Prayers the Devil Answers (36 page)

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

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.

ALSO BY SHARYN McCRUMB

Nora Bonesteel's Christmas Past

King's Mountain

The Ballad of Tom Dooley

The Devil Amongst the Lawyers

Ghost Riders

The Songcatcher

The Ballad of Frankie Silver

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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First Atria Books hardcover edition May 2016

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Interior design by Kyoko Watanabe

Jacket design by Chelsea McGuckin

Jacket image: Mountain Landscape by Mark Owen/Trevillion Images; Gallows by iStock Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4767-7281-3

ISBN 978-1-4767-7285-1 (ebook)