Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Well, like I told you before, I think it was the county board of commissioners. That’s who managed the swearing-in, anyhow. You must have met them then.”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Well, you can always ask Mr. Johnson. He’s the head of the board.”

  “Mr. Johnson?”

  “Yes. Vernon Johnson. His wife was here awhile ago. The gray-haired lady in the purple-flowered dress. Mr. Johnson is one of the railroad bosses, I think, if he’s not retired. But he spends a lot of time in the commissioner’s office in the courthouse. Why do you want to know, ma’am?”

  Ellendor Robbins shrugged. “Just asking.”

  LONNIE VARDEN

  Once he had decided that he would paint the 1776 battle between the settlers and the Cherokee at Sycamore Shoals, Lonnie Varden plunged headlong into the project, begrudging every moment he had to waste eating or sleeping. The day after Lonnie settled on the fort scene, he sketched out a rough plan in charcoal on a long sheet of butcher paper in his room. This drawing was for his own benefit, useful mainly to illustrate the relative positions of the various figures, so that he could decide whether or not the composition was properly balanced. On the far right he placed a shallow, rocky riverbed, and a few feet to the left of it he put an X to symbolize the fort itself. In the left foreground, he made smaller Xs representing the dense forest from which the Indian attack would come. The center of the mural would be taken up by the details of the battle: men fighting in the grassy field, bodies strewn here and there, and in the background, a ripple of dark-green mountains bounding the scene like a natural frame, with perhaps a few inches at the top of the wall allotted to an eggshell-blue sky and some fleecy clouds. He hadn’t decided yet where to put the eagle. He would have to find a picture of one in a book somewhere before he could even begin to sketch it.

  When he had plotted out the logistics of the work to his satisfaction, he went off in search of books with illustrations that would give him the general idea of what a frontier scene should look like. He knew that as he went along he would also need studies, from books or from life, to show him the configurations of horses, rifles, chestnut trees—just about anything that called for detail. The postmaster’s wife expressed surprise when he asked if she had any books with pictures of horses and such that he could look at. He had grown up on a farm surrounded by all of these things, hadn’t he? Surely he knew what a horse looked like. Yes, of course he did, he told her, but seeing a horse in order to make it seem real in a painting required a different kind of knowledge from merely being able to recognize a horse when he saw one. Objects are shapes and angles, light and shadow, but you don’t notice those details unless you are trying to reproduce those effects on paper.

  It was always easier to draw something you could look at rather than having to make it all up in your head. As for depicting the Indians, he figured he could always go to the local theater and watch a cowboy movie.

  Each day at five o’clock as soon as the post office closed he would hurry there, drag the stepladder out of the broom closet in the back, and continue the preliminary work on the mural. First he applied the light-green wash to the blank expanse of wall, and then he alternated between sketchbook drawings and limning the shapes into their allotted positions with sticks of burnt charcoal.

  His main difficulty was the fact that he had no idea what an eighteenth-century Tennessee fort looked like, or what clothing the Indians wore. If his schoolbooks had contained illustrations of such scenes, he had long forgotten them. He didn’t have to be too accurate, of course; artistic license allowed for considerable alteration in a scene for visual effect, but he did have to make an effort to produce a recognizable scene. He couldn’t paint, say, a medieval stone fortress set among palm trees, but he thought that taking a few liberties here and there would be permissible. Most of the people who saw his post office mural would have images of historical scenes in their heads that were as hazy as his own. Just as in religious art, it would be better to meet their emotional expectations than to be perfectly accurate and contradict their imaginings.

  He found no books to suit his needs in the little community library, which set him back a bit at first—apparently the convenience of city life had affected him more than he’d realized—but after some thought, he decided that rather than make a long, time-consuming trip to the closest large town, his best bet would be to visit a local schoolhouse and ask the schoolmarm if he could borrow any history books with illustrations.

  That was how he met Celia.

  When Lonnie Varden walked into the schoolhouse that afternoon the pupils had already gone home, and the moderately pretty young teacher was alone, grading papers at her desk. She couldn’t have been much older than some of her students, slender and small-boned with mousy brown hair tied up in a chignon at the back of her head. It was an old-fashioned style; most young women now wore their hair bobbed or in a pageboy cut, but he decided that long hair would suit her if she wore it down, which perhaps she did after work hours. Round faces needed a bit of embellishment to soften them.

  She looked up with a smile that turned at once into bewilderment when she saw that the visitor was not one of her students or even a concerned parent. She had the tentative smile of a shy and unassuming person, someone who was more at home with young children than with a roomful of brash, opinionated adults. Lonnie doubted that the lessons in this schoolhouse were taught to the tune of a hickory stick.

  For some reason her diffidence reassured him. He would experience no harsh questions from her about why he needed the loan of a book. He said hello, but went no nearer the desk; she looked like she might take flight if he made any sudden moves. He smiled back. “I was hoping you could help me, ma’am. I’m not here to enroll or anything.”

  She blushed. “No, of course you aren’t. At least I hope not! But I don’t quite see—”

  “I finished my schooling a few years back, such as it was. The schoolroom looked a lot like this, in fact. Right now I just need some learned advice on local history.”

  “Well, I don’t know how learned I am. One of the local ministers is an amateur historian. If it’s the Civil War you’re interested in . . . Are you a writer?”

  “No. An artist.” Whenever he said that he wondered if he glowed with pride. He never meant the statement to be boastful; it simply felt good to be content with his role in life and to be able to say so. It wasn’t just a matter of opinion anymore, either, because the US government was paying him a salary to paint, and if that didn’t make it official, he didn’t know what would.

  “My name is Lonnie Varden. Don’t bother looking me up in an art book if you have such a thing on your bookshelves. You won’t find me listed, not even as a footnote. I’m not one of the famous artists—yet. Maybe someday.”

  “I wish some of my students could meet you. They love to draw.”

  How many times had he heard a variation of that? He smiled again, “You been teaching long, Miss—er?”

  She paused for a moment, and he wondered if she was trying to make up her mind whether or not to trust him. Hardly anyone except her pupils would ever stop by the remote schoolhouse, and perhaps she wondered if he was selling something or—surely not—there to steal something . . . or worse. But, after all, it was the middle of the afternoon. She would notice that he didn’t look like one of those traveling bums people were always warning her about, and that he wasn’t drunk or agitated. In fact, rather than menacing, he hoped she might think him pleasant and good-looking, in an ordinary way.

  “Are you from around here?” she asked. “Your accent . . .”

  “Well, I’m not altogether a stranger, but I grew up about half a dozen counties away from here. I was living in Knoxville for a couple of years though, lately.”

  “I’ve never met a real artist before.”

  He laughed. “Well, I hope you have now. The name is Lonnie Varden—I’m re
peating that in case I do turn out to be important someday.”

  “I’m Miss Pasten.” She came out with it automatically, and then she blushed. “Celia Pasten, that is, and I haven’t been teaching long, but I’ll help you with your question if I can. Is it about art?”

  “More about history, really.”

  “Oh. History. I didn’t study history very much at college. They expect future grammar school teachers to concentrate their course work on pedagogy; that is, on learning to teach little children to read and spell and do their sums.”

  “I don’t really have any questions for you, ma’am. I just need to look in some history books, so you don’t have to tell me anything. Books with pictures, I mean. Do you have any?”

  She pointed toward a small bookshelf on the wall near the window, behind a circle of small chairs. “We call that our study library. Sometimes people give us old books, mostly the ones left behind when a relative dies, and a few of the others over there are mine. You’re welcome to look through them.”

  He walked over to the bookshelf and began to study the titles. She hovered a few feet behind him, perhaps hoping he would ask for help. When the silence became awkward, he glanced back at her and said, “How do you like school teaching?”

  “It’s all right, I guess. I never really tried anything else.” Even when she smiled she managed to look serious. “Most of the children aren’t keen on learning, but I do my best. I was lucky to get the job. The last teacher left to get married. What about you? Have you been painting long?”

  “Well, I’ve been drawing all my life, if that counts,” he said, paging through a battered old leather-bound volume. No illustrations at all. He put it back. “For as long as I could hold a pencil, anyhow. It just came naturally to me.” Not as naturally as all that, he admitted to himself, but he always did have a yen to do it as more than a pastime.

  “That’s quite a blessing—knowing from the beginning of your life what it is that you want to be.”

  He flipped through the pages of an old cookery book. (You never knew your luck.) “Well, being an artist isn’t a blessing if you’re set on making any money. Pity I wasn’t born with a knack for being a railroad tycoon.” He pulled another leather-bound volume off the shelf and began to leaf through it. “Anyhow, I started out as a kid with pencil drawing. I even took art lessons for a while in Knoxville, and tried to make it on my own as an independent artist, until I ran out of money—along with the rest of the country.”

  “But you’ve kept at it? You’re still painting?”

  “I got lucky, I guess. In fact, maybe the economic troubles were the best thing that could have happened to me. The federal government started a program to pay artists to do paintings and sculptures and such, and I got one of those jobs. So, yes, I’m still an artist, after a fashion. More so than ever, maybe. I’m painting murals in local post offices.”

  “At a post office? Really? The one here in town?”

  “That’s it. It won’t make me rich, but I won’t go hungry either. Besides, I get to keep practicing my art instead of digging ditches until the country gets back on its feet. When the hard times go away, the government may cancel the program, so in a way I hope things don’t improve for a long time. That’s a selfish point of view, I guess.”

  “It’s human nature, surely, to be glad when things turn out well for you and sorry when they don’t. You said you needed some help concerning history. Are you looking for ideas for the picture you’re planning to put up there in our post office?”

  “That’s it. I figure I’m all right on depicting the look of the land itself. Things haven’t changed much around here in the past couple of centuries. Same humpbacked mountains and big shade trees.” He was still turning pages as he talked. Sometimes he would stop and stare for a moment at a line drawing, and then he would sigh and begin to leaf through the book again. “This mural is what they call a historical tableau, and it has to pertain to the area where the post office is. I talked to some of the people in town, and they all suggested that I paint a scene from local history. Pioneer days.”

  She nodded. “Yes, around here they set a store by frontier history. So many local families have been here since then, and so they feel very connected to those old stories. My students love to hear tales from the olden days, especially when one of the names is the same as one of theirs.”

  “I hope people will like it. I’m trying to do my best to get it right.” He found a promising-looking drawing in the Tennessee history book he had been paging through and set it open on the floor. “This drawing of a woman in pioneer dress. That might be useful.” He pulled a postcard-sized notebook and a stub of pencil from the pocket of his jacket and began to sketch rapidly. “Any idea what color that dress might have been?”

  She thought about it for a moment. “Some shade of brown, like as not. Blue dyes were hard to come by, and you wouldn’t wear yellow or white on a frontier farm. It wouldn’t be practical. What scene did you have in mind?”

  “The attack on the fort at Sycamore Shoals,” he said, making broad strokes with the pencil. “Practically everybody I talked to about the mural came up with that suggestion sooner or later, and I decided it has all the elements of a colorful and dramatic tableau, so I’m going to take a crack at it. That means I have to draw a fort, with some Indians attacking it, and a few frontiersmen shooting back. Mountain landscape, of course, and a forest and a river, each on either side of the fort. Horses and maybe a deer at the edge of the woods. I suppose the women would all be inside the fort for safety, but I’ll try to figure out a way to put a couple of them in the scene.”

  “That’s easy enough. There were some women outside the fort at the start of that battle. I do know that story pretty well. I teach it to the fifth grade in Tennessee history. The first governor of the state fought there.”

  “That sounds like just what I need. What were the women doing outside the fort?”

  “Trying to milk the cows. You see, they had been warned to expect an attack, and the whole settlement left their farms and took refuge in the fort. But there wasn’t room in that little wooden fort for the cattle, so they left them outside to graze in the nearby fields. But after a couple of days the cows needed to be milked, but the Indians had showed up and were lurking in the woods, keeping an eye on the fort.”

  “So a woman went out to milk the cows?”

  “Several of the young girls did. They needed the milk inside the fort for the babies. Off they went with wooden buckets to see to the bawling cows, and of course—”

  “The Cherokee pounced on them.”

  “Yes. The girls dropped their pails and ran back to the fort, but the only survivor that I know of was a girl called Bonnie Kate. She later became the first lady of Tennessee. How’s that for historical significance?”

  He smiled. “What a great story. I think I hit the jackpot here.”

  “Maybe you could draw a couple of girls running back to the fort with the Indians chasing them, with the field of cows somewhere in the background.”

  “It would make a good scene, all right. I sure would like to see that fort. It’s easier to paint things if you can look at them and make some sketches from life. The fort is long gone, I suppose?”

  “Oh, yes. Ages ago. Everybody knows where it is, but there’s nothing left. It was all made of wood, you see.”

  “I figured as much. That’s why I’m here. Since I can’t see it for real, then I need to find pictures that show how the scene should look: the architecture of the fort, how the Indians dressed, and what sort of firearms the frontiersmen carried. I thought you might have a book with illustrations of how they think it looked.”

  “There should be something in Tennessee History. Let me look.” She took a small green volume out of the desk drawer. “Chapter two or three, I think. Yes—here it is.”

  He walked back to her desk and took the book sh
e was holding out. A rough black-and-white engraving depicted a log fort surrounded by running figures, some in frontier costume and some in loincloths over breeches.

  “There’ll be a river close by, too,” she said. “No use having a fort if you don’t have access to water.”

  He nodded and made a note on a page in his sketchbook. “This is just what I need. Another half hour or so and I think I can get enough down to get me started. Or I could come back tomorrow, if you have to get home.”

  “I can stay. There are always papers to grade.”

  He didn’t speak again for another ten minutes. They sat in companionable silence, each absorbed in their respective paperwork, and he filled up five pages in his sketchbook before he stopped. “Well, this has been a good day’s work,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “It’s a starting point, anyway.”

  She looked up and smiled. “Can I see?”

  He flipped the pages of the sketchbook back to the first ­drawing—the one of the woman in pioneer costume—and laid it on the desk in front of her. He had carefully sketched the long dress, the white apron, and the large-brimmed poke bonnet worn by countrywomen of that era, but the most detailed aspect of the drawing was the face he had given to the pioneer woman: Celia Pasten’s own.

  She was startled to recognize herself, but she blushed with pleasure. “It’s wonderful,” she whispered. “It looks like me.”

  The wonder was that it didn’t—quite. Lonnie had captured the shape of her face, the arch of her eyebrows, the full mouth, and the small tip-tilted nose—but somehow he had managed to alter the features just enough to make an idealized version of the ordinary woman. This was Celia as she might have hoped to look, or at least as she might have hoped to be seen by others. But the smile of pleasure that the drawing brought did make her look pretty, and he found himself attracted to her.

  Later he was to reflect that the myth of Pygmalion might have been a cautionary tale: that it is a great danger for an artist to idealize his creation, because seeing can indeed be believing, but pictures do lie. They both made images that day: she in her mind and he on sketch paper, and, while neither of these portraits were entirely true, they formed the basis of an understanding that would lead from attraction to marriage, and ultimately, to tragedy.