Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Well, Deputy, if there’s anything you think I ought to be doing . . .” But before I could finish that thought, the telephone box on the wall began to ring.

  Falcon nodded toward it. “You could start by answering that. Or I will if you’d rather.”

  “No. Time I got to work.”

  I put the receiver to my ear and stood on tiptoe to say “Sheriff’s office” into the mouthpiece. “This is the sheriff speaking . . . Yes, ma’am, I truly am. Are you needing any help from us today?”

  From then on, my side of the conversation mainly consisted of a series of yeses, followed by an occasional when and where. The woman talked a mile a minute, and I didn’t have much choice but to listen without interrupting. I caught myself nodding a few times out of habit as if the caller could see me. I didn’t promise anything, though. When the caller finally got around to saying what the problem was, I told her not to worry and said someone would look into it.

  When I hung up, Falcon was looking at me expectantly. “Trouble?”

  “The lady on the phone seemed to think so. She said her name was Crabtree, I believe. From what I could tell, she sounded elderly. She was calling from the community store out in Bitter Creek where she lives.”

  Falcon smiled. “Oh, we know her of old, ma’am—sheriff, I mean. That must have been Robert Crabtree’s widow. She lives over on Bitter Creek, like she told you, by herself on their old farm that’s mostly hillsides and apple trees. That house has seen better days—well, so has she.”

  “By herself? Doesn’t this Mrs. Crabtree have family?”

  “There are a couple of grown sons, but they’re out and gone to the car factories up north. The poor old lady gets nervous every so often, and we have to go out there and assure her that the burglar was only a shutter banging in the wind, or whatever ordinary thing has set her off at the time. We’re polite to her, though. The old sheriff was very particular about that. He said she pays taxes, same as everybody else, so he reckoned she was entitled to turn to us when something frightened her. She seems to think me and Roy are a cross between handymen and destroying angels.”

  I smiled at the thought of Roy Phillips in long white robes and eagle’s wings. “I wish you were. I’ll bet she could use some of both. I know I could.”

  “Well, we do our best. What did she want this time?”

  “She said a thief broke into her chicken coop and stole two laying hens. What should I have said?”

  Falcon grinned. “Well, Sheriff, I reckon I would have told her that we don’t arrest foxes, but I’ll drive out there and soothe her ruffled feathers.”

  I made it through the first day.

  chapter eleven

  My first month as acting sheriff was as hard on the deputies as it was on me. I was still learning my way around, and the deputies were trying to get accustomed to working for a woman. We all spent the first couple of weeks walking on eggshells—me, trying to be in charge without being seen as the wicked stepmother, and them trying to accept my authority without feeling like overgrown schoolboys.

  After a while, though, we got used to each other, settled into a routine, and got on with our jobs. I got more confident about doing the paperwork; all those times I’d helped Albert paid off. I had even begun to figure out when to give orders and when to rely on the deputies’ judgment. Maybe that was easier on account of me being a woman. A male sheriff might have felt honor-bound to lock horns with the deputies to prove he outranked them, but I didn’t care about that. I just wanted us to work together well enough to do a good job.

  The sheriff’s private office had ceased to conjure up painful memories every time I set foot in it. Working there day after day must have laid Albert’s ghost to rest for me; by the second week I had got so used to being there that I began to treat the office as my own. I took in a mason jar for garden flowers and set it on one side of my desk next to the framed picture of Eddie and George. In the top drawer I put a comb and a powder compact. Albert’s old shaving mirror hung beside the calendar now. I had no hopes of ever looking more than tolerable, but at least I intended to make the effort to keep my face from looking haggard and to make sure that my hair didn’t look like a rat’s nest.

  In those first weeks, as I got better acquainted with each of the deputies, I learned perhaps the most useful thing of all: who was good at what. If we needed an armed and dangerous lawbreaker arrested, Tyree was the man to send, but he was no good at reassuring nervous old ladies or delivering bad news to the next of kin. Falcon Wallace was the best one at dealing with lost children or animal problems, like cows getting through the fencing and blocking the road; we always had a lot of those. Maybe farmers couldn’t afford to buy new fencing nowadays. I’d send Galen Aldridge to handle drunks and fighting—which was often the same thing, and Roy Phillips could deal with businessmen and the more complex financial or technical matters. Not that we had much of that, either because it wasn’t happening here or because the men behind it were too slippery to get caught. Roy was best at figuring out clues, too, in case the culprit wasn’t an obvious choice, and he would help me with the reports if there was too much for one person to do and time was short. I couldn’t always send out the one I wanted to, of course, because sometimes the deputies working the shift were not the ones I would have chosen to tackle the problem, and then we had to make do with whoever was available and hope for the best.

  It was all working well enough; at least I never heard anybody making any complaints. I even made the coffee every now and again, once I was certain that all of us knew who was in charge. Maybe it was easier because I felt older than all of them, but even the married ones with families of their own seemed like big kids a lot of the time. Either becoming a widow had made me older than my years, or else women grow up and most men never quite do. Falcon Wallace was the only one who was much younger in years than me, but the others seemed younger, too, so it was easy to be in charge of them—sometimes it felt just like looking after Eddie and George. If I sounded calm and firm and sure of myself, they listened.

  I was lucky for those first few weeks: we didn’t have to contend with anything more serious than a few fistfights and a couple of fourteen-year-old ne’er-do-wells stealing some farmer’s plow mules to play cowboy with. There were times when I thought a vinegary spinster schoolmarm could have done the job better than all of us.

  One morning just after I arrived at the office a call came in from an excited woman wanting to know if Falcon could come over and help her with a problem.

  “He has the day off,” I told her. “I’ll come myself. Give me the details.” Actually, I was expecting him to walk in any minute, but, as good a fellow as Falcon seemed to be, I was a little uncomfortable with the idea of citizens asking for a particular officer when they had a problem, so I thought I’d better go and see what was going on.

  “We got a call just now, and I’m going to take care of it myself,” I told Falcon when he came in five minutes later. “They asked for you.”

  He didn’t look fazed by this information, which I took to be a good sign. He just smiled and said, “If you’re sure you want to bother, I’ll just drink my coffee and answer the phone then. Send word if you need help. Where are you headed?”

  “To the diner.”

  His face changed then, maybe just a flicker of something, but it was gone so fast that I couldn’t tell what it meant. I didn’t ask him, though. I just nodded and closed the door behind me. But I filed that look away in my mind for future study.

  The town’s only diner is an old metal-sided railroad car, painted silver and edged with boxwood shrubs around it to hide where the wheels had been. A strip of neon around the top surrounded its name: City Diner. Since this little burg had never been a city, and I doubted it ever would be, either the owners were optimistic or else they got the sign cheap from somewhere else, same as they had the building itself. It was parked on a corner lot with
in sight of the hotel, just down the street from the train depot, and it stayed in business by keeping late hours and catering to people passing through, waiting here between trains and such.

  I had only been in there once. When Albert and I first came to town looking for a place to live we had a bite of lunch there, because we knew he was going to be working for the railroad, and it tickled him to take me to eat in a real railroad car. I never went back, though. Housewives with two little boys don’t have the time or the money to eat away from home. I knew they were open early and late, though, to accommodate the train schedule, so maybe the deputies stopped in for coffee and pie in the evening or a hot breakfast before the day shift every now and then.

  I never thought about the diner much, because we didn’t get any nuisance calls from there. They didn’t serve liquor or allow gambling or billiards in the place. It was just an ordinary little eatery with a long counter with a row of stools like mushrooms along its side, and half a dozen booths set next to the front plate-glass windows. Its gravel parking lot, fringed by trees, would hold about ten cars, but it seldom did these days.

  When I got there the place didn’t look crowded. I wondered what kind of problem they could be having at the diner so early on a sunny spring morning. Surely it was too early for drunks or hoboes. Travelers didn’t usually cause trouble unless alcohol was involved. I hoped their problem wasn’t serious because I had forgotten to take a weapon. I wondered if a man would have forgotten. Probably not, but women are more inclined to try talking before they go to brandishing weapons anyhow. I hesitated for a moment on the steps, and then I went in, trying to look more confident than I felt.

  A couple of men in overalls were sitting at the counter, hunched over pancakes, either railroad shop workers or farmers on an early errand to town. In the booth nearest the door a man in a black business suit had a Knoxville newspaper propped up in front of a plate of congealing scrambled eggs.

  A motherly-looking waitress in a faded green uniform was wiping down the counter near the cash register. She had put on a mechanical smile when she heard the door open, but it faded when she saw that it was only me and not one of her regular tippers. I wasn’t in uniform, but after a moment she must have realized who I was, because she nodded toward a booth in the back corner and then went back to mopping down the counter.

  Two people were sitting in that back booth, and one of them was crying.

  I headed back there, thinking as I did that the only two women in the diner—the waitress and I—were the only people working. The skinny boy with his back to the wall, dabbing his face with a paper napkin between sobs, looked about twelve, but not much taller or heavier than my Eddie. To someone not used to being around young’uns, he could have passed for much younger, but I could tell. He had feathery dark hair that could have used a trimming, and an old work shirt that looked like a hand-me-down. The scowling, heavyset man sitting in the booth across from him was wearing a dingy white apron over a tee shirt—he must be the cook here, I thought, but it didn’t look like there was any connection between the two of them, because the cook wasn’t making any effort to console the boy. He just sat there glaring at him. When the boy tried to take a fresh paper napkin out of the dispenser, the cook slapped his hand away, saying, “Those things cost money,” which only made the boy’s tears flow that much harder. He wasn’t making any noise, though; just sitting there with his fists clenched, shaking silently, while tears streamed down his face.

  It was all very matter-of-fact and quiet. Neither of them had a weapon and there didn’t seem to be anything threatening going on, aside from the unauthorized appropriation of paper napkins.

  I slid into the booth beside the tearful boy. “Is there a problem here, gentlemen?”

  The cook glared at me. “I don’t know that it’s any of your business, lady.”

  “I believe it is, sir,” I said, trying not to laugh in his face. “I’m by way of being the sheriff around here, and somebody sent for me. So you need to tell me right now what’s going on.”

  After the cook got used to the idea of a peace officer being female, he brightened up considerably, and I suspected that he had been threatening the young fellow with some sort of legal action. “You’re the sheriff? Good deal. Just who we needed to see. Did you bring your handcuffs?”

  “Tell me what’s going on, and we’ll go from there.”

  “All right, Officer. I’m Ike Bonham. I own this place. This morning I caught this here crybaby punk stealing out of the garbage cans out back. It’s been going on for the better part of a week. At first, when I saw the trash had been disturbed, I thought it was a raccoon, or maybe even a bear, but when I came in this morning I opened the back kitchen window on purpose to keep an eye on the garbage cans, and a little while ago I caught this kid back there trying to help himself.”

  I nodded and held up a finger to signal the cook to stop talking. “Thank you, sir. I believe I am clear now on your side of the situation. And what about you, young man? Let’s start with your name.”

  The boy wiped his eyes with another paper napkin. “Davis Howell, ma’am. Are you gonna put me in jail?”

  “I’m not done listening yet, Davis Howell. What’s your side of the story?”

  “It ain’t stealing, is it? When people throw things away, then them things don’t belong to them anymore, do they? So how can anybody steal ’em?”

  The cook slapped the table with the flat of his hand. “The trash cans still belong to me, by God, and you broke into them! Breaking and entering. That’s illegal, for starters. And then there’s trespassing. And vagrancy. The kid doesn’t have a cent on him. Isn’t that a crime around here?”

  When I took a closer look at the young thief, I could tell that a bright red lump on his left cheek was going to turn into a bruise in an hour or two. I touched the boy’s arm, and he flinched and tried to draw away. “That mark on your face, did he do that?”

  Davis Howell touched his cheek and winced. “Yeah. He smacked me when he pulled me away from the garbage can. I reckon there’ll be one on my arm, too, where he grabbed me and shook me. He punched me in the stomach, too, when I tried to run away.”

  I considered it. “Seems to me, gentlemen, if you want to get the law involved in your little set-to, the way this officer sees it, your offenses are about even. You charge this boy with vandalism of property or some such crime, and he can turn around and get us to arrest you for assault and battery.” I had done some reading up on Tennessee law on nights when I couldn’t sleep, but what I was spouting right then was just plain old common sense. Most of the time when two men are fighting, the rights of the matter are pretty evenly divided between the two sides. You’d be surprised how few really innocent people a lawman ever sees, excepting victims of burglary or theft, I suppose.

  “You mean you’d arrest me for protecting my own property? Me?” The cook was flabbergasted.

  “I still want to hear the rest of what the boy has to say, sir.” I tapped Davis Howell’s arm again. “Go ahead. Don’t mind him. If he tries to hit you while I’m here, I’m taking him straight to jail. You tell me what’s going on.”

  He shook his head. “I took food, like he said. Put me in jail. You all feed prisoners, don’t you?”

  That set me back for a minute. It isn’t often that we get people volunteering to be locked up. “You’re hungry then?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t mind so much about that. But if I went to jail could I take somebody along with me?”

  The cook made an unpleasant noise that was probably a laugh. “They’re not running a hotel over there. Nor a soup kitchen.”

  I ignored him and kept watching the boy’s tear-streaked face. “Well, I’m not saying that you could do it, mind, but if I put you in jail, who would you want to bring along?”

  He hesitated, wondering if he was about to land himself in more trouble. “My little sister. She ain’t b
ut three.”

  “A jail is no place for a little girl. I have a son about that age, and I won’t even let him come down to visit me there. Where are your parents?”

  “My mama died last winter. Pneumonia. So then it was just Daddy and Grace and me. We was all right at first, because I had helped Mama around the house enough to know about cooking and keeping things clean. But then about two months ago, Daddy got to drinking real bad and staying gone all the time. About ten days ago he just took off and never did come back. We ain’t seen him since. We used up all the food in the house, but when it ran out I had to get something to feed Grace.”

  “What about your neighbors? Could you get some help from them?”

  “We don’t live in town. We live out the road a ways going up the mountain, but we allus kept to ourselves. Anyhow, I was a-skeered of anybody finding out we was on our own. We don’t have any kinfolk to take us in, and I don’t want us going to no orphanage. Grace might get adopted—she’s a pretty little thing—but they’d never take me in the bargain, and then we’d be separated forevermore.”

  He had worked it all out carefully, and I couldn’t argue with the logic of any of it, except for his alternate plan, which was stealing food from garbage cans and trying to get by on his own.

  “What about school, Davis?”

  He shrugged. “I never went all that much, even before Mama passed. I don’t reckon they ever missed me. If I coulda left Grace on her own all day, I wouldn’t have gone to school, I’da got me a job.”

  “Hey, sugar. What’s goin’ on?”

  I glanced up. A plump blond woman in a tight uniform was standing in the aisle a few feet away from the booth, but the expression on the cook’s face made it plain that she wasn’t talking to me. He peered at her over his shoulder, and his scowl deepened. “Kinda late, aren’t you, Shel?”