Prayers for Sale (6 page)

The bucket line, which had stopped while Hennie was telling her story, started up just then, the clanking and screeching breaking the stillness in the room, jarring Hennie loose from the past. She hated the sound of it, but she was relieved to hear the clatter, for it meant no one had been hurt. When there was an accident, the dredge stayed shut
down for a long time. “You see, it was just a little thing wrong with the dredge,” Hennie said.

With an effort, Hennie put the story of Sarah out of her mind. She glanced at the window and saw that it was black as tar outside and exclaimed, “Law, you’ve got supper to fix, and here I’ve been talking. That’s what happens when you live by yourself. You lose sight of the time. I’ll get on home and fix hotcakes. I can’t seem to take them for breakfast, so I have them at night.” She wondered if she could swallow the hotcakes after telling her story. Hennie stood and looked around for her coat.

Nit stood, too. She noticed the dark and struck a match and lit the kerosene lamp between them. It sent out a weak circle of light that didn’t illuminate much. The corners of the room were still in shadow. The girl’s eyes were red, and she wiped them with her fingers, then put her hand on the old woman’s arm. “Did Ila Mae—I mean, did you, back when you were Ila Mae—burn the quilt you were working on the way you did that army uniform?”

At first, Hennie didn’t understand, but when she did, she smiled, because the question tickled her. Only a true quilter would remember such a thing as a spoiled quilt. “The Murder quilt,” she mused. “That’s what I call it. I put it away half done, and I’ve kept it all these years. There might be a use for it yet.”

“What use?”

Hennie shook her head. That quilt was one of the things she had to deal with before she left Middle Swan.

“What happened to Abram Fletcher?”

Hennie pulled away from the girl and went to the bed for
her coat. Her back to Nit, Hennie put on the coat and tied a scarf around her head, as she thought what to say about Abram Fletcher.

“Do you hate Abram Fletcher still?” Nit continued. Hennie had put on her mittens and was fumbling with the buttons, so the girl fastened the old woman’s coat for her.

“No, I guess I don’t hate him anymore. But I never forgave him. What he did lodges in my heart like a wild licorice burr. You don’t forget. You never forget. You don’t forgive, either. But time passes, and you find peace of a kind. You will, too, Mrs. Spindle. That’s why I told you my story. You’ll wake up and go an hour without thinking about your baby. And one day, when you think of her, why, you’ll remember her sweetness, not her death.” Hennie sighed.

“Your story heals me,” Nit said.

The old woman thought to tell the girl that there would be other babies, but she wouldn’t, for she knew that might not be true. Hennie herself had suffered miscarriages in Middle Swan. Instead, she said, “You know, I believe Sarah’s death was as painful for Abram Fletcher as it was for me.”

“How can you say that?”

Hennie stared at the light on the table, then looked Nit in the face. “That’s a story with no ending. But I’ve got other stories, happier ones. You come over. I’m there most days, and I’d welcome the company. You come and sew and hear my stories. You know what a storyteller is, don’t you? It’s a person that has a good memory who hopes other people don’t.” The old woman chuckled and stood in the cold doorway a minute. “I promise you you’ll find peace yourself, Mrs. Spindle. Not tomorrow, but one day.”

She studied the girl a moment longer, thinking again how much Nit reminded her of herself at that age. There was indeed a reason the girl had stopped at her gate for a prayer, and maybe the Almighty had Hennie Comfort in mind as the answer. Perhaps it was tied up with letting the old woman stay in Middle Swan a little longer. It surprised her sometimes the way the Lord replied to a prayer, for He didn’t always answer the way Hennie would have answered it if the two of them had traded places.

Nit stood in the doorway and watched as Hennie disappeared into the darkness. Then she called after the old woman, “I thank you for your story. And I’m awful proud we got acquainted.”

The roofs of the French Street shacks smoked as the sun melted the snow on them, and the eaves dripped steady streams of water. Hidden in the doorway of her house, Hennie watched Nit make her way up the trail, her feet in their rubber shoes seeking rocks in the mud. The girl stepped so lightly that she could have walked on eggs and not broken them.

The houses, snuggled close to the ground, were winter-worn, the paint rubbed off, the roofs in need of patching where the wind had torn away the tarpaper. Fences were busted down from the heavy snows that the wind had pounded against them. Even now, in the shadowy places, mounds of dirty snow stood three feet high. Where the sun had melted the snow, a few green patches pushed up, but most of the yards were dead yet, and gray from chimney
smoke and from the ashes housewives threw on the ice that lay on the paths to the clotheslines and the privies. Snow covered the rusted-out engines and broken machinery that littered Middle Swan yards. It was an ugly scene, but it meant that winter was coming to an end.

Nit slowed next to a raw-board house where a dirty quilt hung behind a broken window to keep out the cold. A large slattery woman wearing an apron over her coat stood in a pair of men’s overshoes, hanging sheets on a line, a ragged dog beside her. Nit shaded her eyes with her hand, because the glare of the bright sun on snow brought a hurting to them. She stopped and greeted the woman, who was standing next to a heavy wicker basket, but with the screeching of the dredge in the distance, the woman didn’t hear her. Instead of calling out again, Nit stood quietly, waiting for the woman to turn around.

Her back to Nit, the woman slogged through the mud in her yard, carrying a sheet to a bare place on the line. As she lifted it, she slipped, dragging the wet laundry through the mud. “You cussed thing!” she cried, throwing the sheet into the basket, where it scraped its muddy end against the other laundry. “You go to West Hell!” She stamped her heavy shoe in the mud, splashing brown flecks onto her leg. Then as she picked up the laundry basket to take it into the house, she spotted Nit. The girl smiled, but the woman snarled, “You see something you think is funny?”

“No, ma’am. I was just waiting—”

“Waiting for what? Waiting for me to fall down and drown in this muck? Is that what you was waiting for? Don’t you say a word to me while I’m mad.” The woman glared at
Nit. “You see my butt? Well, kiss me on it.” She picked up the laundry basket so that the muddy edge rubbed against her coat. “Jesus God!” she swore. “Come on, Asia,” she said to the dog and went into the house.

Nit blushed, but whether from the insult or the woman’s sharp tongue wasn’t clear. The girl ducked her head to stare down at the street, and Hennie slipped back inside the house, for she didn’t want Nit to know she’d witnessed the girl’s humiliation.

Nit moved along the trail to the two-story log place with the shake roof and stared for a minute at the sign, the letters not painted on but carved into a board that was silver-gray and splintered with age:
PRAYERS FOR SALE
. Nit looked at the sign for a full minute, while Hennie waited, not knowing if the girl was in need of another prayer or had just come to visit. As Nit stared at the lettering, Hennie opened the door and stepped outside.

“Just you come in, Mrs. Spindle,” Hennie cried, joyed to see the girl. “It’s a fine day for a visit, with the sun blazing and the snow drying up ever as fast as rain in July. Why, it won’t be any time till the lupine and the Indian paintbrush pop up their heads.”

“I hope you don’t mind me calling on you,” Nit said timidly, glancing back over her shoulder, but there was no sign of the angry woman. “I stopped to say hello to a lady hanging up her laundry”—she jerked her head toward the old house—“and she was as friendly as a mad dog. She’s quaint-natured, and she swore something terrible.”

“That would be Thelma Franks, who you’d be hard-pressed to neighbor with. Her profanation is scandalous.
There’s a piece of gutter in her spine that makes her rage so. She’s mad today because a thief stole her two-way stretch girdle off the line last night. She came raging over here and asked if I’d taken it. Now what would I do with her girdle? It would fit around me twice. I think the wind was the thief, for I can’t see why anybody would want the old thing. It was almost out of stretch. Or maybe Asia—that’s that worthless pup—got it.”

“Asia’s a funny name for a dog?”

“Her husband called it that name. He said he wished the thing was on the other side of the world.” Hennie lowered her voice. “She isn’t really Mrs. Franks. She lives with him, but those two won’t marry because they fight too much.”

“She told me—I like to die when she said it . . .” Nit blushed, as if she wasn’t sure whether to repeat the words, but she did. “She told me to kiss her on her butt.”

“That’s not a thing I’d like to think about.”

Nit giggled. “What’s West Hell?”

“She said that, did she? I believe she’s well acquainted with it. That’s a place worse than hell itself. I’ve heard some say it’s Middle Swan in February.” The old woman unlatched the gate for Nit, who handed her a dish, Hennie’s own raspberry pie plate with Hennie’s dishcloth, newly washed and ironed, covering it. Hennie peeked inside and exclaimed, “Snickerdoodles, my favorite. Why, you didn’t have to bring me anything.”

“Mommy always said never return an empty plate.” Nit had a forlorn look on her face and added, “But these are a poor excuse for a cookie. I made them twice, and they fell as flat as stack cakes both times.”

Hennie told the girl it was the altitude that affected her cooking and suggested she use more water and less lard. “It takes a while to learn to cook up here. Water this high up boils at a lower temperature than you’re used to, so you have to leave things on the stove longer. You’ll learn. I did.” Hennie didn’t add that she’d served Jake unleavened bread and hard beans for weeks, and he didn’t say a word until he came home one afternoon and found her crying over her spoiled supper. He told her it wasn’t her fault but the altitude’s, and to ask another woman in the camp about cooking, so Hennie called on her nearest neighbor, Laura Burke, the madam at the Willows, for help.

“I been asked by wives what they done wrong in the bedroom but never the kitchen,” Laura said, and when Hennie laughed, Laura invited her inside for a cup of tea. Laura told the young bride, “Bake your bread with a pinch less of leavening, and if you want beans for Sunday dinner, put them on the stove Friday night.”

Hennie was so pleased with the advice that on baking day, she left a loaf of bread wrapped in a tea towel at the back door of the hookhouse. And the next morning, the towel, freshly laundered, was lying on Hennie’s doorstep.

“Well, I wish I knew about that before I started,” Nit said. “I hate to put cookies like these in Dick’s lunch bucket. I have a pride in what I give him.”

“He won’t mind,” Hennie said, knowing she spoke the truth. She’d met Dick Spindle the week before when the young couple was tramping about in the snow, the boy holding tight to his wife’s hand, treating her as if she was as delicate as a china doll. Nit’s husband wasn’t much more than a
child himself, the flush of youth still on him. Hennie asked how he liked working on the dredge, and he said fine. But Hennie knew from Roy Pinto at the store that the workers were rough on him, especially the boss, Silas Hemp. He was a real stinker and took especial delight in devilment. Later, Hennie asked the Almighty to find Dick another line of work for him, one for which he was better suited.

Hennie leaned over to smell the cookies. “Your stomach doesn’t see what they look like. These’ll taste awful good,” she said. “I was just about frying some bread for breakfast, but I’d rather have a snickerdoodle.” Hennie walked back over the stepping stones to the door. “I was wrecking my mind thinking what to do today, and here you’ve come along for a nice visit.”

Hennie held the door so that Nit could go ahead of her. The house, which was as neat and tidy as if Hennie had just finished spring cleaning, smelled of cloves. The room they entered was large and served as living room with a fireplace constructed from big, smooth stones along one wall, a dining room, and a kitchen. A door in the kitchen opened outside, and a second door led to an inside bathroom, a luxury in Middle Swan. There was another doorway in the back that opened onto a bedroom, where a spool bed was made up a foot high with quilts. A staircase along one wall led to more bedrooms. Hennie’s house was a pure mansion compared to Nit’s cabin.