Prayers the Devil Answers Read Online Free Page B

when I sang, but his eyes stayed shut, and I never did know if he heard me or not. Every now and then he’d gabble a few sounds that might have been words, but I couldn’t make sense of them. Maybe they weren’t words at all, but just the sound of his fever. Finally, when he had gone two days without eating anything, I tried to wake him. When I could not make him wake up to drink, I held a moistened rag to his lips so that he would get the water, but he just lay there moaning softly, his eyes shut tight as a new kitten’s. Every time I held that cloth to his mouth, I thought about the Crucifixion, when someone held a sponge up to Jesus so that he could get a bit of moisture. Sometimes it’s all you can do.
    That was the only time I ever wondered if we had been right to leave the farm.
    Hour after hour I just sat by the bedside, waiting, while Albert slept on. At first I was waiting for him to wake up, and then I was waiting for his condition to change one way or the other, and finally I was just waiting, because when I stopped waiting, time would start again, and I’d have to go on with the rest of my life.
    Every now and again Eddie would remind me, mostly for Georgie’s sake, that they needed meals cooked for them. I’d leave the sickroom long enough to boil some potatoes, fry slices of bacon, and round off the meal with whatever we had left in the larder. No one had been to the store in a week. We mostly ate in silence. I was exhausted and I think Eddie was afraid to ask me any questions about his dad. I was afraid that if I tried to explain it to him, I’d commence to crying and never stop.
    At mealtimes, if I remembered, I would eat a bite or two myself, before I went back to the chair by the bedside. The only times I’d know that I had slept were when I would jerk awake in the chair and see that outside the window the light had changed or the moon was down. It was better to look out the window than to catch sight of my reflection in the mirror—catching even a glimpse of myself made me cringe: b room-straw hair; hollow, staring eyes; a pinched face; and lips pale as a fish belly. Sometimes I caught myself hoping that Albert wouldn’t wake suddenly and find me looking haggard and old. I knew he’d be too sick to care how I looked, but I still minded.

    The front yard of our rented house faced a dirt road, but it was big enough to have a patch of grass and flower beds, and on one side of the house a high blackthorn hedge kept us from having to look at the ramshackle house next to ours. The other side of the house faced the woods, and that view was more to our liking.
    Our backyard faced the railroad tracks, but at least it was big enough to have fifty yards of bedraggled grass and a place to put up a clothesline. That spring I laid out a flower bed next to the blackthorn hedge.
    When we first moved in, we discovered that the house was so close to the railroad tracks that whenever a train went past, the windowpanes rattled and the whole house shook like a leaf in the wind. The shrill scream of the locomotive whistle cut right through your bones. The only thing I ever heard as chilling as that was the sound of the cougars—we called them painters—up on the ridge. Maybe people could get used to such things, even learn to sleep through the shuddering roar of the night train, but none of us adjusted to it quickly. Georgie would wake up screaming. A whole year passed before the rumble of a train became an ordinary night sound, disturbing no one anymore.
    I figured I could plant a vegetable garden in the backyard so that we could save money on groceries. I wasn’t sure about keeping ­chickens—not with the railroad tracks so near. If I turned them out to forage, they’d either get run over by the train, or stolen by the tramps who wandered from place to place with nothing to their names except their independence. We could have put up a chicken wire fence,