Prayers for Sale

by Sandra Dallas

  The others were quick to agree, interrupting one another to tell Hennie how lucky she was to have a daughter with a fine house with enough space for Hennie to have her own room. They said she wouldn’t have to clean out stove ashes ever again, and that living in a town like Fort Madison, she wouldn’t have to worry about the milk at the store being sour—everyone glanced at Monalisa when Bonnie made that remark. Carla said Hennie could just sit all day and quilt, which gave the old woman a sense of dread. Quilting was pure pleasure in snatched moments, but Hennie would grow bored with it if she had nothing else to do.

  The women chattered so, that Hennie wanted to cover her ears, for she knew they didn’t mean a word of what they said. They were as sorry as she was to hear of her leaving.

  At last, Hennie interrupted them. “I’m not moving away tomorrow. I’ll wait till the end of the year, and I told Mae I’ll be back in the summers.”

  “Of course you will,” Bonnie said fiercely.

  “That’s why I’m keeping my house just like it is. I won’t sell it, or rent it, either.”

  “Of course you won’t,” Carla said. She looked down at the quilt and announced they were ready to roll.

  The women stood and adjusted the quilt so that the final unfinished section was set in. They sat down again, quiet now, waiting to see if Hennie wanted to speak about the move. The old woman told them, “Let’s not have any more talk of it. It makes me tired,” and the women nodded in agreement.

  They stitched quietly, and when the quilt was almost done, Nit asked Hennie what had happened to Missouri Rice.

  “I feared one of you would wonder about that. Sometimes you ought not to know the end of a story,” Hennie replied.

  “You said he didn’t gamble anymore,” Zepha reminded Hennie.

  The old woman gave a sad smile. “No, he didn’t gamble, and he didn’t drink. He got a job in the Big Minnie Mill and was as good a worker as ever was.” She glanced down at her hands, at the thin gold wedding band that was as much a part of her finger as the age spots. Then she looked up at Nit and Zepha. “The problem was Missouri. Maybe she’d put up with too much from Otto for too long. Whatever it was, in the end, she didn’t care any more for Otto than the hog cares for Sunday. One day, Otto came home and found Missouri’d sold the house and she and the kids had run off with a miner from the Pelican Kate.”

  Hennie took a backstitch in the quilt and cut her thread. “That’s the end of the story,” she said, looking around the table at the other women, who were putting away their needles and thimbles. “And the end of the quilt,” she added. Hennie sighed and muttered to herself, “And just about the end of me as a Tenmile quilter.”

  Chapter 6

  The girl looked peaked, her face white, and her breath came in gasps as she stumbled up the trail behind Hennie. The two were headed for the burn on the saddle on Sunset Peak. The old woman slowed to allow Nit to catch up with her. Each of the women carried two buckets. Nit’s pails were empty. One of Hennie’s contained their dinner, the other a canteen with water enough for the trip up the peak. They would refill it from one of the streams that fed into the Swan before they went downhill. Nothing refreshed a body more than mountain water.

  Hennie thought of the number of times that she had climbed that trail and stopped beside a stream, dipping her hand into the wet and wondering if the water Sarah had drowned in felt as icy cold to the baby as the snowmelt did to Hennie’s hand. It seemed odd to her, losing Sarah in the manner she had, that she always found the mountain streams comforting. She’d made the hike along that very trail after she’d lost the first of Jake’s babies, and had stopped to put her toes into the stream and felt cleansed.

  Hennie showed up at Nit’s cabin that morning, telling the girl she’d like to borrow a little of her time if she could spare it, because it was as fine a day for raspberrying as there ever was. “We can’t let the sun go down on it,” she said. The day was only a little past noon of the year, just the right time for picking berries. Besides, Hennie felt protective of the girl, who had been doing poorly. A walk in the mountain air would bring color to her cheeks.

  You’d think she was your own daughter, the way you carry on about her, Hennie told herself. But they were kindred spirits, too, the two of them having lost their babies, and the girl still freshly grieving for hers. Only another mother who knew the agony herself could understand that particular pain, and Hennie hoped that her sharing the girl’s burden would help. Besides, Hennie thought, there was a reason the girl needed her more than ever now.

  Nit had been glad to go, for she’d gotten up backwards that morning, she said, smiling her gladness at an excuse to be away from the house. “If I work at it like I have this morning, I’ll not get nothing done anyway.” She put aside her scrub board and laundry tubs, and the two women set out, walking at a leisurely pace down Main Street, because it was not a day for hurrying. They greeted Zepha Massie, the woman Nit had met at Hennie’s quilting party, and invited her along, but she was greatly agitated. Her face was flushed, her pale blue eyes red, and she admitted, “I almost cried my eyes out this morning. I broke my needle stitching my husband’s shirt.”

  “Don’t you have but one needle?” Nit asked. Before Zepha could reply, Nit added, “Well, don’t you worry. I’ve got a needle right here in my pocket you can have.” Hennie had reminded Nit to take along her quilting, so the girl’s gesture, while small, was generous, for it meant Nit wouldn’t be able to sew at their nooning.

  “That won’t do any good. Breaking a needle when you’re sewing on something that belongs to your man means he’ll have himself a new love before what you’re stitching wears out. Everybody knows that. I’ll tell you the truth: If Blue threw me over, I’d die, me with two little ones and a dog.”

  “There’s no need to fuss,” Hennie told her soothingly. “You can cut up the shirt to make you a quilt.”

  Zepha mulled that over, but Hennie’s words didn’t satisfy her. “What if all the bad luck goes right into the quilt? What then? Tell me that.”

  “It won’t. I know it for a fact,” Hennie insisted. “Barbara Annie Moon who lived over to Breckenridge broke her needle when she was stitching her husband’s pants, so she cut ’em up and made herself a britches quilt. Her husband was just as besotted over Barbara Annie after they wore out that quilt as he ever was.”

  Zepha pondered Hennie’s words before she nodded. “I could try it. I could be real careful and use that quilt just for good, so it’ll last until Blue’s too old for devilment.” She nodded to herself. “I thank you, Mrs. Comfort. It’s a relief off my mind. You won’t tell him, will you? If Blue finds out, he’ll worry himself sick.”

  “Not a word.”

  After Zepha hurried off, the girl and the old woman paused to look at the bric-a-brac in Ye Olde Shop, mostly leavings from folks who had moved away or stuff that Maggie Fox, who ran the shop, had picked up around the mines. “Eli Nash had the first bathtub in town, and Ye Olde Maggie tried to buy it to sell to some tourist as an antique,” Hennie said, shaking her head. Maggie never sold much, for most of her merchandise could be found at the dump, but the shop attracted its share of summer tourists, and that was Maggie’s goal, Hennie said, because the woman did like to chatter. Nit’s eyes lit up when she spotted a white platter in the window, just below the word CURIOSITIES, which was stenciled in black on the glass. The platter was feather-edged with blue, and there was only a tiny chip in it, but the tag said fifty cents, nothing short of robbery.

  “Just wait. By the end of summer, she’ll sell the whole store for a nickel,” Hennie replied. “It’s a right pretty plate. I wonder where she accumulated it from.”

  A few steps away, they encountered Monalisa Pinto by the Skelly pump at the Pinto store and stopped a minute to exchange pleasantries with her. Now that Nit was a member of the Tenmile Quilters, Monalisa had softened toward her. “The store’s just got in a bolt of cloth in robin’s egg blue with kittens on it. You young girls always like kitten
s,” she said. Nit gave Monalisa a pretty smile at that, although when the woman went on her way, Nit told Hennie that she wouldn’t let a cat into the house. “Cats get in your bed when you’re asleep and suck your breath,” she said.

  Just then, the Reverend Shadd passed them on his way to the store and raised his hat. “Good morning, Mrs. Comfort, and Mrs. Spindle, is it?”

  Nit appeared pleased that the man knew her name, for she was shy and scurried out of church on Sunday mornings instead of shaking hands with the minister. “It is. Good morning,” she replied, waiting for Hennie to greet the man.

  But the old woman turned her back on the minister and was watching a man as aged as she was, taller and with a head of hair that shone like polished silver, come out of the barbershop. He hailed her, and she cried, “Tom Earley, I thought you were dead. Are you back in town? When was it you were planning to come around and see me and have a toddy and so forth?”

  He didn’t answer her question but, instead, he grinned at Hennie, the smile lines around his eyes crinkling. “Slow down and tell me how’s the madam?”

  “Couldn’t be better now that I’ve seen you. And you, Tom, you look stout as a mule. How’s your health?”

  “Same.”

  “Make you acquainted with Nit Spindle. She’s new to Middle Swan. Her husband, Dick, works the Liberty Dredge. Nit, this here is Tom Earley. Tom and his brother Moses came to Middle Swan not long after I did.”

  “And if I’d seen her before Jake Comfort grabbed her, I’d have married her myself—prettiest girl I ever saw.”

  “Oh, go on with you.” Hennie blushed, then said fondly, “You always had a way with you.” It hit her then that if she moved below, she might never see Tom Earley again, and that caused a pounding in her heart, for he was nearly her oldest friend. To still the thumping, she put a hand on her chest and turned to Nit, saying, “Mr. Earley was one of the hardest-working prospectors on the Swan.”

  “Not that it did me any good. All the gold dust I panned would fit into Hennie’s thimble.”

  “That’s right.” Then Hennie explained, “But later on, he set up a plant to manufacture mining machinery, and that factory’s worth more than any gold mine ever discovered on the Tenmile. Mr. Earley lives in Chicago.”

  Nit studied the man then. He was dressed in a fine white shirt and a good khaki suit, not flashy but much finer than the overalls and rough twill pants of the prospectors and dredge workers. He didn’t wear a ruby stick pin or a gold ring or any other jewelry, but nonetheless, he looked as rich as a Pikes Peak nugget.

  “Tom’s had a cabin here for almost seventy years, and he can’t stay away from these mountains. They do that to you,” Hennie said.

  “Can’t stay away from you, Hennie. Are you still selling prayers?”

  “Are you in need of one?”

  “It might restoreth my soul.”

  “You sound like a stump-knocker.”

  “I read the Bible more now that I’m getting old.”

  “Old? Oh no. Not you, Tom.”

  The two bantered for a few minutes, until Hennie insisted, “You come to supper tomorrow evening. I’ll bake a raspberry pie as good as you’ll never know.”

  And Tom agreed. “Yep, old gal. I’ll bring a loaf of bread.”

  “He’s a good hand to make bread,” Hennie told Nit. Then she turned to her old friend. “Us be going now. Tap ’er light, Tom.”

  “And yourself, Hennie.”

  As the two old friends paused in their good-byes, Nit wandered over to a deserted store with CANDY, NUTS & LADIES UNDERWEAR in dull gold lettering on the window. The shop’s door was secured by a rusty lock, and stuck inside in the window frame was a handwritten note: “Back in 15 min,” the words so faded that they were barely legible. Nit peeked into the display window, which was littered with dead flies. The corset on the headless, armless model in the window was dusty and yellow with age, and a slip that once had been pinned to the dummy had crumpled into a pile and was sun-faded.

  When Nit turned around to ask about the store, she found Tom Earley gone and Hennie talking to the oldest couple the girl had ever seen in Middle Swan. The man had a face as wrinkled as that of a dried-apple doll, while the woman was as fat as mud, and the parchment skin of her face was powdered with flour. She was bent over, the upper part of her body almost parallel with the ground, and she carried a green birdcage with a yellow canary inside, which she held up for Nit to inspect. “We’re taking Henry for his walk,” she explained in a voice that was surprising for its youth and merriment. “I catched him gone this morning, but he was only up on the stove.”

  “It’d kill her if she lost him,” the old man added in a voice scratched by mine dust.

  “It’d kill me if I lost you, old feller,” the woman said, taking the man’s hand and squeezing it, and they exchanged adoring looks. The couple moved on slowly then, the woman swaying from side to side as she walked, for her legs were angled from rickets, and his were as wobbly as dishrags. They held the birdcage between them and swung it a little as they made their way down the street.

  “They’re as old as these mountains. I’ll tell you about them sometime,” Hennie said. The two women reached the edge of town and started up the trail that led to Sunset Peak. Hennie said again that it was a fine day for raspberrying. The sky was bright enough to hurt your eyes, and a breeze carried the scent of pines on it. Camp robbers and squirrels chattered along the trail, drowning out the screeching of the dredge, which grew fainter as the women climbed higher. The raspberry bushes would be full by now, Hennie guessed. The two would pick all they could carry, with plenty for pies and enough left over to fill half a dozen bottles. Before she left home, Hennie had taken down the jars and rubbers from her shelves and brought out the kettle, so that they could preserve the berries. The two would do the canning at Hennie’s house, for the girl didn’t have her own bottles. Or maybe they’d make jam. Nit liked her sweetness, and God knew, raspberry jam on a winter’s morning took away the blue devils. It was like tasting summer.

  When they stopped, the girl leaned against a rock, panting, saying she didn’t know what was wrong with her, maybe the altitude. She thought she’d have adjusted by now, she said, “But I feel just like a baked apple.”

  “It’s terrible hot, all right, Mrs. Spindle. Besides, up here, we’re a thousand foot higher than Middle Swan. This climb would wind a mule,” Hennie told her, although she herself showed no signs of slowing. She reached over and slapped the girl’s arm, then held out her hand to show a dead mosquito squashed on the palm. “Drat thing! Did it bite you?”

  The girl nodded, scratching her arm until there was a faint ooze of blood.

  Hennie told Nit to stay where she was while the old woman walked a few hundred yards down a faint trail and returned with a handful of leaves. “I thought I’d find some by that old cabin. Rub you with tansy, and you won’t get you nary another mosquito bite.” She held out half of the leaves to Nit and rubbed the rest across her own face and arms. Nit watched the old woman, then wiped her skin with the leaves. “I forgot you told me tansy kept skeeters away. At home, we used tansy tea for the chicken pox.” Nit put a leaf into her pocket.

  Hennie made a face, for tansy tea sounded bitter. “We’ll go ahead, if you’re ready. It’s not far,” she said.

  Now that the girl was rested, the old woman started on, leading the way past a mine, whose head frame, weathered to the color of a slag heap, towered over young pines. Deserted cabins, their doors sagged open, were lined up near the mine. Through the door of one, the women could make out a white metal bed, its head- and footboards fanciful swirls of iron. “The Confederate Belle,” Hennie said. “It shut down before the century, but it’ll take a hundred years before the trees grow up again. They cut them every bit down for mine timbers and stove wood.”

  Up ahead was a glory hole, its opening surrounded by the golden remnants of discarded ore. The range was potted with the old prospect holes, their waste dumps trailing do
wn the mountainsides like spilled cornmeal. When they reached the hole, which was circled by yellow mine waste, the girl walked over to it and peered down, inching forward. Hennie reached out and grabbed Nit’s dress. “Best not. Who knows how far down these shafts go?”

  “They ought to fill them up then.”

  Hennie shrugged and wondered who would do that. The prospectors who’d found the outcroppings and dug the holes searching for gold had moved on long ago or had passed over, most likely. Nobody owned the dead holes. “The bootleggers use them,” Hennie said. “In Prohibition time, we had dozens of stills in these mountains. Men here made more money from brewing tanglefoot than they did from mining. The bootleggers charged twenty dollars a gallon and the bars, five cents a shot. We’ve got stills yet that are running full out, because there’s some say homemade is better than anything you can buy legal. You ever see any such activity as that, you head in the opposite direction.”

  “I know about those things,” Nit said, and Hennie bit her tongue at her overbearing way. Of course the girl did. There must be ten times as much moonshining in the Appalachian Mountains where Nit had come from than in all of Colorado.

  Hennie held out the canteen. “God himself brewed this—mountain water. Drink,” she insisted, explaining that nothing wore out a body faster than lack of water in that dry altitude. The girl did as she was told. Hennie finished the water and detoured to a stream to refill the canteen. They were almost to the burn now, and Hennie led the way through the pines, Nit following, until they broke into the clearing just a little below timberline, and Hennie pointed to the bushes weighted down by crimson berries.

  Nit rushed forward and began pulling raspberries off the branches, shoving them into her mouth. In a minute, she remembered her manners and held out a handful to Hennie. “Would you have some?”

  But Hennie was already picking berries and putting them into one of the pails. A red smear on her cheek told that she had sampled her share.