Prayers for Sale Read online

  “Seventy years? Why, I didn’t know Colorado’d been here that long.” Nit flushed and bit her lip, looking anxious for fear she’d given offense.

  Hennie only laughed. “It hasn’t. But I have. I’m almost as old as these hills—eighty and six.” She didn’t look it. Oh, her skin was brown from years of living too close to the sun, and her hair was the color of the snow that had fallen for days now. But there was a toughness and sense of purpose to Hennie Comfort that belied her age. And while she’d never been pretty, she had been handsome and still was, with her tall angular body, her large mouth and straight nose set in a long face. She sat upright, her back straight as a pine, not stooped like most mountain women.

  Nit stared at Hennie, about to say something but too tongue-tied. She shook her curls and said at last, “We’ve got coffee, the grounds not used but once.”

  “I’ll take a cup if it wouldn’t rob you.”

  “No, ma’am. It would not.” Nit turned quickly and busied herself at the range, putting kindling into the firebox, watching the fire flare up, adjusting the damper, then adding stove wood. After she dipped water from a bucket and poured it into the cast-iron tea kettle, fitting the kettle into the eye over the firebox, the girl lifted down a basket and took out a bundle wrapped in newspaper. She removed the paper to display two fine teacups and saucers, which she polished with a dish towel before setting them on the table.

  “Oh my, real English bone china,” Hennie said.

  “Sometimes I’m afraid to use them. They’re delicate as birds’ eggs, and I’ve got nary another. But you’re my first caller.” She paused. “I guess I already said that.”

  Hennie wanted to tell the girl that cracked mugs would do for her, but seeing Nit’s pride, she said instead, “I thank you for the honor.”

  “I didn’t mean you’d break them.” Nit turned back to the stove and spooned the used grounds into the coffeepot, then added a spoonful of fresh. She poured boiling water into the pot and let the coffee steep, the grounds settle. “I hope you don’t think I’m putting on airs, Mrs. Comfort. The cups are a wedding present, and I love them so. I’m saving them for good, for callers such as yourself. Have you ever seen anything so pretty?”

  A long-ago look came over Hennie Comfort’s face. “Somebody gave me china cups as a wedding present, too. I was younger than you.” The old woman had packed them in a barrel of flour for the trip to Colorado, and she had them yet, chipped and mended but still good enough to use.

  Nit said she was seventeen. Small, with clear pink skin, her bobbed hair the color of the rust that covered Middle Swan’s abandoned mining machinery like a patina, and wearing a prim little dress with cap sleeves and a sash, she was just a chunk of a girl.

  Hennie told her she’d been fourteen, going on fifteen, when she’d married.

  “It’s old enough,” Nit said.

  “That was eighteen and sixty-four. There was a war, and Billy was taken for a soldier and scared he wouldn’t come home.”

  “Did he?”

  Hennie Comfort shook her head.

  Nit waited for her guest to say more, and when she didn’t, the girl brought the pot to the table and poured the coffee. She returned the coffee to the back of the stove to keep warm and sat down on the box across from Hennie. After a minute, she jumped up, saying, “I forgot my manners,” and reached for a sugar bowl on the shelf and set it on the table. She took down a pickle jar that served as a spooner and placed it in front of Hennie. “You use the silver spoon. It’s real silver,” she said.

  Hennie didn’t care for sweetening in her coffee that late in the day, but rather than hurt the girl’s feelings, she picked up the spoon and dipped it into the sugar bowl. “It’s as fine a spoon as I ever saw. When I married, I had but two spoons, and they were tin.”

  Nit flushed. “I shouldn’t have bragged. Mostly, we don’t have any stuff that costs a lot.” The two were quiet for a moment, sipping the coffee. Then the girl asked, “Were your people for the Union?”

  “We weren’t for anything, not to start with. We didn’t want the war in our part of Tennessee. But if you didn’t enlist for the Confederacy, you got shot. Billy didn’t have a choice. He was only two years older than me, but they told him it was his time.”

  “Tennessee!” Nit almost shouted. “Ah gee, I’m from Kentucky.”

  “I thought you might be. Welcome to Middle Swan, Mrs. Spindle.” Hennie held up her cup in a toast. She’d been right, after all, about the girl being from the South, and she was glad she’d come to welcome her. Hennie remembered the long days after she herself had arrived, lonely because she had but one friend in the camp, and that one lived high up on the mountain at a mine, too far to visit every day. The other women in Middle Swan didn’t call on Hennie. Only later did she learn that they were hookers. Still, she wouldn’t have minded.

  Nit thanked her for the welcome, and the two sat a minute longer, picking up their cups, sipping, and carefully setting the cups down on the saucers, which had a design of pale pink roses on them. When she finished her coffee, Hennie reached into her pocket and took out a bit of sewing.

  “Oh, you quilt!” Nit said. She took the square from the older woman and examined it, running her fingers over the squares and triangles that made up a pattern the younger woman knew—Bear Paw.

  “Lordy, I love it! I’d rather quilt than eat on the starvingest day of my life. Law yes! I reckon I do love it!” Hennie told her.

  “Why, me, too. I don’t know why I do, but I do.” Nit jumped up and returned with her own workbasket. “I love to quilt and watch the snow come down. I’ve been doing it all week since we came here. Imagine snow in May. Why, I had my cotton coming up long before now.”

  “May, June, July. I’ve seen it snow in Middle Swan every month of the year. If you like snow, you’ll be happy here.” Hennie commenced sewing, taking stitches the size of mustard seeds.

  Nit removed her own piecing from the basket and set it in her lap. After a bit, Hennie asked to see it, and Nit shyly handed her the square. “I’m not so good,” she said. “It’s just an old scrap quilt.” She didn’t have to explain that a scrap quilt was made from fabric leftovers of every pattern and color; there wasn’t a woman who didn’t know that.

  “Nobody starts out a perfect quilter,” Hennie said, marking down in her mind to give Nit some of her scraps, for it wasn’t likely that the girl, who would have come by train, for few cars could get into Middle Swan in the snow, had thought to pack leavings from dresses and shirts. Hennie, on the other hand, had brought her scraps on the trip west, because she’d come by covered wagon and wanted something to do in the evenings around the campfire. Of course, it had turned out that on the trip, she hadn’t had a minute of leisure to pick up her needle, except for mending—and then that time when she’d gashed her arm. Hennie had sent the man whose wagon she rode in for her sewing basket, and while he watched, she’d sewn up the gash herself. The man had fainted.

  “Did you make those over there?” Hennie asked, indicating the quilts on the bed and bench. The girl twitched her shoulders, uncomfortable at the attention, and nodded. The quilts were thick, lumpy, probably filled with rags or worn-out quilts for batting, and they were put together with large stitches—not quilts that a fine stitcher like Hennie would make. Instead of edging the quilts with binding, the girl had turned the backsides over the quilt tops and stitched them. And they were pieced from a variety of fabrics—mattress ticking, feed sacks, old towels, domestics that had been dyed with onions, walnuts, and red clay. But the variety of colors was like sunshine on a day when storm clouds hovered over the Tenmile Range, so gay and bold that Hennie wanted to shade her eyes.

  “I can see they’re from the South,” she observed, for she was familiar with quilts. “Some folks tell where a woman’s come from by the way she talks, but I tell from her quilts. Women from the East bring those fancy red and green quilts, and there isn’t a woman in Kansas who hasn’t made a Drunkard’s Path. Oh my yes, your
quilts are from the South. Happy quilts, I’d call them.” Hennie smiled at the girl, thinking it was all right if a woman quilted with her heart instead of her hands.

  Nit’s face burned, and to hide her embarrassment she took the cups to the stove and poured more coffee. As she set the coffee down on the table, there was the sound of metal scraping far off up the river. The creaking of the dredge boat’s bucket line went on day and night. “I can’t stand that chatter. It punishes my ears, and I can’t sleep,” she said.

  “You’ll get used to it. After a bit, you won’t notice it at all. One day, the bucket line’ll break, and the noise’ll stop, and that’s what will wake you,” Hennie told her. She didn’t add that when the dredge was silent too long, the women in Middle Swan got fidgety, worrying that the dredge had been shut down on purpose because of an accident. The girl would learn soon enough about the dangers of the gold boats. No need to tell her now.

  “It’s a funny way to mine gold, with a boat.”

  “It’s not mining. It’s dredging. A real miner works underground, not on a rackety boat.” Hennie’s voice was sharp. She was one of the old people in Middle Swan who hated the gold boats. But then, most people did. Even some of the folks who worked on the dredges hated them. But they didn’t have any choice. Even with the price of gold at thirty-five dollars an ounce, only a dozen mines were open. The men who toiled underground nowadays owned the workings, and they employed just a handful of others. The laid-off miners found jobs on the huge dredges that squatted in the mountain streams up the gulch of the middle branch of the Swan River and over on the Blue River at Breckenridge. Those were paying jobs, and the dredge men were grateful for the paychecks. Men in Middle Swan fought for those jobs, and Roy Pinto had been right when he said they resented an outsider getting hired on. Nit’s husband would have to be careful.

  A gold boat was a big, brutal thing, with a high gantry like the gallows frame of a mine. A dredge sat in a pond of its own making and used a bucket line made up of huge iron scoops that were permanently attached to a revolving chain. The buckets went down through the water in the front of the boat, down thirty or forty or fifty feet to bedrock, scooping up dirt and rocks, then rode the chain up a ladder to the top of the gantry. Large rocks were separated out, while sand and gravel were dumped into a kind of sluice box. Then the sand and gravel were washed away, leaving the heavier grains and nuggets of gold behind in the riffles of the box. The waste went out on a conveyor belt and was dropped behind the boat in piles as high as the chimney of a two-story house. The riffles were cleaned every week, and the gold melted out and molded into a brick. Where once a good, clear river had flowed, there were mountains of tailings that dammed the water and forced it to trickle through gray piles of rock.

  Dredging was dangerous work. A man could get caught up in the bucket line and lose a finger or worse. More than one worker had died when he touched the electric. In winter, the decks and gangplank froze and a man might lose his footing—or maybe get pushed—sliding into the icy water. With his heavy boots and coat, he would sink into the dredge pond with barely a cry. Even if someone heard him and rescued him before he drowned, he’d likely come down with pneumonia, which at ten thousand feet was just a slower death.

  A real miner, now, he worked underground and was as comfortable as you please, because the mines were warm in winter, cool in summer. Of course, mines were as dangerous as the gold boats. Hennie knew that as well as anybody, better than most. A miner got old early from working underground. He could be crushed in a cave-in or blown to kingdom come with blasting powder, or he could get rock dust in his lungs and develop the miner’s puff. Not for nothing were the drills used in the mines called “widow makers.” Some men couldn’t take it underground, where it was as dark as a dungeon. But unless a blast released a wall of underground water, which was rare, you didn’t drown in a mine. It might be said that dying in a mine was a better way to go, although it was dying just the same.

  A man was proud of his work as a miner, proud of how he developed a feel for where a gold vein twisted or hid after it looked like it had pinched out. Mining was a calling. And there was always hope of a big strike—finding rich ore or even breaking through into a honeycomb. She remembered Lonnie Trucker, who’d done just that years before—hit the rock wall with a pick, and that pretty little vug like a honeycomb of gold had opened up. Lonnie mined it out with a trowel, saving the biggest nugget for himself. He carried it around wrapped up in a doll’s quilt that Hennie had given him, unfolding the blanket to show off the nugget, just as if it had been his son. Folks called that nugget “Trucker’s Baby.”

  Men weren’t proud of their work on the dredges. Dredging was a poor excuse for a job, Hennie thought, no better than working in a big factory. But there was no call to tell that to Nit Spindle. Or to warn her husband to watch out for foolishness. Most likely, he’d learned that already.

  Hennie took a few stitches in her quilt square, made a knot, and bit off the thread. “I expect your husband works on the Liberty Dredge,” she said. The Liberty was the gold boat on the Swan River above Middle Swan, the boat whose clanking had interrupted them.

  “Oh yes, ma’am. Dick’s a deckhand.”

  Hennie asked how he’d gotten hired on.

  Nit replied that Dick’s cousin once removed worked at the dredge company’s office in the East. She chewed at her finger. “Do you think people hate us for that? Maybe Dick took the job away from somebody else.”

  Instead of answering, Hennie said, “Not everybody wants to work on a dredge.”

  Nit sighed. “I thought maybe that’s why nobody’s come calling. But we were so desperate. There aren’t any jobs at home, so Dick wrote his cousin. He’s always been partial to Dick. I’ve been afraid that people here didn’t like us ’cause Dick took a job that rightly belongs to somebody else. I’m so lonesome.”

  The old woman reached over and patted the girl’s hand. “They’ll come along. A mountain woman, now if she wants to visit, she makes an errand. If she comes on an errand, she pretends it’s a visit. Don’t fret. They’re just taking their time thinking up errands.”

  Hennie remembered again how lonely she’d been that first year and how she’d vowed to call on every new woman in Middle Swan, and over the years, she had. Except for the hookers. She visited them at first, but they looked at her warily, their eyes shifting back and forth. They didn’t ask her in, and Hennie knew she made the girls uneasy. She meant well, of course, but one of the prostitutes told her, “Most women like you want to send we girls to a farm. Well, I come from a farm. Why do you think I turned out?” And Hennie had understood, because she knew too many women in Tennessee who had gone to the grave young from farm work.

  Hennie’s eyes watered then for no reason, the way old women’s eyes do, and she reached into her pocket for her handkerchief, but instead she pulled out a smoky blue feather. “I forgot about this. I found it on the trail this morning, lying in the snow. Now what do you suppose a bluebird’s doing here this time of year?” She placed the feather on her palm and held out her hand to Nit. “Go on. Take it. You can pin it on the wall. Bluebirds are luck. Up here, they’re like bits the Lord cut out from the sky, just like you’d cut quilt pieces, and sent down to us.”

  “Oh gee!” The girl took the feather and stared at it. Suddenly, she burst into tears.

  Now what have you gone and done, old woman? Hennie asked herself. She set down her sewing and got up to put her arms around the girl, who cried even harder at the tenderness. Hennie patted her on the back, but the crying continued. “There now, dearie. I was lonesome, too, when I first came here, lonely as the devil at a revival meeting, as they say. But I came to like it right well. Why, in no time at all, I couldn’t hardly stand to go down below. I can’t breathe in that thick air. You’ll find a woman along the Tenmile Range, now it takes her a time to warm up, but once she does, you’ll never have a better neighbor. And a good neighbor’s worth more than money.”

  The
words only made Nit sob harder. There was nothing for Hennie to do then but let the girl cry herself out, and after a bit, the tears slowed, then stopped. Nit sniffed and wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “It’s not that,” Nit said. “You see, that feather’s the color of my baby’s eyes. I had to leave her behind when we moved here, leave her in the cold ground.” Nit reached into her pocket and withdrew a handkerchief that was white and neatly folded, and blew her nose. “She’s all alone, my little girl. I buried her under a marker that says ‘Sweet Baby Effie,’ but what if nobody remembers who Effie Spindle is? What if the sign falls away? I asked you to pray for her that day at your house. I left the nickel for you. I’d be obliged if you’d pray she won’t be forgot.”

  “I will.” Nit’s tears brought an aching to Hennie’s own heart, for she understood the girl’s sorrow. “You don’t have your people there?”

  Nit shook her head. “When we got married, Dick and I wanted us to go out to ourself. So we moved away from our homefolks.”

  “Then God will tend that baby’s grave.”

  The girl stared at Hennie.

  “You’ve got to believe that. Besides, it’s just a grave. Your baby lives in your heart now.” Hennie seemed to debate something with herself, and the thinking took a long time. Was there any reason to bring up what had happened so many years before? If she let herself talk about it, she wouldn’t sleep that night but, instead, would thrash about, reliving that time, because the pain never went away but only lay hidden in her mind. The story took such a toll on her that she rarely told it anymore. But she felt a kinship with the girl, who seemed little more than a baby herself. Besides, Hennie had asked the Lord to let her be the answer to Nit’s prayer, and He sometimes answered prayers in the oddest way. The old woman couldn’t overlook that. So, sighing, she said deliberately, looking down at the sewing in her hands, “My baby’s eyes were that color, too. She’s buried in Tennessee. I never went back. Not once.”