Prayers for Sale Read online

  “In seventy years?”

  Hennie shook her head. “I couldn’t go back. I have my grievements.” One still needed to be attended to, she thought, but didn’t tell that to Nit.

  “Was she dead-born, too, like Effie?”

  “She was eight months and two days when she got taken. Or maybe three days. I never knew for sure.”

  “Why couldn’t you go back, Mrs. Comfort?” The girl leaned forward. Her eyes still glittered with tears, but there was a questioning look in them. “Did you think you’d left her all alone, and you were afraid to see what became of her grave? That’s what it’s like for me. I feel I just left Effie by herself in the cold. If she’d been born alive and got sick, I could have helped her. I’m real good with the herbs. There’s a plant for every disease if you have the sense to find the right one, but Effie never lived long enough to get a disease. She was just born a small, puny little old thing that never took a breath.”

  Hennie patted the younger woman’s hand but did not speak.

  “Didn’t you ever want to see your girl’s resting place once more? I couldn’t bear it if I never saw Effie’s again. They say you shouldn’t name a dead baby, but I did anyway, named her for Mrs. Effie Pickle, who tended me during my labor.”

  Hennie shook her head. “I just couldn’t stand to be there again, knowing my little Sarah was under the ground and never deserved it—God’s precious child. I couldn’t look at the place where she’d died. Sometimes, it’s easier for me to look ahead than back.”

  Snow, which had stopped when Hennie set out for Nit’s cabin, was falling again, big, wet flakes, a sloppy spring snow, not one of the screaming mountain storms of winter, and the light was gone from the room, but neither of the women thought to strike a match for the kerosene lamp. “How did she die?” the girl asked in a whisper.

  Hennie went as rigid as a drill bit. “Drowned. Drowned in the creek where there wasn’t six inches of water.” She sighed deeply, recalling that tiny body, clad in a white dress that Hennie had embroidered with forget-me-nots.

  “Oh, Mrs. Comfort! There’s been a lot of suffering in it for you.” The girl cried softly now.

  Nit’s quiet sobs went to Hennie’s heart, and in a minute, a tear wet the scrap of quilting in the old woman’s lap. Hennie sniffed. She was not a woman who cried much, and she didn’t want to add to the girl’s misery. “There’s some here that know the story. I’m known in Middle Swan for my stories, but not this one. I haven’t told it in a long time, not since I stopped going to church. There’s not many that remember it.”

  “Do you need to tell it now? Do you feel the need of it?” The two seemed to have changed roles, and it was the girl now who offered solace to the old woman. Nit stood and took down the dipper hanging beside the stove. She filled it with water from the bucket, and held it out to Hennie. “Would you drink?” she asked.

  Nit’s concern made Hennie’s hands shake, for there was not a great deal of tenderness in a mining camp. She steadied the dipper and drank the water, which was cold. Most likely, it was melted snow, because the cabin didn’t have a well, and the stream was a long walk away.

  The girl took the dipper and hung it up. “I don’t mean to pry.”

  “You didn’t.” Hennie picked up her needle and took two or three stitches on the quilt square, but it was too dark to sew, and she knew the stitches were crooked and she’d have to take them out later. She stabbed the needle into the cloth. “I try not to bother folks with my troubles, and this happened so long ago that it’s best forgot. But you never really forget a thing like this, just like you’ll never forget about your little Effie.” She paused, still debating with herself. “It’s not a pretty story.” The old woman looked at Nit, half hoping the girl would stop her, for she still didn’t want to tell the story. She’d have a bad case of the blue devils tomorrow if she did.

  Instead, Nit leaned forward, her eyes on Hennie’s face, waiting for the woman to continue. Hennie felt a hairpin loosen in her white hair, which was pulled into a knot at the back of her neck. Without thinking about it, she scooped up stray hairs with the loose pin, which she secured in the knot. After a minute, she folded the sewing, although she did not put it into her pocket. Then taking a long breath, which was more of a sigh, she began. “Back then, I wasn’t Hennie Comfort. In those days, I was called by the name of Ila Mae Stubbs.”

  In the golden days before the start of the War Between the States, Ila Mae was the precious only child of Obadiah Stubbs, a successful miller, and his wife. They lived in White Pigeon, Tennessee. The girl was raised with advantages, attending a school for young ladies where she was taught to cipher and write a fine hand, sew a seam with stitches as tiny as specks of salt. Her framed sampler, with its embroidered house and willow trees and a verse about serving the Lord, hung in the place of honor over the mantel in the parlor.

  Ila Mae was not a pampered child. Although the Stubbses had servants—paid servants, because Obadiah Stubbs opposed slavery and owned neither man nor woman—Ila Mae helped at the cook stove and the laundry tubs. She loved the days spent in the barn and the garden, and truth be told, she was happier at the flour mill where the men argued about whether to join the North or the South if Mr. Lincoln were elected president than she was dressed in satin over corset and hoopskirt, gossiping at the tea table with her mother’s friends. Like her father, Ila Mae did not hold with human bondage, and as a girl of strong opinions, she sometimes joined the men’s conversations. Even at that age, she was one to speak her mind.

  “Teach her to curb her tongue, and she’ll make a good match,” said Barton Fletcher, foreman of the Stubbs Mill.

  “Some like a woman that speaks her mind,” Obadiah replied.

  “None I know. A husband could teach her.”

  “A husband that harms a hair on her head will be the worse for it,” Obadiah thundered.

  Both men were aware that Barton’s son, Abram, had a fondness for Ila Mae, but they knew, too, that she would have none of him. Abram Fletcher was a handsome-made man, but he was randy and ill-tempered as a hornet and had too high an opinion of himself. He’d been spoiled by his mother and never made to work by his father. “Rather than marry with him, I’ll betroth myself to a hog,” Ila Mae told her father when he asked her view of the young man. Obadiah was not upset by his daughter’s answer, for he considered Abram to be a fortune hunter.

  While Obadiah did not hold with the war, he thought nonetheless that when the fighting broke out, it was his duty to enlist for the South. He was killed at Shiloh. Had Ila Mae been older, she might have been trained to run the mill, for she had a clear head, and her father had no quarrel with a woman who was ambitious. But she was a girl yet, so the mill was entrusted to Barton Fletcher. The mother left business affairs to him, while, dressed in widow’s weeds, she sat long days in the parlor, the curtains drawn against the light. Death, when it came only a year after her husband’s, was welcome to her.

  By then, Barton Fletcher was running the mill with a free hand. Because her father had trusted him and he had eaten at their table, Ila Mae looked to him for guidance. She did not know a man would cheat a girl out of her inheritance, and when he told her to sign a paper, Ila Mae did so. Barton smirked at her then, handed her forty dollars, and claimed that she’d just sold him the mill and the house where she’d lived all her life, and every other thing that had belonged to her mother and father.

  She could stay on in the house, Barton told her, if she would marry his son. But Ila Mae would not allow Abram Fletcher to court her. Besides, she thought the world and all of Billy Lloyd and had promised herself to him. Billy wasn’t pretty like Abram. He was short and square-built, and at times, when riled, he had a temper. But he was a better man than Abram, kind and quiet-spoken, almost always showing a sunny disposition. Some thought those qualities made him soft and cowardly, and hoping to eliminate him as a rival, Abram used some trifling matter to challenge Billy to a duel. Given the choice of weapons, Billy selected fists,
and he beat Abram nearly senseless. Ila Mae worried that Abram would try to even the score, but Billy said that Abram was too afraid of another fisting.

  Obadiah had liked Billy, had told Ila Mae he would not mind if the boy joined him in running the mill one day, although he asked the young people to wait until Ila Mae was sixteen to wed. But homeless now, with both of her parents dead, Ila Mae found no reason to postpone marriage.

  Ila Mae and Billy moved into an old log blockhouse on land Billy had inherited when his own parents died. The house was hidden away in the timber just off the Buttermilk Road, so-called because a farmer had blazed it to haul his milk into town. Ila Mae loved her new home, with its thatched roof and a fireplace that Billy himself built out of mud and rocks. He put in a window, too, because he didn’t want Ila Mae to live in a blindhouse. “It’s okay for a mole like me, but not a girl as pretty as stars.” Billy blushed then, because he was not much for fine words.

  Ila Mae reddened, too, for she knew she was not pretty. Her face was strong, not soft, and brown from working outdoors, and she was as tall as Billy. “You’re not a mole,” she said fiercely. “You’re as finely built as an oak tree and just as strong.” He picked her up then and carried her to the house to show her how strong he really was.

  Billy was gentle, too, and Ila Mae loved the way he stroked her as they lay on a bed on the ground under a strip of cheesecloth hung from the branches of a tree as a mosquito net. They slept outside in the heat of the summer, and Ila Mae joyed to the touch of Billy’s hand on her hot body. Sometimes, warm with lovemaking, they lay on their backs looking up at the stars and talked about their future. Although the war had intruded into their young lives, they saw years stretching out ahead of them filled with children and a fruitful farm. “Lordy, we’ll live good,” Billy promised.

  They planted a garden, and what they raised was about what they had. Billy hunted, and Ila Mae cut the meat into strips and hung it to dry from a rope that they stretched from the tree in front of the house to the fence. They weren’t more than a few hundred feet from a creek, but Billy still dug a well for Ila Mae. The two lived outdoors most of the time, except when the weather was bad, Ila Mae cooking over a campfire. Billy made a frame for Ila Mae to lay her quilts on, made it from pieces of seasoned oak so it would last, and she stitched outdoors, too. They were young, not jelled yet, but Lordy, they were full of life. When to no one’s surprise, Sarah was born just nine months and three days after the wedding, “I didn’t know a person could be so happy,” Billy told Ila Mae.

  The couple figured that being back in the woods like they were and Billy not very old and with a family to care for, nobody would expect him to go for a soldier. They talked about whether Billy ought to join up. He was willing, for he was more of a Confederate than Ila Mae. Besides, other young men had left their families to fight for the South, he said.

  But Ila Mae pointed out that by then, everyone knew the South wouldn’t win the war, and what was the good of risking his life for a cause that was lost? Better to stay where he was and help the families of Confederate soldiers, as he had been doing. There wasn’t a widow along the Buttermilk Road who didn’t know she could ask Billy Lloyd to mend her fence or hunt a lost cow. “You’ll be here to rebuild after the peace. The men coming back’ll be wounded and sick, and you can help them,” Ila Mae told Billy, and he agreed. They were green yet and didn’t know they were fools.

  White Pigeon had a home guard. It was made up mostly of old men and the lame—soldiers who’d come back missing a leg or an arm or who’d gone queer in the head from the noise of the guns and the cannons, and the fear. But there were local boys in the guard, too, single men who ought to have joined up themselves. Ila Mae didn’t understand why they weren’t made to be soldiers. The guard was supposed to protect the women whose husbands were fighting the Yankees. But instead, they strutted around, threatening to arrest anyone they didn’t like for not being patriotic. They stole guns and crops, saying such was for the army, but the home guard sold it all and kept the money. Folks around White Pigeon knew to stay away from them. Ila Mae knew that, too, because Abram Fletcher was one of the guards.

  One morning, Ila Mae came in from cutting Christmas greens and found the home guard in her yard. The men had dragged Billy out of the house without his shoes on and tied him up in a wagon. He was bruised and had one eye nearly swollen shut from fighting with the guards. Abram Fletcher was there. “So you married a feather-legged man, Ila Mae,” he said.

  “That’s a black lie! If there’s any cowards about, it’s you, Abram Fletcher. You tied up Billy because you’re afraid he’ll fist you. How come you haven’t joined up? Are you too lazy or just too scared?”

  Abram didn’t like that, but with the other men around, some of the older ones once friends of Ila Mae’s father, Abram didn’t dare strike her. Instead, he punched Billy, saying, “Your wife would make a better soldier than you.” Billy kicked at Abram, who dodged and laughed.

  Ila Mae knew that if she said more, Billy’d get the worst of it, maybe get beat up a ways down the road. So she bit her tongue and said, “I’ll get Billy’s shoes.” There was frost on the ground, and she didn’t want Billy’s feet to freeze.

  Ila Mae went into the house and came back with the shoes, but just as she reached the wagon, Abram, who was seated on the bench, larruped up the horses. The wagon lurched, knocking Billy onto his side. The men started up after Abram. Ila Mae threw the shoes at Billy, but only one of them landed in the wagon. She picked up the other from the ground and ran after that wagon as long as she could, but she never caught up to it, and the farther it went, the farther behind she got. Finally, Ila Mae just stopped and waved and called, “I love you, Billy.”

  “I’ll be back. I promise. I’ll come home,” he yelled, as the wagon went around a bend in the Buttermilk Road. She didn’t see Billy after that. She would have followed him all the way into town then, but she couldn’t leave Sarah alone in the cabin. So Ila Mae picked up the shoe and went back to the house and fed Sarah, then walked into White Pigeon with the baby, but she was too late. Billy’d already been taken off to the Tennessee volunteers—him wearing one shoe. Ila Mae never saw him again, never knew where he went. He wrote her—one letter anyway. There might have been more, but one was all she received. Billy wrote that if he ever got the chance, he’d come home, and Abram Fletcher and anybody else who tried to make him go back had better watch out.

  Two or three months later, folks in the neighborhood spotted a soldier hiding out in the woods. They knew he was a Confederate because he was dressed in gray. Talk was that the soldier was Billy, but Ila Mae knew he wasn’t, because by the time Billy was in the army, there weren’t any uniforms left. Besides, the man had on two shoes. But most important, if he were Billy, he’d have come to see his family right off.

  Whoever he was, he didn’t come to the farm. Instead, while Ila Mae was sitting at her quilt frame one afternoon, Abram and some of his fellows rode up. They’d been drinking. She could tell that right off, and she was scared, because they were all young. None of the old men who might have calmed them down were with them.

  “Where’s your man?” one of the guards called out to Ila Mae.

  “He’s in the army, least he ought to be,” she replied. “That’s where you took him, isn’t it?”

  “We heard he’s run off and is somewheres out in the woods, hiding like the yellow scum he is,” Abram Fletcher said, leering at her.

  “What makes you think that’s Billy?” Ila Mae asked.

  “Because Billy’s not good for much ’cept taking to ground.” The men laughed at that, and one took out a jug and handed it about.

  “Billy’s too much of a man to run!” Ila Mae told them.

  “Well, ain’t we men, too, and white at that? Not yellow like Billy,” Abram said, and the others laughed again.

  “You can look all around. He’s not here,” Ila Mae told them. She continued quilting, taking the worst stitches she’d ever made in her
life but keeping on sewing because she didn’t want the guards to think she was afraid of them.

  One of the home guards dismounted, and he went into the house. Ila Mae heard things falling onto the floor. In a minute, the man came out with the skillet of cornbread she’d left on the hearth to bake. He’d wrapped the hot pan in the Seven Sisters quilt she’d made just after she was married. “I thought Billy’d be hiding under the bed, but he ain’t there. Found his dinner, though,” the man said, passing around the skillet so that the others could scoop out the cornbread with their hands. Then he flung the skillet into the woods. Abram took the quilt from the guard and tucked it in front of his saddle.

  “You going to tell us where he’s at?” Abram rode his horse over next to Ila Mae, so close that the animal knocked against the quilt frame. Abram reached down with a big knife and slashed the center of Ila Mae’s half-finished quilt. “Martha Merritt sewed a Yankee flag in the middle of her quilt. If she hadn’t lit out, we’d have took care of the traitor. You get what I mean?” he asked.

  Ila Mae knew what he meant. “I told you, Billy’s in the army. He hasn’t been back since you took him off to town.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Abram climbed off his horse then and grabbed Ila Mae’s arm so hard that she thought he’d pulled it out of its socket. “I always did fancy this girl,” he told the others.

  Despite the pain in her arm, Ila Mae made a fist, ready to defend herself. No man but Billy had ever touched her, and she didn’t intend for any other man to try.

  “Now, Abram,” one of the men said. “We ain’t here for that.”

  “Aw, what are you thinking?” Abram replied. “She’s not so lucky. I just thought we’d tie her up so’s she’ll tell us where Billy’s at.”

  “Maybe we ought to beat her with a whip,” the man with the jug suggested. That was whiskey talk and it scared Ila Mae.