Prayers the Devil Answers (2 page)

She had tried to calm her nerves by adjusting the table setting, making sure that the plate was not too close to the edge, and that the flatware was neatly spaced on either side. When she reached behind her to straighten the knife beside the dinner plate, her hands were shaking. At the last instant, the knife slipped through her fingers, missing the chair, and striking the floor with a thump that echoed in the silence. When the others turned to see what made the sound, she slid the knife under the table with her foot, and then kept still, waiting for them to turn away again. After a few moments the others lost interest in the disruption, so she thought it might still be all right.

When she was sure no one was looking, Celia bent her knees so that she could touch the floor, and reached down, feeling under the table for the knife. There it was, a few inches from the chair. She knew she ought to tell the others what had happened, so that they could end the ritual before it could jinx them, but she kept silent. If the others knew, they would scold her, and blame her for spoiling the evening. She blinked back tears. Why tell them anything? After all it was just a silly game. Why risk their wrath and spoil their fun over a simple mistake?

Before she could make up her mind to speak, the first of the human guests arrived—Aurelia's best beau, of course, and the grinning girls took hold of his arms and gently guided him backward to his appointed place at the table. Sarah's young man came in a few minutes later and was seated next to the other suitor. The Dumb Supper had begun, and Celia's chance to admit her mistake passed.

While the others were paying attention to the young man, Celia made up her mind. She picked up the knife and wiped the blade on her skirt. Aurelia was smiling and hugging the others, overjoyed but
careful to make no sound. No one noticed that Celia did not join in. No one noticed Celia much at all.

She pushed the knife back into its proper place on the table, but, worried that she might drop it again and be found out, she turned and looked at the table—only for an instant—just to make sure that the knife was not too close to the table's edge.

The Dumb Supper went on without further incident. Sarah and Aurelia's would-be suitors wolfed down the cold, unsalted food as if it were a feast, and grinned their approval, though, of course, the girls could not turn to see their expressions. The guests must eat and leave without a word or a sign to anyone. The girls whose sweethearts came were triumphant at this token of esteem; the other four chairs remained empty throughout the meal. Perhaps the ritual silence was a blessing after all; no one could make comments about the vacant chairs or boast of her own good fortune.

At the end of the supper, still four hours from daybreak, the girls gathered up their plates and the leftover food, which had gone unclaimed, and set out for home, still keeping the silence for good measure.

In the days afterward, when they did laugh and talk about the adventure, the two betrothed girls were careful not to say that no one had come for the others. Maybe someone had come for them. The ritual was a channel to old magic. It might have summoned phantom guests, invisible and silent, a sign that these girls had yet to meet their future husbands. That, too, could be good news—they might meet someone from outside the community, a rich and successful gentleman. Who knew? Perhaps these girls would be the fortunate ones after all. They might travel far from home to strange cities and distant places, instead of ending up right where they started as brides of eighteen: a worn-out woman, old at thirty-five and forever bound to a hardscrabble mountain farm.

A year later, though, at Aurelia's wedding to her dinner guest,
Celia told one of the Greer girls about dropping the knife at the Dumb Supper.

“Why didn't you say something then?” asked Eunice Greer, wide-eyed with alarm.

“Maybe no one will ever marry me,” she said a little sadly.

The Greer girl nodded and managed to smile. “You're young yet, Celia. You'll meet someone one of these days.” But she was thinking that if the Dumb Supper really was a magic ritual, then worse than mere spinsterhood might come from that mistake.

chapter one

I
f you looked close enough, you could tell he wasn't sleeping. This was something else. The sheet was rumpled and sweat-soaked from his thrashing in delirium. Sometimes he'd be burning up, and struggling to tear the covers away from himself. At other times he
would shiver and moan, no matter how many quilts I put on the bed. All without waking up. No matter how often I wiped his forehead with a damp rag, beads of sweat still glistened on his brow, and when I spoke to him, he never seemed to hear. He would not come back from oblivion.

He's not even forty yet
. That thought rose unbidden to my mind, and that's when deep inside me I knew the truth that I would not admit or even
think about. No matter how well I tended him or how much I cared, he was going to die. Soon.

Soon.

I reckon things might have been different if we hadn't moved to town. Times were hard for everybody these days. Mr. Hoover's Depression had stretched on into President Roosevelt's term with no end in sight, but the fate of the stock market did not matter to the likes of us, just as long as there were jobs nearby for Albert. But all the jobs
were in town, which meant a whole new set of problems. At least if you lived out in the country, you might not have any ready money or store-bought goods, but nobody ever went cold or hungry. You could always be sure there would be logs for the woodstove and food to put on the table at suppertime. Country people could hunt the fields and forest for squirrels and rabbits, same as the red hawk did. A family could eat good on rabbit stew thickened with flour, cooked with carrots, taters, and onions from the garden. It cost little enough to keep a flock of chickens if you had land enough for them to forage on, which saved the cost of feed. Chickens would give you eggs and a good Sunday dinner every now and then. Looking back on it, I can see that the country was the best place to ride out hard times.

Back then, though, moving to town seemed like the right thing to do. Albert's cousin Willis worked in the machine shop of the railroad. When he came up the mountain for that summer's dinner on the ground at the church cemetery, Albert asked him about jobs in town. The graveyard picnic was held to honor our dead kinfolk, but Albert said people ought to think about helping out the living, too. Willis saw the sense in that; he told Albert that if we were willing to move to town, he could get him hired on at the rail yard. After they talked it over, Albert asked me what I thought about it.

To me a regular paycheck sounded like an answer to prayer.

Ready money meant that we could buy food that didn't grow on the farm—oranges, coffee beans, and sugar. Money meant shoes for the boys when they outgrew their old ones, and maybe a store-bought dress for myself every once in a while, or at least a home-stitched one made with cloth that hadn't once been a flour sack. In town we might even manage to eat something for dinner besides stewed chicken or rabbit. I thought that if we could afford to eat pot roast once a week, maybe Albert could put on some weight, instead of having his ribs poking out, looking like a half-starved hound. With a little more meat on his bones, I hoped he wouldn't catch so many of those head colds
that made him cough and wheeze all the way through every winter.

The town school would be better for the boys, too; no more one-room schoolhouse, where the teacher's attention had to be split up eight different ways and there weren't enough books to go around. People said that town schools had blackboards and books aplenty, and, best of all, they split the pupils up into different grades, so that they shared a class with schoolmates their own age, and there was one teacher for every single one of those classrooms. Eddie was bright, and, just like me, he loved to read, even if it was just those old dime novels about the Wild West. Georgie was still too little to read on his own, but he'd sit and listen as long as anybody cared to read to him from a storybook. I hoped that better schooling would help the boys go further in life than their daddy ever had. Albert could read and cipher well enough, but he wasn't what you would call educated. Never had the chance, coming from where we did.

Not that Albert was a bad man—he wasn't. He worked long and hard, even when he was sick as a dog, with never a word of complaint, never drinking his paycheck away, or making wagers with it. Everybody saw him as rock-steady, but he was nearing middle age now, and it was plain that no matter how hard he worked he wouldn't ever earn much more than it took to pay the bills and put food on the table. If it was the Lord's will, I wanted a better life than that for Eddie and George, and maybe a town school would make the difference.

I told Albert: “They could be anything; if they get good schooling and work as hard as you do, there's no telling what they could do in life.”

We went back and forth about it for most of the week, talking in hoarse whispers in the bed so as not to be overheard through the wall. Finally Albert sighed and said, “All right, Ellendor. If you're dead set on it, why, we'll go.”

Every time he moaned, I'd open my eyes and jerk back awake.

Although I tried not to, every now and then I'd catch my
self dozing off in the chair. Ever since he took sick, Albert had been in our bed alone, and for all that time I had sat in that chair and watched him every minute I wasn't tending to the boys. I didn't want him to wake up and find me gone, or be in need of something and have to do without. I kept on telling myself that he would wake up—
any hour now,
I thought, and then it became
any day
.

But he didn't.

If there had been someone I could ask to come in and sit a spell with Albert while I got something to eat or to sleep a little in the boys' room, it would have been a blessing. But I was on my own. Even Eddie was too young to watch over his daddy. I couldn't bear to think of our boy keeping watch
there alone, in case Albert should die while his son looked on. There might have been ladies I knew from church who would have sat with Albert so that I could rest, but I didn't feel like I knew any of them well enough to go asking favors. They weren't family. Cousin Willis was the only family we had in town, but he had no wife to be counted on, and besides, he had his job at the railroad yard taking up most of his time. Men are no use in a sickroom anyhow.

I must have slept sometime, but I can't remember doing it. I had worn the same clothes for days, not that it mattered compared to everything else. I kept thinking that surely Albert's fever would break soon, and once the crisis had passed, I could go and tend to
myself. For days I waited for him to begin to recover on his own, but instead he seemed to sink deeper into himself, shutting out food and water, light and sound. Shutting out the world, like he was getting ready to let go.

I tried to pray every now and then, but it didn't give me any comfort. I kept asking the Lord to let my husband wake up and come back to me, but gradually I began to realize that if God had answered my prayer, then His answer had been
no.

The time came when I was more afraid than hopeful. The practical
side of me—the one that took me through hog killing and childbearing and doing without—told me that I ought to be thinking about a future without Albert, but I felt some kind of superstitious dread that if I started making plans for a life without him—if I so much as thought such a thing—then my acceptance of his fate would cause him
to die. I know it was whistling in the dark to believe that if I didn't plan ahead he would have to recover, but it gave me a feeling of control when in fact there wasn't any. Things just happened, and nothing I could do would change what was meant to be.

Finally, it felt like our little rented house had shrunk to just this one small room.

We knew that living in town meant we would have to pay rent, of course, but we were resigned to that. At least Albert and I had the sense to make the trip down the mountain to town to look things over before we went forward with our plans to move—no use wishing for something if you can't make it so. Albert said it wasn't as if we'd be cast alone among strangers. Cousin Willis had promised to look after us, at least at first.

True to his word, Willis took Albert to work with him down at the railroad yard and managed to convince the shop foreman to hire him on. Albert was good with machinery. All the men in the Robbins family were—always tinkering with a broken clock or a misfiring gun. It just came naturally to them. I think they'd rather take a machine apart than to use it.

When we knew he would have a job with the railroad, Willis took us down to see one of the deacons from church and explained about his country kinfolk who were fixing to move to town and needed a helping hand. We just stood there like geese and let him do all the talking. Well, we were new in town then.

That church deacon said he thought there was more to religion
than just praying, because the Lord told us to love one another, so he took it upon himself to help us find a place we could afford, which wasn't much. He claimed he knew everybody in town, and that if there was a house to be had, he would find it for us. When we made our minds up to rent one of the houses the deacon showed us, Albert said that the fellow's kindness made us beholden to him, so he reckoned that settled the question of where we would go to church. Country people pay what they owe—be it money or favors or meanness. Sugar for sugar; salt for salt.

It seemed like I sat there at the bedside for months instead of days. Sometimes I read the Bible, not so much for
comfort as to forget all the other things I'd rather not worry about. I didn't know how Albert had caught this illness, and that made me afraid that the rest of us would get it too. Georgie was too little to survive such a sickness; maybe Eddie was too. Back when I was still in school, during the Great War that was, an epidemic of influenza hit the big cities and the army camps across the country, and it wasn't the old folks or the babies who mostly died. It was the soldiers, and strong, healthy people in their prime—like Albert was now. I worried, too, that I might be taken, but only because if I fell ill, there would be no one to look after the boys. It was for their sakes that I made myself eat when I fixed food for them, for I had no appetite and scarcely tasted anything that passed my lips.