Prayers the Devil Answers by Sharyn McCrumb Read Free Book Online

targets not by accident, but because I was aiming at them.
    After a few more shooting lessons from Albert we both figured I could protect myself if I had to. The gun was in a drawer where I could get at it quickly, and I kept on practicing until even at twenty feet my aim was dead-on. I was ready, but no hobo ever tried to break into the house, and after months passed and nothing happened, my fear of the homeless men dwindled to a faint uneasiness. The family had finally learned to sleep through the roar of the passing trains in the night. Eddie got used to the ways of the town school, and Albert seemed happy enough working at the machine shop with Willis. As for me, I found out that the household chores—cooking, scrubbing floors,washing clothes—were the same whether you lived in town or on the mountain. I did get to buy some store-bought cloth to sew a new dress so that I wouldn’t feel like such a ragamuffin when we went to church. Mostly, though, any spare money from Albert’s wages went for shoes for the boys and to replace their clothes when they outgrew them.
    By the time a year had passed, we had settled into the community, and we even had a few friends. Well, acquaintances, more like. Where we came from, friend is a word folks take pretty seriously. Albert got to know the other men from work; Eddie and George found playmates from the nearby houses, and I got acquainted with the women of the church, though I never said much. Mostly I just let them talk, figuring I’d learn something, and they seemed happy to have someone to listen to them. When I really wanted company I read a book, and I was thankful for the little public library. For all of us the town was beginning to feel like home.
    Of the neighbors we had, I had got to know Annie Slocombe the best, but it wasn’t because the two of us had much in common. We had both married young, and we both had little children, but that’s as far as the similarities went. I was older than she was and, in every way that I could see, more fortunate. I’d see Annie out in her yard now and again, usually hanging up a clothesline full of diapers, and even when she smiled she looked like a whipped hound. I kept to myself right enough, but that was because I was satisfied with my own company. The Slocombes came from Pennsylvania, she told me once, swept along by the railroad as if it was a flooded creek carrying rootless things along its path. She never said why they left home, but neither of them had family around here, and they kept to themselves, as if they were afraid of anybody getting too close. Annie looked like she had been set down to live among crocodiles and dare not turn her back for an instant. Maybe she had reason to be leery of the world. A time or two, when our windows were open, I’d hear shouting coming from the Slocombe place—only one voice, and it wasn’t hers.
    Judging by the way he yelled and ordered her around, you’d have expected Annie’s husband to outweigh her by fifty pounds and to be older than she was by a decade, but he wasn’t a big bruiser at all. He was a wiry banty rooster of a man with slicked-back hair and a hand-rolled cigarette hanging off his lip every time I saw him. You’d think that a strong wind would blow him away, but he was like a little yappy dog, far likelier to bite than a big old hound: a big attitude in a small package. Maybe it was because he was little that he bullied his wife: it was the only chance he had to outrank anybody. He might have been a year or two older than Annie, but it was hard to tell their ages. Being slight gave him the look of a teenage boy, while Annie’s youth was running out awful fast. Her hair was scraggly and dull, and she had gone from slender to scrawny sooner than she ought to have. At this rate, she’d be an old woman at thirty, and if meanness didn’t get her husband killed, he’d probably still look twenty-five when he