Maybe I should have asked Rev. McKee to meet me here, but I hadn’t thought of it. I reckoned I could say a prayer myself, though, if I felt like it.
When I stepped forward to meet them, the undertakers’ men looked up, startled, and one of them lost his footing, and nearly dropped his end of the coffin.
“It’s only me,” I said. “I wanted to make sure you had the right place.” Of course they did; they had already dug the hole, but I couldn’t say why I had really come, because I didn’t know myself. I just wanted to see it through, I guess.
They mumbled a greeting and got on with their work. I stood back and watched them lower the box into the ground. One last rope.
They didn’t stop to pray or say any words over the grave. Death was all in a day’s work to them. After they filled in the hole, they murmured hasty farewells and hurried away. I stood there for a long time, staring down at the freshly turned earth, trying to think of something fitten to say—to either of the two men lying there. But, for different reasons, I couldn’t offer forgiveness to either one of them. I had the rest of my life to think of something to say, though. They’d still be there.
I went down the hill, away from the cemetery, and kept walking, but I wasn’t going home. Not yet. I followed the creek path back through town, past the office, where all seemed peaceful, past the almost-empty hotel, and across the street to the silver railroad car with the neon sign on top: CITY DINER. I looked through the windows and saw Mildred, the henna-haired waitress, behind the counter. Most of the booths were empty. Now that the excitement was over, people had either gone home to relax or they’d gone elsewhere to look for more excitement. The place had the same drained, empty feeling it had the day after the circus left town.
I crossed the parking lot and went around to the back door of the diner, thinking about Davis Howell rooting through those garbage cans for food. At least now he was safe. As I reached up to tap on the door, the scar on my wrist caught the light from the bare bulb above the stoop. I had lived with that scar for nearly twenty-five years, but the mad dog that gave it to me had died before the sun set. Its owner had to put it down, because you have a responsibility to keep the creatures in your care from hurting the community. When they get out of control, you have to stop them.
I tapped on the door and waited.
A moment later a scowling Ike Bonham jerked it open, holding a .32 pistol aimed at my head. I just stared him down, didn’t move a muscle. Seconds later, when he recognized me, he grunted and shoved the pistol into the waistband of his pants. “Thought you might be somebody trying to rob us.”
Something in the way he said that made me think that wasn’t why he’d answered the back door with a loaded gun. He wasn’t expecting a robber—or me. I smiled a little.
“Well? What do you want? Nobody here called you.”
I stood my ground, despite the mingled stench of whisky and garlic on his breath. “No. I just stopped by to bring something for your wife. That man we hanged today asked me to give this to her. Last request. And I promised him I would. Is she here?” I craned my neck and looked past him into the grease-spattered kitchen. I wondered if the walls were really yellow or just discolored from all the smoke and grease.
“She’s in the john.” He kept watching me with narrowed eyes, but he made no move to call to her. “What do you mean that killer left her something?”
“It isn’t worth anything, but I guess it meant a lot to him.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the blue tobacco tin and two small pictures: the photo inscribed Ain’t we got fun? and the little sketch of her that Lonnie Varden had drawn on the scrap of butcher paper in his cell.
“He wanted her to have these to remember him by. You’ll see that she gets them, won’t you?”
Ike Bonham’s hand was shaking when he took the tin, and when he saw the two pictures, his face contorted with rage. He tipped the photo up into the light, and his lips trembled as he read the scrawled message on the back: Ain’t we got fun?
I waited, but he seemed to have forgotten all about me. Still clutching the tobacco tin and the pictures, he staggered back a step and slammed the door in my face. That was all right. I turned and walked away, headed home.
First thing in the morning I would travel up the mountain to get my boys so that whatever happened in town tomorrow would be none of my business.
It was over now.
acknowledgments
A newly appointed female sheriff is required by law to personally hang a prisoner in a public execution.
How much of this story is true?
Although Prayers the Devil Answers was inspired by a true story, it was not intended to be an exact chronicle of the actual events. It is true that in 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky, a woman sheriff, appointed to serve out the term of her late husband, was obliged to oversee the public execution by hanging of a convicted felon. It was the last public hanging ever carried out in the United States.
Like Ellendor Robbins in the novel, the real widow also had young children to support, and it was for that reason that she accepted the job of sheriff.
The similarities between the stories end there, though. In constructing my novel about this incident, I was primarily interested in the dilemma of a widow with children—a housewife—faced with the prospect of hanging a man before a crowd of thousands of onlookers. I changed the circumstances of the prisoner and the crime, because I wanted to keep the focus on the woman sheriff and her determination to do her duty at all costs in order to honor her oath of office, so that she could keep her job and take care of her children. The grain of truth in this novel is like the grain of sand that forms the heart of a pearl: it so obscured by layers of embellishment that the original germ of inspiration is no longer visible at all.
You always have to do research for a novel, though, even if you are not faithfully chronicling the lives of actual historical figures.
There’s very little invention in most works of fiction, but there is some rearranging. The outcropping of rock on the mountaintop, called “the Hawk’s Wing” in this novel, is a real place called McAfee’s Knob. You will find it on the Appalachian Trail near Roanoke, Virginia.
I’m grateful to Hamblen County, Tennessee Sheriff, Esco Jarnagin for his advice on the operation of a Depression-era Tennessee sheriff’s department, and the politics involved for the new sheriff. When I asked him how much he thought a 1930s sheriff would be paid in rural Tennessee, he laughingly answered, “Not enough!”
Award-winning artist Alan Shuptrine of Chattanooga guided me through the steps an artist would take in preparing to paint a mural on the wall of a public building, and he helped me to figure out how the prisoner Lonnie Varden would have gone about drawing a portrait in the confines of his cell. My thanks to him for the wealth of arcane detail about the process, from his explanations about the making of gesso and doing a color wash for the mural, to the burning of a willow branch to produce a stick of charcoal suitable for drawing a portrait. Alan was very patient and thorough in his instructions on how to describe these processes, and I thank him for sharing his expertise with me.
The subject of Lonnie Varden’s post office mural, the July 1776 attack on Fort Watauga, was an actual incident in frontier history, and Tennessee’s first governor, John Sevier, took part in the battle. Celia’s description of those events is correct. You can visit a replica of the fort and see museum exhibits relating to that era at Sycamore Shoals State Park in Elizabethton, Tennessee. As far as I know, though, no WPA artist ever painted a mural of the scene on the wall of a post office.
I’m grateful to my agent, Irene Goodman, who was captivated by this story and refused to let me not write it, and to my editor, Johanna Castillo, of Atria Books for her guidance in bringing the novel to publication. A special thanks to all the kind readers who have expressed great interest in this book and eagerly awaited its arrival.
Sharyn McCrumb
Roanoke County, Virginia, 2015
About the Author
Photograph by David McCrumb
Sharyn McCrumb is the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Ballad novels. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Southern Literature, the AWA Book of the Year, and Notable Books in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. She was also named a “Virginia Woman of History” for Achievement in Literature. She lives and writes in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, fewer than one hundred miles from where her family settled in 1790.
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ALSO BY SHARYN McCRUMB
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The Rosewood Casket
She Walks These Hills
The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Sharyn McCrumb
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4767-7281-3
ISBN 978-1-4767-7285-1 (ebook)
Prayers the Devil Answers Page 34
