Prayers for Sale Page 4

  Abram took down the rope that had been strung for meat drying, and he tied Ila Mae’s hands together. Then he fastened her hands to the crosspost of the well. After he finished, he leaned down and kissed her hard. Ila Mae spat at him, and he slapped her across the face, then put his fingers through the gold hoops in her ears and ripped them out. “We’ll come back later on and see if you’ve changed your mind,” he said, then whispered, “You be nice now, and I’ll show you a good time.” He mounted his horse and rode off with the others, the earrings in his pocket, Ila Mae’s Seven Sisters quilt still affixed to his saddle.

  Although Ila Mae wasn’t able to move, she was grateful that the men were gone. Her ears ached, and her wrists hurt where the rope was tied too tightly. She cried out, hoping a neighbor would hear her; with Billy gone, the old farmers still living in the neighborhood were in the habit of checking in on her. Even if none of the neighbors heard her cries, somebody would come down the Buttermilk Road and set her free. Or one of the guards might sober up and be bemeaned by what the men had done and come back to cut her loose.

  At the worst, Abram would return. As the day wore on, Ila Mae’s arms began to swell, and she developed a terrible thirst. She was tied to the well, but she might have been in the middle of a desert for all the good that the water did her.

  Still, Ila Mae didn’t lose heart until she became sensible of Sarah, who began to cry. Ila Mae ached for the little girl, hungry and thirsty, although she knew the baby was safe inside the crib Billy had made for her. Ila Mae pulled with all her might, hoping the rope would come loose, pulled until she scraped the skin off her wrists.

  It was on toward evening, when Ila Mae heard Sarah calling, “Ma, Ma,” for Sarah was a bright thing who even at that young age knew her mother was Ma. Ila Mae realized the sound was louder than before. She wrenched herself around toward the house and saw then that the little girl was in the doorway. The man who’d gone into the house had upset the baby’s crib, and Sarah crawled through the door and out into the dirt. Ila Mae called to her, “Sarah, come to Mama. Come to Mama, sweet girl.”

  Sarah heard her mother’s voice and laughed and crawled toward the well. But something turned her head, and despite Ila Mae’s pleadings, the little girl sat in the dirt and played with sticks. When she grew bored, she looked around and began to crawl again. Ila Mae called her to come, and she did, but with Ila Mae’s hands tied over her head, the mother couldn’t grab the baby. Ila Mae tried to hold the child with her feet, but Sarah pulled away and started down the hill, cooing and talking. The baby must have tumbled then, because after a time, the little thing began to cry. The crying grew fainter and farther away, until Ila Mae could hear it no longer. She called until her voice gave out, but she never again heard her baby’s voice. Ila Mae strained her eyes trying to make out the baby in the moonlight, but she couldn’t see her, either. She pulled at the ropes that bound her until they rubbed almost to the bone, but the restraints held. Finally, she gave up and closed her eyes and prayed—prayed that someone would come along and free her or that Sarah would crawl back up the hill to safety. Billy was gone and Sarah was all she had now. What if Billy survived the war, only to come home and find that his little girl had perished? Or maybe he wouldn’t come home, and she’d have lost them both. Bitter tears ran down Ila Mae’s face, and with her hands tied, she couldn’t even wipe them away.

  Just at dawn, Ila Mae heard something stir behind the house. A man darted across the yard, and Ila Mae called out. It wasn’t much of a sound, because her voice was gone, but the man heard her, and moving from tree to tree, he came close. He was the Confederate, and Ila Mae thought he was there to rob her.

  “You got yourself in a pickle,” he said.

  If God had heard her prayer and sent this man, then maybe Sarah was all right, Ila Mae thought. But they had to hurry. “Quick. They think you’re my husband, Billy, hiding out. The home guard tied me up because I wouldn’t tell on you, and my baby’s crawled off. I can’t see her. Please help me, mister,” Ila Mae whispered. “Please hurry.”

  “You won’t turn me in if I do? You got to promise me that.”

  “I won’t turn you in. My word’s as honest as gold. They made my husband enlist and he’d run off, too, if he could.”

  The soldier studied Ila Mae a moment before making up his mind. Then he cut the rope. He took her raw wrists to rub the circulation back into them, but Ila Mae wouldn’t wait. “I’ve got to find Sarah. She’s my baby, and she’s loose out here. Help me.”

  The two took off down the hill, Ila Mae going one way, the man another, and it wasn’t two or three minutes before she heard him call, “Missus.”

  There was such sadness in his voice that Ila Mae knew he’d found Sarah. She tried to rush to him, but her feet were as heavy as if they’d been weighted down with sad irons, and she could hardly move. It seemed as if it took her five minutes to go three hundred yards. When she reached the soldier, he was squatting down next to Sarah, who was lying facedown in the creek. The surface of the water had frozen a crust around her face. When she picked up that tiny body, dressed in the white gown that was now ripped and stained with dirt, Ila Mae saw that Sarah’s face was wet, and she dried it with her hands, then wrapped the baby in her apron and carried her to the house. She could not cry, because her heart was too broken. Her mind was dull, and her stomach seemed as if she had swallowed a lump of clay. A voice inside her kept saying, “Sarah’s dead. Sarah’s dead.” And Ila Mae felt as if she were dead, too.

  The soldier wasn’t a Rebel, he told her. He was a Union man who’d been captured and escaped and taken the uniform from a dead Confederate. He was a good man. He built a fire in the hearth and cooked up some bacon for Ila Mae, then heated water so that she could wash Sarah. He told Ila Mae that his little girl was just about Sarah’s age. “I ought to never have left her, and your man ought to be here now,” he said.

  Ila Mae wrapped Sarah in a quilt to warm her, just as if she’d been alive. “Have you had her baptized in the Lord?” the man asked. “I’m a preacher and can do it if it would ease you some.” Ila Mae had been waiting until Billy came home before asking a preacher to bless the baby, so she told the Yankee that she’d appreciate it if he’d say the words over the child. Ila Mae drew fresh water from the well, and the man made a wet cross on the dead child’s forehead and said a Bible verse from memory. The words comforted her a little. Then Ila Mae dressed the baby in a clean gown, and they laid Sarah in a little grave that the Yankee dug in the burial ground out back where Billy’s people rested.

  After that, the soldier offered to walk Ila Mae to White Pigeon, but she told him no. She had to stay beside the grave. She couldn’t leave Sarah alone. Besides, if the home guard caught the Yankee, he’d be shot. “Take my husband’s clothes from the trunk. You’ll be safer in them than dressed like a Confederate. Throw your uniform in the fire.” She filled a pillowcase with bread and bacon and a sack of cornmeal. “Go west,” she told the Yankee. “That’s where they’re fighting. You’ll run into the Union Army. If you see a boy with one shoe, don’t shoot him. That’s my husband.”

  “I seen plenty of men barefoot but never one with one shoe. I’ll keep a lookout for him.”

  “I’ll say a prayer for you.”

  “The name’s Simon Smith, missus, but the Lord’s acquainted with me. I’ll keep you and yours in my prayers, too,” he replied, and was off.

  Ila Mae never knew if he made it.

  She wrote Billy to tell him Sarah was dead, although she didn’t tell him how it had happened. Time enough for that after he returned home, although he never did. After the war ended, a man came looking for her. He and Billy were pards in the army, he said, and they’d promised each other if one of them got killed, the other would tell the family. The man couldn’t write, so he came all the way to Tennessee to find her. Billy was shot less than a week before the war was over. The man said Billy died easy, saying he’d given his life for a noble cause and wasn’t sorry, but Ila Ma
e knew that was what they always told the widows. She never found out where he was buried.

  In a day or two, after the soldier was well away, Ila Mae forced herself away from the little grave and walked into White Pigeon and told what Abram and his fellows had done. People believed her and wouldn’t speak to him after that. When the fighting was over and the soldiers came home, they ran off Abram, declared he had bemeaned the town and wasn’t ever to show his face there again. Not long after that, a soldier came to Ila Mae’s cabin and set $500 on her table. He said the men had had a talk with Barton Fletcher and told him that if he didn’t want to leave White Pigeon like Abram, he’d have to come up with more than $40 to buy her father’s house and mill. The men said she could have a better life with the money, but that meant nothing to Ila Mae. She believed she’d already lived the happiest days of her life.

  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.”

  Chapter 2

  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 Henni
e 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.”