Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  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 the
re. 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.

  Albert put the poker back beside the woodstove. Then he came over and knelt beside me, holding my burned wrist in his hands, trying to think what could be done for me. He figured he might be able to help because dealing with injuries and giving first aid were regular occurrences on a family farm.

  We watched the skin pucker and redden, and it already hid the mark of the wound. I could tell Albert was bewildered, because the burn looked more serious—and certainly more painful—than the cut it had covered.

  “Why did you do it?” he whispered, still staring at the blistering red streak across my wrist.

  I jerked away from him, shaking my head because I still couldn’t trust myself to speak. I felt tears coursing down my cheeks, and I was afraid that if I tried to speak, the sound would come out as a scream instead.

  The whys of it didn’t matter just then. What was done was done.

  He was looking around the room, and I could see he meant to do something to help me. There was no time to wait for the teacher to arrive. Cool the burn. A bucket of cold water stood near the teacher’s desk, a precaution in case a spark or a fragment of burning wood escaped from the stove. Another part of Albert’s duties was filling that bucket from the spring every morning. He went over and hoisted that heavy bucket with both hands and carried it back to where I sat. He squatted down beside me and pushed up the sleeve of my sweater. Then he grabbed my arm and pulled it down into the bucket until the water covered it up to the elbow.

  For another minute or so neither of us spoke. Albert held my hand down in the cold water until I stopped trembling. After a couple of minutes the cold water dulled the pain, and my breath stopped coming in ragged gulps.

  Albert nodded toward my burned arm. “It won’t kill you, Ellendor,” he said. I reckon he couldn’t think of any reason for me to have done it except an attempt at suicide. “It’ll hurt like blazes for a good long time, but I don’t reckon you’ll die, if that’s what you were aiming to do.”

  I looked up at him and sighed, wishing I didn’t have to waste my strength making explanations. “I wasn’t fixing to die, Albert. I was trying to live.”

  He waited, but I didn’t say anything else. “Ellendor, everybody is going to be coming through that door in a few minutes.”

  “Oh all right.” I figured I owed him for trying to help me. I swirled my hand around in the water, drew it out to look at the burn, and put it back. “I’ll tell you what happened. I was walking to school this morning by myself because I wanted to get here early to finish my homework. Chores got in the way last night.”

  He nodded. “So you were walking alone.”

  “Yes, and as I was crossing the track that leads to the Ritters’ farm, I saw a little black and tan dog standing there in the weeds looking out at me. The sky was just light enough for me to make out his shape through the morning mist. At first I thought he might be a painter or else a wolf . . .”

  Albert shook his head. “Ellendor, there haven’t been any wolves around here in . . .”

  “I know that, Albert. Wolf was just a stray thought when I first spied the dark shape there next to the trace. Once I saw that it was just a little old dog, I went over to pet it. I’m partial to dogs, always wanted one. Anyhow, I leaned down and patted its head. That is, I tried to. But before I could draw my hand away, the dog tossed his head and grabbed on to my wrist. I jerked it away so it didn’t get a good hold on my skin, but its teeth cut that gash just above my hand, and when I saw that it was slobbering, I started running.”

  Albert still looked puzzled. “Did the dog chase you?”

  “No. It didn’t even try. When I got a little distance away I turned to look back to see if he was coming after me, but he paid me no mind. I saw him staggering off into the weeds.”

  “A wild dog, then?”

  “No. It turned out that he was from the Ritters’ farm all right. ’Cause when I got to the part of the path next to their hayfield, I met Ned Ritter coming toward me, toting a shotgun. He waved me over and asked me if I had seen a little brown and black dog anyw
here along the path. I pointed back the way I came, and he hurried on, but after a couple of steps he turned back to me and said, ‘He was a good dog, but I got to put him down. He’s got the rabies.’ ”

  “And it bit you,” Albert whispered. A look passed between us, but nothing needed to be said. We knew about rabies. Sometimes a rabid fox or skunk, made fearless by pain, would stagger out of the woods, coming much closer to the house than any normal wild animal would. Sometimes you could see foam around its mouth. As soon as people spotted it in the yard, someone would have to go out and—at a safe distance—shoot the suffering animal before it could infect any livestock, and before a child tried to approach it, like I had just done. Rabies was a death sentence.

  “Yes, Albert, the dog bit me. But I thought maybe I could burn out the poison before it took hold.” I looked at the blistered skin on my wrist, wondering if I had been fast enough. “The burn hurts beyond words, but it’s better than dying.”

  Before the rest of the students got to school I pulled down the sleeve of my sweater to hide the wound. Albert and I never spoke of it again. For weeks we waited to see what would happen. The scar didn’t go away, but the purge by fire must have worked, because I never got the sickness.

  I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, but Albert never forgot it.