Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  When Buck Tyler was killed, the county elections were less than two months away, and he had been up for reelection. With so little time left before the vote, the county officials granted Albert’s request to serve as the acting sheriff until Mr. Tyler’s term expired. The county’s other deputies voiced no objection to that, not when they had just seen the last sheriff shot dead and buried. Between the danger and the paperwork, none of them much wanted the job, even for a few extra dollars a month in their paychecks.

  Albert wanted the job, though. The first reason he gave was that he thought it might be better to take on the job rather than having to be under the direction of somebody new. With our boys eating like wolves and outgrowing their clothes at every whipstitch, he said we could use the extra money, and, danger or no danger, I couldn’t argue with that. Most of all, though, I suspected that Albert wanted the job to acquire the respect and importance that came along with it. The paperwork might be difficult for him at first, but he said he reckoned that anybody could learn to do it if they put their mind to it. I think he was counting on help from me with that too.

  Albert wasn’t afraid of hard work. In fact, the thought of being out of work, being unable to feed his family, terrified him. So with the blessing of everyone in the department and in the county government, he took over the job of sheriff, and hired an eager young fellow named Falcon Wallace to take his old job.

  By election time, Albert had worked as hard as he could, and he had proved to everyone’s satisfaction that he could do the job. Maybe it was mostly good fortune that nothing terrible happened in those few weeks before election, but Albert got the credit for it. Besides that, he hadn’t ruffled anyone’s feathers or made a nuisance of himself. He was always soft-spoken, but he was also resolute and fair. When he let it be known that he wanted to keep the job by being duly elected, nobody objected. Being a newcomer to town, Albert was not burdened with any old family loyalties that might be troublesome in delicate situations.

  With the support of the county officials, the local business leaders, and his fellow deputies, and with votes from his old workmates at the railroad yard, newcomer Albert Robbins ran for sheriff and won the election. I think he found that campaigning was harder than the job. Even in a small town like this he had to do a bit of glad-handing to campaign for office, conversing with strangers and asking for the favor of their vote, but he wanted the job bad enough to work to get it. I stood by his side—as the dutiful little woman, living testimony that the candidate was a solid family man—and I made myself smile and look as if I enjoyed talking to people.

  Albert went to local civic meetings and visited a different church every week. The role of politician’s wife put me in the path of strangers and I dreaded every occasion, but for Albert’s sake, because he wanted it so much, I went along. I smiled until my cheeks ached and shook hands until my fingers were numb, all the while longing to be back in our little house by the railroad tracks.

  The sacrifice was worth it, though. Albert wanted the job so much that I couldn’t help but be glad for him when he won. Besides, the job of sheriff was perhaps the only chance he would ever have to get ahead, and for all our sakes I hoped he would do well at it.

  Now no one would ever know whether or not he could have made a go of this opportunity, for he had been the high sheriff just shy of three months when he was stricken with the fever that carried him away forever. It was ironic: I had prayed so hard that Albert would be safe in the job—not be shot down by criminals nor killed in a car wreck while pursuing them—that it had not occurred to me that, young as he was, he should take ill and die of pneumonia, just the same as an ordinary person with a safer occupation. Prayers the devil answers, they used to call it up home: when you asked for something and your wish was granted in such a way that it did you no good at all. Albert had not been killed in the line of duty, but he died all the same.

  Now he was gone, and in the space of a week—from when he first took sick until the morning he died—I could feel myself growing old. Ever after, I thought, my life would stretch on and on, with no one ever sharing my bed again, no one holding me as Albert had. No one I had known all my life and could trust completely. I was only thirty-six.

  Besides all the other sorrows, the loss of Albert meant that I would have no one to shoulder the burden of coping with strangers. Eddie adjusted to town living quicker than I did, on account of his being young, but he was still just a schoolboy, mostly ignorant in the ways of grown-ups. Now he would have to grow up fast, and it made me sad to think that if Albert died one of the things that would be lost was Eddie’s childhood. Georgie was so young that he might not understand about death. In a few months’ time, he might even forget his father altogether. And I had lost my barrier against the world.

  Albert used to try to ease me out of my shyness, but he never managed to make much headway at it. “What are you a-scared of, Ellendor?” he would say, winking at me to calm me down when we had to be around people outside the family. “They’re just ordinary folks, hon, same as us.”

  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 sw
eeping 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

  On 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.