Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  He glanced at Elva, and she shook her head slightly. I wasn’t surprised. The farmhouse was twice as big as our house here, and she had thought it too small to contain the both of us.

  He turned back to me, still looking like thunder. “Well, Ellendor, I’ll grant that you are pale and haggard enough, but I see no sign of tears. How much are you really grieving?”

  I could have blazed back at him and asked what business it was of his, and who was he to judge how I felt, but this was probably as close to grief as Henry could feel for his brother. I would give him more consideration than he gave me. I stared back at him until he looked away. “Let’s pretend you didn’t say that, Henry.”

  He reddened. “I just think you look like you’ve come through the ordeal well enough.”

  “Well, maybe it hasn’t altogether hit me yet that Albert is gone. I haven’t had much time to think—nor to eat and sleep, for that matter. I am also bone-tired from sitting by his sickbed for most of the past week.”

  He sniffed, not satisfied with my answer, but finding no way to fault it. “All right. What about my brother’s funeral then? Have you given any thought to that?”

  “Not yet, Henry. I guess I’ll talk it over with the man at the funeral home tomorrow.”

  “Undertakers!” He spat out the word. “We never bothered with such foolishness up home. The Bible says dust to dust, and that’s the way it ought to be.”

  I wasn’t going to argue the Bible with him. “Well, it’s done now. It’s how folks do things in town. I think there’s a law that says you have to have it done if you want to bury the deceased in the town cemetery.”

  “Surely Albert would want to be buried on the farm with our family. Where our mommy and daddy are laid to rest. We could lay him to rest out next to our brother Virgil.”

  I was tired. My patience was wearing thin. “Strictly speaking, Henry, in order to bury Albert next to Virgil, they’d have to dig him a grave somewhere in France.”

  I should have kept my temper, though. There was no point in quarreling with Henry when his anger was just another way of grieving, because men weren’t supposed to cry. But between exhaustion and despair, I had no stomach for putting up with anybody right now, whether his anger was grief or not. As we talked, a part of my mind kept waiting for Henry to get past his own bitterness and sorrow and express anything resembling sympathy for me and the boys, who had just lost their father, but he never did.

  “The funeral . . .” he said again.

  He was right. I hadn’t really considered it. Everything else kept getting in the way and planning seemed to be the only thing that could wait. I rubbed my eyes and stifled a yawn. “I don’t know where Albert would want to be laid to rest, Henry. I haven’t had any time to think about it. We never talked about it, because . . .” I could feel the tears sting my eyes, but I would not cry in front of Henry. “He wasn’t old. It was all so sudden . . . I wasn’t sure what to do, what he’d want.”

  “Well, now that we are here, we can talk about it.”

  I ignored him. “The preacher at our church here in town came to call this afternoon. He said I could count on him to help us in any way he could—with the undertaker, the cemetery—whatever we needed. I reckon he’d do the funeral service if I was to ask him to. That way the people in town could come. Folks here set a store by Albert. They’ll want to be there.”

  Albert and I had never even thought about dying or what either of us would want done afterward, much less the details of a funeral. What hymn would he have liked to have sung at the funeral? What inscription on his grave marker? We should have had decades to come up with those answers. I might have asked him toward the end of his illness, when I began to fear the worst, but by then it was too late. Albert never woke up.

  When the preacher came by to express his condolences and offer to help, he didn’t pressure me to work out the practical details of a death in the family. He could see I was not up to the task of decision-making. I expect he had seen enough bereaved families to know not to rush them into deciding things straight away.

  “Don’t trouble yourself about those things now,” he’d told me. “There will be time enough for planning in another day, or the one after that. Whenever you find that the first shock of grief has begun to wear off.” I had resolved to do that. “There is some urgency at the funeral and burial plans, of course. You mustn’t leave it too long, but don’t worry about the inscription on the grave marker yet. They won’t put a permanent headstone on the grave until the ground settles, which will be about six months from now.”

  “Town preacher!” Henry’s scowl looked likely to become permanent. He wasn’t even thirty yet, and already his face was etched with grooves marking the shape of his bitterness and anger. “Surely you must realize that Albert’s real church is the one up the mountain that he attended for most of his life, Ellendor? It’s your church, too, come to that. Brother Cavendish, who has known Albert and the rest of us since we were little, ought to be the one to lay him to rest. That’s what Albert would want.”

  “I’ll think about it, Henry.” I didn’t know where Albert would have wanted to be buried, or who he would want to conduct the funeral service. Maybe he would want a grave on the family farm far from the new life we’d made, but he never seemed homesick or anxious to go back there. Town was his home now. He might have preferred to be buried in the public cemetery on the hill above the town. And even if he had a preference, what did it matter now? Surely Albert was now past caring where he ended up. If you ask me, graves are for the living. The decision ought to be mine.

  Maybe all Henry really cared about was winning this family argument, but aside from that piddling little victory, I didn’t think the location of Albert’s grave would matter to him one bit. He spent precious little time at Virgil’s. After he took over running the farm, he didn’t even see to it that his wife took care of the graves. The flowers their mother planted there were long since dead, and the family plot was overgrown with weeds. What was the point of burying Albert there, to be forgotten along with the rest of them?

  I stopped mulling over the possibilities and turned back to Henry. “If we buried Albert here in town, the boys and I could visit him more often.”

  Henry’s anger nearly made him unable to speak. I wished it had. “In town? Away from family? More importantly, could you afford a cemetery plot here? Why, they must cost twenty-five dollars or more. I hope you wouldn’t expect us to contribute to such foolishness. Buying a plot in town when you can have a perfectly good one for free would certainly be throwing away good money, no matter how well off you think you are. Did the county insure Albert’s life when he became sheriff? Will they pay for his burial?”

  I shook my head. “I haven’t asked, but I don’t expect they will. There is no insurance, either. We could have bought a policy ourselves, but Albert said he didn’t see the need to waste any money insuring people who were young and healthy like us. There were things we needed more, he reckoned. Mostly things for George and Eddie—shoes, winter coats. But we do have a little money put by from his pay, and I reckon I could use some of it to buy him a place in the burying ground.”

  Henry shut his eyes and heaved a weary sigh. “Well, I can’t think of a greater waste of money. Leave it to a woman to make a hash of practical matters once she is on her own. It’s a good thing we came to tell you what to do before it was too late.”

  Elva spoke up, perhaps to prove that she could be practical despite being female. “Bury him in town, Ellendor? But where is the sense in that?”

  Not that it’s any of your business, I thought. “The sense is this, Elva: when he died, Albert was the county sheriff. He made friends here—men from the railroad shop, the church, the neighbors—enough well-wishers to get him elected to office, in fact. People here respected him. He was the sheriff, and he was proud of that. Here he was somebody.”

  “Somebody,
indeed! He wasn’t sheriff for long, was he? Not even three months. I think you’ll find that people have short memories, Ellendor, especially when it comes to dead men who were no kin to them. Three months from now in a town cemetery Albert would be lying forgotten in an untended grave.”

  “He will not. I will be here to tend it. And the boys and I would visit him. That’s all that matters, really.”

  “You’ll visit him?” Henry was still glowering. “That brings up another matter, doesn’t it? I took it for granted that you’d agree with me about Albert being buried at the homeplace, not only because that is where he belongs—with family—but also because the three of you will be moving back there yourselves.”

  I looked away. “That hasn’t been decided.” But where would we go now? That was another thing I had not had the time or the will to think about. Moving in with Henry and Elva again. I supposed that it did seem inevitable to everyone. What else could I do? Now Henry was forcing me to think about it. I looked over at Elva’s smug face and pictured myself going back to sharing a kitchen with her . . . only this time I wouldn’t be there as an equal. Now that Albert wasn’t around to stand up for me, I wouldn’t put it past Elva to treat me like a servant. What was there to stop her from doing it? Albert was dead, and everyone would expect us to go back to live with family.

  Family . . . But I couldn’t stand it there, and the boys weren’t close to Henry either. He seldom took any notice of them. Since they were too young to help with the farm chores, Henry had no use for them, and consequently no interest in them. I knew that regardless of what I felt, all that mattered was what was best for Eddie and George. Should I take them back to their father’s homeplace on the mountain, where they could count on having a roof over their heads and enough to eat, however grudgingly it was given? At least they would be safe that way. But if I took them back to the farm Eddie would have to attend the settlement’s one-room schoolhouse that hadn’t changed since Albert and I went there: just one teacher for all eight grades and not enough books to go around. As for Georgie, with the farm’s nearest neighbors a mile away, he would have no one to play with, and without Albert to teach him skills, Georgie would never learn the pleasures of living in the country: hunting, fishing. Henry had no interest in any of that. He had never learned those things himself.

  And I would be no better off than the boys. Henry’s attitude made it plain that we would be living back at the farm on sufferance, an object of charity. The thought of being somebody’s “poor relation” made me shudder. I suppose with times being hard and money being tight, Henry had good reason to resent three more mouths to feed. After all, I wasn’t blood kin to Albert’s brother, and there was no one in my family who could take us in. My folks were dead, and my brothers and sisters were scattered between here and Detroit, none of them prosperous enough to take on extra mouths to feed.

  Then there was my dread of sharing the house again with Elva, only this time Elva would be in charge absolutely, and she’d never let me forget it either.

  I glanced at my sister-in-law, who was more of a stranger to me than an Eskimo. I never knew what she was thinking, but you could tell from her expression that it wasn’t good. Elva was staring up at the ceiling with her arms crossed, her body rigid, and her mouth set in a tight frown. She said nothing, but her disapproval radiated from every pore. Apparently, it had not occurred to her that we might be coming back to the farm. Obviously Henry had not discussed the future plans with her, and knowing Elva, she would spend most of the drive back to the farm expressing her displeasure.

  “Since you are my brother’s widow, Ellendor, I—that is, we—” he amended with a wary glance at his wife. “We think it is our Christian duty to give you a home with us.” Henry’s tone of voice made it clear that rather than a family member to share his home with, he considered me and the children his cross to bear. No matter how hard I might try to be useful, no matter how meekly I accepted my position as a “poor relation,” I would never be welcome. It would never be home.

  “It is unfortunate that Albert lacked the foresight to provide insurance to support you after his death . . .” Henry was saying. “I would have thought he had more sense than that.”

  And suddenly I knew. It wasn’t for the sake of Eddie’s education or Georgie’s future. It wasn’t a reasoned decision, or a careful weighing of pros and cons. It wasn’t even a sign of self-confidence on my part, much less ambition. It was just that anything on earth would be better than going back to that farm without Albert, where I would be unwanted and considered a burden. My life there would be an unchanging round of drudgery that would go on and on until I finally ran out of time and joined Albert again.

  “We’re staying here, Henry. Albert will be buried up the hill in the town cemetery, and we’ll keep on living here. I don’t know what we’ll live on, but one way or another, the boys and I will manage without your charity. So y’all can go home and stop worrying about us. We’re not your problem. We’ll be fine.”

  Henry’s smile was grim. “When you are homeless and starving, you can come and apologize to me and Elva for your uncivil attitude, and then, for the sake of Albert’s sons, we’ll take you in.”

  I stood up, finally feeling more angry than tired. Instead of shouting at him, I took a deep breath and motioned them toward the front door. “Don’t hold your breath, Henry.”

  chapter eight

  Well, ma’am, first let me say how sorry I am, Mrs. Robbins. Your Albert was a good man, and his loss will be felt by all of us.”

  I nodded, wondering if I ought to sit down in the visitor’s chair in front of the desk, but I decided against it. This was Mr. Johnson’s office; it was only proper to wait until the commissioner invited me to be seated. I stood there, and he must have realized that I was still standing.

  “Ma’am, you put me in mind of a child called on the carpet for some bit of mischief and expecting a whipping.” With a faint smile he motioned me toward the chair. “Very formal, you mountain people. Though on the whole that’s not a bad thing at all.”

  “Thank you for the loan of your umbrella yesterday.” I handed it to him across the desk.

  He took it and waved away my awkward attempt to thank him. “I’d have been happy for you to keep it, ma’am.”

  The silence stretched on after that, making both of us uneasy, I think. I was still standing, gripping the back of the wooden chair, and trying to think of some casual remark that would continue the conversation with this prosperous-looking gentleman, but I had gone so long on ragged bits of sleep that my mind could not summon up any suitable words. Finally, for want of anything else to do, I sat down.

  I saw him looking at my clothes. I had put on an old black cloth coat over a homemade brown church dress; that was as close to mourning as my wardrobe allowed. I hoped he understood that. I had worn the same outfit to Albert’s funeral, not for a lack of grief, but because I thought that buying a black dress for that one occasion would have been a sinful waste of money. Albert might have wanted me to buy some proper mourning clothes, and perhaps a dark suit for Eddie as well so that what we wore would reflect well on his position as a county official. Albert considered the rules of etiquette to be laws that must be obeyed as surely as those on the law books. Even when we were having nothing for supper but soup beans and cornbread, he still expected ironed cloth napkins and serving bowls on the table, because dishing the food straight out of the pot was not fitten—a word he used more and more often as he adapted himself to town ways and learned its rules.

  Albert had been quick to figure out that the most important laws in life are the unwritten ones.

  To please him, I did my best to follow the rules as he saw them, but mostly I didn’t really care what people thought. If they judged you by your clothes, I figured they weren’t worth knowing. Besides, meeting people’s expectations usually meant that you wanted something from them, even if it was only a bit of resp
ect, but I don’t think I ever wanted favors from anyone. I already had a husband, a home, and two healthy children, which was all I wanted. Why bother to ingratiate yourself to society people if you didn’t want anything from them?

  I might have to change my ways now, though, and try to be more sociable like Albert. Pride does not come cheap, and I could no longer afford it.

  As for the proper attire befitting a town funeral, now that Albert was gone I would please myself. Funerals were for the living, because, one way or another, the dead were past caring. Either they were in the hereafter with other things to occupy their minds or they were nowhere, so what they would have wanted no longer mattered. I wouldn’t indulge in the foolishness of expensive mourning finery when the rent needed paying and the larder was almost empty.

  I would try to do as Albert wished, as long as it was practical, but really I had my own ideas about the rules to be followed after a death in the family. My rules weren’t printed in etiquette books; they were born of long tradition, and they had nothing to do with the opinions of town-bred strangers.

  First I had to record Albert’s death in the family Bible, alongside his name and the date of his birth. Some town people must still do that as well, since many of them set such a store by their bloodlines. Did they also open a window and put a dish of salt on the windowsill? Did they drape a cloth over the mirror? I never heard anyone mention it here, but I didn’t think so.

  A few hours after Albert took his last breath, I opened the boys’ bedroom window, which was on the backside of the house facing the railroad tracks. That way people coming to the house would not see it and want to know why in the chill of early March I had left a window open. The old people up home said that when there was a death in the family someone had to open a window in order for the soul of the departed to leave the house and pass on. The salt on the windowsill was to prevent other spirits from getting in.

  If we had kept bees in the yard I would have gone out to the hives to tie a bit of crape on each one and tell them about Albert’s death. You must do this if there is a death in the family or else the bees will swarm—leave the hives and go elsewhere. That was true. Every beekeeper I ever knew swore by it, but none of them ever explained how the bees knew or why they cared.