Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Off and on since the kid’s arrival they had made unintrusive small talk, but they hadn’t yet bothered with names. The old man liked it that way. Part of the lure of the open road was the chance to be nobody for as long as you wanted. You could invent a new past every day for all anyone cared, and best of all, you could run away from the real one.

  The nameless chicken hawk didn’t want to know his life story, which was just as well, but after the initial alarm at being locked up wore off, he became bored in the bare cell. When he found out his companion was a railroad bum, he passed the time by asking the sort of questions a new traveler generally wants to know: how to survive while riding the rails—where to get clean water, how to avoid the railroad guards, and how to keep well if you have just a few clothes in bad weather. (“You don’t.”) The old man humored him, knowing that his answers to these questions were fuel for the escape fantasy the chicken hawk would have started constructing in his head.

  Before long the chicken hawk seemed to think that their chance meeting made them friends, and the old man did not disabuse him of this belief. What would be the point?

  He sized up the new prisoner. He was a polite, clean-cut fellow, and, despite the superficial friendliness, he was worried about something—why else would a good-looking fellow be in jail in the first place?—but the way he covered his troubles with a ready smile and a flow of amiable chatter would fool most people. Out in the world that might have been worth something. If they had met on the rails, and the chicken hawk had been determined to tag along, he would have found a way to turn that charm to their advantage. On the road, you learned to use whatever comes to hand.

  Too bad they were locked away instead of free to roam the countryside. The chicken hawk’s baby-faced innocence would have been useful in getting them handouts from motherly housewives. Like as not, the ladies would have been so taken with that tight little body and chiseled face that they’d miss the coldness in his companion’s eyes. The old man had taken the newcomer’s measure right off, from force of habit, because sizing up people was life and death to a hungry traveler. He had been traveling for so long that he had nearly forgotten what came before it; if he hadn’t been good at reading strangers he’d have been dead long ago.

  The young man smiled, but he was staring off into space again. “Yessiree bob. I sure wish I could be riding the rails like you did, like I used to pretend I was doing when I was a kid. You ever do that, mister? Hop trains as a kid?”

  “Never did.”

  “Well, I guess you had to live out in the country, near the railroad tracks, to do it. And, Lord knows, there wasn’t much else to do where I grew up, except hunting and farm chores. Maybe town boys play sandlot baseball, but we chased trains. We called it playing Pony Express. Ever heard of it?”

  “Can’t say that I have.” The chicken hawk was angling for information with that mention of town boys and baseball, but the old man did not take the bait. Best to keep him talking about himself; it was too soon yet to get the truth out of him, but sooner or later those idle reminiscences were bound to end up in revelations.

  “Well, a bunch of us pals would ride our bikes to the railroad tracks . . .”

  “Oh, you had bikes?” Something in the old man’s voice said that he hadn’t had a childhood, much less a bicycle, but the chicken hawk was too wrapped up in memories to notice.

  “Some of the fellas did. If their daddies could afford to buy them one. I built mine out of scrap parts. Garden hose for tires. It didn’t look like much, but I could keep up with the rest of them.”

  “Pony Express on bikes, you said . . .” The old man shook his head. “Pony Express. Y’all delivered the mail then, did you?”

  “Naw. We just called it that ’cause we rode hard, same as those Wild West riders once did. We got all that from the dime novels about cowboys and outlaws. When we played Pony Express, we’d ride our bikes through the woods to a steep hill next to the tracks, waiting for a train headed up that long grade. Going slow, you see.”

  The old man nodded, imagining a ribbon of trees unwinding outside. It was hard to tell if he was listening or not, but the young man was oblivious, caught up in his tale and smiling as he remembered it. He had forgotten where he was—and why.

  “Mind you, it had to be a freight train—well, that’s about all we ever saw out our way, anyhow. Hopper wagons full of coal, flat wagons, and finally that long chain of boxcars—that’s what we were waiting for. We’d let the locomotive and the coal cars pass, and we’d try to spot the freight brakeman so we could stay out of his way. Then we’d scratch off on our bikes, trying to keep level with one of the boxcars. We’d be pedaling hard, and reaching for that outside ladder.”

  The old man nodded, picturing the metal ladder on the side of the boxcar.

  “The trick was to grab on to it, kick your bike away from the train, and ride along a half mile or so, hanging on to the ladder. Then you had to jump down before the train picked up speed again.”

  The old man considered it. “Sounds dangerous. You lose many bikes? Or many chums for that matter?”

  “The danger was what made it fun. You don’t believe in death anyhow when you’re that age.”

  “Falling under a train would convince you quick enough.”

  The chicken hawk grinned. “A time or two somebody’s bike would fall the wrong way and get smashed to pieces by the boxcar wheels—it never happened to mine, though. Worst I ever got was a twisted ankle jumping down on a hard place and landing wrong. Looking back, I reckon it would have been easy to lose the grip on the ladder and fall under the train, but none of us ever did.”

  The old man snorted, unimpressed. “God protects drunks and fools.”

  “I reckon He does. Sometimes. Most of us quit chasing freight trains about the time we turned fourteen.”

  “Better things to do then?”

  “Different things, anyhow. Work or school. Chasing girls instead of trains.”

  “Well, that’s safer.”

  The chicken hawk gave him a look. “Don’t you believe it.” He yawned and stretched. “Yeah, I never thought I’d be wishing I could catch a boxcar again. Just goes to show, don’t it? Fifteen years pass, and here I am—lower than a bum.”

  Bum. The old man narrowed his eyes. Now he was paying attention.

  Traveler . . . wayfarer . . . vagabond. Even when he hadn’t eaten for a day or two, asking for a handout at some citizen’s back door, the old man was particular about what people called him, and it stung him that he had never heard any citizen refer to him by any word as polite as any of those perfectly respectable words for a wanderer.

  When the lady of the house, holding a cold potato or a hunk of cornbread, invariably asked, “How long have you been a hobo?,” he would smile to soften his answer so that he’d get his handout, but even at the risk of having the door slammed in his face, he always said: “Not a hobo, dear lady. Hoboes travel from job to job, working whenever they can get work, which I confess I do not. To the hobo, travel is merely a means to an end. But I am not a bum, either. Now, you see, your bum, he doesn’t ride the rails at all. He stays put in one place, but he doesn’t work. Just bone lazy, I suppose. No, madam, properly speaking, the correct name for my species is tramp. I work when I plain flat have to, but I am traveling all the time. To us tramps, the journey is the end, not the means.”

  If the lady hadn’t slammed the door in his face by then, next she would ask him how he came to be down-and-out, and then he would have to size her up quick to figure out which yarn would be likeliest to land him a plate of choicer leftovers. The one where the wicked banker cheated him out of his inheritance usually went down well. Most everybody these days hated bankers.

  This cold-eyed young buck currently horning in on his boxcar fantasy wouldn’t have thought up any good yarns yet. He had been demoted from citizen to felon quite recently, if the old man was any judge
. He was too clean and too jaunty to have been in the system for any length of time. Less than a week, most likely. Mark-of-Cain guilty or just naughty and unlucky? Too soon to tell; maybe the chicken hawk didn’t even know yet himself. His way of talking said he was a little short on education and probably not too far from home, because he sounded like the folks from these parts. That, too, might have been handy for getting some local lady of the house to part with a slab of pie, as long as the chicken hawk wasn’t afflicted with that stiff-necked mountain pride that made the hill folk think themselves above taking charity, no matter how hungry they were. No hillbilly would last long on the road if he tried to hang on to his pride. Begging or stealing. Take your pick. If they had been in a boxcar instead of a jail cell he would have given the chicken hawk some pointers in panhandling before the next stop. It would have been a shame to waste those clean-cut looks of his.

  He wondered what the chicken hawk’s story was, but he didn’t much care. On the outside he would have wanted a cut of whatever the chicken hawk could charm out of the pantries of sentimental small-town matrons. In here, though, since neither of them had a scrap of food or a single fag to smoke, he figured he’d lean back on his bunk and keep listening to the flow of talk. It kept his mind off his empty stomach. Maybe even put him back to sleep, if he was lucky.

  “What’s your name, son?” he asked when the silence had stretched on for a few more minutes. He judged that their acquaintance had lasted long enough for trivial confidences. Maybe he’d learn enough to verify that hunch he had about the newcomer.

  The cool stare the chicken hawk gave him instead of an answer told the old man what he already suspected: this fellow was in here for something so serious that he didn’t want anybody knowing who he was. Too late now, of course, but maybe there had been a reward out for him—not that he would have bothered trying to collect it. Even attempting to do the town cops a favor could land you in trouble; best to steer clear of them altogether. When the silence had stretched out for too long, he added, “I ain’t the law, son. I’m just your cellmate, trying to be civilized. Getting acquainted. You can call me Ulysses.”

  The fellow shrugged. “After the general?”

  So that name made the chicken hawk think of the Union general rather than the wanderer in Greek mythology. That squared with what he figured about the fellow’s education—or lack of it. “Okay.” He couldn’t be bothered to teach a cellmate any lessons in world literature. He wasn’t all that bored. “Now how about yourself?”

  “Name’s Lonnie Var—” He stopped before he said it and grinned. “Just make it Lonnie.”

  “Look around you, son. You’re not running from something. You’re already penned up, and if I don’t know your name, I’ll be just about the only person in these parts that doesn’t.”

  “Varden then. Lonnie Varden.”

  “Okay. And you’re in a world of trouble, aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t say so.”

  “I don’t hear you denying it.”

  Lonnie Varden sighed. “Well, these days who isn’t in trouble from something? Between the bank foreclosers, the revenuers, and the tax collectors, I reckon the likes of Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd got nothing on the rest of us when it comes to trying not to get caught for one thing or another. But there’s nothing I’d like more than a chance to go home. Well—nothing except not being locked up. I reckon I want my freedom more than I want to go home.”

  Ulysses smiled. “Most people in here feel the same. Only most of them don’t have homes to go back to anymore. Now a good while back, I believe you said you had two choices, and it doesn’t sound like going back home is one of them. What do you reckon your other choice is?”

  “Well, like I said, my first choice is to ride some old freight train, and the next one, and the one after that, all the way to south Texas, and then stroll across the border into Me-hee-co.” He shrugged. “Either that, or else I got to learn how to talk to cops and judges without sounding stiff-necked and unrepentant.” He sighed. “Hellfire, General Ulysses, no matter how sorry I really am, acting stiff-necked and unrepentant just comes naturally to people from my neck of the woods, but that attitude won’t win me any favors with the potentates of this world, will it?”

  “Sure won’t.” That observation was certainly true; a man in charge usually set store by servility, which meant that unless you ate crow, you weren’t likely to get anything else. Still, since life usually came up snake eyes, he’d bet that in the end Lonnie Varden would not be able to do either of those things. If he managed to escape he’d get caught and jailed again, and if he tried to talk his way out of trouble, he’d look weak as well as guilty. The old man didn’t point that out, though. People seldom thank you for telling them the truth.

  “Well, son, there is a precedent for the freight train option, anyhow, considering who your ancestors were.”

  He stiffened, trying to work out the insult, but pretty sure that had been one. “How the devil would you know—”

  “I don’t know your pedigree, son. I was speaking of your mountain people in general.” If he talked about history, his cellmate might let down his guard about personal matters. “The way I heard it, after the War Between the States, your mountain ancestors—that is, the ancestor of everybody in these parts—were about evenly divided between one army and the other, which made for a lot of bitterness both during and after the fighting.”

  “We have long memories.”

  “You didn’t have any big battles up in these mountains, did you? Not like Gettysburg.”

  “Not that I ever heard of, no.”

  “I thought not. Elsewhere the war meant anonymous armies shooting at one another, but who’d want to stage a big battle in these mountains?”

  “Yeah, but there was still a war.”

  “Indeed there was.”

  “We don’t talk much about that war.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Do you know why? Because around here the war was personal. When the enemy is your neighbors or your cousins, you know exactly who has burned down your house or stolen your cows.”

  “They mostly got away with it, too. All the surrendering in the world can’t erase the bitterness of that. I can’t say I blame folks for feeling like that.”

  “That was the general consensus, I believe. It didn’t make it any easier to keep living around here, though. Appomattox didn’t settle any personal scores. Many a man tried to escape the bitter aftermath by taking off for foreign parts, someplace where nobody knew them, and where kinship ties were not iron shackles.”

  Varden shook his head. “Kinship . . . Iron shackles . . . You sure do talk like a teacher, mister.”

  Ulysses smiled. “Or someone with too much schooling, perhaps. Sometimes for me another life seeps into this one.”

  “What are you doing locked up in here?”

  “I was attempting to redistribute the wealth on a small farm not far from here, and in my attempt to evade the farmer who interrupted me in his barn, I pushed him aside as I ran, and he injured himself—not my intention, just an unfortunate mishap.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He fell backward onto his pitchfork. I didn’t do it, but the authorities have seen fit to blame me anyway.”

  The young man whistled and shook his head. “That sounds bad. I’ll bet you wish you had stayed in your former life, whatever it was.”

  “You’re hunting another life, too, aren’t you? Seventy years later, you are trying to get away from it all, just like those men who slipped away after the war. People used to say ‘Gone to Texas,’ whether they had or not. It just meant starting a new life without having to die.”

  “That would suit me just fine.”

  “I suppose they all felt like that, but I wonder how many of them managed to achieve it. A fellow might just possibly get down out of the mountains, change his name, go someplac
e else, and hope that trouble wouldn’t follow him. But that would be unlikely.”

  “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

  “Well, what if the fugitive had no money, damn little education, and no particular skills that would serve him anywhere else?”

  Lonnie Varden shrugged. “Then I reckon you’re right. Going away would be mighty hard, but for me the other alternative—­explaining yourself to your so-called betters, and sounding humble and sorry—now that would be flat-out impossible.”

  “Why? It’s just words. Words don’t cost you anything.”

  “Well, it would stick in my craw to say it because I don’t believe the bosses in this world are any better than me. I did what I did, all right, but it was just two weaknesses coming together and making a tragedy. I didn’t mean for any of it to happen. It’s not that I’d be lying if I said I was sorry, General, but I’d have trouble begging for mercy and showing how much I regret what I did. Other fellas who felt like I do—maybe they could bare their feelings in front of a bunch of holier-than-thou authorities, but I couldn’t.”

  “Maybe you’d better start practicing then, because your attitude in court could mean the difference between getting out someday or not.”

  “Getting out?” Varden’s laugh ended in a sob. “I killed my wife. I murdered her without provocation in front of two witnesses, and I never even bothered to deny it. It doesn’t matter what I say in court. I’m a dead man.”

  Probably true, but it wouldn’t do to agree with the fellow. Living with a distraught cellmate was harder time than anybody deserved. The old tramp shrugged. “Maybe you could tell the court she had it coming.”

  “Tell lies about my Celia and sully her name?” The prisoner shook his head. “I’ve already killed her once, General.”

  chapter fourteen

  Bruno Hauptmann had kept his appointment with the electric chair in New Jersey on April 3, and, along with the rest of the country, we had promptly forgotten all about him. A few months after that I came into the office a little later than usual. late. The yellow daylilies in the yard were blooming and we had stopped to pick some that morning. Eddie took some to school for his teacher, with the lilies’ stems wrapped in wet newspaper, and I brought a few to work for my desk.