Zepha clucked her tongue and exchanged a glance with Nit. The two younger women looked tickled with the story.
“They just left Starlight there. But then he got to smelling, and they had the darnedest time getting him out, had to take out most of the floor. Now that’s the dyin’ truth,” Hennie said.
“What happened to the man?” Zepha asked in a low voice, glancing around her, as if she wasn’t sure she should have spoken.
Hennie thought a minute. “Why, I don’t know. He just disappeared, I guess. He was around for a time. Then he wasn’t. Do you know where he went, Carla?”
The other woman shook her head. Back then, men just went and came, she said.
“They still do,” Edna added, resting a fleshy arm on the quilt and peering out the door. “Lookit there, it’s raining a bit, sun and rain at the same time.”
“Devil rain,” Hennie said.
Monalisa looked up sharply. “I haven’t heard of such a thing.”
Hennie caught Nit’s eye, for Nit had been the one to tell her about devil rain. “Why, I can’t hardly know why you haven’t,” she said.
“You think there’s more rain coming?” Zepha asked. “I ask it because I heard the bread wagon pass over.”
Hennie looked at her blankly, and Nit, who knew the expression, explained that the bread wagon was thunder. Nit exchanged a glance with Zepha as if the two of them shared a secret.
“You can’t ever tell in these mountains,” Hennie said. “It’s best always to expect rain, maybe snow.”
“Oh!” Zepha exclaimed. “This place is the strangest I’ve ever been. To think you have to use a blanket in the middle of summer! I hope it doesn’t get much colder come winter.” The women, even Nit, exchanged glances with each other, but none wanted to apprise Zepha of winter along the Tenmile Range. Hennie marked it in her mind to look through her trunk for a coat that her daughter, Mae, had worn as a baby. It ought to fit Queenie. And if she couldn’t find it, she’d order one from the catalogue and say it had been Mae’s.
Edna, who’d finished her portion of the quilting, pushed back her chair, stood and stretched her back like a cat.
Hennie looked over the quilt and asked, “Everybody ready to roll again?” The women got up and adjusted the quilt, worked the kinks out of their backs, and went to quilting once more. Bonnie glanced over at the food but didn’t say anything. It was Hennie’s call as to when they ate.
“Maybe Mutt got run out of town. He hadn’t the brains of a sapsucker and used one of those little things you fix to your sleeve to hold a card. What do you call it?” Hennie asked.
“A hold-out,” Bonnie said.
“How do you know about hold-outs?” her sister asked.
“I know plenty about gambling. You forget I lived next door to Missouri Rice.”
“Some of us here knew that name mighty well once,” Hennie said. She felt a tug on the hem of her skirt and glanced down to see the little girl, Queenie, looking up at her. She was chewing on a piece of her mother’s cornbread, and the floor was covered with crumbs. “I think I’ve got a doll of Mae’s someplace that ought to be played with,” Hennie told Zepha.
The woman said not to bother. She reached into the pocket of her apron and brought out a rag doll with an embroidered face and a patchwork dress. As Zepha handed it to her daughter, Carla caught her arm and said, “Look at the tiny dress. It’s got a piece of that old-fashioned paisley.” She pointed to a scrap of material that was pink and white and purple.
“Pickle,” Zepha said. “The lady that made me a present of it called it Persian pickle.”
“Persian pear was the name my grandmother put to it. That scrap’s as pretty as your special blue, Hennie,” Edna said, referring to the peacock blue cotton that Hennie had bought years before and still used in her quilts. “Why look, there it is right here in this top,” Edna added, pointing to a coffee cup that had been pieced out of the blue. The women looked up at Nit, who blushed, because Hennie was partial to the women she gave scraps to.
“Who’s Missouri Rice?” Nit asked, changing the subject. She looked at Hennie as if she sensed another story.
“Tell her,” Bonnie said, adding, “It’s a better story than Mutt Elmore’s.”
The others watched Hennie expectantly, and Edna said she hadn’t heard about Missouri Rice, either.
Hennie glanced around the frame. Some of the quilters were ready to eat, she knew, but Missouri Rice was a good tale, and Hennie’d never let down a person who wanted a story. Besides, she herself would rather talk than eat. “I’ll tell you. Then we’ll have our dinner.” Bonnie and Carla knew about Missouri Rice, because they were in on it, she said. Edna wasn’t living in Middle Swan then, and Monalisa, “I don’t recollect as to whether you were around then, either, were you?” Hennie glanced at Monalisa, who didn’t reply. Hennie knew full well that Monalisa had been in town, but she was working at the Willows then and hardly a member of the Tenmilers. What’s more, Missouri Rice might have been one of those who’d snubbed Monalisa. There was nobody so down and out that she couldn’t look down on someone else.
“I don’t recall,” Monalisa replied.
Hennie nodded, not wanting to put too fine a point on it, and began her story. “Missouri Rice was a Middle Swan lady that married Otto Rice, and he wasn’t worth shooting. I wouldn’t have took up with him if he was strung with pure gold. He was as handsome as a hog—and a gambler to boot.” She took three stitches and rested her needle.
Otto Rice was also a con man. He played three-card monte and the shell game. In the shell game, he’d put a pea under one of three walnut shells, then quickly move them around. He’d get some sucker to put up money, thinking he could spot the shell with the pea under it, but of course, Otto had already palmed the pea. Jake Comfort was as smart a man as ever was to spot the switch. There wasn’t anybody could fool him. So he put up a dollar on a game Otto was running, thinking to catch Otto when he slipped the pea into his hand, but right in the middle of moving around the shells, Otto said, “Damn mouse,” and before he could catch himself, Jake looked away. Jake told Hennie he didn’t mind losing the dollar to see a man who could cheat a fellow that good.
Not everybody admired the way Otto cheated, however, and after a time, suckers fell off for Otto’s tricks. He turned to poker and other card games, and he stuck with them because he was took up with the gambling fever. When he thought he could get away with it, he cheated. Otto would sit in the Gold Pan all day looking for somebody to play cards with. He was partial to poker, but when he couldn’t get up a game, he’d bet on anything—how far a mouse would run across a floor before the cat got it, when the first snowstorm would come in the fall, how long before one of the girls at the Willows would find herself a husband. He’d even bet on whether the sun would come up in the west in the morning.
Unlike most sporting men, Otto was married, and he loved his wife and kids more than just about anything except for gambling. When he was flush, he shared the winnings with them, always buying presents. He ordered silk dresses from Denver for his wife, Missouri, and enough toys for the kids, a boy and a girl, that they’d think it was Christmas. And then he’d go and gamble them away. If Missouri went out to quilting, she never knew when she got home, but whether her best dress was missing.
Otto went through a little bit of money that Missouri had inherited. He gambled away her jewelry, even her gold wedding ring. He took her dresses, the girl’s doll, the boy’s wagon. The only thing that was left to them was their house, which was one of the nicest in Middle Swan. Otto promised Missouri, promised on the children’s heads, that he’d never risk their home, that he’d stop gambling before he did, but you’d as easy keep a squirrel on the ground as keep that man from cards. Many’s the time Missouri went to Hennie, crying that she knew it was only a matter of time before Otto gambled away her home.
And that was just what he did. One afternoon, a stranger wandered into the Gold Pan, asking for a whiskey. Otto sized him up�
��the man looked young and was duded up—and invited him to sit down at the poker table. The man, who introduced himself as Jim Book, protested, saying what he knew about cards wouldn’t fill a shot glass.
Otto insisted he was just putting together a friendly game, low stakes, so the man wasn’t risking much. Jim bragged that he was as smart as a bee sting, and he guessed he might try a hand at that. He sat down with Otto and two or three other men, one of them Jake Comfort.
Jim won the first few times, because Otto was setting him up. The man turned gleeful, acting biggity at his luck, laughing and pounding the table and ordering whiskey for the other players. The loungers at the Gold Pan gathered around to watch, because it was always a treat to see a goose being plucked, although most of the men had lost to Otto at one time or another and didn’t have any reason to want him to win. They’d just as soon both men lost.
The more Jim won, the more reckless he became, insisting on bigger and bigger stakes. He lost every now and again, but that didn’t dampen his enthusiasm.
The stakes got higher—and higher—and Otto thought he’d take the sucker for a bundle. After all, he’d had a streak of luck that week, and he figured it hadn’t ended. He’d take Jim Book’s money, then maybe he’d treat Missouri and the kids to a trip to Glenwood Springs, where they’d take the baths. He’d buy Missouri a new wedding ring, too, one with diamonds, get the kids a hobby horse. At least, that was what he told Jake later on. Jake wasn’t so sure, because no matter how good his intentions were, Otto always used his winnings to stake another game.
For a time, it looked as if Otto was right, for Jim began to lose big. The other men at the table said it was the man’s own fault. He was a greenhorn and didn’t have the chicken sense to know he was being plucked. Otto not only could use the hold-out and a sucker reflector, but he could make the pass and change a card, palm a card and bottom-deal. If there was a way to cheat, Otto had perfected it. Finally, Otto moved in to finish off the man, but suddenly, Jim won that hand, then another, and before he knew it, Otto was close to losing everything he’d won all week.
“Better drop out,” Jake warned, but Otto couldn’t be told, and he nodded at Jim to deal.
Otto picked up his cards and tried not to grin. He placed a bet, and Jim raised him. Jake and the others dropped out, so it was just Jim and Otto playing then. Otto asked for one card, and when he looked at it, he couldn’t keep the grin off his face. Jim kept his hand. Otto increased the bet, and then Jim pushed his entire winnings, $500, into the center of the table. “Is your hand that good?” he taunted.
Otto swallowed hard, peeking at his cards from time to time. “I don’t have five hundred dollars, but I’ve got a house. There’s none finer in Middle Swan,” he blurted out.
“What do I need a house for? I don’t live here.”
“That house is worth twelve hundred dollars, maybe more. I’ll put it up against your five hundred.”
The men around the table looked at one another. “Missouri’ll kill you dead,” Jake warned him, but instead of causing Otto to think, the remark only egged him on.
“You keep out of this, Jake,” Otto said. “It’s my house, and I’ll do what I please. With the hand I’ve got, you’d go against Hennie if you was me.”
“Well, I’m not going against a woman,” Jim said. “She’ll say she owns half the house, and some judge will side with her, and then where will I be?”
“She don’t own any of it. That house is mine, was mine before I married her. I can sell it or burn it down if I want to, and she’s got no say.”
“He has kids,” Jake told the stranger.
Jim shrugged. “That’s not my concern.” He thought a minute. “You say it’s worth twelve hundred dollars. I guess maybe I could sell it for five hundred dollars then.”
“I’ll buy it,” someone called. The rest of the men told him to hush, but instead, the man said, “Well, I will.”
Finally Jim agreed, and Otto scribbled a deed to his house on a piece of paper, and when he finished, Jim said, “Call.”
Otto grinned at Jim and put down his hand. “Flush,” he said, leaning back in his chair until it was balanced on two legs.
He laughed out loud at Jim, and somebody slapped Otto on the back and said, “You did it, you durn fool.” The others looked toward the bar, because the winner of a big pot always bought a round of drinks. Only Jake sat where he was, waiting.
Otto was ready to scoop up the pot when, without a word, the stranger put his hand on Otto’s arm, then silently set down his cards, spreading them out like a fan. “Full house,” he said.
There never had been a man as hard-put as Otto Rice at that moment. He stared at those cards with awe, just like they were the Ark of the Covenant, and slowly leaned forward, letting the chair crash down onto its front legs. “Why, you can’t take my house,” he said at last.
“He already did,” Jake told him.
“How’m I going to tell Missouri? I’d rather eat a fried raccoon than tell Missouri I lost the house.” Otto looked hard at Jim. “You’re a professional and mean as a striped snake, ain’t you? You came in here to beat me out of everything I own. You left me broke as a convict.”
Jim only smiled and said, “And you were planning on fleecing a greenhorn? You small-town gamblers make me tired.”
Otto swore and whined and begged, but in the end, there was nothing to it but for him to sign over the deed to Jim. Somebody offered him a drink, but Otto shook his head. Otto’s face when he walked out of that bar was as black as a hat, and he swore he’d never touch a card again.
“The next time you come again, we’ll remind you of that,” the barkeep told him.
“You won’t have to. I’m not going to follow drinking no more, neither,” Otto vowed, and Otto never took another shot of liquor as long as he lived. He never picked up a card again, either.
Missouri bemeaned Otto for a few days, until her fury was spent, and then Jake and Hennie went to the house, where Missouri was all packed up, and gave her the deed, made out in her name.
Hennie and the Tenmilers had worked it all out one day, after Missouri had gone to the Comfort house, bitterer than quinine, saying she didn’t have enough to feed the kids. “He’s took everything else. I know the house is next,” she’d cried.
The women had talked it over and decided there was nothing to it but to get that house away from Otto. Jake had known Jim Book when Book was a professional gambler, before he gave it up and became a preacher down in Denver. So he asked Jim to win that house off of Otto. “You keep the money. Just give us the deed,” Jake told him, and after the game was over, the preacher brought the deed right there to the Comfort house, and Jake transferred it to Missouri. Even if he’d wanted to, Otto couldn’t have gambled away their home again, because his wife owned it free and clear.
“Time to eat,” Hennie said. The women secured their needles in the quilt and stood up, moving to Hennie’s kitchen and the big dinner plates. Stacked like they were, the plates were a series of red rims with white showing through where they had been nicked and chipped over the years. But they were real English china, and the women were proud to eat off them. While Hennie took Nit’s chicken from the warming oven and dished up her own pot roast from the back of the range, the others removed the dish towels from the platters and plates they’d brought with them and complimented one another on the offerings.
“Sugar bread,” Zepha whispered to Queenie, pointing to Edna’s pound cake. Bonnie commented on Nit’s chicken, and Edna told Zepha she’d hadn’t had ashcakes since she didn’t know when and had been hungering for them. Carla insisted Bonnie grew the best salad lettuce in Middle Swan; Hennie said she didn’t know how Carla could bake such fat loaves of bread at ten thousand feet. They all asked for half-moon pies. Someone even complimented Monalisa on her relish. The women took their chairs from the quilt frame and carried them to Hennie’s big table and sat to dinner, quiet while they ate. “It’s the best eating I ever did eat,” Ni
t said, as she fed the last of her sugar cake to Queenie, who was sitting on her mother’s lap, and the others agreed.
After they were finished with the dinner, they returned to the frame for a final hour of quilting. Drowsy with the big meal, the women were quiet now, gossiping a little, commenting on their stitching. Someone asked Hennie for another story, but she said, “My tongue’s been going like a clapper in a cowbell, and I best rest it. But first, I got something to say.”
Hennie paused until the others looked up from their stitching and stared at her.
She took a deep breath and blurted out, “This’ll be my last year on the Swan. I’m moving below to live with my daughter.” Hennie hadn’t intended to announce her plans that way, but she’d have to let her friends know sooner or later, and that afternoon seemed as good a time as any. She’d tell them all at once, so there would be less gossip about it.
The women were quiet for a moment.
“You’re leaving out?” Bonnie asked, stunned.
Hennie nodded.
“It won’t be Middle Swan without you here,” Edna said. “You’re as much a part of this place as the gold yet in the ground.”
“And the rocks on the dredge pile, too,” Hennie replied. “But it can’t be helped. After all, the Lord would be taking me soon enough anyway. The only difference is I’ll be leaving on my own two feet instead of being carried out.”
The women were silent then, until Hennie said, “Leaving’s not my idea. Mae’s been pestering me and wouldn’t give me any rest until I agreed to live with her. She keeps asking what if I fell or had heart failure. It’s for the best.” Hennie felt her eyes water but didn’t wipe them for fear of calling attention to the tears.
“Well, I think it’s a fine idea,” Monalisa interrupted. “Why would you want to spend another winter snowed in with days so dark you can’t see your hand unless the electric’s on. You made the right choice, Hennie.”
Prayers for Sale Page 14
