Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  He meant for me to smile back, so I did, and I promised to be careful. Being appointed so quickly pleased me, not only because it meant money coming in again, but also because it seemed the surest way to get on with my life. It suited me just fine to begin the job at once with as little fanfare as possible. I didn’t need any distractions.

  The day after the commissioners made the appointment official, I got to the sheriff’s office an hour early. Before I went to work, though, my day began as it always had: getting out of bed well before sunup, making a fire in the woodstove, and starting breakfast. The only difference now was that instead of sending Albert off to work, I would go myself. Just past daybreak I woke the boys and took them a bowl of clean water to wash with. Then I packed lunches—one egg sandwich for myself and one for Eddie—in brown paper sacks saved from the grocery store. That task was much the same, only now I would be eating the sheriff’s lunch instead of just packing it. I looked forward to the time when lunch-packing became just another part of the morning routine instead of a source of bitter memories.

  Later, after I had made sure that both the boys were fed and checked to see that Eddie was properly dressed for school, we all left the house together. First we walked Georgie, still clutching his battered red fire truck, to Annie Slocombe’s house. She would give him lunch and look after him until Eddie came home. She couldn’t get any kind of job because she had three children of her own and that restless, unreliable husband, who, when he was docile and sober, almost counted as a fourth child himself. At least he hadn’t laid a hand on her recently. Things at the Slocombe place had been quiet since our last encounter. I decided it would be a good thing to remind him that I would be looking in on them every day—and that I still had a gun.

  Annie had agreed to look after another young’un for two dollars a week, which was all I could afford to pay out of the sheriff’s salary of one hundred dollars a month. Once they let me know that I could have the job, I sat down and worked out a budget in one of Eddie’s exercise books from school: food, rent, light bill, clothes for the boys, odds and ends. There wouldn’t be much left over, and no reserve for emergencies, but I knew we would get by. We had managed on that amount of money when the salary was Albert’s, and now the family had one person less to support with it.

  The first thing I had thought when I came in the door of the station was, I wonder who does the cleaning around here. Typical woman’s reaction, Albert would have said. I doubt if he would have even noticed. Whoever the cleaner was, he wasn’t doing a very good job. The floors still had traces of spring mud here and there, as if somebody with a mop had given the room a lick and a promise and called it quits. If they thought that, being a woman, I was going to do the housework around here, they all had another think coming. Cleaning a room was one thing I could claim to be an expert on, and I intended to supervise the next pass one of them made with a broom or a mop and bucket. But I wouldn’t be doing the cleaning myself.

  After I’d spent a few minutes looking around, I went to Albert’s old office. It looked just as it had on the times I’d dropped by to see him, but now it felt empty. Since I thought I knew the deputies’ schedules, I had planned to get there ahead of them and spend some time alone in Albert’s office, in case my emotions got away from me. I wondered how long it would take me to think of it as my office. I thought I might need just a little time at first—half an hour at most—to put aside the memory of this office as a place belonging to my husband. It wouldn’t do for the deputies to catch me crying, but my guess had been right: nobody was here yet. I meant to be done with my grieving by the time they came in.

  For the time being, I decided to think of the room as “the sheriff’s office,” not Albert’s and not mine—just a working space for a county official.

  I glanced through the filing cabinets, and riffled through the pile of papers on the desk. In a tin ashtray beside the desk blotter I found a key ring holding a dozen keys, none of them labeled. Later, when I found out what opened what, I would put a little tag on each one so I wouldn’t have to fumble through the whole set whenever I wanted to open something.

  Finally I sat down in the swivel chair, trying to convince myself that I had really been appointed sheriff. But being given the title and having the authority are two different things. If I wanted to earn the respect of the deputies, I had to work in this office with no maudlin grief to hamper the work. Now that I had talked the commissioners into giving me the job, I meant to do it well and to make it clear to everybody that I neither needed nor wanted charity or pity. I was also going to take care not to ask for any more help from the deputies than I had to. That was another reason to come in early: to make sure I could find my way around the station and the jail without relying too much on them.

  There wasn’t anything fancy about the sheriff’s private office. The wooden desk and swivel chair were ordinary pieces of furniture that could be found anywhere from a doctor’s office to a pastor’s study. I would have had to stand up to reach more than halfway across the desk, though, and if my arms had been a few inches longer, I could have touched the walls on either side of it.

  The room was a small square windowless box. (I could hear him saying it: “A sheriff doesn’t want a prisoner’s angry relatives shooting at him through a window. If I want a view, Ellie, I’ll just look at the calendar.”) Sure enough, the wall calendar in the office offered prettier scenery than you’d get looking out a window at the row of old buildings that lined Main Street. A smiling blond girl in a fringed turquoise cowgirl outfit—complete with boots and hat—held the reins of a palomino in a field bordered by woods, and in the background were gray snow-capped mountains. Not our mountains. In east Tennessee the mountains are rounded instead of sharp, and mostly covered with hardwood trees. The bare peak on the calendar looked like the kind you see in westerns, jagged and treeless. I thought the scene might be in Wyoming or Montana—not that I’d ever been west of Knoxville myself. A line on the calendar above the year said that it was a gift of Saunders Feed & Seed, which is here in town, so I guess they didn’t take the picture themselves.

  The deputies had not quite disposed of all traces of Albert, and it had not occurred to me to go to the office and collect them. I suppose I would have remembered to do it eventually, after I had finished all the more necessary tasks that come with a death in the family. I had not considered that, when I took over his office, I would be haunted by small reminders of him, some of which could not be filed away. There were only a few personal items in the office. A chunk of quartz he had used as a paperweight, a framed photo of George and Eddie, dressed in their Sunday best, sitting on a log behind our house—the same log I’d used for target practice. Beside it, full of pencils, was the brown glazed Blue Ridge coffee mug from the Erwin pottery that the boys had given him for Christmas. I had supplied the quarter for the purchase, but they picked out the mug. Sooner or later it would be just another mug to me, I supposed, but I couldn’t bear to touch it now. There was also a thick white china coffee mug, and I decided to use that one. It was the sort of mug that diners served coffee in; maybe that’s where he got it.

  The wide oak desk occupied most of the room. When I looked at the stack of papers still on it, I caught my breath at the sight of Albert’s spiky handwriting, scribbled in the margins of the topmost report. Tucked in a corner of the desk blotter was a photograph I hadn’t noticed before: a snapshot of our family, posing in front of a stand of laurels—Albert, all smiles, standing with his hand on Eddie’s shoulder, and me holding baby George in a fleecy white blanket. Albert’s dad had taken that photo a couple of years ago at a family picnic. I wish somebody had taken one of us with him, because he died a little while after that outing. I looked at that picture for a good while before I put it at the back of the top drawer. No distractions; no looking back. But the framed snapshot of Eddie and George could stay.

  I spent most of that first hour sifting through the papers on the
desk, reading a few of them, trying to decide what I ought to work on first. I had no idea which things were important, which ones had to be done sooner than the others, or even who to send them to when I did finish them. I was tempted to ask one of the deputies—probably Roy Phillips, “the smart one”—for advice. Would he take my asking him for help as a sign of weakness—or worse, an invitation to take charge? Albert had only been in charge for a short time. How did he learn the ropes of being in charge and maintain his authority over men who used to be his coworkers, while he was getting the hang of it? I wished I had thought to ask him. I suspected, though, that a man’s asking for help was a different matter from a woman doing the same.

  The cells were empty right now, so no one else would be around until eight o’clock. I knew that whenever we had prisoners one of the deputies on day watch acted as jailer, and a prisoner in the jail meant that he had to come in earlier to bring the inmates breakfast, such as it was. In the ordinary way of things, no one watched the prisoners overnight. I guess if we had some modern-day Jesse James in custody, someone would have to stay.

  When I asked about that, Roy Phillips told me that when somebody locked up a prisoner, they took away their belt and shoelaces, but, since the department budget didn’t stretch to round-the-clock guards, all we could do was hope the prisoners wouldn’t find a way to get into mischief during the night. Since our typical inmates generally ran to drunks and petty thieves, most of them repeat offenders, they were unlikely to be ashamed enough to kill themselves over an infraction that would cost them, at most, a couple of weeks in jail.

  But what did a deputy do when there weren’t calls to answer or prisoners to tend to? Surely, as tight as the budget was, the department couldn’t pay him to sit around doing nothing. When the answer occurred to me, I smiled: the cleaning.

  According to the schedule book on the sheriff’s desk, the day shift would be Falcon and Roy, as it usually was, and they would arrive after they’d had their own breakfast—Falcon at the boarding house and Roy at the local diner. At about the same time, the night shift deputies, Tyree and Galen, would stop by the office to report on the evening’s events and sign out. One of them should have been here now in case the phone rang, but I suspected the night deputies might have joined Roy at the diner, and that they’d all come in together. I had arrived well before they would. All of this information about departmental routines I had heard from Albert. It was lucky I had listened.

  Falcon Wallace was the first to arrive. He looked startled to see me there, but after a moment he recovered his composure and said good morning, trying to act as if a lady sheriff was the most natural thing in the world.

  I supposed that we should have begun with some small talk about the weather and such, but I was too preoccupied with everything else, and I couldn’t think of any. I could have thanked him for his kindness to Eddie and George after Albert died, but I didn’t want to talk about Albert unless I had to.

  “I didn’t expect you to be here so early, ma’am,” he said. “I have been meaning to tidy up the sheriff’s office for you, but what with one thing and another, I didn’t get around to it.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll see to it myself. I probably should have come and taken away his belongings earlier, but, like you said, what with one thing and another . . .”

  “Well, I wish you would let me . . .”

  “I hope we have more important things to concern us. But speaking of cleaning, do you all take it in turns to mop the floors and so on?”

  Falcon hesitated. “Well, we do our best.”

  “Maybe we should spread the chores around. I’ll draw up a list of who should do what each week.” I smiled, because women have to smile when they’re being firm. “Just because you have a woman sheriff doesn’t mean you also got a cleaning lady. I might pitch in, same as the rest of you, but no more than that.”

  Falcon nodded uneasily and glanced at the telephone. “Has anybody called yet?”

  “No. It hasn’t rung since I got here. I guess nothing’s going on.”

  “Well, Galen says something is always going on. It’s just a matter of whether or not they’ve been caught. This is about the time we hear from people whose property was stolen or damaged in the night. They get up first thing in the morning and discover that the cow is gone, or their mailbox has been smashed, and then they want us to drop everything and go over there to set it to rights.”

  “And do you?”

  “More often than not. It’s not as if we have any more pressing demands on our time. Neither Dillinger nor the Barrow Gang ever got this far east that I know of.”

  “Well, they’re dead anyhow, so unless somebody around here goes into the outlaw business, I guess we can go on worrying about cows and mailboxes.”

  “Suits me. Nobody’s going to shoot one of us over a cow.”

  “It’s a little after eight. What happens now?”

  “Generally, when Roy comes in, I’ll go out on patrol, and he’ll stick around in case there’s an emergency.” He caught his breath. “I mean, if that’s all right with you. You’re the sheriff. That is if you want to bother with all this stuff. If you don’t, then we can just carry on like we have been. We’re doing our jobs the way your husband wanted it done, you know. Roy says routine doesn’t change much, no matter who the sheriff is.”

  “I expect it’s all right then, but let’s see how it goes, Falcon.” There was no point in making a decision until I had enough experience to know if there was any way that would work better than what they had always done.

  “Will do, ma’am. Anything I can do to help you get started . . . well, anything any of us can do, really . . .”

  He had that sorrowful look that people get when they are pitying someone, but I wanted none of it. “You mustn’t feel sorry for me. Not for a minute. I may be here on sufferance, and I may need a little help at first, but I don’t take charity. I intend to prove myself and do this job as well as I’m able.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Understood.”

  I smiled. “No need to go calling me ma’am, Falcon. Sheriff will do, or—” I almost told him to call me Ellendor, but then I realized that allowing people to call me by my first name would not help anybody to see me as the person in charge. Next thing you know they’d have me mopping the floors every morning. “Or you can say Mrs. Robbins, I suppose.”

  He nodded. “I’ll try to remember, ma’am—sheriff, I aimed to say . . . Are you finding everything all right so far?”

  “I’m taking it as it goes, and I may ask for explanations every now and again—not too much, just a nudge in the right direction. I’d like for somebody to tell me what needs to be done until I learn more about what to do. You could let me know if there’s something that ought to be attended to. I’d appreciate that.”

  He brightened. “Well, that’s good. Any of us would be happy to help any way we can. The laws about prisoners and arrests and all are written down in a manual, but routine is mostly common sense. One thing is the schedules. We set them up for a week at a time. Usually, I’m on with Roy, and Galen works with Tyree. We’re on day shift, Roy and I, but one week a month one or both of us swaps with the others for night duty.”

  “Just to keep from getting stale?”

  Falcon smiled. “Well, that’s what the sheriff always said. Mr. Tyler, I mean. He was the one who started the switching around, and Sheriff Robbins just kept on with it. Roy says it’s to make sure none of us is letting anybody get away with anything on our shift. You know, like not stopping a moonshiner who’s heading off to Knoxville to deliver his product, or looking the other way when a whore—” He stopped, and his expression said he had remembered that he was talking to a lady.

  I pretended not to notice. “Don’t worry about what you have to say to me concerning department business, Deputy. I know we’re not dealing with angels, and I’m better off knowing the facts.” />
  “Well, anyhow, the old sheriff figured that swapping shifts means that we’d get caught if we tried to let anything slide on a regular basis.”

  “I see that.”

  “Not that we’re doing anything we shouldn’t, though.”

  “No, I would hope not.”

  Ever since I knew I’d gotten the appointment I wondered how I ought to dress to carry out my duties as sheriff. Albert had not worn a uniform, but ever since he got elected he was careful to dress in a formal way so that people would know he was somebody in charge. He usually wore his church clothes—a starched white shirt and his dark suit. He had wanted a black Stetson hat—they weren’t just for wearing in cowboy movies; we had even seen railroad executives wearing them, and Albert thought it made a man look like someone who was not to be trifled with. I had thought about using some of the housekeeping money to buy him one for his birthday, but that never came around, so to the end of his life he wore his brown fedora. After he died I put the hat away in the wardrobe. At the time I told myself I was doing it in case Eddie should ever want it, but I think I really kept it because I could not bear to get rid of his things so soon. It had not yet been long enough to let go.

  Some women these days wore trousers, if the ladies’ magazines were to be believed, but in rural Tennessee it would have caused comment if I had done it. After all, nobody expected me to go chasing bandits or breaking up stills. I didn’t need any special clothes to sit at a desk and write all day, and new clothes cost money, which was the most important point of all. On that first day I wore my light-blue dress, the one I most often wore to church, but I tacked on a white lace collar instead of the dime store pearls Albert had given me one Christmas, and I left off the little squashed hat with a few inches of net veil. All I owned were high heels and old house slippers, and neither seemed exactly right to wear on the job. I would have to think some more about footwear, but that day I wore the black high heels, because, being short, I decided that a few extra inches would add to my authority.