Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  They all looked at me, some looking stern and a couple with pity in their eyes, but nobody looked convinced that I would be able to do it.

  I took off my cotton glove and pushed my sleeve up a little. I held my arm out straight so they all could see it. “Do you all see this here scar on my wrist? Let me tell you how I got it.” I think Albert fell in love with me partly on account of the fact that I was brave enough to put a red-hot poker over the bite of that mad dog, but I never talk about that time if I can help it, for I nearly drowned in the pain of it. But if I had to show I was brave, I reckon that was the best proof I had. When I finished talking they were staring at that shriveled scar on my wrist, and most of them had gone greenish white.

  Before they could recover, Vernon Johnson called for a vote. It wasn’t unanimous, but the farmer I spoke to about shoveling manure cast the deciding vote. I would perform the execution, and thereby keep my job.

  The clattering went on. I laid down my pen and pushed away the paperwork. I couldn’t keep my mind on it. “I wish we could get a radio brought in here,” I said to nobody in particular. In the main part of the office Roy was typing up a report, and Falcon had gone out on patrol, but even if anybody had been close enough and paying attention, they wouldn’t have heard me. The noise of the hammering outside drowned out everything, and I felt myself beginning to flinch in time with the pounding.

  The carpenters hired by the county were building a scaffold.

  The hanging was only a week away now, and preparations were well under way. The newspapers were already running stories, and a dozen or so big-city reporters had already arrived in town to cover the event. They passed the time waiting for the hanging by pestering us for interviews, because public executions were becoming increasingly rare. I wouldn’t be sorry to see them disappear altogether. We had to keep someone on duty all the time to keep the journalists from trying to get into the jail to interview the prisoner. Some of them offered bribes, too, but fortunately my deputies caught on to the contempt and condescension in the reporters’ attitudes toward them, which made them so angry that no amount of money would have tempted them. I had thought long and hard about the offer from the magazine reporter for an exclusive interview with me, but it became easy to refuse the money when I thought of how I’d feel if Falcon or Roy accepted an offer like that. I called the fellow and declined the offer. I suppose he’ll write his story anyway, making up quotes and getting someone to take pictures of me when I’m not looking, but at least I’ll know I did the right thing as I saw it, and that, I decided, was something I owed Eddie and George more than I owed them new clothes or fancy food.

  If the county had given me a say in the decision, the builders would have been constructing the contraption a mile or more outside town instead of practically on our doorstep, but everybody was full of reasons why the vacant lot on the street behind the jail was the ideal place to construct a gallows. Something about the soil and the drainage and the size of the parcel of land being good for limiting crowds. I was wholeheartedly in favor of that last reason, because the fewer spectators we had to contend with, the better. We were likely to have more people attending than the usual hanging because of the novelty of having a woman perform the execution. If in fact I did end up performing the execution. That had not officially been decided yet. Someone in the state government could overrule the county’s decision, for all I knew. Still, judging by the phone calls and the letters we were getting, almost every big newspaper east of the Mississippi was planning to send somebody to cover it, and even a couple of radio stations intended to have reporters on hand to broadcast the event. I wondered if their presence would make the ordeal any more terrible than it already would be. I couldn’t imagine even sparing them a thought: they would be like flies on a battlefield, annoying but insignificant.

  It couldn’t have been easy for Lonnie Varden to have to sit there in his cell, listening to that pounding day after day, knowing, as he must have, that the hammers measured out the span of his life same as heartbeats, and that when they stopped, his time would be almost up. Falcon had asked the carpentry foreman when he reckoned on them finishing, and he said they planned to be done by sundown on the day before the execution. The construction boss said they knew they had to allow us enough time to test the mechanism before the ceremony itself.

  “The foreman called it a ceremony?” I’d asked Falcon.

  “Well, I don’t think he likes to say the word execution,” said Falcon. “It casts a pall on his honest carpentry.”

  Penned up and listening to his death coming closer by the hour . . . I felt sorry for the prisoner, which wasn’t the same thing as believing that he ought to be set free. He hadn’t shown his wife an ounce of pity; I was mindful of that. I thought it was all too easy for people to see a sorrowful doomed prisoner and forget all about the poor victim who never had a chance to appeal for mercy. I figured it was our job in law enforcement to remember those who couldn’t speak for themselves anymore. But I did think that the forfeit of a man’s life was punishment enough. He should not have to listen to the building of the gallows to disturb whatever peace he could find in his last days. I went back to his cell to tell him so.

  “I’m gonna go check on the prisoner,” I told Roy. I nearly had to shout to make him hear me.

  Roy glanced up from his typing and nodded to show he had heard me. “Maybe I ought to check the manual and see if the town has a noise ordinance!” he called back.

  Even if they did have a noise ordinance I didn’t see what we could do about enforcing it. Roy was joking, though. The din would be worse back in the cell corridor, which was at the back of the building, only a few hundred yards from the construction site.

  Roy motioned for me to stop. “Are you sure you want to go back and talk to that fellow?”

  “Well, somebody has to look in on him every now and again.” I smiled. “He doesn’t seem dangerous to me. I know what he did and all, but I think he’s safe enough now.”

  “That wasn’t what I was getting at. When I was a kid my daddy let me raise a piglet, the runt of the litter. I had to feed it with a knotted cloth soaked in milk so’s it would get enough to eat. When it got bigger, that little shoat followed me around like a puppy dog. Smart too. I was going to teach him to do tricks.”

  “And?”

  “You were raised on a farm. You know, don’t you?” I nodded. “I thought you would. Come October, when my piglet got to be a good-sized porker, my daddy rounded it up with the rest of the surplus hogs and killed it for meat to see us through the winter. I flat-out cried for days.”

  “When we lived on the Robbinses’ farm, I never would let Eddie make a pet of something we were planning to kill. Not even a baby chick.”

  “I’m just afraid that’s what you’re doing now. Making a pet out of some pitiful creature that you’re going to have to kill one of these days. And I remember how much it hurts when it’s time to let go.”

  I shrugged. “Reckon I’m used to letting go by now.”

  I found Lonnie Varden sitting on his bunk, staring up at the ceiling. A dime novel western lay open facedown on the blanket beside him. When he saw me he tapped the book and sighed. “Just killing time, before it—”

  Before it kills me, he almost said. I nodded, glad that he hadn’t said it. “I can go if you’d rather read.”

  “I’ve quit reading. It doesn’t provide any distraction at all. You’re supposed to care about whether the cowboy can escape the marauding Indians who are chasing him, but somehow I can’t work up any enthusiasm for the fellow’s troubles. At least he has a chance.”

  “Yes. I can see how you might think he was better off than you are. Maybe you’d be better off reading something else. Would you like a Bible?”

  “I might, sooner or later. But I’m not sure I’d find it very comforting right now either. They’re pretty definite about those Ten Commandments, and I think I
broke the big one—being a murderer and all.” He rubbed his hand over his eyes. “Maybe one or two other important ones, too.”

  I nodded. “I suppose most people have. I don’t have any other reading material to offer you right now, though. I just came to check on you and to apologize for the noise.” I had to raise my voice a little to be heard over the clamor.

  He shrugged. “I don’t suppose you care for it either. Nothing you can do about it, is there?”

  “No. They’ve got to do their jobs, same as the rest of us, and they can’t very well see to do it after dark—that wouldn’t help anyhow, would it? Then it would just keep you awake all night.”

  “That wouldn’t make the neighbors very happy.”

  “No. Hammering is not a quiet job, so I guess we’ll all have to put up with it as best we can.”

  “If those are the only choices, then I’d rather have it quiet at night. But it’s not much of an improvement. At first, the quiet is a welcome relief, but I don’t sleep much, and when it’s been dark and silent for a couple of hours, there’s nothing I can do but brood about my situation and how it’s going to end. I almost miss the hammering then.”

  “I’m sorry that paperback western didn’t take your mind off your troubles. I could get you another one at the drugstore.” Or ask somebody for the loan of one. I wondered what Roy read.

  He shook his head. “The problem with reading is that whatever’s in the book always seems to relate to my situation in real life. Will the hero get the girl? Sure, but so what? In real life, nobody writes The End across the sky. There are no happy endings. If it’s happy, it isn’t the end. So you just keep going until you reach the unhappy ending. And I won’t go near a whodunit. Lord, whatever you do, don’t bring me one of those. It’s hard to read one when you’ve lived one yourself and to know that instead of being the morally superior detective you’re the heartless villain.”

  I was surprised to hear him say that, because most people have a bucketful of excuses for anything they’re ever blamed for. “Do you feel like a heartless villain?”

  He didn’t look at me, but he thought about the question for a good while. Just as he began to answer there was a break in the construction noise, which was good, because he spoke so softly I could barely hear. “A heartless villain? Maybe I am one, but I don’t see myself that way. I feel like I tried to be a good person, but I wasn’t always as strong or self-disciplined as I thought I could be. And one day my pride or my weakness got the best of me and took away everything that mattered. Somehow my whole life got balled up into a nightmare that lasted less than a minute out there on that rock. Then it was over, with no going back, and I know that forever after I will be judged by just that one minute and by nothing else I ever did.”

  “You must have thought a lot about that.” His answer had been too pat to have occurred to him right then in reply to my question. I guess sometime or other everybody broods over how they’ll be remembered, and knowing exactly when you are going to die must make those thoughts that much more terrible. Maybe I’ll be remembered as ‘the lady sheriff,’ but I’d rather be remembered with respect and love by Eddie and George. That’s all that matters, really, and at least, God willing, I’ll have time to do more with my life before it’s over.

  The hammering started up again.

  Lonnie Varden put his hands over his ears. “Nobody could read through that din. I wish to God I had something to draw with!”

  “So you wouldn’t have to think, you mean?”

  He shrugged. “It’s funny, but drawing is thinking, in a way.”

  I tried to work out what he meant. “You mean you have to analyze what you’re drawing so you can figure out how to make things the right shape and make them look like they’re supposed to?”

  “You do, but that’s not what I was thinking about. After you do it often enough, that just comes second nature. What I’m talking about is the fact that sometimes when you start putting things on paper you find out what you really think, even if you hadn’t realized it before. You draw a person, just trying to capture the set of the eyes, the angle of the jaw, . . . and when you finally stop and look at what you’ve put down on paper, you see a faint sneer on the lips, maybe, or a spark of anger in the eyes. Apparently you spotted some emotion while you were drawing that face, but you weren’t aware that you knew it.”

  “Did that always happen when you drew pictures of people?”

  “Hardly ever, to tell you the truth. If you know someone well enough to do a portrait of them, usually you know what they’re like and what they might be feeling. Most of the time there isn’t much emotion at all—except boredom. Posing is generally about as tiresome as watching the paint dry. It happened to me once, though. I drew a woman. I guess she was pretty enough—not like a movie star, not even all that attractive, really, but she had that look, that attitude that said, ‘I’m available. Yours for the taking.’ Men mistake that for beauty more often than you’d think. Anyhow, everybody thinks pretty people are also nice, you know. Even artists fall for that. Fairy tales, movies, you name it: we’re all trained to believe that beautiful equals good.”

  “Angels.”

  “Yeah. Like angels. Just try putting an ugly angel on a stained glass window. Or have the good guy in a western played by some plump ordinary Joe. Anyhow, one time I drew this woman, thinking she was a fairy-tale beauty, and—well, she wasn’t.”

  “Your wife, you mean?”

  “No. Somebody else. Somebody I wish had been on that rock instead of my wife.” Then he straightened up and shivered a little—a goose walking over your grave, people called that feeling—and I knew he wished he hadn’t said any of that. When the moment passed, he turned to look at me, and I could see that he was calm and back in the present. “How ’bout I draw your boys?”

  I hadn’t expected that. “My boys?”

  Lonnie Varden smiled. “I’ll bet he didn’t tell you. Your son Eddie sneaks back here sometimes when he’s supposed to be dumping the mop bucket out back, and we pass the time of day for a couple of minutes. Please don’t let on I told you. I didn’t mean to get him in trouble.”

  “I won’t.” But I did make a mental note to tell the deputies to watch him closer.

  “He’ll be all right. I wouldn’t do anything to scare him. I promise you that. We don’t talk about—you know, what’s about to happen to me. Nice kid, that boy of yours. Well-spoken. He’s got good bone structure too. You ever had his portrait done?”

  I shook my head. “Just snapshots with our old box camera, that’s all. I don’t think even the rich people around here get portraits painted of their children. It wouldn’t be easy.”

  He looked around the bare cell. “I could probably manage to do his portrait for you.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t—”

  “I know. You couldn’t let your boys come in here and pose for a killer like me.”

  “Not just that.” I was embarrassed that he had guessed my first thought, but there were other reasons as well. “I couldn’t allow you to have all that painting paraphernalia in here.”

  “I don’t have any painting paraphernalia anymore. I never went home after it happened, you know, and I heard that Celia’s family came down and burned everything that ever belonged to me—clothes, books, painting supplies—even the paintings themselves. It’s all gone. So I guess once this hanging is over, I’ll disappear from the world altogether.”

  “The mural in the post office will still be there. They’ll probably put pictures of it in magazines, on account of the fact that you did it.”

  He made a face. “Not the way I wanted to get famous. I wish I could do something more than that.”

  “You asked me for art supplies before.”

  “I know, but now that the hammering has started, I thought you might reconsider, just to keep me from going crazy.”

  I hesitated. “P
ainting supplies could be dangerous, couldn’t they?”

  He smiled, bemused at the notion. “Yeah, I reckon I could squeeze the oil paint out of the tube, swallow it, and die of poisoning. Or I might break up a wooden easel and make a sharp lance out of one of its legs.”

  “I hadn’t thought much about it. Sounds like you have, though.”

  “Just off the top of my head. I was just being silly. But I tell you what: I’m bored out of my skull just staring at these bare walls—and listening to the sounds of the hammering out there. I wish I didn’t know what they were building.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help that. I told you: none of us much cares for the noise either. We can hardly hear ourselves think.”

  “At least you don’t have to take it personally. For me those hammer blows are like a loud heartbeat. When they stop, I stop.”

  “I’m sorry. Nobody meant for it to torment you. They just decided to build the scaffold there for practical reasons.”

  “Tell you what: let’s see if we can work out a safe way for me to keep myself from going crazy and for you to get a portrait of your son. My last chance to leave a mark on the world.” He saw me hesitate, and his teasing expression gave way to one of regret. “Please, ma’am. I want to be remembered for something besides what I’m dying for.”

  I was still looking for the snare. My people don’t trust strangers at the best of times, and I was afraid that because I was female he’d think I could be easily tricked. “You could turn a paintbrush into a weapon, too, though.”

  “All right. What about a piece of chalk? Or a stub of charcoal? They’re not poison. You know those pills people take for indigestion? Chalk is what they are, more or less.”

  “Charcoal burns.”

  “I don’t have any matches, though. And I don’t see anything in here that I could rub together to make a spark, do you?”

  “I guess not. I doubt that would work on bare charcoal anyhow. It sure wouldn’t work on coal. But there’s not an art supply store within forty miles of here, is there? Where would I get fancy charcoal for making pictures with?”