Prayers the Devil Answers by Sharyn McCrumb Page B

sake, because he wanted it so much, I went along. I smiled until my cheeks ached and shook hands until my fingers were numb, all the while longing to be back in our little house by the railroad tracks.
    The sacrifice was worth it, though. Albert wanted the job so much that I couldn’t help but be glad for him when he won. Besides, the job of sheriff was perhaps the only chance he would ever have to get ahead, and for all our sakes I hoped he would do well at it.
    Now no one would ever know whether or not he could have made a go of this opportunity, for he had been the high sheriff just shy of three months when he was stricken with the fever that carried him away forever. It was ironic: I had prayed so hard that Albert would be safe in the job—not be shot down by criminals nor killed in a car wreck while pursuing them—that it had not occurred to me that, young as he was, he should take ill and die of pneumonia, just the same as an ordinary person with a safer occupation. Prayers the devil answers ,they used to call it up home: when you asked for something and your wish was granted in such a way that it did you no good at all. Albert had not been killed in the line of duty, but he died all the same.
    Now he was gone, and in the space of a week—from when he first took sick until the morning he died—I could feel myself growing old. Ever after, I thought, my life would stretch on and on, with no one ever sharing my bed again, no one holding me as Albert had. No one I had known all my life and could trust completely. I was only thirty-six.
    Besides all the other sorrows, the loss of Albert meant that I would have no one to shoulder the burden of coping with strangers. Eddie adjusted to town living quicker than I did, on account of his being young, but he was still just a schoolboy, mostly ignorant in the ways of grown-ups. Now he would have to grow up fast, and it made me sad to think that if Albert died one of the things that would be lost was Eddie’s childhood. Georgie was so young that he might not understand about death. In a few months’ time, he might even forget his father altogether. And I had lost my barrier against the world.
    Albert used to try to ease me out of my shyness, but he never managed to make much headway at it. “What are you a-scared of, Ellendor?” he would say, winking at me to calm me down when we had to be around people outside the family. “They’re just ordinary folks, hon, same as us.”
    I reckon Albert’s swearing-in after the election was my trial by fire at dealing with a host of strangers. All the county dignitaries and their wives were there. Albert told me that the local bureaucrats were quietly glad he had won the election. He thought that behind the scenes they might have had a lot to do with his winning. It wasn’t so much that the county officials wanted Albert to win the job of sheriff as that they wanted his opponent to lose it. We reckoned the county officials favored him in the election because they knew he was an honest man—poor folk mostly are—and he had no scores to settle. All he wanted was a steady job he couldn’t get laid off from, and a decent paycheck.
    His opponent in the race came from an influential family in town, bred to be aware of his own importance. His family’s prosperity and connections stretched all the way back to the War Between the States, but so did the grudges and loyalties that generations of his family passed down like heirlooms. If that man had won the job of sheriff—and probably the very reason he wanted the job at all—he would use his power to benefit his friends and get even with his enemies. Sincea few of the county officials were probably numbered among those enemies, they had good reason to want somebody else to get the job of sheriff. When an unassuming young deputy with no local ties put himself forth as a candidate for sheriff, they quietly pulled strings behind