Prayers the Devil Answers

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Instead of paints and canvas, you mean?” He shook his head. “I doubt if I could keep my mind on the story. But drawing makes me concentrate. Maybe if I could draw, I might manage to forget—”

  “So you’re a real artist?” I wanted to keep him talking about things that wouldn’t upset him. “Are you from around here?”

  “Used to be.” He shrugged. “Am I from here? Same mountains, anyhow. I’ve lived here a couple of years, though. I don’t make my living being an artist anymore—mainly because you can’t make a living as an artist these days—not that it was ever easy, even at the best of times. I expect you have seen a sample of my work, though.”

  I shook my head. “Couldn’t have. There aren’t any museums around here.”

  “You won’t find my work in any museums. My painting is over in the post office. The mural of the pioneer fort on the wall above the post office boxes. It was the first one I did when the government sent me to this area to paint scenery in public buildings. Well, one of the last ones, too, because that’s when I met Celia and decided to settle down. Can’t support a wife and family on what an artist makes. I couldn’t, anyhow.”

  “You have children?”

  “No. But back when we got married, we thought we would—same as everybody, I guess. But no babies had come yet. If I had known different in the beginning, I guess I could have kept trying to be a painter. We could have gotten by for sure if the state would let lady schoolteachers keep working after they got married. When I first met her, Celia was making ninety dollars a month. Then we got married, and it was all on me. So I got a real job working at the sawmill. Instead of having a gallery full of paintings, I have a wall in a backwoods post office.”

  “I’ve seen it many a time,” I said. “It’s a good picture. Folks can tell right off what it’s supposed to be, and you drew it just the way I always thought it would look. I think I mighta had an ancestor in that fort; at least I told my boys that, and they like going to see it.” I wanted to ask him how somebody could paint such a beautiful scene and yet treat another human being so cruelly, but I guess it only takes a minute to do something evil that you can’t take back, and, fair or not, that one action can cancel out all the years of your life you spent doing good. If that was what happened to him, I could feel sorry for him, but I didn’t know anything about why he had killed that woman, and even if I had known, forgiveness was no part of my job.

  “My youngest boy always wants to go with me to the post office so he can look at the Tennessee cowboys, as he calls them. Georgie’s a great one for westerns.”

  He looked pleased at that. “I’m happy he likes it, and glad you think the mural is good. Being from around here you’d be more likely to know if I got the details right. My—my wife helped me figure out how the fort ought to look.” His voice shook a little when he said that, and I knew that for a few minutes he had forgotten she was dead. I tried to think of something else to say on another topic, but it probably didn’t matter: sooner or later whatever we talked about would lead his train of thought back to the killing.

  “Celia. My wife,” he spoke very softly now, staring at the floor. “She liked it too. When we were courting she helped with the planning of it, so I put her in it as a way of thanking her. One of the pioneer women down by the river has her face. The one in the brown dress.”

  “I remember.” I did recall the figure in the brown dress, but not what her face looked like. Next time I went to the post office I would look again. Had she been pretty? Did it matter whether she had been or not?

  “I guess you could say that painting of the fort is my legacy. I don’t reckon I’ll ever paint any more murals now.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say, because I was pretty sure he was right about that, so I said, “I just came to look in on you, now that you’re awake. I wanted to see how you’re faring. They tell me that last night you said you didn’t need a doctor.”

  “A doctor?” He shrugged, rubbing a scabbed-over scratch on the side of his face. “I walked into some briars on the way down the mountain. It was near dark by then. Felt like a horsewhip at the time, but I reckon I’m all right now.” He looked around him at the tiny cell. “Considering.”

  The meal tray, on the floor beside the cell door, held an untouched metal bowl of watery oatmeal and a tin cup of cold black coffee.

  “You weren’t hungry?”

  He managed a wry smile. “It wasn’t too hard to resist this morning’s offerings.”

  A few more hours in captivity would make him less finicky about what he ate. Or maybe he just didn’t want to admit that what he had done had taken away his appetite. Anyhow, he had other things on his mind—or he ought to have had. I wanted to ask him why he did it, but nobody around here asks prying questions if they can help it. It’s not fitten. We keep ourselves to ourselves. Whys aren’t any of my business. Such questions are for courts and judges. It did seem odd, though, to have a soft-spoken, cultured painter locked up for murder. I thought artists were peaceable sorts. Now a likkered-up logger or a young lout with a temper and a mean streak—that wouldn’t have surprised me, but a mild-mannered artist is not what small towns usually get in the way of killers.

  “Have you got you a lawyer yet?”

  The question didn’t seem to interest him. “A lawyer? Don’t know any. Don’t trust any either. Besides, I doubt they accept payment in the form of a painting—unless one of ’em is mighty fond of his dog.”

  “You’re charged with murder. You have to have a lawyer, like it or not. Maybe your family can contact somebody for you. Do they know you’re here? Do we need to get word to anybody?”

  “I left my family a long time ago. I don’t want to see anybody. Not anywhere, but especially not here.”

  “If you have people, they’re bound to find out, so you might as well get word to them. Even if you parted with them on bad terms, like as not, they’ll come through for you now. Families mostly do. I hope they can help you, because the sooner you get a lawyer the better off you will be, it seems to me.”

  “I’ll think on it.”

  “Do that. It’s not my place to give you legal advice, but common sense ought to tell you it won’t do you any good just to sit here and do nothing.”

  He stifled a yawn. “I’m tired. I just want to sleep. When I sleep, all this goes away. The nightmare is being awake.”

  Sleeping wouldn’t solve anything, but I knew how tempting it was, because I remembered those days after I lost Albert, when sleep was the only refuge there was from sorrow and pain. After a few weeks it got better, but I wasn’t sure it ever would for this prisoner, because his grief was tempered with guilt. “If you’d like a preacher to stop in and see you later today, I think we could arrange that.”

  “No, thanks. I don’t know what I’d say to a man of God.”

  “I suppose he could help you to pray.”

  “Don’t you think I’m past praying for, ma’am?”

  “They say nobody is. You might try praying for somebody besides yourself, though.”

  “A preacher would want an explanation, and I don’t want to talk about it. I already admitted to doing it. That should be enough.”

  “I doubt the Lord is very happy about what you did, of course, but maybe you had your reasons. If so, He must already know what they were.”

  I thought the prisoner was about to say something else then, but the door at the end of the corridor opened and Tyree hollered out, “Telephone for you, Sheriff!”

  I didn’t believe that for a minute—Tyree was just worried that I’d get my throat cut if I lingered too long with a dangerous prisoner—but I turned to go, anyway. I had about run out of things to say to a murderer, except for the one question that would be on the tip of everybody’s tongue, which was the very one he didn’t want to answer: Why did you do it?

  “Who’s on the phone?” Tyree and Fal
con were still in the office when I came back from the cells: Tyree drinking coffee and Falcon paging through the sports page of the Johnson City paper.

  “Oh, the phone call?” Tyree had the grace to blush. “It turned out to be a wrong number. Sorry to disturb you. Did you get on all right back there?”

  “He’s not violent. I’d say he might be a danger to himself, and we should keep a close watch on him for that, but the rest of us are safe enough. Has anybody asked to see him?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “Any family? A lawyer?”

  “Not that we know of,” said Falcon.

  “I’m headed off home now, but if his in-laws stop by, I don’t reckon you ought to let them in.” Tyree said this straight-faced, but I recognized it as the first of many jokes that would be made at the expense of the wife-killer.

  I ignored him. “Shouldn’t we find out more about who this fellow is?”

  “We don’t have to, Sheriff. All we have to do is keep him locked up here and make sure nobody breaks him out or lynches him. All the rest of it—if he did it, why he did it—that’s for the lawyers.”

  Falcon shook his head. “No, Tyree, the sheriff is right. We need to know more about the prisoner: who his friends are, where he worked, and how well liked he is. Because who knows how long we’re going to have to hold him in here. Those things will tell us if we need to worry about a lynch mob coming to get him or a bunch of his pals from work trying to slip him a knife or storming the jail to get him out. We have to know who we’re dealing with.”

  I was pleased to see Falcon come up with such logical thinking. Maybe he’d make sheriff himself one day. “Why don’t you go and see what you can find out about him then? I think it’s better for us to know. He told me he works at the sawmill. Start there.”

  Falcon came back in time to eat his lunch—an orange and a can of beans from McInturf’s Store—at the reception desk. “Did you know that fellow’s an artist?” he asked me, between spoonfuls of beans.

  “He told me that. He’s the one who did that mural in the post office. But he doesn’t make his living at it anymore. I guess the hard times are what made him go to work at the sawmill.”

  Falcon grinned. “Well, he don’t work there anymore. The owner of the mill told me they fired him last week.”

  “What for?”

  “If you wasn’t the sheriff, I don’t believe I’d tell you, Miz Robbins, but, seeing as how you are—” Then he stopped and looked up at the ceiling, trying to work out some delicate way of explaining it to me.

  I sighed. “So he wasn’t let go for stealing or for general incompetence?”

  “No. Well . . . that’s a matter of opinion. I reckon the girl’s ­father—he’s the foreman there—might call it that. Seems the young lady always took her daddy’s lunch to him, and she got in the way of talking to some of the men who were taking their lunch breaks as well.”

  “How old is this girl?”

  “Oh, seventeen or so. Old enough to know better. Maybe she thought she’d catch a husband by making eyes at the sawmill workers. Well, she did, but, unfortunately, the one she caught was somebody else’s husband. Anyhow, last week the foreman caught her and our Mr. Varden back there on some burlap sacks in the equipment shed—”

  “Making hay?” I said, before he could phrase it in a cruder way.

  “Making trouble, that’s for sure. The foreman went in to get a screwdriver and caught them in the act. He fired the loverboy before he could even get his pants up. I suppose they didn’t think they’d get caught.”

  “Or maybe one of them was hoping they would.” Women need a lot less protecting from the unpleasantness of life than men seemed to think. “I wonder what he told his wife about getting fired?”

  “I don’t think he told her anything. Maybe he killed her because he wanted to go off with his girlfriend.”

  “Why couldn’t they just run away together? I don’t think he had much to lose from a divorce. They didn’t have much money or land or anything.”

  Falcon shook his head. “Beats me, ma’am. I reckon you’ll have to ask him.”

  People around here assuming that woman’s death was her own fault didn’t mean they were going to let her killer get away with it, though; not when there were two horrified witnesses who were able to describe exactly what they saw: no quarrel, no blows exchanged, no provocation that anyone could see—just a plain little woman holding a camera, her back turned to the man behind her, suddenly thrown from a mountain outcrop and smashed to pieces on the boulders below. The law wouldn’t let an act like that go unpunished, even if people had wanted it to, and, because this was a God-fearing place, mostly they didn’t. At least, despite Galen’s warning, we never heard any talk about people wanting to lynch the killer. That was something to be thankful for, not on his account, but because if a mob stormed the jail, some of the deputies were likely to get hurt trying to protect the worthless wife-killer. The speculation went on for a few more days, but Lonnie Varden never said a word about what happened—not to the officers of the sheriff’s department, not to his court-appointed lawyer, not even to Rev. McKee, who came to the jail to pray for him, more out of Christian charity than sympathy.

  The incident had been a nine days’ wonder when it happened, even attracting newspaper reporters from as far away as Nashville.

  A few weeks later everybody here more or less forgot about him, because shortly after the arrest, whoever makes such decisions arranged for the case to be tried in Knoxville, and they took him to the jail there to await trial. I wondered why he ended up in Knoxville. I suppose either they thought he wouldn’t get a fair trial in a town where a lot of people knew him, or else they thought a murder case was so serious that they wanted it tried by a more experienced prosecutor than the one we had. I asked Roy, but he didn’t know either. “I figure our job is to catch lawbreakers. What happens to them after that is somebody else’s problem.”

  I was too busy doing my job and taking care of my sons to give much thought to the trial of a stranger happening a hundred miles away. It didn’t seem worth wondering about. It wasn’t as if there was any doubt about whether or not he did it, after all.

  LONNIE VARDEN

  “The way I figure it,” Lonnie Varden told his cellmate, “if I could just bust outta here, I’d have two choices: I could either jump a freight train down at the rail yard, ride it until I can catch another one heading west, and another one after that, until I got all the way to south Texas and then I could jump the border, where the law couldn’t get me . . .”

  “Or?” The grizzled old man with the pock-marked face didn’t care, really. Every inmate whiled away some of the time dreaming up escape fantasies, and men on trial for their lives dreamed even longer and harder.

  This little chicken hawk of a fellow—the old man judged him to be on one side or the other of thirty—was a stranger. He was just somebody who had happened to be put in the same cell with him, waiting for trial. Now, it turned out he was the talkative kind, nervous to be trapped in jail with a dangerous felon, and hoping he could muster enough charm to keep himself from getting murdered in the night. The sort of fellow who would end up telling you secrets his mama don’t even know, if you are a stranger, because strangers were the only ones safe to confide in.

  He said again, “Or—what?”

  The chicken hawk still didn’t answer. He sat on his bunk, staring out the cell door, perhaps regretting that he had blurted out that admission. Maybe he wasn’t as cocky as he pretended to be. Something was chasing him, anyhow. His nails were bitten down to the quick, which told the old man that this kid had two things that he didn’t: more trouble than he was accustomed to and good teeth.

  The old man thought of the boxcars, where he often sat among the crates on the straw floor, swaying with every lurch of the train, and watching brown-stubbled fields flicker past. Above the clat
ter of the train, the tramps would talk in fits and starts. Here there was only the noise made by the men in other cells, sometimes howls or sobbing, because the state didn’t seem to differentiate between madmen and felons.

  At least this young man kept talking calmly, and, even if he had preferred otherwise, the older one didn’t have much choice but to listen. Well, that was all right. Listening to a talker was as good a way as any to pass the time. Food or smokes would have been better, of course, but just now those things were past praying for. Sometimes when he’d been out on the rails he might get a windfall—a crate of canned goods in an unguarded boxcar or a moonlight raid on somebody’s orchard or garden. If he ever got hungry enough, he could make a few dimes chopping wood, or burning trash, or digging out some flower beds—whatever the housewife had wanted done. Here he was as helpless as a penned-up hog. All he could do was wait for whatever his captors chose to dole out, and he didn’t even have the choice in the company he kept.

  In the long silence, swallowed by all the noise from outside, the old tramp had nearly managed to drop off to sleep again, but then his young cellmate stirred, apparently remembering he wasn’t alone. He looked over at the old man with a faraway smile. “You’re a traveler, aren’t you? Riding the rails, I mean.”

  “When I can. It’s a life.”

  “Funny, I used to hop trains as a kid. Never thought I’d still be wishing I could do it when I grew up.”

  The old man shrugged. “That right?” His garrulous companion of twenty-four hours’ acquaintance had been hauled into the cell the day before, feet shackled together and wearing handcuffs attached to chains around his waist. The manacles were gone now, and the young man seemed to be neither insane nor violent, which made his cellmate wonder what all the fuss had been about. There had been no point in asking the guards who’d brought him in. Guards made a point of ignoring anything a prisoner said. From the sound of him, though, the young man himself would be telling him all about it, sooner or later.