Prayers the Devil Answers Read online

  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?”

  I guess it really didn’t matter whether Albert liked it here or not, though, because we were doing what we had to, but even if that had not been the case, I had no intention of going back up the mountain and living on sufferance from Henry and Elva. We would manage in town on our own.

  After I had spent three days tending him, scarcely leaving the room except to see to Eddie and George, Albert stopped thrashing and his breathing changed. That’s when I truly became afraid and gave up trying to care for him on my own. Digging two quarters out of my change purse in the dresser drawer, I called for Eddie and told him to fetch the doctor.

  “Eddie, your daddy’s took bad,” I said, as if he didn’t know that already. “You go and fetch the doctor, and if he’s busy, you stay with him until he can come with you, so you can show him the way.”

  “And so he won’t go tending to somebody else first,” said Eddie.

  “That too. Give him the quarters. Tell him it’s all we got.”

  We had some jars of blackberry jam left over from summer, and I thought I’d give the doctor one of those along with the quarters. People pay what they can these days, and I reckon by now the doctor is used to taking his fee in vegetables or fresh-killed chickens. He was raised in these parts, so maybe he took these things so that his patients wouldn’t feel beholden to him or feel shamed by charity. Most people’s pride walled them away from anybody except family, and when illness struck, they tended their own. Fetching a doctor was the last resort. If a family felt ashamed to be in the doctor’s debt, they’d not be sending for him again.

  After Eddie set off, I stayed there by the bedside, wondering how long we could make do with just the food we had in the house. Albert hadn’t got his paycheck on account of his being sick, and we had no money now to buy more. I’d had to choose, and I chose the doctor. That’s what people do in town: when someone took sick, they sent for doctors. Well, poultices and herbal home remedies first, same as up home, but finally, doctors.

  A passing freight train thundered past, shaking the house, its shrill whistle cutting through the silence. It shook me awake, for during my weary vigil I had nodded off in the chair. Albert did not stir. He still laid there, eyes shut tight, dead to the world, sleeping but yet not sleeping. He sank all the way into the mire of illness before I ever realized how serious it was, and before I knew that things were coming to an end. Back when Albert was still awake, when I had no inkling of what was to come, I did not try to talk to him about anything other than how he felt and whether he wanted to eat or sleep. Later on I wished I had thought to ask him bigger questions, but that would have meant admitting to myself and to him that he was not coming back. As bad as I needed to know things, I could not have done that. Taken away his hope of surviving—I could not have done that.

  Anyway, I hadn’t believed it myself. I kept thinking, But he can’t be dying. He’s not old.

  But by the end, I knew that if, by the grace of God, Albert did return to life long enough to speak even a few words, I would ask him about everything. By then I’d had many waking hours to sit by the bedside in silence and dwell on the big questions, knowing that the answers to questions would have to last me the rest of my life. I needed to ask him about money, about the boys, about a future without him, whether he wanted me to stay here or go back up the mountain. So many questions, but they all boiled down to a single one: What must I do?

  There had always been things we had to worry about—mostly money—but now all those day-to-day cares seemed meaningless compared to this last great sorrow that swallowed up all the rest. All I could think was: What must I do?

  chapter two

  Those first few months in town, even more than I feared the house shaking to pieces from the passing trains, I worried about the hoboes. They were mostly raggedy, unshaven men with gaunt faces and haunted eyes. There were so many men out of work these days: out of money, out of a place to live, and out of any hope for better times. With no homes to go back to, the hoboes roamed the country, riding in unlocked boxcars, camping out in hobo jungles near the railroad tracks. Some of them had given up on ever finding another job or a second chance at an ordinary life. They would forage, working a day or two when they could, and live off the land. Some of the vagrants were just sad husks, turned into failures by an economic disaster they did not understand, and I felt sorry for them. They were like chickens, headed for the chopping block but not knowing why. But I was uneasy about them, too, because some of them were drunks or dangerously angry men, maybe even deranged. Some of those men stole when they got the chance, so you didn’t leave a door unlocked or a window open.

  Somehow, the fact that some of these men were well spoken and obviously educated made it all the more terrible, because those once-respectable hoboes reminded me that our family might be only one stumble away from sharing the fate of these men: homelessness and hunger. Nothing was safe these days.

  Every so often a grimy man in tattered clothes would knock politely, asking for a cup of water or any food that could be spared, offering to do chores in exchange for a meal. If I didn’t think the tramp looked menacing, I would usually give him water in a tin cup and a hunk of cornbread if there was any left from supper. One day I told one of the ragged men, “We don’t have much to spare. Why don’t you go ask for a handout at the back door of one of those big houses on Elm Street? That’s where the rich folks live—the bankers, the lawyers, and the railroad bosses. Why, I reckon those folks could give you a whole chicken and never miss it.”

  The fellow shook his head. “Don’t you believe it, ma’am. Why, shoot, most of the time those rich folks up the hill won’t give you nothing at all. Poor people will, because they know what it’s like to be hungry and cold, and they realize how easy it is to get there. It’s because they understand that they
’ll give a man whatever they can spare, but rich people don’t think being down and out has anything to do with them or ever will. They think that being what we are is our own fault, and that maybe we’re drunkards, or lazy, or feeble-minded. They won’t give you a thing.”

  Some of the tramps tried to earn a few coins by selling intricately carved boxes fashioned with pocket knives, or they might make wooden toys or whatnots out of scrap from old orange crates and cast-off lumber. Some of their handiwork was as good as anything you’d see in a dime store, but I never did buy one. Pretty as they were, they were a reminder of someone losing everything, and I didn’t want that reminder.

  Albert and I had been together for what seemed like forever. We met in church when we were children, the way most folk up the mountain meet the one they will someday marry. Sixteen years back, when I was two months away from being twenty and Albert was nigh on twenty-two, we tied the knot at that same country church where we met. That wasn’t why we got married there, though. That little white church had been both our families’ place of worship for close to a hundred years. For us, all the ceremonies of life took place there: baptisms, weddings, funerals.

  There was no room for a married couple on my family’s land, not that I’d have wanted to live with them anyhow. What’s the point of taking a husband unless you get to leave home? We could have built a place of our own, but there was no land to spare, because my daddy had my younger brothers to think of. The boys would be needing land for themselves one day, and keeping them living close by meant that they could still help Daddy with the family farm.

  So as newlyweds Albert and I had little choice but to go back to the farm where he grew up and move in with his parents and Henry, his only surviving brother. I agreed to go because we were just starting out and there really wasn’t any other choice, but our stay was never supposed to be permanent—just until we could manage to afford a place of our own—but we lived there longer than we or they ever thought we would.

  Albert’s older brother Virgil, the one who had been expected to take over the farm, went off with Pershing to fight the Kaiser, but mostly he went off to see the world, and the pity of it is just how little of it he got to see. Poor Virgil caught the influenza in an army camp in France just a week or so after he got there, before he even made it to the front. Virgil never came back, not even in a box to rest forever on the family land. If he had a grave somewhere in France, none of his family would ever see it. His mother put a little mound of stones at the far end of the yard, next to the wooded ridge. She wedged a wooden cross among the stones, planted flowers around it, and kept it weeded, summer and winter. Virgil wasn’t there, but no one wanted to remind her of that. Later on we buried our first two babies up there beside him. Our first, a little blue-eyed girl, came too early, and she didn’t thrive from the very beginning. We lost her before a month had passed. The next one, Albert Jr., died in his first winter. After that no more babies came for a few years, and I thought that was the end of it, but maybe my body just had to lie fallow for a while, same as the fields do from time to time, before things will grow there again. Sure enough, I was all of twenty-six by the time Eddie came along, and then after six more years of barrenness, we had little George.

  After the passing of Virgil and our first two babies, Albert’s parents seemed to get older real quick. They just began to fade out, which meant that Albert was obliged to stay and help his father with the farm work, because his other brother Henry, the change-of-life baby, had been only ten years old when we got married, so it would be another six or seven years before he could handle a man’s share of the farm work.

  Albert didn’t want the farm, and he would just as soon have left, and I was praying that we could go anywhere else, but it wouldn’t have been right. Daddy Robbins was getting too old to manage on his own, and we didn’t want it on our heads if he killed himself with overwork or perished in a farming accident. So we stayed on because we had to.

  After a dozen years of living with Albert’s family, the farmhouse got crowded. Little Henry had finally grown up and found himself a wife. That was about the time that Albert and I had our last baby, George Albert Robbins. I had secretly been hoping for a little girl, to replace the firstborn that we lost, but everybody else was overjoyed that we had a son. Georgie was a fat and lusty summer baby, so we knew we had a good chance of keeping him.

  Soon after Georgie was born Albert’s father had a heart attack. He lived through it, but it left him frail, which meant that he was able to do even less work than before. I still wanted us to set out on our own, but it seemed heartless to want to abandon the family just when Daddy Robbins needed us more than ever. Besides, Albert’s parents doted on the new grandbaby and it would have been cruel to take him away. So we stayed on. Somehow, for another year, we all managed to jostle along together: three families in one house, but I had started to feel like a bear on a chain, and I prayed we’d be able to leave.

  When we lived up the mountain Albert would sometimes hire on to one of the logging crews so that we would have some extra money for shoes or for cans of food to stretch out our winter food supply. A paycheck meant ready cash to replace something around the farm that needed fixing or replacing. The logging jobs never lasted long, though, and neither did the money. The timber company always closed down the operation before the cold rains of November. Albert seemed happy harvesting timber or gathering ginseng in the woods to sell to the drugstore in town. He liked the countryside and working outdoors, as long as it wasn’t farming. He always said that farming was like pouring sand down a rat hole: no matter how long you did it, you wouldn’t get anywhere. I thought it was strange that he felt like that because his folk had been farmers nigh on all the way back to Noah.

  I told him I couldn’t see where logging or laying track for the railroad got you anywhere either, but Albert’s answer to that was that at least the trees stayed cut down and a stretch of track didn’t have to be laid but once. Farming, though, meant doing the same thing in the same place over and over, year in and year out. “Same as housework,” I said, and he laughed like he thought I was joking.

  So we kept living on the family farm. The soil wasn’t good, though, and it never produced much in the way of a living. Splitting the land between Albert and Henry would have ruined both of them. Maybe Albert knew that and just said he didn’t like farming to spare his father from having to choose between them.

  As bad as I wanted out of there, I tried not to complain about the close quarters and the lack of privacy, because as Albert’s parents began to fade into the frailty of old age staying on seemed more like a kindness than good sense. When old Miz Robbins’s sight began to fail, Henry’s wife, Elva, and I took over most of the cooking and the heavy work around the house. I tended the little flower path around the memorial to Virgil because my babies were there too. Between the two of them Albert and Henry shouldered more of the farm chores as their daddy’s strength ebbed away. Finally, though, the old man’s heart gave out, and we buried him at the end of October—not in the family burying ground, but out beside Virgil’s plot near the graves of our first two children, which is what he said he wanted. Then in late winter a bout of flu carried off Albert’s mother. She slipped away so gently that it was as if she was glad to go. “She followed him to the grave,” people said at the funeral.

  Since there were two less people living on the farm, it seemed strange that the homeplace began to feel too small to house all of us. When she first married Henry, Elva had been a quiet, biddable girl, but she grew up quick and headstrong, and now she let her temper show when she was displeased, which was often. When running the kitchen became a war of wills between Elva and me, I made up my mind to go. I told Albert that since he didn’t care for farming anyhow, it was time we left the place to Henry, and started looking for somewhere else to go. Sooner or later Henry would have to manage to run the farm on his own, and he might as well start now.

  By
the time we were ready to leave, my parents had been dead for half a dozen years. One by one, all my brothers and sisters got married and went elsewhere—the boys to the car factories in Detroit, and the girls to their husband’s house or off to try their luck at city life. We all agreed to sell the farm, and split the money among the five of us. It hadn’t come to much, but I put my share in the bank to save up for the day when we would be on our own. Money was so scarce in Mr. Hoover’s Depression that I reckon we were lucky to find anybody to buy the farm at all.

  The friction between me and Elva was the last straw that made Albert ask Willis about railroad jobs in town. Soon after, we headed down the mountain to make a new start. Our new place might be shabby, small, and owned by somebody else, but at least we had it all to ourselves.

  I didn’t see any harm in parceling out what food we could spare to the hungry men who came begging at the door, but before long Albert put a stop to my charity. All those tramps seemed so dirty and desperate, he said, you couldn’t tell by looking at them which ones were dangerous and which were not. He reckoned the only safe thing to do was to trust none of them. He never said why he decided that, but maybe he had heard something down at the railroad shop. There must have been an incident; some tramp somewhere must have robbed some woman and killed her. Anyhow, one day he made me promise not to open the door to any of them anymore.

  When he said that, I put down the dishrag I had been using and swung around to face him. I expect he could tell from the look on my face that I was as close to disagreeing with him as I ever got. I took a deep breath to fuel my arguing. “I seem to remember, Albert, that the Bible says we are bidden to help those in need.”