Prayers for Sale (13 page)

“And you, Davy?” Hennie asked

“Same.” He stuffed his mittens into his pocket and held his hands over the stove, rubbing together fingers that were gnarled with arthritis and grimy with dirt. One thumbnail was black.

Roy came out from the back room then, wiping his hands
on his overalls and smelling of Tenmile Moon. He nodded at Davy.

“Look, Pinto, how many gallons of gasoline do I need to get to Denver?” Davy asked.

“About a hundred and fifty, if you’re driving that old Packard touring sedan of yours in this weather. That machine ought to be up on blocks like everybody else’s this time of year. You’ll never make it,” Roy told him. “Besides, that heater wouldn’t warm a gnat.”

“We’ll see. She says she has to go to Denver to have her teeth made. Then she wants me to take her to eat at the Neisner Brothers’ luncheonette.” He pronounced the word “luncheon-eddie.” “I tell you, sir, I got no choice.” Davy reached his grimy hand inside his shirt, and Hennie wondered if he had fleas, for he couldn’t stop scratching.

“Take the train.”

“She won’t ride a train. If I don’t take her, she’ll hurt me on my bum, and I won’t hardly ever sit down no more.”

“You ain’t got the backbone of a fishworm,” Roy told him. “You’ll run off the road going over the top. It’s snowed pretty bad up there last night. Just when you think it might be spring, another storm blows in. Always happens.”

“I know it.” Davy put his hat back on his head and pulled the earflaps down. His face was as gray as the storm outside. “You coming on out to fill ’er up, or you want me to go down the Swan to get my gasoline?”

“Have it your way.” Roy took a dirty woolen jacket from a hook behind the counter and went outside to the Skelly gasoline pump in front of the store.

As he left, Davy turned to Hennie. “Tap ’er light.”

“And yourself, Davy,” Hennie replied.

The two women stared through the open doorway as the gasoline went up and down in the big glass pump. Davy took out a cigarette and lit a match, turning his back to the wind and cupping his hand around the flame, but the wind blew it out. He struck another match, but the wind took it, too. Davy shoved the cigarette under an earflap of his cap.

Nit craned her neck to see the woman through the Packard’s windshield. “You think all her teeth’s fallen out?”

“They got pulled a long time ago, and she had a set made back then,” Hennie told the girl. “But she dropped them down the privy, and now she won’t wear them.”

“Hello, yes. I wouldn’t, either,” Nit said.

Shivering in the cold blowing through the door, the two watched as the man paid Roy and drove off. Roy came back into the store, rubbing his nose, which was red, with pores as big as matchheads. “Judas Priest. That hammer-headed bastard is going to take an automobile over the hump in this weather. I never saw a man so stubborn. Damn fool.” Roy started to say more, but became sensible that Nit was listening. “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he said, but Nit giggled. So he gave her a sly look and went on to the back room, muttering, “Horny-toed bastard.”

Roy had just closed the door when the firehouse siren went off, and the girl jumped.

“Just the noon whistle,” Hennie said. “I best be getting home before the soup burns up.” She put her arms inside her sleeves and pulled the coat around her.

“I’ve been thinking,” Nit said. She studied her apple, which was mostly brown spots now. So she opened the door
of the stove and threw the apple into the coals, where it sizzled. “Middle Swan’s about as different a place as there is from Kentucky. But I think the people aren’t so different, women anyway.”

“How’s that?” Hennie asked.

“They’re strong. I think you have to be strong to live there or here. Like you,” Nit said.

Hennie thought that over. “Like you, too, Mrs. Spindle. Maybe you don’t know it, but you are. You’ll see.”

“Do you think so?” Nit asked, pleased. “I’d like to be strong. Do you really think I am?”

Before Hennie could answer, the door opened, letting in the moan of the dredge and a stern-looking woman with a plate covered by a napkin.

“How’s yourself?” she asked Hennie.

“Good as ever,” Hennie replied. “And you?”

“Same.”

The woman looked Nit up and down but didn’t speak. “I’ve got his dinner,” she said to Hennie and continued on into the back room and shut the door.

“Don’t mind her. She keeps her nose so high in the air, she’s liable to drown in a good rainstorm,” Hennie said. “Monalisa Pinto thinks she’s the second coming of Jesus Christ.”

“It’s a good thing that Greta Garbo wasn’t here when she came in. Mrs. Pinto would have knocked her dead with the look she gave me,” Nit said. A horrified expression came over her face. “Maybe she thinks I’m one of those sorry girls.”

“No. You can set your mind at rest.” Hennie rose and buttoned her coat. She picked up the yeast and left five pennies on the counter. Nit stood as well, and the two walked
out of the store together, Hennie closing the door and testing it to make sure that it was shut tight.

“Mrs. Pinto is what they call her, but she’s not. You remember me telling you about that hooker from the Willows, the one who was a nurse and got hitched up with a man?” Hennie chuckled and started down the street, leaving the girl standing in front of the store with her little pink hand over her mouth.

The Liberty Dredge gave an enormous shudder, then with a groan of agony, the gold boat shut down, and the silence awakened Hennie Comfort. Or perhaps she awoke because of the sound of birds chattering. With all the hollering the dredge made, Hennie hadn’t heard the dawn call of birds in a long time. She pulled herself into consciousness, sensing that something was different. Then she heard the scream of a camp robber and sprang out of bed—that is, as much as an eighty-six-year-old woman with rheumatism in her knees could spring. She found her carpet slippers and shuffled on rubbery ankles to the window she’d left open the night before and peered out.

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
.