Prayers the Devil Answers (21 page)

Tyree nodded. “That's right. If we wanted to take responsibility for the law's decisions, we'd have the judge's job—or yours.”

They both laughed then, and we talked of other things while we finished our coffee. It was just an idle conversation to pass the time, that's all. Shooting the breeze about a case in New Jersey that had nothing at all to do with us.

Except, as it turns out, it did.

The commissioners generally left us alone, too, at first, for which I was uncommonly grateful. I guess they were waiting to see if I could handle the job or not, or whether the deputies could manage to work for a woman. When neither of those things proved to be a problem, they still held off, giving me time to decide whether or not I wanted to quit on account of having young children to raise. But if anything, I was growing more sure of myself as acting sheriff, better at making
decisions and faster with the assignments and the paperwork. I got accustomed to talking to strangers and making them believe that they could trust us to take care of their troubles. In fact, as the days passed I was beginning to think that the job wouldn't give me much trouble at all.

If only Lonnie Varden hadn't killed his wife.

THE KILLING

She wasn't looking at him, or even at the uneven path beneath her feet. He had warned her once to watch where she was going, but she was too busy looking at the trees, her new camera dangling from a strap on her wrist.

“Look at that redbud over there under the poplars. With the sun hitting it, it looks like stained glass. The trees are mostly bare, but the forest is aflame. See the new leaves? The ones that are the shade of yellow green that only lasts a week or so.”

“Yes. You said that last year, too, Ceil.”

“But don't you think it's glorious here in the spring? I've lived here all my life, but every April the beauty of it still takes me unawares.”

“I guess I stopped noticing.”

“But you're an artist! You should notice it more than anybody.”

“Used to be.” He had worked at the sawmill for more than a year, and the feeling of being connected to some universal ideal of art was long gone. The only painting he was expected to do anymore was to hand-letter the signs for the office and the prices on cards for each lot of lumber. He had wanted to settle down with Celia, but when they did marry, life changed for both of them more than either had quite expected. By the time he had finished painting the mural of the frontier fort on the post office wall they had settled into being a couple, recognized as such by the community. By then, avoiding marriage—
even if he had wanted to—would have been like swimming upstream against a strong current. Celia Pasten was intelligent and easy to talk to, and she thought he was a wonderful artist—all qualities that had been lacking in the girls he had previously known. With her he was no longer lonely, and that counted most.

At their wedding reception in the church hall, when one of the Greers went through the receiving line, she leaned in close and whispered in the bride's ear, “You see, Celia? Dropping that old knife at the Dumb Supper didn't do you a bit of harm. Here you are, married after all!”

With a frozen smile, Celia went on shaking hands, but she remembered very little of the reception after that. She would tell her new husband about that silly courting tradition. Someday.

Remembering the Dumb Supper made her wonder if her new husband really had been a gift from fate, conjured up by the ancient ritual. He wasn't very tall, but he was as handsome as she could have wished for. He wasn't rich or trained for a grand profession, like medicine or law, but he was an artist, which was more than a profession, really. To her that meant he had been touched with some sort of divine gift for creation; the less she understood his vocation, the more she was in awe of it. Aside from that, her new husband seemed gentle and serious, and perhaps most wonderful of all, Celia thought he looked rather like a prince out of a fairy tale. Because she had never thought of herself as anything but timid and plain, Lonnie's air of quiet confidence and his calmness around people seemed as great an accomplishment—and as difficult—as wing walking or sword swallowing: fascinating to watch, but not something you'd ever attempt yourself.

She had known she would have to resign from teaching when she married, but she hadn't quite realized how much her job defined who she was. Before she became a bride she had been the community's
schoolmarm, respected for her knowledge and her independence, as exalted and different from the other women as a pagan priestess, but now she had surrendered all that to become just another wife, no better than the women who had not gone to college, perhaps even outranked by them, because they had children and she did not. It chafed a bit to be dependent on someone else, no matter how beloved, when you had been accustomed to earning your own money and spending it as you pleased, without having to take anyone else's preferences into account.

For his part, marriage meant settling down. People thought that artists could draw anywhere, anytime, and maybe some of them could, but for him the unfettered, itinerant life of a freelance painter had turned out to be the part of the vocation he had valued most. When he lost that, the desire to create art seemed to go with it. He didn't miss it at first. He was happy with Celia, and he would not say that he regretted choosing a life with her over the one he had before, but sometimes he wished he didn't see his future as a straight line leading directly through the decades to the grave—no turns, no shadows, no surprises, except, perhaps, unpleasant ones. Maybe that was why he had done what he had—just to put a curve in that monotonous straight line.

And now he couldn't think of anything else. There must be some way to tell her, but he had been unable to find one. The burden of all this worry had driven all thoughts of nature and beauty out of his mind.

“Spring doesn't inspire you?”

He shrugged. “Not particularly. Anyhow, it doesn't last long.”

“No. Two weeks at most, but I wish I could make it last forever.”

He looked down at the little Brownie camera his wife was holding. “Well, I guess that's what cameras are for. So you'll remember. But a
blurry little snapshot in black-and-white? I don't think that's gonna do it, honey.”

“Well, the pictures won't mean anything to anybody else, but at least they will help me remember how it was until next year. I wish you'd draw a picture of spring for me.” She pushed a bare branch out of her way, and stepped off the path, aiming the camera at the pink-flowered tree lit by a shaft of sunlight. She took a few more steps, peered through the viewfinder, went closer and backed away again, turning the camera this way and that. After a few more tries, she looked back at him, frowning. “I don't know. Maybe you're right. Without color, it might just look like ordinary leaves. I'm trying to think in black and white.”

“Just think of the movies.” The woods looked mostly black-and-white to him, anyway: dark tree trunks and barren limbs, brown underbrush still locked in winter, and above it all a clabbered sky the color of milk. You could make them interesting in a painting, but not in a snapshot taken with a cheap camera.

They had a quick lunch after church, and then she suggested a Sunday afternoon stroll through the woods and up the ridge. He went along, because it wasn't worth saying he wanted to stay home and having a discussion about it, since it didn't matter where he was, really. He knew he would barely notice the signs of spring, scarcely hear her voice, trapped as he was inside a fog of his own thoughts. Like clouds, it moved away sometimes, especially when something else distracted him, but it always came back. He couldn't talk about that, though. Better to walk along in the April sunshine, see her joy in the coming of spring, and try to feel a little of it himself. He just hoped he would remember to answer when she spoke to him.

The little box camera had been his gift to her at Christmas, but the winter had been harsh, giving her little chance to use it. The lens needed so much light that it was best to take the photographs outdoors, but there weren't many pictures worth taking in freezing, wet
weather, even if you were willing to brave the elements, which Celia wasn't. She put him in mind of a cat—staying inside when it was cold, and always looking for the warmest place to sit. Now, though, she was venturing out on this damp, cool day, because she was so anxious to try out the camera. He was surprised by how much she liked it. She had always seemed most pleased by gifts of jewelry or perfume. Once, early on, he had given her a mechanical carpet sweeper for her birthday, thinking it much more effective than a straw broom, but she'd cried when she saw it. Sometime after that, he worked out why: she never thought she was pretty, no matter what he said to the contrary, and any present that did not honor her femininity diminished her even more.

He thought Celia's problem was a lack of confidence. Someone else he knew had a cheap prettiness concocted with hair bleach and dime store lipstick and rouge, and the blowsy plumpness that made her look like a slattern no matter what she wore, but that one never doubted her attractiveness, either from vanity or from the certainty that free and casual offers of sex was all the beauty that most men required. That woman and Jonella were as different as chalk and cheese, and he had taken too long to realize that they were much the same after all.

Maybe he should have bought his wife a string of glass pearls or a flower brooch, but somehow it would have felt like lying. Instead, after several birthdays and Christmases of costume jewelry and drugstore perfume, he had risked buying her the camera, hoping that she would use it to focus on something besides herself. Much to his relief, it seemed to have worked. She was delighted. Having never had sisters or any serious girlfriends before her, he never knew what to do or say when a woman cried. The sight of her tears was so unsettling that he would do almost anything to avoid causing it—or at least to keep her from finding out that he had given her cause to weep. He trudged after her through the wet woods, scarcely noticing the faint signs of spring.

The trees were still mostly bare and the ground was muddy from the March rains, but nevertheless this windy, sunny afternoon made a welcome change from the bleak chill of the weeks preceding it. It was good to get outside again. They had been married nearly three years, long enough for this walk in the woods to be a picture-taking expedition and not a romantic outing. It wasn't that they didn't care for each other, he told himself, just that eventually the newness of anything wears off, and you settle into a familiar routine without thinking much about it anymore. Their silences were companionable, a sign that they were comfortable together. Mostly they suited each other very well. He had just lately come to realize that, and to wish he had known it sooner.

The day had been sunny when they set out from home, but the wind had blown clouds across the valley and shrouded the ridge they were climbing toward, dimming her hope of seeing a vista of spring. She didn't complain, though, or suggest turning back. After a long winter cooped up indoors, it was good to be out. Besides, the weather was changing so quickly that it was hard to tell how the ridge would look when they finally reached it.

Now the sun was playing hide-and-seek, changing the light so much from one minute to the next that taking photographs in the forest would produce uncertain results. The camera was a cheap one, all he could afford, and, because it was intended to be used for family snapshots, its lens could not be adjusted to accommodate changing conditions. She had been pleased by it, though, and that was all that mattered. He hoped the quality of the pictures would not change that.

She was still giving the redbud tree an appraising stare. There were only eight pictures on a roll of film, and what with the cost of developing, she wouldn't want to waste any. After a moment she shrugged and turned away without taking the picture. “You're right, Lon. The flowers are beautiful, but in black and white that tree won't look any different from the ordinary green ones.” The clouds shifted, and the
ray of sunlight no longer illuminated the tree. “Maybe you ought to try to draw it instead of me trying to photograph it.”

“Take your picture and we'll see. I can use your snapshot as a model and do the colors from memory.”

She smiled happily at this compromise and went back to looking for ways to make the tree worth photographing. She tried kneeling down to see if an upward angle made a better shot, but after a long look through the viewfinder, she stood up again. “I don't know. Maybe the sun will come back. I guess I could take just one picture to see how it comes out.”

“But by the time you get the pictures back from the drugstore, the redbud will have stopped blooming.”

“Yes, but then I'd know for next year.” She looked back at the tree. “It might look pretty against the bare branches of the tall trees. I wonder why they call it a redbud when its flowers are bright pink.”

He shrugged. “It has other names. My granddaddy used to call them spicewood trees, because people used the green twigs from them to season venison.”