Prayers the Devil Answers (12 page)

After a companionable silence, Falcon said, “I'm real sorry about your daddy. He was a good sheriff, and a good man.”

The boy nodded, staring down at his plate. “We knew he was ailing and this past week he got worse, but we never thought it would come to this.”

“Yeah. Nobody could have foreseen it.”

Mrs. Thompson stood over them. “If you boys are all right here, I'll just go into the parlor and see if Mrs. Robbins or any of the others would like a bite to eat.”

“You go on, ma'am. We'll be just fine here.” Falcon waited until she bustled away before he spoke again. “How are you faring, Eddie?”

The boy shrugged. “I'm bearing up all right, I reckon. Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet. I keep thinking there must be some way to change what happened.”

“Most people would wish that in times of trouble.” Falcon wanted to ask about the funeral arrangements, but Eddie did not need to be reminded of such things. Anyway he judged that it was too soon yet. There hadn't been time to make those decisions, certainly not time for the children to know about it. He decided to tell Roy that they all ought to offer to be pallbearers; he thought the sheriff would have liked that. “Are you managing here all right?”

Eddie shrugged. “I have to, don't I? Somebody's got to stay clear-headed enough to take care of Mama and Georgie, and there ain't nobody else here but me. Reckon in a week or so I'll have to hunt up a job somewhere.”

Falcon was sorry to hear a quaver in the boy's voice, but he thought it was even sadder to see Eddie's stoic determination to take on his father's responsibilities. Eddie was a brave kid, but he was in over his head, trying to swallow his own grief because he had decided that he had to be the man of the family now. Sometimes it was hard to tell courage from pigheadedness.

Falcon picked up Eddie's plate of untouched pie and handed it to him. Who knew when the kid had last eaten? “Better eat this. Never turn down a meal, especially in times like this. You're going to need your strength to cope with what's to come. Has your mother eaten anything?”

“Miz Thompson tried to make her take a plate. So did I. She keeps saying she'll eat later, but I don't think she wants to.” Eddie picked up the slice of pie and chewed it mechanically, his thoughts elsewhere. A tear slid down his cheek. “How can I take care of Mama and Georgie if I can't even remember to eat?”

“You're still a kid, son. It's not your job to take care of everybody else. As for going to work, you'd best stay in school. Your daddy
would have wanted you to. I do know that. He set a store by education. He said he wished he'd had more of it himself.”

Falcon wished someone had given him the advice he had just given Eddie. He was older when his own father passed away, but he had felt just the way Eddie did—that everything now was up to him. If he hadn't tried to take on a man's responsibilities before he was old enough to shave, maybe he could have worked his way through some local college. Then he might have become a lawyer instead of a county lawman. He patted the boy's shoulder. “Yessir, Eddie, you do the best you can in your schoolwork, look out for your little brother there, and leave the rest of it to the grown-ups. Most of the folks in this town are good people. I'm sure they will see that you boys and your mama are all right.” He wasn't entirely sure about that, but he hoped it would be the case.

Falcon tried to think of some way to help. He didn't have any money to give the family, but he thought he might offer to get firewood for them and chop it if they needed him to do it.

“I'll think it over,” said Eddie.

“And you can still come by the jail and help us out after school. I reckon we can afford to pay you.” Even if it came out of his own pocket, Falcon would see that the sheriff's son got paid for his work. He wondered if anybody else was looking out for the family.

“Do you have any kinfolk around, Eddie? Someone we can send word to?”

“My uncle Henry. Daddy's brother. He farms the old homeplace. We sent word.”

“Well, that's good. Maybe you boys and your mother can go stay with him on the farm.”

After a long pause Eddie said, “Maybe,” but he didn't sound like he believed it, or maybe he didn't want to go.

Falcon wondered what the story was there.

Georgie, who had eaten all the pie that hadn't stuck to his face
and clothes, headed toward the bedroom, calling out for his father to help him.

Eddie sighed. “Georgie's gotta pee. We don't let him go outside by himself on account of the train tracks.” He stood up and hurried after him, to head him off before the little fellow could reach the door of their parents' room.

Falcon watched as Eddie led his younger brother out the back door and across the yard to the outhouse. After a few moments he got to his feet. He had postponed his duty long enough. It was time to pay his respects to the sheriff's widow.

The rays of the winter sun slanted through the parlor window, too feeble to make the dust motes dance or to disturb the occupants of the room with an unwelcome blaze of light. It did, however, remind them that it was late afternoon. Through meaningful glances at one another, the ladies passed the signal that the visit could come to a close. Soon they began to drift away, one or two at a time. There was supper to fix at home.

A plump blond woman, one of the younger ones without a baby in tow, took her leave of Mrs. Robbins, crying and dabbing at her eyes with a paper handkerchief. “I can't believe he's gone,” she said. “I can't believe it.”

Ellendor Robbins looked up sharply. It was the first time all day that Falcon had seen her actually paying attention. She didn't say anything to the blonde, though. She just nodded and the woman turned and walked away, still weeping.

When Falcon finally edged into the parlor, the last of the visitors took it as an excuse to take her leave. Nodding briskly at Falcon, she headed for the door. In the kitchen doorway Mrs. Thompson was putting on her coat, getting ready to leave as well.

Where
the devil were Roy and the others?

Duty was duty, but the prospect of being alone with a woman who might become hysterical made Falcon sweat. The widow was
now alone, sitting on the horsehair sofa, staring at nothing. Each departing woman had shaken her hand or hugged her, murmuring one last bit of sympathy, and urging Ellendor to send for them if she needed anything. Falcon wondered if she had even noticed.

“I came as soon as I could, ma'am.” He sat down on the straight chair beside the sofa. He would have kept standing out of politeness, but, because he was tall, Mrs. Robbins would have had to crane her neck back to look up at him, and the distance would have required them to speak louder than he thought fitting under such solemn circumstances. He doubted that this poor haggard woman would care to stand on ceremony.

“We didn't know.”

“No. Nobody did. I didn't send for you because Albert was young and strong. I kept thinking he was going to get better. I couldn't imagine him gone. We never thought on it, him and me.”

“Hardly anybody ever does, ma'am. Many's the time we've been called out to the scene of an accident. Some poor fellow killed in a road accident, or a farmhand caught in the machinery; a hunter shot by his buddies, after a drop too much to drink. Then it would fall to one of us to go and inform the families that the man was gone.” He shook his head. “The way most of those folks carry on, you'd think that practically everybody lived forever. Never a thought in the world for worse coming to worst.”

“No. You can't think like that—not for long. It would drive you mad to dwell on the possibility.” She kept twisting her hands together in her lap, and her voice quavered, but she did not cry.

“It ought to be done, though, ma'am. I don't have a family myself, but I've resolved that if I ever do, I'll see to it they make some kind of plan for themselves, if I'm no longer around. But maybe everybody tells himself that, and then he never gets around to it.”

He ran out of things to say, and her attention drifted away again. She stared out the window for a few moments before she turned back
to him and said quietly, “Mr. Wallace, who was that woman who just left?”

He hesitated just a second too long. “Which one, ma'am? Seems to me like a whole crowd of them just left.”

“The . . . blond woman who was crying.” He wondered what words of description she had considered before she settled on “blond.”
Dumpy? Cheap-looking? Brazen?
All of them fit.

“Oh, you mean that hefty gal in the green dress?”

She nodded.

“Well, that was just Shelley. She's a waitress. I almost didn't recognize her without an apron and a coffeepot in her hand.”

“She seemed awful upset.”

“Well, all of us are, ma'am. We set a store by Sheriff Robbins. I reckon some folks just show their feelings more than others. Wearing their hearts on their sleeves, my mama used to call it. And that ­Shelley—why, she'd be in tears if you swatted a fly.”

“I see.” She seemed to be thinking about that, and then she said, “What happens now?”

“Now?” The question, and her way of asking it, took Falcon by surprise. Surely the minister had been to see her by now to settle all that. “Well . . . the funeral, I reckon,” he stammered. “You need to let people know when and where that will be so they can pay their last respects. We'd be proud to act as pallbearers—the other deputies and I—if you need any.”

“Thank you. I believe Albert would have liked that. But . . . I meant afterward. The job.”

“Oh, do you mean who will be sheriff now? That's not up to us, but if it matters to you, you should ask one of the commissioners, but I don't think you ought to worry about that. You need to set this family to rights.”

“Yes.”

“If there's any way I can help you . . . Chopping wood, maybe.
I'm right good at fixing things. And come spring I could dig you a garden plot out back—” Falcon shifted from one foot to the other, wondering why it embarrassed him to make the offer.

At the offer of help Ellendor blushed and turned away. “No. It's kind of you, but we couldn't ask you for any favors like that.”

“Well, it's early days, ma'am. I know you'll try to make do on your own, but it would be no shame if you can't manage it. If you change your mind, all you have to do is ask.”

She nodded, just to say that she understood—not meaning that she ever would would take him up on the offer. She tried again. “When will they decide what happens now about Albert's job?”

Falcon shook his head. “I don't know. Soon, I guess. All I know is that I don't want it.”

“Why? Because it's dangerous?”

“No. It's no more dangerous than being a deputy, maybe less so, since we do most of the legwork. But as for taking on the job of sheriff, it's the paperwork that would do me in. All sorts of reports to fill out and warrants to read . . . I never was much good at spelling in school. I can read all right, but I'd rather be outdoors, using my eyes and ears instead of my writing hand, not cooped up behind a desk.”

Ellendor nodded. Since she had heard Albert say something of the sort about Deputy Wallace, she was not surprised. “What about Mr. Phillips and the others?”

“Roy? I don't believe he'd care for the extra duties or the paperwork, either, but what would really put Roy off is the politicking. Being the official, elected or appointed, means having to smile and go to receptions and be sociable with the rich folks and the bureaucrats.”

“Yes. I'd consider that the hard part myself. But Albert took it in stride.”

“Roy says that, if the truth be told, some of those people are just as much lawbreakers as the burglars and bootleggers we do arrest. But rich people mostly don't get prosecuted. That's what Roy says, any
how. I never heard Sheriff Robbins opine on that particular subject, though.”

“No. You wouldn't. Most of the time my husband didn't let people know what he thought. Not even me sometimes. If there were anything about the job he didn't care for, he wouldn't let on. I know the paperwork was a trial to him. I helped him some with that.”

After a short, strained silence, Falcon said, “Why do you want to know who'll take Sheriff Robbins's place?”

“Well, I'd like to inquire as to who gets to decide that.”

“Oh, I see.” Falcon didn't see at all, but he'd rather talk county politics with the grieving widow than have to hand her handkerchiefs while she wept. “Who does the deciding? Let's see . . . when Mr. Tyler died, they appointed your husband to take his place until the election, didn't they? And then he got elected himself. So like as not, the county will appoint somebody to take on the job now—if they can find somebody who will take it.”

“Yes. I see that. I can't remember who exactly did the appointing when Albert took over. It didn't matter to me then; all I really cared about was the extra money in his pay envelope. Who did the appointing? Do you remember?”

“Well, like I told you before, I think it was the county board of commissioners. That's who managed the swearing-in, anyhow. You must have met them then.”

“I don't recall.”

“Well, you can always ask Mr. Johnson. He's the head of the board.”

“Mr. Johnson?”

“Yes. Vernon Johnson. His wife was here awhile ago. The gray-haired lady in the purple-flowered dress. Mr. Johnson is one of the railroad bosses, I think, if he's not retired. But he spends a lot of time in the commissioner's office in the courthouse. Why do you want to know, ma'am?”

Ellendor Robbins shrugged. “Just asking.”

LONNIE VARDEN

Once he had decided that he would paint the 1776 battle between the settlers and the Cherokee at Sycamore Shoals, Lonnie Varden plunged headlong into the project, begrudging every moment he had to waste eating or sleeping. The day after Lonnie settled on the fort scene, he sketched out a rough plan in charcoal on a long sheet of butcher paper in his room. This drawing was for his own benefit, useful mainly to illustrate the relative positions of the various figures, so that he could decide whether or not the composition was properly balanced. On the far right he placed a shallow, rocky riverbed, and a few feet to the left of it he put an X to symbolize the fort itself. In the left foreground, he made smaller Xs representing the dense forest from which the Indian attack would come. The center of the mural would be taken up by the details of the battle: men fighting in the grassy field, bodies strewn here and there, and in the background, a ripple of dark-green mountains bounding the scene like a natural frame, with perhaps a few inches at the top of the wall allotted to an eggshell-blue sky and some fleecy clouds. He hadn't decided yet where to put the eagle. He would have to find a picture of one in a book somewhere before he could even begin to sketch it.

When he had plotted out the logistics of the work to his satisfaction, he went off in search of books with illustrations that would give him the general idea of what a frontier scene should look like. He
knew that as he went along he would also need studies, from books or from life, to show him the configurations of horses, rifles, chestnut trees—just about anything that called for detail. The postmaster's wife expressed surprise when he asked if she had any books with pictures of horses and such that he could look at. He had grown up on a farm surrounded by all of these things, hadn't he? Surely he knew what a horse looked like. Yes, of course he did, he told her, but seeing a horse in order to make it seem real in a painting required a different kind of knowledge from merely being able to recognize a horse when he saw one. Objects are shapes and angles, light and shadow, but you don't notice those details unless you are trying to reproduce those effects on paper.

It was always easier to draw something you could look at rather than having to make it all up in your head. As for depicting the Indians, he figured he could always go to the local theater and watch a cowboy movie.

Each day at five o'clock as soon as the post office closed he would hurry there, drag the stepladder out of the broom closet in the back, and continue the preliminary work on the mural. First he applied the light-green wash to the blank expanse of wall, and then he alternated between sketchbook drawings and limning the shapes into their allotted positions with sticks of burnt charcoal.

His main difficulty was the fact that he had no idea what an eighteenth-century Tennessee fort looked like, or what clothing the Indians wore. If his schoolbooks had contained illustrations of such scenes, he had long forgotten them. He didn't have to be too accurate, of course; artistic license allowed for considerable alteration in a scene for visual effect, but he did have to make an effort to produce a recognizable scene. He couldn't paint, say, a medieval stone fortress set among palm trees, but he thought that taking a few liberties here and there would be permissible. Most of the people who saw his post office mural would have images of historical scenes in their heads that
were as hazy as his own. Just as in religious art, it would be better to meet their emotional expectations than to be perfectly accurate and contradict their imaginings.

He found no books to suit his needs in the little community library, which set him back a bit at first—apparently the convenience of city life had affected him more than he'd realized—but after some thought, he decided that rather than make a long, time-consuming trip to the closest large town, his best bet would be to visit a local schoolhouse and ask the schoolmarm if he could borrow any history books with illustrations.

That was how he met Celia.

When Lonnie Varden walked into the schoolhouse that afternoon the pupils had already gone home, and the moderately pretty young teacher was alone, grading papers at her desk. She couldn't have been much older than some of her students, slender and small-boned with mousy brown hair tied up in a chignon at the back of her head. It was an old-fashioned style; most young women now wore their hair bobbed or in a pageboy cut, but he decided that long hair would suit her if she wore it down, which perhaps she did after work hours. Round faces needed a bit of embellishment to soften them.

She looked up with a smile that turned at once into bewilderment when she saw that the visitor was not one of her students or even a concerned parent. She had the tentative smile of a shy and unassuming person, someone who was more at home with young children than with a roomful of brash, opinionated adults. Lonnie doubted that the lessons in this schoolhouse were taught to the tune of a hickory stick
.

For some reason her diffidence reassured him. He would experience no harsh questions from her about why he needed the loan of a book. He said hello, but went no nearer the desk; she looked like she might take flight if he made any sudden moves. He smiled back. “I was hoping you could help me, ma'am. I'm not here to enroll or anything.”

She blushed. “No, of course you aren't. At least I hope not! But I don't quite see—”

“I finished my schooling a few years back, such as it was. The schoolroom looked a lot like this, in fact. Right now I just need some learned advice on local history.”

“Well, I don't know how learned I am. One of the local ministers is an amateur historian. If it's the Civil War you're interested in . . . Are you a writer?”

“No. An artist.” Whenever he said that he wondered if he glowed with pride. He never meant the statement to be boastful; it simply felt good to be content with his role in life and to be able to say so. It wasn't just a matter of opinion anymore, either, because the US government was paying him a salary to paint, and if that didn't make it official, he didn't know what would.

“My name is Lonnie Varden. Don't bother looking me up in an art book if you have such a thing on your bookshelves. You won't find me listed, not even as a footnote. I'm not one of the famous artists—yet. Maybe someday.”

“I wish some of my students could meet you. They love to draw.”

How many times had he heard a variation of that? He smiled again, “You been teaching long, Miss—er?”

She paused for a moment, and he wondered if she was trying to make up her mind whether or not to trust him. Hardly anyone except her pupils would ever stop by the remote schoolhouse, and perhaps she wondered if he was selling something or—surely not—there to steal something . . . or worse. But, after all, it was the middle of the afternoon. She would notice that he didn't look like one of those traveling bums people were always warning her about, and that he wasn't drunk or agitated. In fact, rather than menacing, he hoped she might think him pleasant and good-looking, in an ordinary way.

“Are you from around here?” she asked. “Your accent . . .”

“Well, I'm not altogether a stranger, but I grew up about half a dozen counties away from here. I was living in Knoxville for a couple of years though, lately.”

“I've never met a real artist before.”

He laughed. “Well, I hope you have now. The name is Lonnie Varden—I'm repeating that in case I do turn out to be important someday.”

“I'm Miss Pasten.” She came out with it automatically, and then she blushed. “Celia Pasten, that is, and I haven't been teaching long, but I'll help you with your question if I can. Is it about art?”

“More about history, really.”

“Oh. History. I didn't study history very much at college. They expect future grammar school teachers to concentrate their course work on pedagogy; that is, on learning to teach little children to read and spell and do their sums.”

“I don't really have any questions for you, ma'am. I just need to look in some history books, so you don't have to tell me anything. Books with pictures, I mean. Do you have any?”

She pointed toward a small bookshelf on the wall near the window, behind a circle of small chairs. “We call that our study library. Sometimes people give us old books, mostly the ones left behind when a relative dies, and a few of the others over there are mine. You're welcome to look through them.”

He walked over to the bookshelf and began to study the titles. She hovered a few feet behind him, perhaps hoping he would ask for help. When the silence became awkward, he glanced back at her and said, “How do you like school teaching?”

“It's all right, I guess. I never really tried anything else.” Even when she smiled she managed to look serious. “Most of the children aren't keen on learning, but I do my best. I was lucky to get the job. The last teacher left to get married. What about you? Have you been painting long?”

“Well, I've been drawing all my life, if that counts,” he said, paging through a battered old leather-bound volume. No illustrations at all. He put it back. “For as long as I could hold a pencil, anyhow. It just came naturally to me.” Not as naturally as all that, he admitted to himself, but he always did have a yen to do it as more than a pastime.

“That's quite a blessing—knowing from the beginning of your life what it is that you want to be.”

He flipped through the pages of an old cookery book. (You never knew your luck.) “Well, being an artist isn't a blessing if you're set on making any money. Pity I wasn't born with a knack for being a railroad tycoon.” He pulled another leather-bound volume off the shelf and began to leaf through it. “Anyhow, I started out as a kid with pencil drawing. I even took art lessons for a while in Knoxville, and tried to make it on my own as an independent artist, until I ran out of money—along with the rest of the country.”

“But you've kept at it? You're still painting?”

“I got lucky, I guess. In fact, maybe the economic troubles were the best thing that could have happened to me. The federal government started a program to pay artists to do paintings and sculptures and such, and I got one of those jobs. So, yes, I'm still an artist, after a fashion. More so than ever, maybe. I'm painting murals in local post offices.”

“At a post office? Really? The one here in town?”

“That's it. It won't make me rich, but I won't go hungry either. Besides, I get to keep practicing my art instead of digging ditches until the country gets back on its feet. When the hard times go away, the government may cancel the program, so in a way I hope things don't improve for a long time. That's a selfish point of view, I guess.”

“It's human nature, surely, to be glad when things turn out well for you and sorry when they don't. You said you needed some help
concerning history. Are you looking for ideas for the picture you're planning to put up there in our post office?”

“That's it. I figure I'm all right on depicting the look of the land itself. Things haven't changed much around here in the past couple of centuries. Same humpbacked mountains and big shade trees.” He was still turning pages as he talked. Sometimes he would stop and stare for a moment at a line drawing, and then he would sigh and begin to leaf through the book again. “This mural is what they call a historical tableau, and it has to pertain to the area where the post office is. I talked to some of the people in town, and they all suggested that I paint a scene from local history. Pioneer days.”

She nodded. “Yes, around here they set a store by frontier history. So many local families have been here since then, and so they feel very connected to those old stories. My students love to hear tales from the olden days, especially when one of the names is the same as one of theirs.”

“I hope people will like it. I'm trying to do my best to get it right.” He found a promising-looking drawing in the Tennessee history book he had been paging through and set it open on the floor. “This drawing of a woman in pioneer dress. That might be useful.” He pulled a postcard-sized notebook and a stub of pencil from the pocket of his jacket and began to sketch rapidly. “Any idea what color that dress might have been?”

She thought about it for a moment. “Some shade of brown, like as not. Blue dyes were hard to come by, and you wouldn't wear yellow or white on a frontier farm. It wouldn't be practical. What scene did you have in mind?”

“The attack on the fort at Sycamore Shoals,” he said, making broad strokes with the pencil. “Practically everybody I talked to about the mural came up with that suggestion sooner or later, and I decided it has all the elements of a colorful and dramatic tableau, so I'm going to take a crack at it. That means I have to draw a fort, with some In
dians attacking it, and a few frontiersmen shooting back. Mountain landscape, of course, and a forest and a river, each on either side of the fort. Horses and maybe a deer at the edge of the woods. I suppose the women would all be inside the fort for safety, but I'll try to figure out a way to put a couple of them in the scene.”

“That's easy enough. There were some women outside the fort at the start of that battle. I do know that story pretty well. I teach it to the fifth grade in Tennessee history. The first governor of the state fought there.”

“That sounds like just what I need. What were the women doing outside the fort?”

“Trying to milk the cows. You see, they had been warned to expect an attack, and the whole settlement left their farms and took refuge in the fort. But there wasn't room in that little wooden fort for the cattle, so they left them outside to graze in the nearby fields. But after a couple of days the cows needed to be milked, but the Indians had showed up and were lurking in the woods, keeping an eye on the fort.”

“So a woman went out to milk the cows?”