Prayers the Devil Answers Page 6

  “Thank you. I will.”

  As he stood up to leave, he seemed to make up his mind about something. With his hand on the doorknob he looked back at me. “One more thing, Mrs. Robbins: When I came in, I saw two boys playing outside in the yard. The older one is the boy who came to fetch me here. The little one is yours too?”

  “Yes sir. That would be Edward and George. We had two more before them, but they died as babies.”

  “How old is the younger boy?”

  “Georgie is going on four. Why? Is there a chance that they might catch this too?”

  “No. It isn’t that. It’s just that I think you should call the children in to say good-bye to their daddy. You know—just in case worse comes to worst.” He hesitated before he said quietly, “But, ma’am, don’t wait too long.” He hurried away then so that he wouldn’t hear me weeping.

  LONNIE VARDEN

  Lonnie Varden would not have chosen to come back to the Tennessee mountains, but he didn’t have any say in the matter, not unless he wanted to give up art and look for an ordinary job. He didn’t want to do that, so perhaps it was fortunate that there were no jobs to be had on account of the stock market crash, making the federal government decide to invent some. He knew he was lucky to be hired as an artist, no matter where they sent him.

  He had left the mountains before he was eighteen for a stint in the army, half a dozen years too late for the European war. He had hoped to get sent overseas—all artists yearned to see Paris, didn’t they?—but he never got any farther than a stateside army camp. At least he traveled through more of the world than any of his ancestors had seen in the past two hundred years, although he had seen most of it from the window of a train. Somewhere along the way he figured out that he liked drawing almost as much as he hated farming.

  Where he came from in the Southern mountains families were supposed to be close, but his kin must have been the exception. They seemed no more attached to one another than a flock of chickens. When he first went away his mother wrote him every now and again, but the letters came fewer and farther apart until finally they stopped altogether. He scarcely noticed. The one thing he had learned from his family—or perhaps inherited through the bloodline—was his father’s locked-in reserve, so absolute that no one ever knew what he thought or felt about anything. He thought that might explain why he took up drawing—because he couldn’t express his feelings any other way.

  Close-knit family or not, after the army it had seemed natural for him to head home to the farm, but when he was within a hundred miles of it the train stopped in Knoxville, and suddenly he knew he couldn’t face going back. He decided to stay in Knoxville, and take a chance on learning to be an artist. Perhaps there would have been greater opportunities in Philadelphia or New York, but to an uneducated kid from the back of beyond, Knoxville seemed a more manageable sort of place. If he did well there, maybe he could aim for bigger things. And if he failed miserably, he wasn’t too far from home: he could always go back, if he had to.

  He worked at laborer’s jobs, saving up for art lessons, and managed to take a few classes at the university. When he told people in the art community that he wanted to paint, they all said the same thing: what a pity you didn’t get here a couple of years earlier. Lloyd Branson, a master of historical paintings, lived in Knoxville, and had taken pupils at his studio on Gay Street. He was widely hailed for his two frontier paintings: Gathering of the Overmountain Men at Sycamore Shoals and The Battle of King’s Mountain. The latter had been lost ten years earlier when the Hotel Imperial, which owned it, had burned to the ground, taking the painting with it. But Mr. Branson had passed away in 1925, and no one else measured up to him.

  Lonnie made do with the teachers he could find and afford, and he earned his keep by preparing gesso and doing other odd jobs for working artists. That in itself had been an education, but it didn’t pay as much as laborer’s jobs. Still, he scraped along for four years, thinking that sooner or later he’d make enough contacts to get some well-paying commissions, or at least enough jobs to allow him to buy meat for supper every now and then.

  Even if the Depression hadn’t happened, he doubted he would ever have been able to support himself with his art. Very few painters ever did. One of his friends joked that the best preparation for being an artist was to be born into a wealthy family. Or perhaps he hadn’t been joking. Failing that, he said, the best alternative was to ingratiate yourself to the rich and tedious, until you found someone willing to keep an artist as a pet. It had worked for Michelangelo. There weren’t any Medicis around these days, and the pope wasn’t hiring, but America was sufficiently endowed with steel barons and railroad tycoons to make the idea seem possible.

  With an indifferent education and no skills aside from his art, Lonnie Varden faced the fact that he hadn’t much chance of finding better employment to support his vocation. The Depression hadn’t made any difference to him at first. He wasn’t particularly fazed by the poverty that the economic disaster had spawned; as far as he could tell, for an artist, being poor was a way of life. There wasn’t much call for artists even at the best of times, and as the country’s hard times dragged on, people no longer had money to spend on portraits of their children, or for acquiring pretty lake and cottage scenes to hang above the parlor mantelpiece. There was another world of art out there, too—people whose work hung in museums and sold for great sums to discerning collectors—but he had none of the qualifications to join that group, least of all the ability to ingratiate himself to rich and influential people.

  Despite his ardor, Lonnie wasn’t a natural talent as an artist, if the opinions of his teachers and fellow painters were anything to go by. At first, he could make a portrait resemble the person who posed for it, albeit without imbuing any life or personality into the image, and his attempts at landscapes, which he intended to appear as real as a photograph, showed no particular talent for composition or theme. He worked hard at it, though, and finally he learned how to put what he felt into the work so that other people could see it too.

  Before times became really hard, people had liked his early efforts well enough to shell out a couple of dollars to own one, usually to be given as a gift, but, as he learned more about the social side of art, he finally resigned himself to the fact that his work would never hang in museums or sell for fabulous sums in galleries. What he lacked was not technical precision but style. His carefully wrought paintings showed no originality; no distinctive touches set his work apart from that of anyone else. He was not bad as a draftsman—as a human camera, perhaps—but in terms of creativity he was at best mediocre, and finally he learned enough about art to realize that. Charm and social connections might have made up for that deficit, but he had found them even more difficult than learning to paint.

  For a while he paid thirty cents a lesson to be taught painting by an Austrian drawing master from the university. He learned about composition, perspective, and drawing the light, but he was also given an assessment of his worth. Despite his doubts about his talent, he had grieved for a bit when the tutor had confirmed his fears: “In the world of art, Varden, you are not an architect, but simply a carpenter. But, as you draw passably well, you can probably offload your paintings to middlebrow persons with aspirations to culture.”

  Even at the loss of the thirty-cent fees, he knew the instructor had meant to discourage him with that assessment of his work, but Lonnie was not particularly ambitious, and he thought that if he could manage to eke out a living from family portraits and scenes of meadows and cottages, he would not have to take any more jobs that required a great deal of effort, like ditch-digging or selling neckties. He had left his family long ago, and he had no desire to go back. They’d had no money to give him anyhow. Even if he could have afforded a university education, he doubted he could have qualified as an engineer or a doctor. Talented or not, he enjoyed making paintings, and if he could manage to keep body and soul toge
ther by selling his work for a couple of bucks, he would settle for that. He was just past twenty; if he tired of the struggle of being an artist, there was plenty of time to choose another path.

  Once after a couple of whiskies at the bar where they usually ended up after the art lessons, the drawing master had confided that there was one other benefit from being an artist that Lonnie might not have considered: it was an excellent way to meet likely-looking women, single and sometimes otherwise. It was a rare young lady who could resist the charm of an earnest and attentive gentleman who pronounced her beautiful and asked permission to paint her portrait. The drawing master advised him to take as long as possible to finish that sort of painting, gaining by that a few good dinners and sometimes, if the woman was the adventurous type, a temporary bedmate. “You will seldom make any money from those portraits, but the other benefits make up for it, eh?” said the drawing master. But that lesson, too, was lost upon Lonnie Varden. He was too shy to try it, even once.

  Over time he became rather good at dog portraits, and sometimes their fond owners would give him a few dinners as well as his fee, but romantic encounters with beautiful female models never materialized. He did not live well, and, to his surprise, he began to grow tired of the city, and to find himself thinking about those mountains he came from. He was making a living after a fashion, though, and he stayed where he was. In the early thirties, when the “middlebrow persons with aspirations to culture” fell on hard times and stopped buying paintings, Lonnie heard from some of the other local artists about a new government program aimed at preserving the arts by providing jobs for writers and artists. He didn’t think much of his chances, but he applied anyhow.

  ELLENDOR

  Sometimes in the dead of night during Albert’s illness, my mind began to wander, and I tried to think of things I ought to do, though mostly I forgot about them by morning. One thing I should have done was tell the sheriff’s office and maybe one of the local bureaucrats that Albert was ailing. When I did remember one of the things that needed doing, I still didn’t do it. I told myself I was too busy tending to my husband to bother about civilities, and partly that was true, but mostly I was shy about talking to strangers.

  I knew I ought to tell them, though, because Albert was sheriff. And he was dying.

  Albert was better at talking to strangers than I’ll ever be. Maybe he got used to dealing with people when he was younger, working summers at those logging camps. Then we moved to town and he took the railroad job, which gave him even more chances to become accustomed to new people. After a while, he became good at it. Whether Albert took to somebody or not, he could smile at them, find something pleasant to talk about, and look at ease, which generally made the other fellow cotton to him. He did it so well that most people didn’t realize that they never got any closer to Albert than they were on the day they met him. He’d pass the time of day with anybody, acting just as friendly as a hungry pup, but he never let people see what he thought or felt. Albert seemed so sociable, though, that hardly anyone ever noticed how little of himself he gave away in conversation.

  I asked him once if he thought he was acting false, being sociable to people he was indifferent to, but Albert said that was just the way you had to act if you lived in a town among strangers.

  “People don’t trust you if you’re standoffish, Ellie. They think you have something to hide.”

  “What you call friendly I call brown-nosing.”

  He laughed. “Stubborn, ain’t you? You’d better get used to town ways, hon, or else you’ll get downright lonely here. Well, considering which branch of the McCourry clan you come from I don’t reckon you ever would get lonely, but since you decided to live here in town, you’re obliged to get used to talking to people. Someday you may need a favor. From a friend you might get one, but there are mighty few strangers who will put themselves out for you. They have no reason to.”

  “Charity?” He knew I hated the very idea. “I’d never ask anybody for a favor, Albert.”

  “I know you wouldn’t want to, Ellendor, but someday you may have to.”

  Well, Albert was right. It looked like that day had come, and I wasn’t prepared for it. There hadn’t been time for me to get used to social ways—although maybe a lifetime wouldn’t have been long enough for me. I did try, but it came easier to Albert than it did to me.

  I could see that he was right about friends being useful, though, because when he needed a favor, he got one. As much as his fine rec­ord as a deputy, Albert’s genial gift of seeming with strangers had got him elected sheriff when the job came open.

  Maybe townspeople found it strange that I kept to myself, but the people where we came from know that I came by it naturally.

  In the little settlement I grew up in, our branch of the McCourry family was called the Solitary McCourrys, as opposed to the Preaching McCourrys or the Fiddling McCourrys. Last names weren’t much use where Albert and I came from. Every family up there was descended from the few pioneer families who had settled the mountains around the time of the revolution. For the first couple of generations every pioneer family had raised about a dozen children apiece, so, as Albert used to joke about it, “Sooner or later one of us married one of them, so we may be just fourth or fifth cousins, but we’re all family.” He reckoned that if you went back six or seven generations, you could find a common ancestor with just about everybody you knew, and many surnames were shared by people who considered one another no kin at all. With few last names for so many present-day families, the settlers’ descendants had to think up other ways to tell who was from which branch of the family.

  My kinfolk, the Solitary McCourrys, are known for keeping to themselves. Most of us were born that way. We weren’t shy; at least most of us would claim we aren’t. We can be just as helpful and friendly as anybody else when you meet us in church or at a community gathering. It is just that we don’t need a lot of people around us all the time, and we tend to think that socializing is just as much hard work as chopping firewood. When it comes to strangers, my family is as elusive as deer.

  We don’t have any use for charity either. We never want anybody to think we are asking for anything. We fend for ourselves, and I expect that because of this most of us are particular about who we help in times of trouble. If we know you well, and if you are an honest, hardworking fellow who has fallen on hard times through some misfortune, I reckon most of us would give you whatever help you need. We have no use for shiftless people who want a handout instead of a job, though; and we downright hate those slick fellers who try to float through life on their good looks or their oily friendliness, forever trying to charm people into making life easy for them. As far as the Solitary McCourrys are concerned, being obnoxious is a grave offense. We don’t ingratiate ourselves with other people, for fear of being thought pushy or scheming. We called ourselves honorable, but Albert always said we were mostly proud, and maybe he was right about that.

  When I first started keeping company with Albert as a young girl, some of the nosy old biddies in the community tried to warn him that he had taken up with one of the Solitary McCourrys, as if he hadn’t known that all along. He didn’t mind. Up the mountain my kinfolks’ proud and chilly ways didn’t matter much, because from one generation to the next people came to expect it. They knew the Solitary McCourrys didn’t intend to offend anybody with their remoteness; it was just that the family was made that way.

  When we were newlyweds all those years ago, Albert and I could not have foreseen that one day we would be pent up in a valley town among strangers. Here people judge you by what they see, without knowing anything about the ways of your family. But, for good or ill, here we were.

  It hadn’t been so bad when Albert worked at the railroad yard, or even when he got hired on as a deputy sheriff. None of Albert’s friends seemed to mind that I kept to myself. In fact, most of them thought I behaved just as a woman ought to: quiet, polite,
and never troubling anybody with opinions. Maybe the women found me as hard to talk to as I did them, but I tried to be pleasant, and since we had two boys to raise, nobody could fault me for sticking close to home. There are others around here who could do with a lesson from me, judging by the number of catty old gossips, wayward young wives, and contentious shrews there are in town.

  With George and Eddie and a husband to look after, I always kept busy—cooking, sewing, scrubbing, canning the summer pole beans and tomatoes—all of which gave me the perfect excuse to stay home.

  Life changed for me when the high sheriff got shot trying to catch a nest of moonshiners in the woods, but his term had almost expired anyhow, and Albert made up his mind to put his name on the ballot for sheriff in the upcoming election. I don’t think anybody else much wanted it, anyhow, seeing as how poor Buck Tyler had been the second sheriff in a row to get killed in the line of duty by lawbreakers. Everyone agreed that his death was a tragedy, but some said it was an unnecessary one. People said that with the whole country going bankrupt, you could hardly call it a crime if some poor fellows made whisky, just trying to get enough money to feed their families. It was better than begging, wasn’t it? And whether it was a crime was a matter of opinion too. All it meant was that the moonshine still operators had not paid the government a tax on their whisky. There were a lot of folks who thought that if the government was allowing people to go hungry then they had a lot of damn gall asking for a cut of some poor fellow’s hard-earned profits. Neither the whisky tax nor the Depression was the sheriff’s fault, of course. Sheriffs didn’t make the laws; they only carried out the orders of those that did, but maybe a sheriff ought to keep himself busy chasing the railroad tramps who stole chickens from honest folks, or looking into deaths that were a little too convenient for somebody. Bravery was only a virtue if you were doing something that needed doing, which, in their view, persecuting local bootleggers was not. They all said it was a shame that Sheriff Tyler got shot in the line of duty, but some of them also said that maybe the moonshiners had acted in self-defense, trying to protect what was theirs. I could see both sides of the argument, but nobody asked me what I thought, and I didn’t tell them.