Prayers for Sale Read online

  Hennie interrupted. “It’s been my experience you’re not so good at explaining things. I came for a nickel’s worth of yeast cakes. Roy, you go get me that yeast.”

  “Have it your way, old lady.” As he went along behind the counter to the refrigerator, he said over his shoulder, “I wouldn’t want to miss out on a five-cent sale. No sir.”

  Hennie turned to Nit. “Just you come.” Hennie took the girl’s arm and led her to one of the chairs beside the stove, then sat down herself, heavily, as if her bones hurt. But everybody’s bones hurt in the cold weather when there was no sign the snow would stop. Oh, there had been that false spring, but it hadn’t lasted long, and now it was snowing again.

  The old woman took off her woolen scarf and folded it, setting it in her lap, then unbuttoned her old coat. As she did so, she wondered when she’d accumulated the coat, maybe fifty years before. Well, it was made of good stuff. It would last another fifty, even if she wouldn’t. For a minute, Hennie ruminated about the coat. Jake had bought it for her when the ore assayed high, and promised to buy her a fur coat later on, but the ore was only a pocket, and he’d had to go to work for wages. Every time she saw a rabbit or a fox and thought about the poor thing dead in a cold steel trap, she was glad she’d never gotten the fur. She wasn’t soft, but she never saw the sense of a living thing dying such a cruel death just for some woman’s vanity. Still, she thought, a fur coat when the wind blew down off the Tenmile Range would feel mighty good. Maybe they made fur coats out of foxes that died of old age.

  “The hookhouse,” Nit said after she was settled. “You don’t mean . . .” When she looked up at Hennie, the girl was flushed, but whether it was from the heat of the stove or embarrassment, Hennie couldn’t tell. “You don’t mean a whorehouse?” She pushed her elbows into her sides and looked at her hands.

  “I think you understand,” Hennie said. She reached into the barrel and took out an apple, but it was mushy-feeling, so she got up and peered into the barrel until she found one with only a few dotty places. She polished it on her scarf and held it out to the girl. “There’s nothing to be upset about. I expect there’s been a hookhouse in Middle Swan since eighteen and fifty-nine, when the first prospectors came here. It’s a fact that when men outnumber good women, if you want to call them that, the other kind comes in. Not that hookers aren’t good in their way. I never minded them.”

  Hennie herself was flustered, and Roy Pinto, watching from behind the counter with the yeast in his stubby hand, appeared to be enjoying the old woman’s discomfort. “You tell her good, Hennie.”

  “Somebody had to tell me. I was as green as a willow shoot when I came to this camp—and Middle Swan wasn’t any more than a camp back then—not that it’s much more now. When I saw Cockeyed Lil strutting up and down the street in her red stockings, I told Jake I wanted a pair just like them. He had to tell me why I didn’t.” Hennie blushed a little, remembering that later on, Jake gave her a pair of red stockings to wear for him. “You remember Lil, don’t you, Roy?”

  The merchant shook his thick head and said that was before his time.

  “Lil was a beauty, except for that cast in her eye. She wore yellow, yards and yards of it. Yellow dresses, yellow hats. And she rode a horse astride. Nowadays, women think nothing of that, but back then, riding a horse astride like a man was a scandal. And then there were those stockings. I haven’t thought about them in a long time. I’d like a pair right now.” Hennie pushed her foot forward and lifted her long skirt a little, showing a flesh-colored cotton stocking.

  “And I’d like to drive a Cord Phaeton automobile,” Roy told her.

  Nit was nibbling at the apple like a little mouse, her head down. “That Greta Garbo must have thought I was a real dope trying to get acquainted with her like I did,” she said softly.

  “Naw. She was just suspicious. She’s not used to talking with ladies such as yourself,” Roy Pinto said with rough kindness. “Don’t give it no thought.”

  “A hookhouse,” Nit whispered.

  “Well, you have to say it keeps the boys out of the saloons and pool halls.” Roy guffawed.

  Hennie waved him off, and Roy set the yeast on the counter and walked heavily to the back room, stopping to align a can of peas that was turned sideways. Hennie reached into the barrel for an apple for herself, rubbing at the loose skin before she bit into it. The apple was soft, but they were mostly all soft this far from apple season. She thought for a moment how nice it would be to have an apple tree in her yard, but apple trees didn’t grow at ten thousand feet. They grew in Fort Madison, however. She’d remember that when she got to feeling discouraged about the move.

  Nit set her apple in her lap. It had little rows of bites around it, like she’d made a bracelet for the apple. “I know about sorry girls. We had them at home, but I never met one before. I reckon they’re shameful.”

  Hennie caught a scent of vanilla and thought the girl had put it behind her ears. She was a clean little thing, and tidy, too. She must be a good wife to Dick Spindle. “Some are, some aren’t, just like folks in general,” Hennie said. “There’s girls that will cozy up to a miner and pick him clean, tough as a boiled owl they are. Even a pack rat will leave you something, but those hookers take the least little thing. Others are just as nice as you please. Most of them are regular women who chose that kind of work—or had it chose for them.”

  Nit seemed to study Hennie as if she wondered whether the old woman was trying to put one over on her. “I guess I never thought about it.”

  “I could tell you about them.” The older woman settled into her chair, glad for an audience, for she’d been cooped up at home in the storm for so long that it was a wonder her voice hadn’t rusted. Besides, it was cozy by the stove, like sitting on a log in the sun of a summer morning, and she was in no hurry to leave. But she wished she had her piecing. Storytelling was always nicer when she had her quilting to occupy her fingers. She reached into her pocket in hopes she’d put a patch and a needle there and forgotten about them, but she hadn’t. Coffee would be nice, too, but there was no sign of the coffeepot that Roy kept on top of the stove. Well, a body couldn’t expect him to give out free apples and coffee both, when she’d spent only a nickel on yeast.

  Of course, Roy Senior would have made coffee for her. He’d have given her anything in the store if she’d married him, but Hennie was always too particular about men. She wouldn’t wed a man, even one as decent as Roy Senior, just for a frame house and a lifetime supply of canned beans. She’d rather be alone with her quilting and her prayers than married to a man she didn’t love with all her heart and soul. Besides, being married to Roy Senior would have made her Roy Junior’s stepmother—and Monalisa Pinto’s mother-in-law. Hennie rolled her eyes at that thought.

  The girl leaned forward a little and watched Hennie with glittering eyes, making Hennie wonder why women always seemed to be so crazy to hear about hookers, even when they disapproved of them. Well, Hennie wouldn’t disappoint her. Besides, she knew some good stories about the girls, and enough of them to keep her at the stove until lunchtime. She wouldn’t have so many more opportunities to tell her stories. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Silver Heels?” she asked.

  Nit shook her head, and Hennie settled into her chair. “Silver Heels worked in a dance hall thirty miles over the mountain in Buckskin Joe. She had the face of an angel, and she wore silver slippers to show off her feet, which were as tiny as a Chinaman’s wife’s. That’s why the miners called her by the name of Silver Heels. Some of those girls that worked in the saloons and dance halls were hard-boiled as rocks, but Silver Heels was just a little bit whorish, not enough to hurt.”

  Silver Heels had worked in Buckskin Joe a year or two when the smallpox came, and the men began dying like fish in mine runoff, Hennie continued. The girls left town so they wouldn’t catch it, but Silver Heels stayed to nurse the miners. She cooked for them and washed their faces with cold creek water when they were out of their mind
s with fever, and she wrote letters to their folks back home after the boys died, claiming she was a minister’s wife, and saying they’d died in the bosom of the Lord.

  “Oh my,” Nit said, but Hennie held up a finger to show she wasn’t finished with the story.

  “Silver Heels herself caught the pox, and the boys feared for her life, but she came out of it. Her pretty face was gone, however, all poxed up and ruined. So she left out. No one knew where she went. A few years later, a woman wearing a heavy veil showed up at the burial ground to put flowers on the graves of the miners who’d died in the epidemic. You couldn’t say for sure who she was, because her face was covered, but the Buckskin miners knew. They said she was Silver Heels, and they named a mountain for that hooker,” Hennie finished.

  “But you said she was a dance hall girl, not a sorry girl,” Nit said.

  “One and the same,” Hennie told her, getting up to add a few sticks to the fire to take off the chill. She left the stove door open, because a blaze, even one in an old gasoline drum that had been turned into a stove, cheered her. Hennie sat down, moving around a little to get comfortable and thinking Roy Pinto ought to get some decent chairs instead of Monalisa’s worn-out kitchen chairs. Then she chuckled to herself as she realized Roy didn’t want to make it too comfortable for the leather bellies. Settling down, she said, “Most of the hookhouses in Middle Swan are on the other side of the river, and when a girl turns out, it’s said she’s gone ‘over the Swan.’ Now, I’ll tell you about them.”

  Hennie knew about prostitution before she moved to Middle Swan, of course. As a girl before the war, she’d been warned to stay away from Mrs. Buckle’s house in White Pigeon. The house was a frame shanty with the paint worn off, set back in a grove of dark trees. A boy once dared Hennie to run up and knock on Mrs. Buckle’s door, and she’d done it, for you had to take a dare. Hennie’d expected Mrs. Buckle to throw a rock at her or, worse, snatch her up and drag her inside for some evil purpose. But nothing happened. Later, when she understood what the house was about, Hennie realized it had been morning when she knocked, and everybody was asleep.

  Besides, there was nothing to fear, since Mrs. Buckle and the girls were careful not to offend the women and children of White Pigeon. When they went to town, they spent their time in the dance hall and saloon. Hennie had seen Abram Fletcher come out of a bar with a prostitute, both of them drunk. Watching him with the girl made Hennie feel dirty, for Abram was trying to court her then.

  After the war ended, more than one widow of her acquaintance began entertaining, trading an evening for a small coin or a sack of flour, or even a handful of potatoes. Hennie was disdainful and asked, “What will your little ones think?”

  “I expect they like to eat,” came the reply, and Hennie felt put in her place.

  She realized then that morality was for folks with full bellies, and she came to realize that if things had been different, if Sarah had lived and they had been destitute, Hennie herself might have “entertained.” She’d have done anything to keep that precious baby from starving. So when she moved to Middle Swan and learned that some of her neighbors were soiled doves, as they were called then, Hennie wasn’t shocked, wasn’t even surprised.

  Women in mining camps weren’t much better off than the war widows. If a woman in Middle Swan lost her husband to death or he had taken off, she couldn’t do much besides set up a boardinghouse—providing she had a house. Or she might take in washing, rubbing clothes on rocks instead of a scrub board and rinsing them in creek water cold enough to make your hands too numb to feel the cloth. Hennie figured entertaining might be a better line of work than washing clothes.

  For the most part, the hookers had a hard life, although some had happy endings. A few got married. Others moved in with men, and when it looked like it was going to stick, folks started calling the girl by the man’s name. There were half a dozen women in Middle Swan who lived as man and wife but never had the words said over them.

  One, in fact, who worked at Sweetie Purvis’s place, had been a nurse, and when the influenza came in 1918, she went over to the pesthouse and cared for the sick. She took up with one of her patients, a man who’d been using her for a year, and called herself by his name. She had a son about six months later; Hennie didn’t have the nerve to ask who the father was. The “husband” turned into the most biddy-pecked man on the Tenmile Range, as stuck in that marriage as if he’d taken the wedding vows.

  After she’d been in Middle Swan for a while, Hennie found it natural that the fancy women were part of the fabric of the town. They were a little like a scrap of bright damask in the middle of a crazy quilt, a little flashier than some of the other fabrics, but still nicely fitted in.

  Most hookers didn’t fare so well. The girls died from liquor or laudanum, and sometimes, they got beat up. They committed suicide, and a few were murdered. Some girls just wasted away from sadness. Most likely, that was what happened to Minnie Lincoln, who worked at the Briar Rose. A few weeks after Hennie arrived in Middle Swan, Minnie had a baby.

  Hennie had seen the girl walking around the camp, her belly swelling more and more every day. The two stopped to talk sometimes, for the hooker knew nothing about babies.

  “You’ve got to drink milk, lots of milk,” Hennie cautioned her.

  “Milk? Where’m I going to find a cow? All we’s got in Middle Swan is oxen. I ain’t going to milk a steer.”

  Perhaps Minnie had meant to make Hennie blush, but Hennie only laughed. She paid a farmer in the valley who kept dairy cows to deliver milk to the hookhouse once a week and tell Minnie it was from an admirer, for Hennie didn’t want Minnie to think she was interfering. But the girl knew, and she sought out Hennie for advice about caring for the baby once it arrived.

  “I guess I got to have me a house to leave the little feller while I’m working. Babies are undesires at a hookhouse,” Minnie said.

  “You can’t leave a baby by itself! All kinds of things could happen. What if it choked or the house caught fire?” Hennie replied. “You’ll have to hire someone to watch it.”

  “And how am I going to pay for that? You think men will give me tips when I tell them I got a baby needs tending?”

  Hennie was silent, a little ashamed, for she’d never considered how small an amount of money a prostitute made. She wondered how she could help Minnie, but she was stumped. She wouldn’t mind tending the baby nights while the woman worked, but she hadn’t been married long and didn’t know if Jake wouldn’t want a baby staying with them.

  Minnie gave birth to a boy, and in a month, she was back at work. One night, she got drunker than $700, ran off to Buckbush with a miner, and forgot about the baby for a day. “Lordy, he was screaming like a steam engine when I got home. I get so forgetful when I drink. What am I going to do with him?” Minnie asked.

  Hennie shook her head, thinking Minnie didn’t understand how precious a tiny life was, how easily it could be snuffed out. “You could find another line of work,” she suggested.

  “Doing what? You think if I was fit for anything else I’d be hooking? Maybe I ought to give him out,” Minnie said. “I didn’t know babies were so much bother.”

  She looked at Hennie hopefully, and Hennie took her meaning, but she didn’t respond. If she wasn’t sure Jake would let her tend Minnie’s baby at night, she surely did not know what he would think of raising Minnie’s boy as their own. Billy, on the other hand, would have taken in every unwanted baby in White Pigeon. When Sarah was an infant, Billy would pick her up and hold her as if she were a piece of glass, afraid he would scratch her with his rough hands, saying what a miracle she was. “I hope the Lord gives us a hundred,” he’d told Hennie when he first held his daughter. Hennie, still hurting from childbirth, had looked up, startled, and Billy had laughed and insisted he was only joking. But she wasn’t so sure. Hennie hadn’t yet talked about babies with Jake, about the babies they might have, but she’d come to know him as a kind man, and she hoped he felt the way Bil
ly did.

  So that evening, she made Jake an extra-fine dinner, using some of her precious sugar to bake a cake. Then she fixed her husband a toddy and sat down beside him in front of the fire.

  “How many children do you want?” she blurted out, chiding herself for not having thought out her words ahead of time.

  Jake looked at her curiously. “I figured it wasn’t our choice. We’d just take what came.”

  Hennie nodded. “A boy. Do you want a boy first?”

  “Or a girl. If we don’t get a boy, maybe we’ll have a girl. One or the other.” He smiled at his little joke.

  “But you’d want a boy, wouldn’t you?”

  A foolish grin came over Jake’s face, and he reached for Hennie. “What’s this about? Are you in that way?”

  “Oh no,” Hennie said quickly. She tried to calm herself by getting up and poking at the fire, watching the sparks flare up as she broke the burning log in half. “What if we were to have a boy now, one that’s already made?”

  Jake didn’t answer, and she turned around. “What if?”

  “A foundling,” he said. “Whose?”

  “Minnie Lincoln’s.”

  “A hookhouse baby?” he asked, his voice rising.

  “You can’t blame the little feller. Minnie can’t take care of him, and what’s to become of him?” she said in a rush.

  “I didn’t know you were acquainted with her.”

  “She’s been asking me about babies, and I’ve told her as much as I know, but she’s a poor mother. If somebody doesn’t take the little feller, Minnie’s liable to forget all about him. There’s no other woman in camp to take him but me!”

  Jake shook his head. “I don’t know, Hennie.”

  Hennie sat down on Jake’s lap then and put her arms around his neck. “He’s the sweetest little boy you ever saw. Why, he even looks enough like you to be your own. I mean . . .” Hennie stopped, not daring to look at Jake. She stared past him at the chinking between two logs on the far wall while she pondered the thought that had come into her mind. It was possible, she told herself. After all, Jake was manly, and who knew what he’d done before she arrived in Middle Swan. “I didn’t mean . . .”