Prayers the Devil Answers Read Online Free

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.
    We were lucky, I suppose, for Albert was the only one of us who took sick. I didn’t feel fortunate, though, for I knew that whether the rest of us got sick or not, there were hard times ahead. Dying would be easier than what was to come. Quicker, anyhow.

    When word got around that Albert and I were going away to live in town, the folks at our little mountain church prayed for us as if wewere headed off to Abyssinia instead of just down the mountain and a few miles across the valley to a no-account whistle-stop railroad town.
    The town had sprung up at the turn of the century in that narrow river valley around the railroad shops. We had no money to buy land or lumber to build a place of our own, so, with the kind help of that church deacon, we resolved to take what we could get. I was hoping that we would find a house with indoor plumbing—I had heard about places in town having the privy and a bathtub right inside, in a little room of their own, with piped-in water that didn’t have to be boiled. But houses with marvels such as that belonged to the bankers and doctors and the foremen of the railroad shops—not to ordinary folk like us.
    After looking at half a dozen places, some hardly more than shacks, the deacon took us to an across-the-tracks place that wasn’t grand enough for any fancy plumbing, but that was why we could afford it in the first place. Instead of running water, the little house had a hand pump in the yard, which at least was better than an open well. There was a tin bath in a corner of the kitchen, but we had to fill it up with water that we heated on the stove. It took so much water to fill it that by the time we managed to heat enough water—a gallon at a time on the woodstove—the bath wasn’t more than lukewarm.
    A ways from the house on the woods side of the backyard sat an unpainted wooden outhouse. “Four rooms and a path,” Albert called it, trying to tease me out of my disappointment. I hadn’t uttered a word of complaint, but I guess he could see it on my face.
    We had seen the houses that were available, and most of them were beyond our means, so we settled on that four-room frame house a few yards from the railroad tracks. The place was small and in need of a coat of paint, but the kitchen had a cook stove, an old icebox, a pie safe, and an unvarnished pine table, which meant fewer things for us to buy. Above the dry sink, a little square of window overlooked the woods beyond the yard. What I liked best of all was that thekitchen was separate from the parlor. Next to it was a short hallway leading to two bedrooms opposite each other. We gave Eddie and George one of the rooms to share, and we took the bigger one across the hall. After