Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  He laughed. “About fifty yards from here. For free.”

  “Where?”

  “You know that big old willow tree that grows down by the creek? You could break off a limb—about the size of a hammer handle, I guess—and stick the end of that branch into a fire. That’ll make the best charcoal there is. Then you sharpen it with a knife so it will have an edge. That’s what I’d draw with anyhow. I’ll bet you Rembrandt and da Vinci did the same.”

  “Just ordinary charcoal?”

  “Willow charcoal. That’s what artists draw the shapes with. Underneath all that oil paint, every work of art starts out as smudges of charcoal. It’s the bones of the painting.”

  “But you couldn’t have the oil paint or the rest of the materials you’d use.”

  “I can do you a portrait in charcoal. We’d have to fix it afterward so it wouldn’t smear, but it’s the best I can offer. Besides, I can’t think of any way to do any harm with them, even if I had a mind to, which I don’t. Please: fix me a willow branch of charcoal, burn it and sharpen it like I told you, and then get some plain white paper from the butcher shop. If you’ll do that, you have my word that I’ll do you the finest portrait I can.”

  “Would you have time to do one?”

  “I have nothing but time.”

  “Well, I can’t let Eddie come back and pose for you. It wouldn’t be right. And my other boy, Georgie, he’s too little to be hanging around a jail, even if his mama works here.” That was true enough, but in a corner of my mind I pictured the newspaper headlines if those journalist vultures got hold of the tale: SHERIFF’S SONS POSE FOR CONDEMNED KILLER. No picture was worth that kind of public humiliation.

  He thought about it for a moment. “I could work from a snapshot, you know. In fact, it might be easier to do it that way than to try to get two squirming little boys to sit still.”

  “Have you ever done a picture from a photograph?”

  “Sure. A lot of times, when I was painting murals for the government, I had to rely on the illustrations in books, because the real people and buildings I needed to depict were long gone. I’m used to working that way. You can get me a picture of your boys, can’t you?”

  I couldn’t think of anything wrong with that plan. Paper, a burnt stick of charcoal, and a snapshot seemed little enough to ask. I’d be glad of a real portrait of Eddie and George, and I thought it might be a kindness to give the poor man something to do, to take his mind off what was to come. I wouldn’t want to be beholden to him, of course, but maybe I could bring him some pie or a candy bar to thank him for his trouble. He wouldn’t have any use for money anymore. “I’ll think on it,” I told him. “But if I can see my way clear to letting you do this, I’d be grateful to have a picture of my sons. You’re kind to offer.”

  He nodded. “It’ll be my legacy, I guess. All I want is to be remembered for something besides . . . well, besides what happened up on The Hawk’s Wing.”

  “I wish you’d tell me why you did it. Just so I’d know.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You don’t seem like the kind of man who would do such a cruel thing.”

  He nodded. “I wouldn’t have thought so either.”

  The best picture I had of the boys was the one in the wooden dime store frame on the desk in my office. It was just a family snapshot, but I was partial to it. It was a clear fall day, and the two of them were sitting on the log out behind the house. Eddie was leaning back a little on the log with his arms around Georgie; both of them were dressed in their church clothes and grinning crinkled smiles up at the camera—the kind of smiles people put on when they’re having their picture taken so that later you have no idea whether they were happy or not. Albert had taken that picture last fall, and I looked at it for a moment, trying to remember the whole scene: the red and gold oak leaves in the woods behind the log, Albert holding the camera and hollering for the boys to smile, and me standing near the back steps, waving to try to make Georgie look at the camera. But that image in my head was just as much of a picture as the one in the frame. I had taken a picture with my mind’s eye, and now it was just as frozen as a snapshot, not a real living memory at all anymore.

  I picked up the framed photo, intending to take it back to Lonnie Varden in the cell, when I suddenly found myself looking at it as a law officer instead of as a widowed mother wanting a memento of her children. Both the wooden frame and the thin glass panel could be broken into sharp jagged pieces and used as weapons. I stiffened at the thought. Maybe he hadn’t made the suggestion with that idea in mind, but it might very well occur to him sooner or later. Who would want to die at the end of a rope in front of a jeering crowd if there was another way out? Suicide or escape—maybe he wouldn’t even care which. But sorry for him or not, I couldn’t let it happen under my watch.

  Maybe instead of offering to do me a kindness, the prisoner had been trying to trick me into giving him something he could use to cut his own throat, or to hold against the throat of a deputy and force his way out of jail. Lonnie Varden hadn’t seemed so treacherous, or I wouldn’t have agreed in the first place, but I had to keep telling myself that this wasn’t like meeting strangers in church. Almost everybody I met in here would be dangerous in one form or another, and more lives than mine depended on my remembering that. Even the drunks and the petty thieves we usually arrested had tempers or were capable of lashing out in fear. This man hadn’t seemed like the sort of monster who could throw an unsuspecting woman off a cliff, either. What did I know about monsters anyway? One time I had heard a preacher say that Satan had been the most beautiful of all God’s angels. Or maybe, given the right circumstances, there is a minute in everybody’s life when they could be a monster.

  I kept thinking it over, because of how bad I wanted a portrait of my sons and knowing this was likely to be the only chance I’d ever have to get one. Lonnie Varden may have been a bad man, but he was a good artist, and it would be a shame to waste that God-given talent while he was still alive to use it. I decided to take the photograph out of the frame and give that to him instead. It was only a piece of coated paper. And the butcher’s paper and charcoal were harmless enough, as far as I could tell. I’d tell the deputies to keep a closer eye on him while he worked. He must not be allowed to have cigarettes either. Paper burns.

  If the prisoner meant to do me a kindness or to distract himself from what was to come, then I was determined to give him that chance as long as I could do so without endangering anybody. I turned over the frame and pushed the little clasp against the cardboard backing that held it in place. When the cardboard slid away, I picked up the picture of the boys, but as I did so, I found another photo that had been tucked behind it: a studio portrait of a smirking woman with crinkly bleached blond hair and a gherkin nose poking out from between plump rouged cheeks. It was a sepia picture, but the photographer had touched it up by reddening the lips and adding a bright-green tint to the eyes. I had seen movie star pictures tarted up like that, but this was a local job: all the flashy color in the world couldn’t make a starlet out of that homely face.

  I had never seen that photograph before. But I had seen the face. That piggy-eyed woman was the one who had come up to me at the funeral to tell me how sorry she was about Albert’s passing. I had wondered about it at the time. Something about it hadn’t seemed right. There were too many other things going on back then for me to dwell on the matter, but I had not quite forgotten it. She hadn’t talked as if she was mourning the loss of the sheriff or some friend of the family. She had called my husband “Albert,” like whatever connection they had was just between the two of them. She was the waitress at the diner. I wasn’t thinking anything in particular when I turned over the photograph, but my hands were shaking.

  In a loopy pencil scrawl on the back she had written, “To my handsome sweetest pal—Ain’t we got fun? Shelley.”

  I guess that p
icture frame had been a weapon after all.

  chapter sixteen

  It’s funny how something that has always been true changes everything just because you find out about it. For a long time to come I would be questioning every memory I had, trying to second-guess everything he ever said or did. I had a lot of things to think about that afternoon. I might be mulling over some of them for as long as I lived, and the anger in my gut was a banked fire. Maybe it was a good thing that right then I didn’t have much time for thinking. I had all the planning of the execution to focus on, but that was just substituting the state’s anger for mine.

  I was walking home so wrapped up in my thoughts that I scarcely knew where I was. I stopped beside the creek and stared down into the water, not really seeing it at all, but at some point I remembered Eddie and George, who would be wanting supper, and that reminded me that the decision about the portrait of the boys wasn’t something I could postpone for long. Lonnie Varden needed materials to work with.

  The butcher paper had been easy enough to acquire. I had slipped out earlier in the afternoon, before the shop closed, bought six yards of it for fifteen cents, and set it on my desk to give to the prisoner when I got his drawing materials. Obtaining the charcoal wouldn’t be so easy.

  This time of year it stayed light until past eight, so I had taken longer than usual going home from work, because I had to sort out everything in my mind, and I wanted to be done crying before I got home to George and Eddie. I had made it through the entire afternoon at work without shedding a single tear, and as angry as I felt now, any tears I did shed would probably sizzle against my cheeks.

  After I found the picture behind the photo of my boys, I searched every inch of that office: desk drawers, folders in the filing cabinet, the pages of the few books on the shelf. My first thought had been to go storming out of the office with the picture of the blond sow and wave it in the face of the nearest deputy. Surely one of them knew something, but of course they’d never admit that to me. I did stay calm enough to realize that confronting them about this would make me look weak and foolish. I don’t know what good I thought the knowledge would do me; after all, Albert had been dead for months now, but I just wanted to know how bad it was. Once when I was lifting folders out of the filing cabinet, I caught sight of that scar on my wrist, and I wished there were some way I could cauterize this present wound to keep it from contaminating me, because I knew that what I had just learned about Albert was going to poison my memories of all our years together. I had thought he was the kindest, most honest, most disciplined person I knew, but now I wondered if I had ever known him at all. Maybe all that calm silence that I took for strength was just discontent that he couldn’t put into words.

  I found what I was looking for, finally, in a blue tobacco tin at the back of the middle drawer of the file cabinet in the sheriff’s private office. I set it on the desk and stared at it for a few minutes before I opened it, because I knew that once I found out what was inside, I would lose something I could never get back.

  It was a long afternoon. I tried to listen while people complained about drunken delinquents, damaged fences, and noisy neighbors. “We’ll do what we can,” I kept saying, writing down all the particulars of the complaints, but my thoughts were mostly elsewhere. Suddenly my life seemed to divide into before I found the picture and after, just as before the line had fallen at the point of Albert’s death. A bitter thought occurred to me: maybe this new knowing would make me a better sheriff. No longer would I feel inclined to pity people or give them the benefit of the doubt. Never again would I trust anybody.

  Heading home that evening, thoughts of Albert kept circling in my mind, but once I reached the place where the path paralleled the creek and remembered what Lonnie Varden had told me about making charcoal, I knew that getting that chore done was the cleanest and calmest notion I’d had all afternoon. I’d be better off finding something to keep myself busy, rather than brooding on the unalterable past. I walked on to the part of the creek where the willows grew, and threaded my way under the low limbs of the largest tree. The limbs themselves were the size of the trunks of other trees—pines and poplars. Balancing myself against the stoutest limb, as near to the water’s edge as I dared, I hacked off a sturdy willow branch with Albert’s old—with my—pocket knife. It wasn’t an easy job. By the time I finished it was nearly dusk. I should have gone home and come back with an ax, but there wasn’t enough daylight left for that. At last I managed to weaken the branch enough with the knife to break off a foot-long piece.

  I carried it home, and while I was fixing supper, I stuck the end of that branch into the fire in the woodstove. When I judged it was burnt enough, I left it sitting in a dry pan on the top of the stove to cool.

  That night after I put the boys to bed I stood for a long time looking in the bedroom mirror, thinking again about what I had found that afternoon. What had Albert seen when he looked at me? I saw a pale, plain face, and mouse-brown hair pulled back in a knot at the nape of my neck, which is how married ladies wore their hair up home. Hair curlers and beauty shop permanents were popular here in town, but they were mostly for the wives of the town ­leaders—and maybe for sluts, I thought, remembering the frizzy-haired blonde painted up like a Kewpie doll. I never did use makeup like the town ladies did, but I was well over thirty now, and maybe I should have. Little girls—look at a four-year-old—have naturally red lips, a pinkish bloom on their cheeks, and a blue haze on their eyelids, but as little girls get older, all that color fades away, or just wears away with life and chores and hardship. I reckon older women paint their faces to try to put back that color that nature gives to little girls, but rouge and lipstick can’t give you back what you lost, and it can’t stop time. Maybe the pretense was enough, though.

  I did wonder what Albert had seen in that waitress. She was younger than me by maybe half a dozen years, but she was a plump, painted, trashy sort of woman who talked too much and knew too little. I wished I could ask him, Why her? He set such a store by being a respected civic leader, and by all the trappings of gentility, with his insistence on cloth napkins and serving bowls at every meal. Wouldn’t he have been ashamed to go parading around with that uncouth sow on his arm? Wouldn’t divorce have made a scandal even here in town? I don’t suppose he had intended any of that to happen, though. Albert was a middle-aged man who suddenly thought he had become important, and I reckon it went to his head. He got to thinking he was entitled to anything people offered him for free, be it a slab of pie at the diner or the wet favors of a moon-faced trollop.

  I wondered what I would have done about it if he had lived, and for the boys’ sake I thought it might be just as well that he hadn’t.

  I hadn’t seen the doctor since the week Albert died, and I didn’t need him now on account of anybody being sick, but when I told him why I did need to see him, he came along to the office readily enough. Maybe he wasn’t as busy in the summertime, when people stopped coming down with winter ailments. It was high season for farming, though, so maybe the accidents made up the slack. I hated to bother him, but for the kind of advice I needed, there wasn’t anybody else around here to ask.

  He settled himself in the second chair in my office, and looked me over with a practiced eye. “You look thinner, Mrs. Robbins. Sleeping all right?”

  I tried to smile. “I’m not the patient—just the sheriff. So I need to ask you for some advice. You know I have to hang a man next week.”

  He nodded. “Everybody from here to Timbuktu knows that. It’s a barbarous thing, a hanging. We show more mercy toward farm animals when we put them down.”

  “I don’t disagree with you, sir, but it’s the state’s law, and I am sworn to carry it out. And for that I’d be grateful for some help.”

  “Well, I don’t see how I can be of any help to you. You were speaking of sworn duty just now. When I became a doctor I took an oath, too, and mine begins, ‘First do no har
m.’ ”

  “I know. I thought about that, and I figure if you can keep a man from having to endure any unnecessary suffering, that would count as doing no harm, wouldn’t it?”

  He considered it. “I suppose it would. Though I confess I was hoping that all you wanted from me was a bottle of medicine to help you sleep, because I know this execution must be preying on your mind. But what kind of help are you asking for?”

  “One of my deputies says there’s rules about hanging somebody. I mean, ways to make sure the end comes quick and clean. There may be books about that somewhere, but there aren’t any around here. I just thought that since you studied the human body, you might know things that would help me. I’ve heard terrible stories—about prisoners having their heads come off, or going straight through the trapdoor and touching the ground, so that bystanders have to shovel the ground out from under their feet so they have a few inches of clearance . . .”

  “To strangle in.” He scowled. “Yes. If anything could make a hanging more barbaric it would be that.”

  “It’s a public execution, too.”

  He shuddered. “I know. I’ll have to be on hand to pronounce the poor devil dead. And since you’ll leave him hanging for a quarter of an hour before you cut him down, I hope to God he is.”

  “There isn’t much I can do about that, Doctor, but I want him to die with as much dignity as I can manage. It’s like you said: even animals are not treated as cruelly as that. So, as best you can, would you please tell me what I need to know so that I can give that man a merciful exit from this world?”

  He was quiet for a minute or two, turning the idea over in his mind. Finally, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a fountain pen. “Give me a piece of paper. I need to show you how to find the carotid artery.”