Prayers for Sale

by Sandra Dallas

  Summer had come, not the false summer that promised so much, then disappointed, but the real summer. Yesterday was winter still, but today it was summer, a perfect June day. Even if she had not been able to see it with her own eyes, Hennie could smell it—the scent of the earth, the perfume from the sun on the jack pines. Hennie had thought the night before that she might sleep late, maybe even make herself a cup of coffee and return with it to the bed to enjoy the sleep-warmth of the quilts. But that was before she knew that summer would arrive. The deadly sin of slothfulness was for winter. Summer hours were too precious to waste, especially when this summer might be Hennie’s last on the Swan.

  There were two seasons in Middle Swan, the leather bellies of the Warm Stove Mine and Hot Air Smelter, the old-timers who spent their days around the wood-burning stove in the Pinto store, liked to say—this winter and last winter. In fact, the high country had three seasons. Winter lasted seven months, nudging aside spring. Then one day, winter gave way to the short, intense summer, so perfect in its sunshine and clear mountain air that foreigners, as the people from out-of-state were called, flocked to Middle Swan to camp out in the old prospector shacks and log cabins that they’d bought for back taxes. They left in September, with the coming of the color, although the weeks of fall, when the aspen leaves came into their wire-gold tint, were every bit as beautiful to Hennie as the warm months.

  Hennie didn’t stop to think on the seasons now. She dressed quickly and hurried into the kitchen, where a few fire coals glowed in her cookstove, and added kindling, then stove wood, until the surface of the range was hot enough to fry an egg. She dropped a spoonful of bacon grease into the heavy black skillet heating on the stove, let it sizzle, then slipped in an egg. While the egg fried, Hennie sliced a piece of bread and fitted it onto a fork, then removed a stove lid and held the bread over the fire to toast. When the bread was toasted and buttered and jammed, she slid the egg onto a heavy white plate and took the breakfast outside so that she could eat on a stump that was placed just right to catch the first rays of sun as it peeked over the mountains.

  As she ate, listening to the sounds of the dredge, which had started up again, Hennie surveyed the yard. The lettuce seeds she’d planted under the snow had sprouted and broken through the earth to form long green rows, and the tips of pieplant had pushed up through the dirt, their green leaves tightly furled and their bright red stalks barely showing. Spears of grass were greening in the yard, and she spied the leaves of the wild daisies that grew alongside the house. The delphinium behind the daisies had survived the winter—last summer, she’d washed them with soapy water to kill the aphids, but she hadn’t been sure the tall flowers would make it.

  Yellow was almost ready to peek through the buds of the yellow roses, the roses that folks called “women’s gold.” Her rosebushes were the descendents of starts Hennie had brought across the prairie when she’d come from Tennessee. She’d wrapped them in a dishcloth that she dampened each morning of the journey with precious water, and they survived and thrived.

  The buds on the lilac were swollen, not dried and brown as they were so many summers when the cold kept the bloom off the bushes. Soon, when Hennie lifted her bedroom window, the only window in the house that was made to open, she would smell the lilacs as she went to sleep. Hennie thought of how Jake had loved the garden. Most men, now they didn’t care much about flowers. Jake was different. He’d stop on his walk home from a shift and pick a bouquet of Indian paintbrush or wild daises for her. Once she’d opened his lunch bucket to wash it out and discovered a perfect pink rose inside.

  She’d had a good life, Hennie reflected, but there were things left for her to do before she went below. The girl Nit needed help if she was to become a mountain woman. Hennie had a lifetime of stories she wanted to tell one more time. Then there was that other matter that pricked the back of her mind, just this side of consciousness. It ought to be resolved before she moved on. With her days on the Swan growing shorter, she had to come to terms with it after all these years. But the old woman wouldn’t think about that now that the summer air warmed her bones.

  In a week or two, Hennie would feel safe planting her geranium starts outdoors. A month before, she had taken cuttings from the plants in the windows and stuck them into jars of water to root. The geraniums would go into the ground beside the white daisies and blue delphinium, and they would all bloom for the Fourth of July—“the liberty garden,” Mae called it. Hennie smiled now, remembering how Mae would wake as the first charge of dynamite went off on the nation’s birthday and rush out to make certain the flowers were perfect. Hennie and Mae and Jake had loved the Fourth of July more than Christmas—the parade, the picnic, and the hard-rock drilling contest that Jake won three years in a row. Even Jake’s benders didn’t dampen their enthusiasm for the holiday.

  How could anybody be dishearted on such a fine day? Even Thelma Franks wouldn’t spoil it, Hennie told herself as her neighbor came out of her house, leaving her door open, and walked to the trail, its mud of a few days before dried now to a powder. Hennie set down her plate and rose to greet her neighbor. “It’s a fine day,” she called.

  “It’ll be hot as hell’s kitchen before it’s over,” Thelma said. “How’s yourself?”

  “Good as the day,” Hennie said. When Thelma looked glum at Hennie’s fine state, for the neighbor liked to look on the bad side of things, Hennie searched for some ailment that would please the woman. “Except I’m having dark shadows before my eyes.”

  “Same,” Thelma said, with what sounded like relief. “I hurt my foot, too, and I’ll be crippled all day long.”

  Hennie was in no mood to hear complaints. “It’s time for spring cleaning.”

  “Done a’ready.”

  Last year or the year before, Hennie wondered, eyeing the dirty quilt Thelma had hung in her doorway in November to keep out the winter’s cold. Inside, Hennie knew, Thelma’s house would smell of sour blankets and damp wood. She changed the subject, saying brightly, “I guess it’s time for the summer people.” The outsiders in their bright clothes and white shoes, their big cars loaded with new blankets and towels, and jars and boxes of groceries from the Piggly Wiggly and the A&P in Denver, always cheered Hennie.

  “They’re no better than motor gypsies. They think themselves grand and mighty, but they’re lucky, that’s all. I’d be lucky, too, if Bert hadn’t made me spend my life on the devil’s backbone.”

  Hennie remembered when Thelma Franks had arrived in Middle Swan, almost as young then as Nit was now. Bert Franks hadn’t been made for luck, and right off, he’d hurt his leg in a mine accident. Now he operated a still in a shack behind the house and made kill-devil so foul that the federal agents never bothered to shut him down, figuring, Hennie supposed, that anybody who drank the bootleg would repent and give up the stuff. Most of the time, Bert sat in a chair, reading poetry. Thelma had her grievements.

  “They make me tired,” Thelma said of the summer people. “I got to get to the Pinto store for my tonic. My arthritis flares up when the seasons change. I’d buy a prayer off of you if I thought it would help.” Thelma nodded at the ancient sign nailed to Hennie’s fence that read PRAYERS FOR SALE.

  “Free to neighbors.”

  “You’re an odd one. You say prayers for one and all, but you haven’t set foot inside the church for years. And you once a Christian woman! You’ve got your ways.” Thelma turned away and started toward the store, stepping into the only puddle of mud in the trail. “Jesus God,” she said, but there wasn’t much feeling in the swearing, and Hennie knew her neighbor was glad for summer, too.

  Hennie scraped the remains of her breakfast onto a rock for the squirrels and went back inside. There was work to do, the summer clothes gotten out and the winter ones washed and put away, the drawers and cupboards cleaned, the quilts aired. She glanced at the sky and judged the sun would be bright for a while yet. She needed a cloudy day to hang the quilts on the line, for the sun along the crest of the
earth was so strong it would fade them before it slipped behind the Tenmile Range. She thought to wash the cupboards, but the day was such a gift that she could not bear to spend it indoors. Perhaps she’d walk up the trail to timberline, pack a lunch. She might even invite her young neighbor to go along. The girl would be almost crazy by now from being cooped up in her shack in the dying days of winter. If she were home in Tennessee, the child would have been barefoot for a month or two.

  Hennie went inside and tidied the house, cleaning the ashes from the fireplace and carrying them outside to spread on the flower beds. She swept the floor, and when it was still too early to call on the girl, she cleaned the pie safe, washing the shelves and sides and rinsing them with clear water with a sprig of dried lavender in it. She hoped the lavender bushes hadn’t died over the winter. Nobody else could make lavender grow in the high country the way Hennie did, but nonetheless, the cold killed even her lavender some years. Then she cleaned the ashes from the firebox of her cookstove and spread them, too, in her garden. But the sunshine called her, and she went outside and raked and swept the yard of pine needles that had fallen during the winter. She’d wait for another day to grub out the sage.

  When enough time had passed, Hennie returned to the kitchen and cut up yesterday’s potatoes for a salad, mixing them with oil and a little vinegar and a crumbled slice of bacon. Then she made jam sandwiches, using the last of the currant jam she’d cooked from the fruit picked last summer along the railroad tracks. She placed the potato salad and sandwiches in a large lard bucket, along with pickles, a jar of chowchow, and a hunk of yellow cheese. She added two tin cups, for the water high up would be clear and sweet and cold from the melting snow. Then she wrapped a bit of quilting in a napkin and set it on top. When she was finished, she slipped a sweater around her shoulders. Who knew when the weather might turn again? Hennie had worn the sweater so long that she’d forgotten it had once belonged to Jake. She’d taken to putting it on after he died, when the warm wool on her shoulders reminded her of the way Jake held her before he went off to work in the mornings. Like most miners’ wives, she never bid her husband good-bye of a morning without thinking, Will he come home in one piece? She wondered if Jake thought the same, but she never asked. Talking about such a thing would have been bad luck. Perhaps he knew all along what would happen to him.

  As Hennie shut the door, she saw Thelma again and thought it would be a kindness to invite that neighbor to come along on the picnic. Lord knew, Thelma might welcome a bit of Hennie’s dinner, plain as it was. The time Hennie had taken supper at the Franks’s house, she’d found the meat so tough, she couldn’t cut the gravy with a knife. But with all her complaining, Thelma would spoil the day for the girl. Besides, Hennie hadn’t prepared enough picnic for three. So with only a fleeting moment of guilt, she headed down the trail for the Tappan place.

  The girl had pulled the old blue rocking chair out of the house and was sitting outdoors, her eyes closed, her face held up to the sun. Already, her pale skin had turned a darker shade of pink. She heard the old woman’s steps and opened her eyes, then jumped up when she saw Hennie. “You must think I’m the laziest thing on earth. I tried to clean the house, but I just piddled with it, and it’s a mess. I couldn’t stay inside on such a day. I couldn’t at all,” Nit Spindle said.

  Hennie knew that Nit’s description of the house wasn’t true, for the girl’s home was always as neat as her own. Most likely, Nit had finished her work and was wondering how to spend her day. “It’d be a sin,” Hennie replied, setting her lard bucket on a stump. When the girl pointed to the rocker, Hennie sat.

  “Mommy gave me this chair when me and Dick moved away, so’s I wouldn’t forget her. But I would never forget my family. It was made by my great-grandpaw, made while he hid out in a cave from the Yankees. He painted the chair blue, for he didn’t want to forget the color of the sky.” Nit looked up at the mountain sky and shook her head, while Hennie thought that she had indeed picked the right person for the last telling of her tales. The girl had an ear as good as Hennie’s for stories. “I never saw a sky this color, so bright it hurts my eyes,” Nit added.

  “You best protect your skin against it, dearie. Redhead’s skin’s the worst to burn,” Hennie warned. “Up here where the air’s thin, you’ll fry like a hotcake. Put you on a sunbonnet.”

  “I haven’t one.”

  “Then wear you your feller’s old hat.”

  The girl nodded, but instead of going inside for the hat, she sat down on a rock beside Hennie. Young girls today didn’t like a white face like they used to. They wanted to be suntanned, and the girl, Hennie thought, was just the slightest bit vain about her looks. You couldn’t force a person to take your advice. But one bad burn from the sun shining through the thin air and the girl would learn.

  “I was going to sun my quilts,” Nit said.

  “Same, but I’ll wait for a cloudy day. The sun’s too bright this close to timberline. It’ll fade them.”

  Nit thought that over and nodded, and Hennie wondered why a woman would take such good care of a quilt and not herself. It was the way of most quilters, however. They prized their work more than they did themselves.

  The old woman rocked back and forth in the sun, drowsing a little. Then she remembered why she’d come and roused herself. “I’ve got dinner in the bucket, and I ask would you like to go up above where the gold boat’s working and have us a picnic. The food’s slim pickin’s, just leftovers, but it’ll suit if you’re hungry.”

  Nit clasped her hands together in delight. “I baked a chess pie this morning. We’ll take it along.” When Hennie looked confused, the girl explained, “Brown sugar and eggs mostly.”

  “Kentucky pie! That’s what we called it. Why, I haven’t thought about Kentucky pie since I came to Colorado. It suits me fine. But what will your man think when he comes home to supper, and there’s no hereafter?” The boy, slim like he was, could use some fattening up, the old woman decided.

  Nit frowned in thought. “We’ll take half of it,” she said, giggling at the compromise.

  “Why, that’ll make a party.” Hennie glanced up at the sun, which was edging up to the midpoint in the sky now. “Just us hurry. If it rains, it’ll come in the afternoon. Take your rubber shoes. The trail’s not dry yet.” The girl went inside and returned, bareheaded, with a pie tin, a dishcloth tied around it with string. She placed it carefully on top of Hennie’s picnic, then put the lard bucket over her own arm. Touched by the girl’s thoughtfulness, Hennie pretended not to notice that Nit had picked up her burden.

  Just as they started, the girl slapped her arm and muttered, “Drat skeeter!”

  “We’ll find us some tansy leaves to rub on us. They keep the accustomed pests away just fine.”

  “For sure?” asked Nit. When Hennie nodded, the girl said she knew all about plants and their uses, learned from an old lady at home who kept a medicine house, a tiny cabin whose shelves were loaded with crocks and tins of dried plants and herbs, and jars of concoctions. “I know plants for any kind of hurting a person’s got,” Nit said. Hennie told her they’d look for plants high up. She knew a thing or two about medicinal herbs herself.

  The two walked through the old town and out past the gold dredge, which squatted in a pond of its own making, silent as snow the whole morning. Dick stood on the deck, and the two women waved to him, Nit turning back a time or two to catch a glimpse of her husband. “I sure worry about him,” Nit said. “When the dredge was shut down, that Silas Hemp made Dick go over the side for something. Then the boat started up, and Dick almost fell off.”

  “Mr. Hemp’s a mean one,” Hennie agreed. She remembered when the man had tried to mine one of Jake’s old claims, saying it was abandoned. But it wasn’t, and Hennie had forced him out. To get even, he’d left dynamite lying in the drift, and if she hadn’t had a notion to look for a meanness, the stuff might have killed somebody. But Hennie didn’t tell Nit about the dynamite, for she didn’t want to incr
ease the girl’s worries.

  The two women continued along to where the road trickled off into a narrow trail, edged here and there with crusts of snow. As it grew steeper, Hennie slowed her pace, although not for herself. Despite her age, she could still climb a mountain as well as any man. But the girl wasn’t used to the altitude yet, and Hennie didn’t want to tire her.

  “Here’s where I get rose hips for jam,” Hennie said, stopping next to a patch of wild roses so that the girl could rest. She pointed to currant bushes that were just leafing out under the fallen timbers of an old mill, but said she’d show Nit a better patch, the one beside the railroad tracks. “There’s paintbrush there and the pink flowers we call summer’s half-over.” Hennie almost hated to see them bloom, for it meant that Middle Swan was on the down side of summer and winter was coming.

  “Anemones?” the girl asked. “What about anemones?”

  “There’s only one yard in Middle Swan where anemones grow, and it belongs to a fellow in prison for selling whiskey mixed with wood alcohol. Nobody lives there now. Might be we could dig up some, although they never grew for me.” She paused. “They were Mae’s favorites—my daughter,” she added in case Nit had forgotten. “She loves an anemone best of all. I told her an anemone is proof God loves women, although I can’t say it makes up for childbirth.” The two chuckled, and Hennie added, “Anemones and quilting. Yes, I’d say there’s a god, and maybe even that God’s a woman.”

  Hennie looked at the girl to see if the blaspheming had shocked her, but the girl only laughed and asked, “Does Mae quilt?”

  Hennie smiled, switching the lard bucket from one arm to the other, for she had picked it up at the stop. Mae never took to quilting, she said. “That one couldn’t sit still long enough to thread a needle. Sewing was a grievement to her.” Hennie slowed a little, for the altitude got to her now. She hadn’t climbed this high since the fall. Or perhaps it was age that slowed her. Hennie didn’t want to think so.