Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  He sniffed, not best pleased at having Scripture cited at him. “Well, Ellendor, as I recall, the Bible also said, ‘The poor you will always have with you.’ Now that is the pure truth, hon, and you can’t change it with leftover cornbread. I’ll allow that maybe this isn’t how the Bible would have us treat the folks who are poor in spirit, but from what I hear some of those tramps are dangerous. You’ve only got to think of all those Christian martyrs in the Roman Coliseum getting eaten by lions to know that the Lord doesn’t seem to mind if following His teachings gets you killed or not. I guess he reckons heaven is all the reward you need, but I’d rather you didn’t go there just yet, darlin’.”

  He smiled and gave me a one-armed hug to show he wasn’t spoiling for an argument about this, but when I still looked doubtful, he added, “Well, what if one of them tried to break in while you were here by yourself? And what about the boys?”

  After that at least once a week Albert came home full of tales from the machine shop about some woman somewhere who was beaten and raped or found in her kitchen with her throat cut. To hear him talk, you’d think that living here in Tennessee was just as perilous as in the pioneer days, when it was the Indians you had to look out for. Finally, his stories began to get under my skin, and I took to keeping the butcher knife under a dish towel by the sink, in case one of the tramps tried to break in and attack me.

  Albert had a two-dollar pistol with a rubber stock that he’d bought from a fellow at the railroad yard, but he kept it locked in a tin box in the bedroom and wouldn’t let anybody else touch it. “You’d be more dangerous with that shootin’ iron than ten hoboes, Ellie,” he told me, laughing. “I’m afraid you’d panic and shoot one of the boys coming back from the outhouse some night.”

  That laugh flicked me raw. “Are you worried about me or not? You make it sound like somebody could break in here any minute, but what do we have that a hobo or anybody else would think worth taking?”

  “Besides you, Ellie? Anything is worth something to them that have nothing. Hoboes get hungry, same as anybody else. They steal anything that isn’t nailed down to sell so they can buy liquor.”

  It was no use trying to convince Albert of anything when he set his jaw like that and got a mulish look in his eyes, so I let it drop. He had to come to it on his own. Anyhow, he was probably right about the gun being more dangerous than helpful, unless I knew how to use it, so I held my peace and saved the arguments for later. I was thankful that Albert worked days, so that he would be home to protect the boys and me if anybody tried to break in at night while we were sleeping.

  I said no more about it then, but after a couple of days of mulling it over on his own, Albert said maybe he ought to allow me to keep the gun where I could get to it quickly if I had to. “A pistol can stop a man faster and farther away than a butcher knife,” he said, and I wondered what terrible tale he had heard at work to make him change his mind.

  I didn’t much care for guns; all his talk about wayfaring robbers had made me afraid, but I didn’t want to rush into anything. “I think it’s a good idea for me to be able to defend myself and the boys, but I never have fired a gun, you know. I wouldn’t want to shoot anybody by accident because I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  Albert smiled and kissed my cheek. “I’m fixing to teach you, hon.”

  One bright Saturday morning he set down his coffee mug and pushed back from the breakfast table. “Take off that apron, Ellie. We’re going out in the backyard for your first shooting lesson. Last evening Eddie and I collected all the old tin cans and bottles we could find. He’s already set them up on that fallen log on the edge of the woods, haven’t you son?”

  Eddie looked up from his breakfast and nodded happily. “Can I shoot, too, Daddy?”

  “You cannot. That there gun’s no toy, Eddie. It’s dangerous. You stay right where you are and make sure you keep your brother in the house.”

  Then he turned to me and said: “Now we’ll see how you do with a pistol. But you have to do as I say, Ellendor, and for the Lord’s sake, don’t point it at anything but those cans.”

  From the way he talked, you’d think I wasn’t any older than Eddie. “I know to be careful, Albert.”

  Albert looked at Eddie and Georgie, still shoveling pancakes into their mouths. “You boys stay here in the kitchen. Both of you. Don’t even go near the window.” He grinned at them. “Your mama is fixing to learn how to be a crack shot, in case John Dillinger needs any help robbing banks.”

  They had all laughed at that, and I managed a tepid smile. Dillinger was dead: shot by lawmen in Chicago that summer, but I didn’t bother to point that out, because Albert had only been teasing anyway.

  So we went out in the backyard to begin the shooting lesson. The weight of the weapon did not trouble me overmuch. It wasn’t as heavy as the flatiron I used to press our good clothes for church. The first time I fired, the crack of the pistol startled me, not because it was particularly loud—not compared to the whistle of a freight train, anyhow—but because the nearness of it to my ear startled me, causing me to jerk back and almost drop it.

  When he saw that, Albert sighed and shook his head. He looked like he was about to tell me to quit, but before he could say anything I brought the gun up again as fast as I could and fired off a shot at a jam jar in the middle of the log. When the bullet hit it, the jar flew apart, scattering pieces all over the ground around the log.

  Albert chuckled and patted my shoulder. “Well, what do you know?”

  It had been luck, really. I had not even taken the time to aim the pistol the way Albert had told me to, but after a few more practice rounds, I was hitting the targets not by accident, but because I was aiming at them.

  After a few more shooting lessons from Albert we both figured I could protect myself if I had to. The gun was in a drawer where I could get at it quickly, and I kept on practicing until even at twenty feet my aim was dead-on. I was ready, but no hobo ever tried to break into the house, and after months passed and nothing happened, my fear of the homeless men dwindled to a faint uneasiness. The family had finally learned to sleep through the roar of the passing trains in the night. Eddie got used to the ways of the town school, and Albert seemed happy enough working at the machine shop with Willis. As for me, I found out that the household chores—cooking, scrubbing floors, washing clothes—were the same whether you lived in town or on the mountain. I did get to buy some store-bought cloth to sew a new dress so that I wouldn’t feel like such a ragamuffin when we went to church. Mostly, though, any spare money from Albert’s wages went for shoes for the boys and to replace their clothes when they outgrew them.

  By the time a year had passed, we had settled into the community, and we even had a few friends. Well, acquaintances, more like. Where we came from, friend is a word folks take pretty seriously. Albert got to know the other men from work; Eddie and George found playmates from the nearby houses, and I got acquainted with the women of the church, though I never said much. Mostly I just let them talk, figuring I’d learn something, and they seemed happy to have someone to listen to them. When I really wanted company I read a book, and I was thankful for the little public library. For all of us the town was beginning to feel like home.

  Of the neighbors we had, I had got to know Annie Slocombe the best, but it wasn’t because the two of us had much in common. We had both married young, and we both had little children, but that’s as far as the similarities went. I was older than she was and, in every way that I could see, more fortunate. I’d see Annie out in her yard now and again, usually hanging up a clothesline full of diapers, and even when she smiled she looked like a whipped hound. I kept to myself right enough, but that was because I was satisfied with my own company. The Slocombes came from Pennsylvania, she told me once, swept along by the railroad as if it was a flooded creek carrying rootless things along its path. She never said why they left home, but neither of them had
family around here, and they kept to themselves, as if they were afraid of anybody getting too close. Annie looked like she had been set down to live among crocodiles and dare not turn her back for an instant. Maybe she had reason to be leery of the world. A time or two, when our windows were open, I’d hear shouting coming from the Slocombe place—only one voice, and it wasn’t hers.

  Judging by the way he yelled and ordered her around, you’d have expected Annie’s husband to outweigh her by fifty pounds and to be older than she was by a decade, but he wasn’t a big bruiser at all. He was a wiry banty rooster of a man with slicked-back hair and a hand-rolled cigarette hanging off his lip every time I saw him. You’d think that a strong wind would blow him away, but he was like a little yappy dog, far likelier to bite than a big old hound: a big attitude in a small package. Maybe it was because he was little that he bullied his wife: it was the only chance he had to outrank anybody. He might have been a year or two older than Annie, but it was hard to tell their ages. Being slight gave him the look of a teenage boy, while Annie’s youth was running out awful fast. Her hair was scraggly and dull, and she had gone from slender to scrawny sooner than she ought to have. At this rate, she’d be an old woman at thirty, and if meanness didn’t get her husband killed, he’d probably still look twenty-five when he turned fifty.

  She might have been one of those fair-haired women who bloom early and fade fast, but I thought her decline had more to do with how hard she worked, how close together her babies came, and how little money the family had for buying decent food and warm clothes. I never saw the children do without, but I’ll bet that Annie did. Slocombe managed to earn money doing odd jobs and yard work for the railroad gentry up on the hill, but he drank up most of his wages.

  She lived in fear of him—anybody could see that. Even when she was out in the sunshine and everything was quiet, she’d glance back at her house like she was waiting for it to explode. A time or two I tried to tell Albert about how Slocombe treated his wife, but Albert said it wasn’t any of our business, and, besides, he said the few times he’d spoken with Slocombe he’d found him to be a quiet fellow, ready to smile at a joke, though he never had much to say for himself. I couldn’t offer any arguments to the contrary, because Annie wasn’t talking to anybody about it, so I had to let it go.

  Things came to a head one summer evening when Albert had taken the boys with him to go fishing in the river, and I was alone. I had set a kitchen chair out in the yard so that I could shell butter beans in the cool evening breeze, but before long the peace was broken by a crash and a thump, followed by a chorus of wailing. The Slocombe babies were crying from being startled and then frightened, but their mother’s screams sounded like the wailing of someone in pain.

  It didn’t even occur to me to try to hunt up Albert. There wasn’t time. I just went inside and got the pistol and a hunk of cornbread left over from supper. I walked across the yard to the Slocombes’ back door, just letting all the yelling and crying whip past me as if they were no more than a train whistle. I had to pound on the door three times to make myself heard above the din.

  The shouting stopped, and after a minute or two Annie peeped out the door. Her face was streaked with tears and there was a red splotch under one eye that would be swollen and purple in an hour or so. She saw it was me and tried to hide behind the door. “This ain’t a good time, Miz Robbins.”

  I pushed back on the door. “I see that. Let me in, Annie. You take those young’uns out into the yard and give them this cornbread to take their minds off this trouble.”

  The children had been clinging to her skirts anyhow, and when they spied the cornbread they were glad enough to go, and she had no choice but to go with them. When they were out of the way, I pushed the door open wider. “Mr. Slocombe! I know you’re in there.” I didn’t think twice about calling him mister instead of using his first name. Sometimes people mistake that form of address for a sign of respect, but more often it means “I don’t want to give you any cause to think we’re friends.”

  He ambled up to within a few feet of the door, close enough for me to smell the wave of liquor and sweat he gave off. “This ain’t no concern of yours,” he said, like he was turning a hobo away from the door.

  “If I have to listen to it, that makes it my concern.”

  He started toward me, and I let him see the pistol in case he had any ideas about beating up a woman other than his wife. He pulled up short, but the gun didn’t seem to impress him overmuch, because he sneered. “What are you fixin’ to do with that?”

  “Why, I’m fixin’ to use it, Mr. Slocombe. The next time I see anybody besides you from this house sporting bruises or red marks. The next time I hear any shouts, or screams, or cries of pain coming from this house, I’ll come pounding on the door again. I’ll be keeping an eye on this place, and if anything going on here disturbs my peace or rubs me the wrong way, I’ll be over here like white on rice to straighten things out. And if I have to shoot you, Mr. Slocombe, there’s not a jury in the state of Tennessee that will convict me.”

  He gave me a mulish glare. “A man’s got a right to keep order in his own home.”

  “And everybody’s got a right to shoot mad dogs, so look out I don’t take you for one. And don’t go thinking you can take this out on her.” I nodded toward Annie, sitting on the grass with the children crawling all over her like puppies. “If you lay a hand on her I’ll know. I’ll make her tell me. And then we’ll finish this.”

  “I’ll tell your husband—”

  I smiled. “If my husband had any idea what you’re getting up to over here, you’d already be dead. Now you restrain yourself, or me and this gun’ll be back.” I hope I sounded like the good guy in a cowboy movie. I intended to. If I hadn’t been dragged along to the movies once a week with Albert and the boys I wouldn’t have had any idea how to talk to a worthless bully like Slocombe, but apparently I sounded like I knew what I was about, because he left off knocking Annie around, and I never heard any more loud arguments from over there. Of course, I wasn’t exactly dear to his heart after that, but I didn’t care. Annie was grateful, but I don’t know that I cared about that either. It wasn’t right what he was doing, that’s all, and I wouldn’t stand for it. Facing him down with a pistol was a dern sight easier than making chitchat with the old biddies from church.

  After we’d lived in town for a year Albert bought us a big Atwater Kent radio for the parlor, and, with the coins he put in a tin box every week, he saved up enough to get me a secondhand sewing machine for Christmas. The machine had belonged to the wife of one of the railroad shop foremen. It was a good one, but it had stopped working, so instead of trying to fix it, the foreman’s wife bought a new one out of the Sears Wish Book. The foreman let Albert have the broken machine for a couple of dollars, and Albert took it to the machine shop, where he and the other men got it running again, so it worked just fine. Eddie pined for a bicycle, and I wanted an electric refrigerator to replace the old icebox in the kitchen, but Albert was set on putting as much money as we could spare away in savings, so we knew that those things would have to wait.

  After we got accustomed to life in town, our lives ticked steadily along for a while. I thought we were doing well, but then Albert got restless and bored at the railroad shop. He didn’t like being cooped up indoors all day, and maybe he had caught a touch of ambition from living in the town. I didn’t like the change in him as much as I thought I would.

  Albert waited until the boys went to bed before he told me, but he had already made up his mind.

  We were sitting together in the parlor, me mending socks and Albert fidgeting. Finally he turned down the music on the radio and motioned me into the kitchen. I poured him some coffee, and he sat down at the kitchen table, rubbing the sides of his coffee mug while he worked out what to say to me. “Ellie, I’m fixing to quit the machine shop.”

  I kept my eyes on the sock I was darning so th
at he wouldn’t see the look on my face. “Are they laying men off then, Albert?” I kept my voice as steady as I could so he wouldn’t leave off telling me. “I know times are getting worse for everybody.”

  That Atwater Kent radio brought us music and even plays to help us pass the time in the evening when it could pick up the signals from distant stations, but besides all the entertainment, it also reported the news from all over the country, which was a mixed blessing. It let us know that we were not the only ones struggling through hard times, but it also proved that things were no better anywhere else, and, on account of the economic depression, there seemed to be nowhere to go to escape it, and no end in sight.

  “Laying people off?” Albert shook his head. “No. Ain’t nobody at the railroad yard said anything about cutting back on jobs, Ellie. Touch wood. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t decide to do it on a moment’s notice, with not a thought in the world about what would happen to us next. But even if they don’t cut jobs—well, the truth is, sometimes I wish they would. Working in that little shop is a waste of daylight. I reckon the job could pay more, too.”

  “It’s better than no pay at all.”

  He sighed. “Well, I reckon that’s true, hon, but I’ve decided that I wasn’t cut out for working in a shop day in and day out. In the winter, I set off afore sunup and come home past dark. Every now and then I’d like to see sunshine somewhere besides on the other side of the window.”

  I kept my eyes on the darning needle. “I’d like to keep seeing food on the table, Albert.”

  He nodded. I knew he wouldn’t be so selfish as to quit a job without giving a thought to the family he had to support. “I’m mindful of that, Ellie. I’ve been chewing over this for a while now, and I wouldn’t think about leaving unless I had somewhere else to go. You know that. I wouldn’t do anything to make you and the boys go without, and I wouldn’t live on other people’s charity any more than you would. I do have my sights set on another job, though, and I promise you I won’t leave the railroad shop unless I get it.”