Prayers for Sale Read online

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.

  “It’s the prettiest-looking house,” the girl said, looking around again, stopping for a minute to take in the framed sampler over the fireplace mantel.

  In Middle Swan, a person who entered a room was supposed to say, “You’ve got it pretty good here,” but the girl didn’t know that, so Hennie smiled and replied, “Thanks for the compliment.” She shut the door, and the house was so thick and tight that the two women barely heard the rumbling of the dredge.

  In the center of the room was a frame with a quilt laid on it, and Nit went over to peer at the quilt top. The design was Bear Paw, and Nit studied it for the square that Hennie had worked on at the Spindle place. The girl had a good eye for fabrics, but Hennie had pieced the blocks from so many different materials that Nit was bewildered. She spread her fingers over the quilt top, touching the corners where the pieces fit together perfectly, rubbing her index finger over the quilting stitches, which were as tiny as if they’d been taken on a sewing machine. A kitchen chair sat askew beside the frame, where the old woman had been working just that morning.

  “If you live by yourself, you can set up a frame and work on it till your heart’s content. A standing frame’s better than one hung from the ceiling, for it’s always here, ready for my hands,” Hennie explained. “This frame’s the one Billy made for me in White Pigeon seventy years ago, and I’ve never used another. He cut saplings and planed the wood himself, then sanded it down till it was smooth as window glass. Here you can see where he used a hot poker to make the holes because he didn’t have an auger.” Hennie lovingly swept the back of her hand along a row of holes that were still charred black. The frame itself had been polished to a patina by the woman’s hands.

  Hennie thought how like her daughter Mae it was to understand what the frame meant to her and to provide a place for it in the house in Fort Madison when the old woman moved there. But Lordy, what would Hennie do with the quilts she made? Mae wasn’t partial to quilts. Besides, Hennie wanted to do more with her last days than piece quilts nobody wanted, looking out at a river that was as slow as a fishing worm. She’d move to Fort Madison if she had to, but she wasn’t ready to say “deep enough” to life. “Deep enough” was what the miners said when they quit a mine.

  The old woman pulled herself out of her reverie and said to Nit, “Billy told me he wanted a worthy frame, because quilting was pious work and pleasing to God. I myself couldn’t have said it better.”

  “Oh my!” Nit clapped her hands together at the thought. “It’s a lovely quilt,” she added, making Hennie wonder if she should present it to the girl. A person couldn’t have too many quilts in Middle Swan.

  But maybe she should wait until she finished a nicer quilt. This one wasn’t much better than a scrap quilt, made up of fabrics Hennie’d had for a long time. “A quilt’s like the family Bible. It’s got everybody’s mark in it, memories of everybody’s lives. There’s pieces from my old dress that I wore when I came to Middle Swan and another from a shirt I found hanging on a tree in Poverty Gulch, just outside the Terrible Mine, which hasn’t been worked in fifty years. I never knew how that shirt got there. I let it hang all summer before I decided nobody was coming for it and I took it.” She ran her hand over the quilt top and stopped at a white cotton scrap with a design of tiny black feathers and tapped her thimbled ring finger on it. “Mrs. Sabra—she was the dressmaker in Middle Swan—gave me this one. It’s left over from a shirtwaist she made for Bijou, who worked . . .” Hennie stopped, for she didn’t know how the girl felt about hookers. “For a lady long ago. I guess every scrap has its story. But you’re a quilter. You know that.”

  Nit pointed to a piece that had a luminescent quality, the blue the color of a peacock’s feather. “What’s this from?”

  Hennie laughed. “Why, it’s from the Pinto store. I saw that material there fifty years ago, and I had to have a piece of it. I never saw anything that color outside of a book. It was dear-bought. I didn’t want anyone else to have it, so I took it all, the whole bolt, cost me five dollars. Then I was so ashamed of myself for being greedy that I gave pieces of it to one and all. You see a piece of that blue in a Middle Swan quilt, and you know it came from me. That blue’s been in every one of my quilts, too. Still, I’m mighty saving of it and don’t give that material to just anybody these days.” She paused and added, hoping to let the girl know that she was esteemed by the old woman, “But you
might have a piece, if you like.”

  “Oh,” Nit said, sensible of the honor.

  Hennie opened her pie safe and rummaged around in it until she found the blue and tore off a strip. She handed it to the girl, who ran it across the palm of one hand, ironing it with the fingers of her other hand. “I’ll save it till I’m good enough to use it. I’m getting better with my quilting, you know. Dick says when I set my mind to a thing, I do it. He’s the same way. That’s why we get along.” Nit studied the fabric. “We went out to ourself the day we got married so’s we could make something of us. If we’d stayed with our homefolks, we’d have turned out just like them.” Nit thought over what she’d said and added, “I mean, I love them, but they’re easy to satisfy.” The girl put the blue fabric into her pocket. “Like I say, I’ll keep it for a good quilt.”

  Hennie waved her hand and told Nit to use it now. What was the use of saving it? she asked. Besides, Nit was already a fine quilter, Hennie added. The girl wasn’t, but the quickest way to insult a woman was to criticize her quilts. “Would you welcome coffee?” Without waiting for an answer, for Hennie’d never known anyone who wouldn’t welcome coffee, she said, “Now, just you sit, and we’ll have us some with our cookies. If I take hotcakes for supper, then I got the right to eat snickerdoodles for breakfast.” She hurried into the kitchen part of the room and fed chunks of wood into the cookstove, then went to the sink and turned on the faucet, filling the teakettle with water.

  “Just think, running water,” Nit said. Hennie felt a tenderness toward the girl, for hauling water was hard work. Maybe that young fellow Nit was married to hauled it for her. He surely did seem to dote on his wife. The two reminded her of Billy and herself.

  Hennie laughed and explained that she had to wrap the pipe with strips torn from old quilts and keep the water turned on a little in the cold months so that it didn’t freeze up, and even then, in January and February and March, the water wasn’t reliable. “Still, I live nice,” Hennie said, sighing. She chattered as the water boiled and she poured it over the grounds in a brown and white speckled pot. Then she transferred the brew into a silver coffee server that was only a little battered and took down her own good cups and saucers. She placed everything on the table with the pie plate of cookies. Hennie went to her cupboard for a clear-glass spooner shaped like a log cabin and told Nit there was sugar in the bowl beside the condiments caddy in the center of the table.

  The two sat and chatted about the weather while the sun crept through the big windows, spreading its warmth across the floor. She did have it nice there, snug as a harbornated bear, Hennie thought with contentment. Few people got to live in such a nice house for going on seventy years. She hoped Nit had such a fine house one day. Maybe she would, since Dick Spindle was a worker. So was Nit. That was something else the two had in common with Hennie and Billy.

  The old woman picked up her cup, knocking her thimble against it, and laughed. “You’d think I’d remember to take this off, but Billy gave it to me for a present, and it fits me like a wedding ring. I have a dozen thimbles, but I’ve used the same one since I came here. I guess I must have pushed about a million stitches through the fabric with it.”

  “Didn’t your other husband ever give you one?”

  “Why no,” Hennie said, thinking that no, Jake Comfort had not been sensible of her quilting the way Billy was. She didn’t often compare the two men, but now she thought how the husbands had complemented each other, one weak in a way the other was strong. If Jake didn’t pay attention to the quilts, he was proud of her gardening, how she grew the biggest and longest-lasting roses in Middle Swan and was the first in the spring to pick her lettuce and spinach. Billy took care of her as if she were a little girl, which, come to think of it, she had been when they were married. Jake encouraged her to be self-reliant. Her first husband was as sunny as the day, while dark spells like a winter storm came on her second. But both had loved her fiercely, and she’d loved them right back.

  They finished their coffee, and Hennie stood up. So did the girl, picking up her cup and saucer to carry them to the sink. “Leave be. We’ll go to quilting,” Hennie said. “Grab you a needle, and go to work.”

  Nit carried a straight-backed chair to the frame, and the two women sat down beside each other at the quilt. The girl took out a needle stuck in a piece of flannel tied to the end of the frame and threaded it. Then she chose a thimble from a cup on the table. “You sure you want me to do this, Mrs. Comfort? My stitches aren’t as fine as yours. They are every one too big.”

  Hennie waved away the objection, although she knew she might take out Nit’s work later. Nobody else would notice the girl’s big stitches, but Hennie would know that they were there, and she was too proud to let her quilts be anything but near-perfect. Not for anything would she tell her guest not to quilt, however. Why, she wouldn’t insult even Mrs. Franks that way, Hennie thought, glad that Mrs. Franks didn’t sew.

  The two quilted quietly for a few moments, Hennie thinking how nice it was that women gathered over a quilt frame for companionship and gossip, but they could be content with the silence, too. After a few minutes, Hennie got up and opened the door, letting in the sunlight and the fresh air, the sound of the dredge—and a lazy winter fly that buzzed around the room. The winter had been hard on all God’s creatures, and Hennie didn’t have the heart to swat the insect, although she would be ruthless with his brethren come summer. The fly flew back out the door.

  “This is as nice a place as I ever saw,” Nit said after a while.

  “I’m lucky in my choice of a home, that’s for sure.”

  Nit stopped stitching, her hand over the quilt, thinking. Then she asked, “How was it you came here, to this house? I’d like to know that. How was it, Mrs. Comfort?”

  The question brought a warm feeling to Hennie. “My husband built it for me. I said I wanted a house tight enough to keep out the wind in winter, with room for my quilt frame, a bedroom upstairs with a window that opened so that there would be nothing between me and the stars, and front windows big enough so my geraniums could sun theirself all year long. And that’s just what I got. From the day I set foot inside, I never wanted to live anyplace else. In God’s own time, I expect I’ll die here.”

  She said that last bit before she thought, No, God’s time has passed, and she would die elsewhere. But Hennie didn’t correct herself for she’d told no one yet of her decision to leave Middle Swan. She wasn’t ready to hear her friends cluck over her good fortune in having a daughter with a mansion who wanted her mother to live with her. Nor did she want folks knocking on the door, asking could they rent the old place from her, maybe buy it. Jake had built the house for her, and Hennie couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else living in the place she loved so.

  “It’s been a happy house then?”

  Hennie considered the question. The house had seen its sorrows, but like Hennie herself, it had endured. And it had let her survive the long winters when the snow drifted above the windowsills and the sun was too weak to come more than a foot through the window glass. During that time, the cold never left her old fingers and toes, and the blue devils came, enough to nearly drive her out of her mind. But then she would go to quilting, cutting and stitching the pieces together like a crazy woman to fight off the dark memories, the murder of her baby and the loss of others not yet fully made, as well as the deaths of old friends, the men mutilated in mine accidents, the women dead in childbirth. A mining camp was a cruel place, Hennie thought, for she had seen the way the mountains took their revenge on those bold enough to tear up the land.

  The bright scraps of color that Hennie’s fingers fit into patterns never failed to cheer her, lifting her spirits, letting her know that spring would begin and then the precious summer. Summers and quilting, they were gifts from God. There had been grievements and back-sets, but yes, she said, “I’ve been happy in this house—more often than not.”

  The girl took two stitches, using her thimble to
push the needle back and forth through the fabric sandwich of quilt top, batting, and back. “What’ve you got here for your batten?” she asked.

  Cotton batts, ordered out of the monkey book, Hennie told her.

  “Cotton. That’s like quilting through butter.” Nit sighed with pleasure. “At home, we used old quilts or wore-out dresses, sometimes overalls. My, but you can’t get your needle through overalls,” she said. Sometimes she gathered milkweed for filler, and once, oilcloth. Of course, those fillings were for plain quilts. With her quilts for good, Nit picked the cotton herself, dug out the seeds, combed it, and laid it on. “Cotton makes a good soft quilt. Warmth was mostly what I cared about. We had to use three or nine quilts on top of us to keep warm in that dogtrot I was raised up in. You remember dogtrots, don’t you?” She lifted her eyes to the old woman, who nodded. Two rooms, one on each side of a hall that was open to the outside at both ends so that any dog that took a notion could run through it. Dogtrots were raised three or four feet off the ground, so they were nice and cool in summer, but in winter with the open breezeway and the air coming up from under the floorboards, you couldn’t ever keep warm in a dogtrot.

  Hennie shook her head at the memory of those old cabins from her girlhood, colder in winter than anything she’d ever known in a Colorado blizzard. “It’s a wet cold there. You couldn’t hardly get warm if you sat on a cookstove.”

  “I’d have froze if it wasn’t for sleeping in a bed with my four sisters—five red-haired girls in a bed. We were rightly as close as twins. My sisters didn’t know what to do with theirself after I married Dick and moved off to the other end of Kentucky,” Nit said. “The day I got married was the first time in my life that I ever slept in a bed with just one other person. I was afraid I’d get lost. I miss my sisters, but I have a powerful love for Dick, and like I said, we went out to ourself so we could move up in the world. But I never thought we’d leave Kentucky. Then Dick got the job on the dredge, and you know what the Bible says about a woman cleaving to her husband. So I followed him to Middle Swan.” The girl paused and looked at Hennie, who was bent over her stitching, listening and nodding her head. “Now, don’t think I’m too forward, Mrs. Comfort, but I’d like to know how was it you came to Middle Swan? Excuse it if I’m too forward.”