Prayers the Devil Answers (3 page)

We were lucky, I suppose, for Albert was the only one of us who took sick. I didn't feel fortunate, though, for I knew that whether the rest of us got sick or not, there were hard times ahead. Dying would be easier than what was to come. Quicker, anyhow.

When word got around that Albert and I were going away to live in town, the folks at our little mountain church prayed for us as if we
were headed off to Abyssinia instead of just down the mountain and a few miles across the valley to a no-account whistle-stop railroad town.

The town had sprung up at the turn of the century in that narrow river valley around the railroad shops. We had no money to buy land or lumber to build a place of our own, so, with the kind help of that church deacon, we resolved to take what we could get. I was hoping that we would find a house with indoor plumbing—I had heard about places in town having the privy and a bathtub right inside, in a little room of their own, with piped-in water that didn't have to be boiled. But houses with marvels such as that belonged to the bankers and doctors and the foremen of the railroad shops—not to ordinary folk like us.

After looking at half a dozen places, some hardly more than shacks, the deacon took us to an across-the-tracks place that wasn't grand enough for any fancy plumbing, but that was why we could afford it in the first place. Instead of running water, the little house had a hand pump in the yard, which at least was better than an open well. There was a tin bath in a corner of the kitchen, but we had to fill it up with water that we heated on the stove. It took so much water to fill it that by the time we managed to heat enough water—a gallon at a time on the woodstove—the bath wasn't more than lukewarm.

A ways from the house on the woods side of the backyard sat an unpainted wooden outhouse.
“Four rooms and a path,”
Albert called it, trying to tease me out of my disappointment. I hadn't uttered a word of complaint, but I guess he could see it on my face.

We had seen the houses that were available, and most of them were beyond our means, so we settled on that four-room frame house a few yards from the railroad tracks. The place was small and in need of a coat of paint, but the kitchen had a cook stove, an old icebox, a pie safe, and an unvarnished pine table, which meant fewer things for us to buy. Above the dry sink, a little square of window overlooked the woods beyond the yard. What I liked best of all was that the
kitchen was separate from the parlor. Next to it was a short hallway leading to two bedrooms opposite each other. We gave Eddie and George one of the rooms to share, and we took the bigger one across the hall. After all those years of being cooped up on the farm with the in-laws, I could scarcely imagine any more privacy than that.

We were happy to finally have some privacy, even after all the years that we'd been man and wife. It was better than having a kitchen all to myself.

Another disappointment for me, besides the lack of plumbing, was the fact that the house wasn't wired up for power, either, but the deacon said, “That means there won't be no electric bills to pay,” and Albert happily agreed with him, as if that was good news. But he wasn't the one who had to worry about keeping food cold so that it didn't spoil and poison us, and he wouldn't be lying awake nights worrying that a kerosene lantern would get knocked over and cause a fire.

Well, there hadn't been electricity or indoor plumbing at the farm up the mountain, either, so I hadn't lost anything, but I figured if Albert and Willis were handy enough to work in a machine shop, then between the two of them they could rig up some wiring for that little house. I didn't nag him about it—not too much—but he must have known how bad I wanted it, because two months after we moved in, Albert and Willis had the house fitted with electricity so that we could dispense with the kerosene lamps. I wanted a refrigerator, too, instead of an icebox, but I knew it would take a long time to save up for that.

The best thing about leaving the family farm was that we wouldn't have to live with Henry and his wife anymore, bumping elbows with Elva when the two of us were fixing dinner, and then Albert and me trying to keep the bed from creaking in the night. That alone was worth the move to town, and Lord knows the move hadn't been too much trouble. We had lived with Albert's family for the whole of our wedded lives, so there had never been any call for us to buy furniture
or dishes. What little we had to take with us fit in the bed of cousin Willis's old Ford truck, with room to spare.

Albert had started off the N
ew Year with a hacking cough that kept both of us awake nights. By mid-February the cough had turned to wheezing, and his skin was hot to the touch. He was ailing for most of a week before he finally took to his bed and surrendered himself to the fever. He had not left it since.

Albert was never what you'd call hardy. Being thin as an arrow, like all the Robbins men, made him look taller than he was, and
he had a narrow, bony face that made you think that if he wasn't sick, then he wasn't getting enough to eat. But that wasn't so. Albert could put away food like he had a furnace in his stomach—seconds on everything; four biscuits at one sitting; and all the chicken that was left after the boys and I had eaten our fill. Albert could go through twice as much food as I could eat, but he never seemed to keep it on his bones. No matter how much he ate he never put on any weight. I used to tell him that I could gain weight just watching him eat. Not that I was all that heavy either, being little and wiry, but I reckon that if I had tried to keep up with Albert, I would have
swelled up like a toad inside of a month.

I always thought he would get heavier as he got older. People generally do. Running to fat is a bad thing to happen to most men and to all women, but in Albert's case, I figured the extra weight might come as a godsend as he got older. His sandy hair had flecks of gray, but they didn't show much. Being so thin made him look younger.

Sometimes he would moan in a fever dream, and I would try to talk to him. When I ran out of things to say, I'd sing,
“Abide with me; fast falls the eventide . . .”
It was Albert's favorite tune. I know that the words of that old hymn were meant to be spoken to the Lord, but when I sang it then, I was really pleading with Albert himself
. Abide with me.

He seemed to turn toward me, just ever so slightly when I sang, but
his eyes stayed shut, and I never did know if he heard me or not. Every now and then he'd gabble a few sounds that might have been words, but I couldn't make sense of them. Maybe they weren't words at all, but just the sound of his fever. Finally, when he had gone two days without eating anything, I tried to wake him. When I could not make him wake up to drink, I held a moistened rag to his lips so that he would get the water, but he just lay there moaning softly, his eyes shut tight as a new kitten's.
Every time I held that cloth to his mouth, I thought about the Crucifixion, when someone held a sponge up to Jesus so that he could get a bit of moisture. Sometimes it's all you can do.

That was the only time I ever wondered if we had been right to leave the farm.

Hour after hour I just sat by the bedside, waiting, while Albert slept on. At first I was waiting for him to wake up, and then I was waiting for his condition to change one way or the other, and finally I was just waiting, because when I stopped waiting, time would start again, and
I'd have to go on with the rest of my life.

Every now and again Eddie would remind me, mostly for Georgie's sake, that they needed meals cooked for them. I'd leave the sickroom long enough to boil some potatoes, fry slices of bacon, and round off the meal with whatever we had left in the larder. No one had been to the store in a week. We mostly ate in silence. I was exhausted and I
think Eddie was afraid to ask me any questions about his dad. I was afraid that if I tried to explain it to him, I'd commence to crying and never stop.

At mealtimes, if I remembered, I would eat a bite or two myself, before I went back to the chair by the bedside. The only times I'd know that I had slept were when I would jerk awake in the chair and see that outside the window the light had changed or the moon was down. It was better to look out the window than to catch sight of my reflection in the mirror—catching even a glimpse of myself made me cringe: b
room-straw hair; hollow, staring eyes; a pinched face; and lips pale as a fish belly. Sometimes I caught myself hoping that Albert wouldn't wake suddenly
and find me looking haggard and old.
I knew he'd be too sick to care how I looked, but I still minded.

The front yard of our rented house faced a dirt road, but it was big enough to have a patch of grass and flower beds, and on one side of the house a high blackthorn hedge kept us from having to look at the ramshackle house next to ours. The other side of the house faced the woods, and that view was more to our liking.

Our backyard faced the railroad tracks, but at least it was big enough to have fifty yards of bedraggled grass and a place to put up a clothesline. That spring I laid out a flower bed next to the blackthorn hedge.

When we first moved in, we discovered that the house was so close to the railroad tracks that whenever a train went past, the windowpanes rattled and the whole house shook like a leaf in the wind. The shrill scream of the locomotive whistle cut right through your bones. The only thing I ever heard as chilling as that was the sound of the cougars—we called them painters—up on the ridge. Maybe people could get used to such things, even learn to sleep through the shuddering roar of the night train, but none of us adjusted to it quickly. Georgie would wake up screaming. A whole year passed before the rumble of a train became an ordinary night sound, disturbing no one anymore.

I figured I could plant a vegetable garden in the backyard so that we could save money on groceries. I wasn't sure about keeping ­chickens—not with the railroad tracks so near. If I turned them out to forage, they'd either get run over by the train, or stolen by the tramps who wandered from place to place with nothing to their names except their independence. We could have put up a chicken wire fence, but the kind of flimsy fence we could afford wouldn't do much to keep the hoboes out or the chickens in.

Albert loved the woods, even that scraggly patch of weed trees near us that didn't amount to more than a couple of acres. I thought that maybe he wouldn't mind living in town so much if he lived near some woods and didn't have to feel crowded in by other houses. We moved because he needed a job to support us, but I didn't really know if he liked being a town dweller or not. He never said. We never did talk much about feelings or wherefores; mostly it was just
“What's for supper?”
or
“Do you have anything that needs sewn while I'm doing the mending?”