Prayers for Sale Read online

  “I know what you didn’t mean.”

  “Is it—”

  “Not likely,” Jake broke in.

  “But if it is—”

  “I said ‘not likely.’ I never asked you to tell me your secrets. I won’t give out what I did before I met you.” Without another word, he stood and went out the door. Hennie undressed then and got in bed and when Jake returned, the smell of liquor on him, Hennie pretended to be asleep.

  They didn’t discuss the baby the next day or the day after that. And then it was too late. The little feller crossed over. Nobody blamed Minnie, because babies had a hard time up there where the air was thin, and maybe his lungs hadn’t developed. Even with the best care, many babies didn’t make it on the Swan. So it was no surprise that Minnie’s boy died.

  The prospectors came to Hennie then and asked to buy a bit of quilting to wrap the baby in. She told them any money wouldn’t buy it, and gave it to them. They wrapped the baby in the little quilt and laid him out in a piece of long tom and buried him in a prospect hole.

  Someone said a prayer, and the men covered up the makeshift coffin with dirt. When it was done, a man she didn’t know thanked Hennie for attending the burying. “I should have looked after him,” he said in a ragged voice. “I was his father.”

  Minnie quit Middle Swan after that, moving over to Buckbush, where she changed her name to Minnie Grant. She told Hennie she’d come around sometime and look her up and likewise, but she never did. A few months later, she taken out, disappeared just like that, and nobody ever heard of her again.

  Minnie Lincoln was a regular working girl, and her leaving wasn’t remarked on, for there were always others to take her place. But Bijou, who arrived on the Swan in the 1870s, was different. She was special. The miners called her the Blond Venus.

  Hennie thought that Bijou was something out of a picture book—hair so blond it was almost white, and long enough that she could sit on it. She had eyes as blue as a columbine, and her face was delicate like a columbine, too. Most hookers were standoffish, but Bijou was as sweet as her looks. She took a walk every afternoon, and Hennie would go out into her garden just to see her pass by and say hello.

  Hennie loved Bijou and felt beholden to her. When Mae had the diphtheria, Bijou brought her a spray of white roses tied in a gold ribbon. (Hennie made herself a crazy quilt later on, just so she could use that bit of ribbon.) The married women in Middle Swan stayed away from the Comfort cabin, fearful they’d carry home the sickness, but Bijou offered to sit with Mae, so that Hennie could get some rest. Hennie thanked her kindly but told her no, because Mae was better by then, but that didn’t make Hennie feel less beholden.

  Bijou did other kindnesses. Once, she stopped with a bouquet of wildflowers after Hennie lost a half-made baby she was carrying, one of several miscarriages she suffered during her marriage to Jake. Hennie was only a few weeks along, and she always wondered how Bijou knew she was pregnant.

  Half the single men in Middle Swan and some of the married ones, too, were in love with Bijou, but she didn’t give her heart to anyone, not until she met Harold Halleck, a mining engineer from Denver. He came to Middle Swan because his family owned the Honeymaid Mine up at the top of Plug Hat Hill. The Halleck Mining Company was started by Harold’s father, who’d died, so Harold ran it for his mother and sisters.

  He fell for Bijou right off. It didn’t seem to matter one bit that she was a prostitute. Bijou was smitten, too. She worshipped Harold, thought he was the pope of Rome, and she wanted to be his wife. Harold wanted that, too, and in their way, the couple considered themselves betrothed.

  There was no way those two could marry, however. Bijou was famous, not only in the county but as far away as Denver. Harold couldn’t marry her and bring the Blond Venus home to his people. They would have bemeaned her and made her life a misery. And Harold had pledged his father on the old man’s deathbed that he’d never sell the mining company, that he’d run it and support his mother and sisters. “It isn’t in the stars for them,” Hennie told Jake. He hadn’t known she was friends with Bijou, either, but he wasn’t surprised. He’d learned by then that Hennie didn’t hold with convention, that she would take up with anybody she wanted to. He guessed it didn’t matter who his wife befriended.

  One afternoon, Hennie was outside tending her yellow roses with Mae, when Bijou stopped a minute to tell her the little girl was the prettiest flower in the garden. “I hope I have one just like her,” she said.

  Hennie knew right then that Bijou was carrying a child. Hennie said, “Just you sit,” not thinking for a minute she was inviting a hooker into her home but only that Bijou was a woman expecting a baby who shouldn’t be standing in the hot sun. Hennie gave her a drink of water from the dipper, and Bijou held it like it was a crystal goblet and thanked her so prettily that Hennie blurted out, “To say Mr. Halleck’s people are better than you, I couldn’t.” Hennie was horrified at those words, because it wasn’t her business. And when she thought about it later, she wasn’t sure that Bijou was aware that everybody in Middle Swan knew about her and Mr. Halleck. And some of them even prayed for her.

  But Bijou acted like Hennie’s words tickled her to death. She handed Hennie the dipper and said there wasn’t a wine in the world that tasted as sweet as mountain water. She glanced over at Hennie’s PRAYERS FOR SALE sign and said, “I’d like to pay you to say a little prayer for me.”

  “I’ve done it already, and I’ll do it again, but no money will I take.”

  “I thank you kindly.”

  Bijou stopped working on Venus Row and got a place of her own. Of course, Harold could have put her up in style, but that wouldn’t have set right with Bijou. She wanted to be a wife or nothing. The two of them talked and talked about getting married, but they just never could work it out. They didn’t believe God His Self could make it come out for them.

  One day, the lovers quarreled, and Bijou told Harold that he was released. He left for Denver and didn’t come back. Hennie knew what happened, because she’d come across Bijou in the woods, crying.

  “How could he leave, you having a baby and all?” Hennie asked.

  “I haven’t informed him.”

  “He has eyes, doesn’t he?”

  “Men don’t have eyes for that.”

  Hennie didn’t argue, because Bijou knew more about men than she did. “What will you do?” she asked. Because she couldn’t seem to make another baby herself and her arms ached to hold a little one, Hennie wondered if Bijou wanted to give out the baby. Maybe this time, Jake wouldn’t mind taking in someone else’s child. He had a kind heart, and Hennie knew his disappointment each time they lost a chance for a baby of their own. He ought to have children. What did it matter if he wouldn’t be their natural father?

  “I’ll keep it. I couldn’t give it away, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just couldn’t. But what’s to become of us?”

  “There are a dozen men in Middle Swan, some as rich as a bishop, who’d marry you this afternoon.”

  “But I don’t love them.”

  That was an odd thing for a hooker to say, because most of them dreamed of catching a man with money, and love was a luxury they couldn’t afford. But Bijou was different, and Hennie knew she wouldn’t marry anyone but Harold.

  “I wish I was better at praying,” Hennie said. She went to the stream and made a cup of her hands, carrying back cold water to Bijou, who wet her fingers and patted her face.

  “I’m grateful to you, Mrs. Comfort,” Bijou said, and Hennie knew she wasn’t talking about the water. “I’d be pleased if you’d keep on praying, but I don’t think Mr. Halleck will come back.”

  Bijou waited another two weeks, until she was sure Harold really had quit her. Then she took an overdose of laudanum and killed herself. The girls in the hookhouses on Venus Row said it was the noblest thing she ever did, but Hennie didn’t see it that way. She thought it was a waste of a precious life—two lives.

  Hennie herself washed
and dressed the body and laid it out in a coffin, which an admirer had purchased. She embroidered a silk pillow, for she thought Bijou ought to have a fine place to rest her head for eternity. Then the men who’d known Bijou dug the grave, as was the tradition in Middle Swan. Bijou’s family—the girls in the hookhouse—provided jugs of hard liquor to keep them going. The grave was the deepest one in the End of Day burial ground, and the men were the drunkest Middle Swan had ever seen.

  It was maybe a week after Bijou died that Harold Halleck came back to Middle Swan, strutting down the street in a good suit, carrying a walking cane and a big box, strolling right by Hennie’s house. She rushed outside and ran after him all the way down the trail to Bijou’s house. But before Hennie could reach him, he knocked on the door and asked for Bijou. “That whore killed herself over some man that weren’t worth a nickel,” said the woman who answered, because the house had already been rented.

  Hennie reached Harold then, and she touched his arm. “Mr. Halleck,” she said.

  He turned to her, confused. “Bijou’s dead?”

  Hennie led him back to the trail, for the woman at the door was curious, and what Hennie had to say was private. She didn’t want Bijou to be the subject of more gossip.

  “I brought her roses—and a ring. I have a diamond wedding ring in my pocket. I was going to propose marriage,” Harold said, shaking his head in bewilderment. He took a ring out of his pocket and looked at it.

  “It’s too late,” Hennie said softly. “She thought you quit her. She didn’t see any other way for her and the baby.”

  “A baby?” Mr. Halleck looked at Hennie sharply. “I didn’t know about a baby.”

  “I know,” Hennie said.

  Tears came to his eyes, and he wiped them with a silk handkerchief. “I would have taken care of them, both of them. You see, my sister just married a mining man in Denver, and I turned the company over to him. That’s why I’ve been gone so long. I didn’t write, because I wanted to surprise Bijou. I was going to tell her we could move to San Francisco and get a fresh start where nobody would know a thing about her.”

  Harold held on to Hennie’s arm to steady himself. Then he asked Hennie to show him Bijou’s grave, and the two of them walked together to the burial ground. He scratched in the dirt and buried the ring. Then he opened the box of flowers, and one by one, he tore the petals off the roses, scattering them over the grave. Hennie thought the bright red mutilated flowers floating down onto the dirt looked like blood. She felt like an intruder on Harold’s grief then, so she left the man alone with his sorrow. “I’ll have tea waiting for you—or a toddy,” she said. “You stop by the two-story log place when you leave.” Harold didn’t answer.

  With a last look at the grave, covered now with the torn roses, Hennie started toward the gate. She had almost reached it when she heard the gunshot and rushed back to the grave. Harold lay dead on top of the rose petals.

  Hennie wrote to the Halleck family, asking that Harold be buried next to Bijou. But she received no reply. The Hallecks shipped the body to Denver and buried it in the family plot, under a monument with the words “Love and Honor” on it.

  The door of the Pinto store opened, and a man, low and square, like a timberline-stunted tree, came in. Hennie wondered why mountain men always seemed to be runted—rooted to the ground as if they were built for long winters and heavy snows. He took off his plaid cap and tucked it under his arm, bowing a little to Hennie and asking, “How’s yourself?”

  “I am deteriorating at a normal rate,” she told him.

  “That’s about to be expected,” he replied.

  “And you, Davy?” Hennie asked

  “Same.” He stuffed his mittens into his pocket and held his hands over the stove, rubbing together fingers that were gnarled with arthritis and grimy with dirt. One thumbnail was black.

  Roy came out from the back room then, wiping his hands on his overalls and smelling of Tenmile Moon. He nodded at Davy.

  “Look, Pinto, how many gallons of gasoline do I need to get to Denver?” Davy asked.

  “About a hundred and fifty, if you’re driving that old Packard touring sedan of yours in this weather. That machine ought to be up on blocks like everybody else’s this time of year. You’ll never make it,” Roy told him. “Besides, that heater wouldn’t warm a gnat.”

  “We’ll see. She says she has to go to Denver to have her teeth made. Then she wants me to take her to eat at the Neisner Brothers’ luncheonette.” He pronounced the word “luncheon-eddie.” “I tell you, sir, I got no choice.” Davy reached his grimy hand inside his shirt, and Hennie wondered if he had fleas, for he couldn’t stop scratching.

  “Take the train.”

  “She won’t ride a train. If I don’t take her, she’ll hurt me on my bum, and I won’t hardly ever sit down no more.”

  “You ain’t got the backbone of a fishworm,” Roy told him. “You’ll run off the road going over the top. It’s snowed pretty bad up there last night. Just when you think it might be spring, another storm blows in. Always happens.”

  “I know it.” Davy put his hat back on his head and pulled the earflaps down. His face was as gray as the storm outside. “You coming on out to fill ’er up, or you want me to go down the Swan to get my gasoline?”

  “Have it your way.” Roy took a dirty woolen jacket from a hook behind the counter and went outside to the Skelly gasoline pump in front of the store.

  As he left, Davy turned to Hennie. “Tap ’er light.”

  “And yourself, Davy,” Hennie replied.

  The two women stared through the open doorway as the gasoline went up and down in the big glass pump. Davy took out a cigarette and lit a match, turning his back to the wind and cupping his hand around the flame, but the wind blew it out. He struck another match, but the wind took it, too. Davy shoved the cigarette under an earflap of his cap.

  Nit craned her neck to see the woman through the Packard’s windshield. “You think all her teeth’s fallen out?”

  “They got pulled a long time ago, and she had a set made back then,” Hennie told the girl. “But she dropped them down the privy, and now she won’t wear them.”

  “Hello, yes. I wouldn’t, either,” Nit said.

  Shivering in the cold blowing through the door, the two watched as the man paid Roy and drove off. Roy came back into the store, rubbing his nose, which was red, with pores as big as matchheads. “Judas Priest. That hammer-headed bastard is going to take an automobile over the hump in this weather. I never saw a man so stubborn. Damn fool.” Roy started to say more, but became sensible that Nit was listening. “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he said, but Nit giggled. So he gave her a sly look and went on to the back room, muttering, “Horny-toed bastard.”

  Roy had just closed the door when the firehouse siren went off, and the girl jumped.

  “Just the noon whistle,” Hennie said. “I best be getting home before the soup burns up.” She put her arms inside her sleeves and pulled the coat around her.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Nit said. She studied her apple, which was mostly brown spots now. So she opened the door of the stove and threw the apple into the coals, where it sizzled. “Middle Swan’s about as different a place as there is from Kentucky. But I think the people aren’t so different, women anyway.”

  “How’s that?” Hennie asked.

  “They’re strong. I think you have to be strong to live there or here. Like you,” Nit said.

  Hennie thought that over. “Like you, too, Mrs. Spindle. Maybe you don’t know it, but you are. You’ll see.”

  “Do you think so?” Nit asked, pleased. “I’d like to be strong. Do you really think I am?”

  Before Hennie could answer, the door opened, letting in the moan of the dredge and a stern-looking woman with a plate covered by a napkin.

  “How’s yourself?” she asked Hennie.

  “Good as ever,” Hennie replied. “And you?”

  “Same.”

  The woman l
ooked Nit up and down but didn’t speak. “I’ve got his dinner,” she said to Hennie and continued on into the back room and shut the door.

  “Don’t mind her. She keeps her nose so high in the air, she’s liable to drown in a good rainstorm,” Hennie said. “Monalisa Pinto thinks she’s the second coming of Jesus Christ.”

  “It’s a good thing that Greta Garbo wasn’t here when she came in. Mrs. Pinto would have knocked her dead with the look she gave me,” Nit said. A horrified expression came over her face. “Maybe she thinks I’m one of those sorry girls.”

  “No. You can set your mind at rest.” Hennie rose and buttoned her coat. She picked up the yeast and left five pennies on the counter. Nit stood as well, and the two walked out of the store together, Hennie closing the door and testing it to make sure that it was shut tight.

  “Mrs. Pinto is what they call her, but she’s not. You remember me telling you about that hooker from the Willows, the one who was a nurse and got hitched up with a man?” Hennie chuckled and started down the street, leaving the girl standing in front of the store with her little pink hand over her mouth.

  Chapter 4

  The Liberty Dredge gave an enormous shudder, then with a groan of agony, the gold boat shut down, and the silence awakened Hennie Comfort. Or perhaps she awoke because of the sound of birds chattering. With all the hollering the dredge made, Hennie hadn’t heard the dawn call of birds in a long time. She pulled herself into consciousness, sensing that something was different. Then she heard the scream of a camp robber and sprang out of bed—that is, as much as an eighty-six-year-old woman with rheumatism in her knees could spring. She found her carpet slippers and shuffled on rubbery ankles to the window she’d left open the night before and peered out.