Prayers the Devil Answers (9 page)

I reckon Albert's swearing-in after the election was my trial by fire at dealing with a host of strangers. All the county dignitaries and their wives were there. Albert told me that the local bureaucrats were quietly glad he had won the election. He thought that behind the scenes they might have had a lot to do with his winning. It wasn't so much that the county officials wanted Albert to win the job of sheriff as that they wanted his opponent to lose it. We reckoned the county officials favored him in the election because they knew he was an honest man—poor folk mostly are—and he had no scores to settle. All he wanted was a steady job he couldn't get laid off from, and a decent paycheck.

His opponent in the race came from an influential family in town, bred to be aware of his own importance. His family's prosperity and connections stretched all the way back to the War Between the States, but so did the grudges and loyalties that generations of his family passed down like heirlooms. If that man had won the job of sheriff—and probably the very reason he wanted the job at all—he would use his power to benefit his friends and get even with his enemies. Since
a few of the county officials were probably numbered among those enemies, they had good reason to want somebody else to get the job of sheriff. When an unassuming young deputy with no local ties put himself forth as a candidate for sheriff, they quietly pulled strings behind the scenes to see that the unconnected fellow won the election. Albert had figured all that out little by little, but since the county politicians had not asked any favors of him nor tried to influence how he enforced the laws—or on whom—he went ahead and did the job as fairly as he knew how.

LONNIE VARDEN

Perhaps he was fortunate that some of the government bureaucrats in charge of such decisions were middlebrow themselves. They looked at samples of Lonnie's work and decided he was a talented artist; you could tell at a glance what his pictures were about, not like those painters who imitated the style of degenerate Frenchmen, and whose canvases looked like they had been scrawled by a child of six. The bureaucrats were not interested in hiring anyone who painted like those foreign daubers to produce art for a US government project. They preferred the likes of Lonnie Varden, who would give them pretty pictures that ordinary people could understand. They hired him, along with hundreds of other artists of varying degrees of talent, paid him a pittance, and sent him off to the hinterlands to paint murals on the walls of small-town post offices.

Two months later, there he was, back where he started, more or less, in a little mountain town in the backwoods of east Tennessee, assigned to depict some popular scene from local history as a mural inside the little brick post office. The portion of the blank white wall earmarked for the mural was a space above the post office boxes, perhaps eight feet high and twice as long. Too large for a simple portrait of, say, Andrew Jackson, whom he seemed to remember hailed from somewhere-or-other near that end of Tennessee; the space called for a sweeping vista, depicting a landscape as well as human figures.

His school days, punctuated all too often with farm work, left him little recollection of American history, and he had never been interested in reading about it, either, except as it was mentioned in passing in paperback westerns. Thus he had only a hazy idea of what an appropriate scene might be for that area of the state, but he asked around, first talking to the elderly widow whose spare room he rented, then chatting with the locals in the diner, then consulting the mayor and the local ministers, more for diplomatic reasons than for enlightenment. He got a couple of good dinners at the homes of these local worthies, which he valued somewhat more than the information they provided.

He had expected to hear suggestions about Civil War battle scenes, but apparently, despite all the talk he'd heard from old soldiers in the Knoxville taverns, the war had not amounted to much in the Southern mountains. He could not find a suitably dramatic, large-scale battle that would fit the bill. Shiloh, it turned out, was way on the other side of Nashville, hundreds of miles away. Sooner or later, he might make his way to that end of the state, one post office at a time, but at present he had to come up with some other subject for his first painting. He wasn't entirely displeased: trees and meadows were less challenging to paint than hand-to-hand combat.

Most people Lonnie talked to thought he ought to paint a scene from the eighteenth century, rather than the nineteenth. (They all agreed that the twentieth century was too new to merit much in the way of documentation.) In the late 1700s the region was frontier territory, dotted with log cabins and wooden forts set in an unbroken wilderness. The people who currently lived there, descendants of those early pioneers and proud of it, wanted their mural to honor those original settlers.

“You oughta paint you a fort, being attacked by Indians,” said an old man, who stopped to talk to Lonnie while he was preparing the wall in the post office. He had weeks of work to do before he would make a single mark toward what would become the painting. He kept
having to explain to the interested locals that he couldn't just slap up a painting on the bare wall.

“Don't see why it would take you more'n a week or two,” said the postmaster. “I painted the whole living room in my house over one weekend.”

Lonnie smiled. Maybe the city artists had made him feel like a dunce, but around here he could pass for Rembrandt. Perhaps style and talent were God-given traits that could not be taught, but any fool who was willing to learn could mix paint and chemicals. That was one part of the craft he had mastered as well as any of them.

That afternoon a couple of farmers, who had stopped in to pick up their mail, wanted to know when the picture was going to start appearing on the blank wall. “First I have to sand off the white paint that's already on the wall,” he told them. “That will take me a couple of days. Then when I get down to the raw plaster, I'll apply the dry ground gesso.” He didn't even wait for their next question. “That's the base of the painting—a foundation so the paint will stick.”

“How long will it last?”

Lonnie shrugged. “The
Mona Lisa
is still going strong.”

“That must be some foundation then, son. What's in it?”

“Well, sir, the formula is to mix ten parts
whiting
—chalk-white limestone, that is—with one part rabbit-skin glue crystals . . .”

“Rabbit skin?”
That usually brought a grin. “Reckon you are a local feller if you're making do with that old country stuff.”

“No, that's not a backwoods form of making do. Everybody uses it. Well, I suppose technically glue from any animal hide would work, but artists say that rabbit is the best choice. So I mix them up, and then I add one part titanium-white pigment powder.”

“Sounds like you ought to be working in a drugstore.”

“Well, I guess it's like farming, sir. Before you can grow your crops and harvest them, there's a lot of plowing and hoeing that has to be done, isn't that so?”

About that time, the spectators generally lost interest in the technical explanation of mural making and wandered away. Lonnie spent a few days in the post office lobby, scraping the paint off the plaster and chatting with passersby. He didn't mind, though. Much of his preliminary work had to be done in solitude, and, as he had explained to the farmers, in the beginning it was more like chemistry than art. He felt more like an artist talking to passersby than he did mixing the potions.

The chemical preparations required the mixing and heating of various ingredients, actions he couldn't perform in the lobby of the post office. His landlady wouldn't hear of his making any kind of a mess in her guest room, so he had to find an empty space where he could work without disturbing anybody. After his weeklong search for a decent workspace came to nothing, the postmaster finally offered him an old toolshed at the back of his house a few blocks away, and he moved his supplies there and began to prepare the mix that would be the bedrock of his work.

“I'll need to cook the mixture after I've prepared it,” he told the postmaster. “Will your wife mind if I use your stove?”

“As long as you don't make a mess or blow us all up, I suppose it will be all right. After all, the government sent you here to do a job of work, so it must be my duty to help you.”

For a week or so, it wouldn't matter what the subject of the mural was to be, as the preparations never varied. Limestone, rabbit glue, and titanium-white powder. He mixed the dry ingredients in one of the two metal bowls he'd bought from the feed store, and then added six parts distilled water (half the amount in proportion to the dry ingredients). When the mixture began to look like cake batter, he took the bowl to the kitchen, balanced it in a larger bowl filled with water, and placed them on the stove.

The postmaster's wife came in to inspect his efforts. “I bake my cornbread in a flat pan.”

Lonnie laughed. “So would I, but nobody's going to eat what I'm cooking here. I'm melting rabbit-skin glue into limestone. It's the first layer of my mural for the post office.”

“Why do you have to heat it up?”

“I'm thinning the mixture. Once it gets thin enough to spread, I'll have to hustle over to the post office and slap it up on the wall with a paintbrush—the kind people use to paint ordinary walls, I mean. Do you mind if I come and go here as I please? I'll need to do this a couple more times.”

“Tonight?”

“If you don't mind.”

“But the post office is closed.”

“I know, but your husband very kindly lent me a key so I can work after hours. I'll be in and out of there all night. After I put up this first coat, it will take about five hours to dry, and then I can put up the next one.”

She shook her head. “Doesn't sound like any kind of fancy artwork I ever heard tell of. How many times will you have to do it?”

“Three more times after this ought to be enough. It'll take me until tomorrow afternoon to finish, I suppose, but I can catch a nap while each layer is drying.” He laughed. “One of the best things about being an artist is that you can set your own hours.”

“In that case, why don't you just do one layer a day?”

“Well, I know I said I could set my own hours, but unfortunately art doesn't pay by the hour, so I need to finish this job before I run out of money. Besides, the truth is, I can't wait to get started on what you'd call the fancy artwork, that is, the mural itself. It's the first big thing I've ever done. I guess more people will see this painting than will ever see all the dog and lake cottage paintings I've done put together. I'm raring to go.”

The postmaster's wife nodded. “I'm that way myself about making dresses. I hurry through cutting the material and fitting the pattern,
so's I can watch the dress take shape. I can see how you'd be anxious to see your picture appear on the wall. What's that mural of yours gonna be about?”

“I haven't decided yet. It ought to be a historical event, but I guess I can do the color wash—”

“Color wash?” She raised her eyebrows. “First cooking and then laundry?”

“What? Oh, I see.
The wash.
That's what painters call the layer of background color that underlies the whole painting. It can be pale blue or a light ochre—”

“What's wrong with white?”

“Just about anything
except
white.” He stirred the gesso, and tried to think of a way to explain it to her. “It does sound strange, doesn't it? I suppose it's because white is so important to a painting. You need some other color to paint over so that you can really see the white when you put it where you need it. Does that make sense?”

She shook her head. “Not really, but I guess I'd have a hard time explaining sewing to you, though. Anyhow, I do have an idea about what story you might base your mural on.”

“What's that?”

And then, like almost everybody else he had talked to in town, the postmaster's wife launched into the tale of the Cherokee attack on the frontier fort at Sycamore Shoals.

chapter four

O
n the day of Albert's swearing-in, I was introduced to a raft of strangers. I exchanged pleasantries with most of the representatives of the county government, as puffed up and solemn as toads, during all the glad-handing after the oaths had been administered, but I remembered little of it, partly because I had to keep an eye on the boys, but mostly on account of my own skittishness.

After the ceremony Albert and I walked home from the courthouse, talking about the afternoon's events. A wife of one of the commissioners had brought lemonade and plates of carrot cake to the reception. I offered to help serve the cake, mainly to be doing something, because handing out cake and forks was easier than thinking up things to say to strangers. Afterward, the commissioner's wife had insisted we take some of the leftover cake home for Eddie and George. We had allowed the boys to attend the ceremony, because Albert wanted his sons to share his pride in the day, but by the time the reception began, Georgie was getting fractious, on account of missing his afternoon nap, so Eddie volunteered to go home with him so that his daddy and I could enjoy the rest of the afternoon. I might have been happier going home with the boys, but Albert wanted me there, so I stayed.

When it was finally over, we set off for home, following the little
creek that ran behind the courthouse. The stream flowed south, eventually passing within sight of our little house by the railroad tracks. At first the creek bed bordered the alley in back of a line of storefronts, but when it reached the edge of town it flowed into a stand of woods. In private now, surrounded by great soaring chestnut trees, Albert took my hand, something he seldom did, because both of us were shy about showing our feelings in public.

“You did fine at the reception, hon,” he told me. “The prettiest woman there, if you ask me.”

I laughed. “Nobody did ask you, though. Just as well. I'm satisfied that I looked better than that lady with the little dead weasels around her neck.”

“I wish the boys could have stayed.”

“They saw the swearing-in, though, Albert, and I know they're as proud of you as I am. I'm glad they got to be there, but as soon as I saw that fancy assortment of people I wished that we had left them with Miz Collier for the afternoon. They were the only children there.”

“Eddie would have been all right staying. He's old enough to know how to behave, but Georgie was starting to raise Cain so somebody had to take him home. I wouldn't have wanted him to embarrass us in front of all those county nabobs. Not with me just starting out on the job.”

“Well, I reckon they're important gentlemen—they dress like it anyhow—but maybe they wouldn't have minded a fractious baby. They all seemed friendly, Albert.”

Albert smiled. “Seeming friendly is part and parcel of the job of being a local politician. I'll allow that they're pleasant company, all right, as long as you don't put too much stock in what they say to you.”

I considered this. “Don't you think they like you?”

“Like me personally, you mean? I have no idea, Ellie. I don't think that kind of thing matters to them. I know they're grateful that I ran
for sheriff, on account of their deep dislike of the other candidate, and they seemed quietly glad when I won. I told you: I have a suspicion that they caused it to happen. I think those powerful fellows were behind the scenes, pulling strings on my behalf.”

“You don't mean they rigged the voting?”

“No, nothing that obvious. Nothing illegal. But still, I'm pretty sure they had a lot to do with me winning.”

I thought about it, but I could not imagine how powerful men might have managed to sway an election without stuffing the ballot box. They each had one vote, same as anybody else, but maybe they each had a lot of friends who would take their advice on which candidate to vote for. Or if they were bosses with a lot of men working for them, maybe they could order their employees to vote a certain way. If there were other, more dishonest ways to influence the outcome of an election, I didn't want to know what they were, because knowing would taint my pride in Albert's success. But I did want to understand why they had backed him.

“Why were those men so partial to you, Albert? Were they acquainted with you?” I knew that some of the commissioners had connections to the railroad company, much higher up than Albert had been, of course, but it was just possible that somehow they knew him from there.

“Acquainted with me?” Albert shook his head. “Until I took Mr. Tyler's place, those men didn't know me from Adam's off ox. Where power is concerned, I don't believe personal feelings come into it. It ain't so much that the county officials wanted me to win the election for sheriff as it was that they wanted the other fellow to lose it, because they were acquainted with him.”

“Well, if they didn't know you at all, why would they rather have you than him?”

He laughed. “You mean aside from my handsome face and my devilish charm?”

I swatted him playfully on the arm. “Yeah. Aside from that. Come on, hon. No fooling.”

Albert kicked a stone out of his way on the path. “Well, if I had to say, I reckon that my distinguished opponent was the commissioners' second choice for the job of sheriff. Their first choice was anybody else.”

I laughed at that. “So you just happened to be the anybody else that ran for the office.”

“That's it. Aside from that, I suppose that the county officials are partial to me because they know that I'm an honest man.”

“Poor folk mostly are.”

“I reckon that's why they're poor. The commissioners must think so, anyhow. But aside from their presumption of my honesty—which they were right about—I think the political fellows were most happy about the fact that I'm not from town.”

“But we live here, same as everybody. You couldn't have run if you didn't live in the county.”

“Yeah, but we're not from here, Ellie. In town we're strangers. Our families aren't from here.”

“What would that matter? Seems to me like they'd want somebody who already knew his way around.”

“They'd rather have somebody who isn't beholden to anybody. With me being a newcomer, they figured that I'd have no old scores to settle with anybody in particular. When they interviewed me, I told them right off that all I wanted was a steady job I couldn't get laid off from, and a decent paycheck so I could feed my family. They liked that.”

“Well, that's the truth. I know that. What about the other fellow who was running for sheriff? That Mr. Snyder?”

“Oh, he's from here, all right. His family is dug in this town tighter than a badger in a rabbit hole. Snyder's father and uncles and cousins are lawyers and businessmen—one of them is even a state
legislator. People say every man in the family is a big wheel around here, and apparently none of them lets people forget it. The Snyders around here have been rich and powerful for generations. Sometimes it seems like this town is a big spider web, and there's usually a Snyder somewhere pulling on old threads and weaving new ones. If he was to get elected, he'd be a law unto himself.”

“And some of the other big wheels don't like him? I thought they were all kinda like that themselves.”

“I expect they are. That's why they know that if Samuel Snyder had won the job of sheriff—and probably the very reason he wanted the job in the first place—he would use his term in office to settle old scores with some of the other local families, while he looked the other way for anything done by his own kinsmen and friends. That favoritism might have been all right with the county officials, except—”

“Except some of their kinfolks were exactly the people he wanted to settle old scores with, I bet.”

Albert nodded. “Nobody came right out and said that, but that's how I see it. It took me awhile to work it out, but now I think that when a humble deputy with no local ties—in other words, me—put himself forward as a candidate for sheriff, these local politicians quietly pulled strings behind the scenes to make sure the unconnected fellow won the election.”

“Albert! You knew that? Was it fair for you to take a job that you knew you were given just to spite somebody else?”

“They said they wanted an honest man, and by God they got one.”

“Now that you are sheriff, I expect I'll have to learn to talk to people I don't know.”

Albert smiled. “I believe you will, Ellie, but you have more courage than you know. You may have forgotten but I haven't. You carry a reminder.” He let go of my hand and touched the long puckered scar on my wrist.

That was a long time ago, and nothing I cared to think back on.

I was nearly thirteen that winter, still a scrawny kid with patches on the knees of my blue jeans and my brown hair worn in a Dutch boy bob: cut straight as a stick to reach just beneath my ears and a curtain of bangs that covered my eyebrows. Albert was a string bean back then, all skin and bones, and already trying to act grown up. We went to the settlement's one-room schoolhouse with all the other kids from our side of the ridge, all of us often walking together to get there. I was two years younger than Albert, but in the same grade, because in a one-room schoolhouse, promotion depended on capability, not on the age of the pupil.

That autumn and winter Albert walked alone, because he had to leave an hour before the rest of us. When the weather turned cold, the teacher had offered him a quarter a week if he would arrive early and get the fire going in the woodstove. Getting up before daylight was a small price to pay to earn enough money to buy a skinning knife with enough left over to get his mother something store-bought for Christmas.

Albert was glad of the work, and pleased that the teacher had trusted him with the chore. Considering all the farm chores he had to do at home for nothing, even in the winter rain or darkness, building a fire in the schoolhouse woodstove was no trouble at all, and getting paid for it was manna from heaven.

Every school morning that winter before first light, Albert went along to the schoolhouse and lit the fire so that at eight the rest of us would arrive to a room already warm.

He used to say he'd never forget the mornings that fall and winter, when he walked to school alone under a field of stars, with dead leaves swirling around him in the wind. By the time the sky began to lighten, he would have started the fire and sat on a bench pulled up close to the stove, thawing his hands. He said he was tempted more
than once to use one of his weekly quarters to buy some gloves, because his hands got so numb on the way to school.

On that November day that neither one of us ever forgot, he was alone, tending the fire and rearranging the logs with the iron poker, when I came in.

He looked surprised because he seldom saw anybody else until a quarter of an hour before class began. He looked past me to see if the rest of the pupils from the hollow had come with me, but I was alone.

“What brings you out so early on a cold morning?” he asked me, smiling at me, the mousy little neighbor girl, younger than him.

I hardly noticed him. I stumbled to the stove without even a word. When I flung my coat and book sack down by the teacher's desk, he saw the gash on my wrist. Blood was still oozing from it, and I reckon I was ashen-faced, but I was not crying. I was afraid I might faint.

He stared at me. “You all right, Ellendor McCourry?”

I mumbled, “Don't know,” and reached for the poker.

Before he realized what I was doing, I had yanked the poker out of his hand and pulled it out of the flames. The metal tip was glowing red in the lamplight. As I held it up, I could feel the waves of heat, and Albert stepped aside to avoid it, but I was already backing away from the woodstove and from him, holding on to that poker for dear life.

I did what I had to, before I had any time to think about it, and before Albert could figure out what was going on and try to stop me. Before he could reach me or even tell me to stop, I stretched out the injured arm well away from my body. The gashes on my wrist were jagged, with blood pooled around the edges, but I didn't pause to study it. I had to be quick, before the fear caught up with me.

My hand wobbled some when I aimed the poker at the wound, but I pressed the glowing tip of the poker against the gash before I
could think about it. There was a hiss and a sizzle when it touched my wrist, and a moan from Albert when he saw what I was doing, but I made no sound at all.

I kept my teeth clenched when the poker seared my wrist, but I had to keep my eyes open, to make sure the glowing tip touched the wound. When it was done, I felt dizzy and sick. I sank to the floor, and the poker clattered down beside me and rolled toward the door. I still didn't scream, but I remember trembling, keeping my eyes scrunched shut. I began to rock back and forth, gripping my wrist just above the burn mark. I made myself look at the reddening burn to be sure that it covered the cut on the underside of my wrist. My stomach heaved, and I became afraid that I would faint after all, but Albert swears I never made a sound.