravagances for myself were past praying for, though. There were better ways to spend Albert's salary: first, on the boys; then on Albert; then things for the kitchen, and, finally, clothes for me, if there was any money left over. There never was.