Prayers for Sale (25 page)

“It’s the meanest kind of action,” Hennie said.

“Mr. Hemp talks big about dredging, but he doesn’t
know nothing practical about it. He’s went to school too long,” Dick said.

“He has at that. He’s overeducated and doesn’t have a lick of common sense. I don’t know why Will Gum keeps him on,” Tom told them. “His looks don’t help him, either.”

“He’s poorly shaped, all right. It’s too bad his legs aren’t split up because his shoulders would make a better butt than what he’s got. Excuse me.” Dick looked around, stricken at what he’d said, until Hennie and Tom laughed.

“Silas Hemp cut Dick’s wages,” Nit whispered, twisting her macaroni necklace around her neck. She had made it herself from different shapes colored by dyes from flowers she’d picked. Hennie told her once that it looked right pretty on her, which was why the girl wore it that evening.

Tom slammed his hand down on the arm of his chair. “You’d get blood out of a beet before you’d get money out of Silas Hemp.” He nodded to emphasize the truth of his words. There came a silence after that, and finally Tom asked the boy had he been a farmer.

“Oh, I can farm all right, but I’d rather work in the coal mines. Now that’s a job for a man. I’m hoping maybe I could get hired on at a gold mine, ’cause I like it underground better than on top, but there’s scarce few mine jobs here.”

“Scarce few,” Tom said, rubbing his bad leg. “You’d rather work in a mine, then?”

Dick nodded. “I’m not complaining, you understand. And I’m sorry for coming in here with my troubles, what with Mrs. Comfort’s being so nice to Nit and all. With the baby on the way, I guess I’m luckier than most.”

Nit blushed and put her palms together between her
knees as she looked down at the floor. She glanced at Hennie sideways, then looked back at the carpet, which Hennie had made from rags put together hit-or-miss. “It’s of a personal nature. You shouldn’t tell it, Dick,” she muttered.

“Why, of course he should. Isn’t that fine! That’s as good a surprise as any I ever got,” Hennie told the girl, although she had known for weeks that Nit was pregnant, probably knew it before the girl herself did. Hennie’d even asked the Lord to let her stay in Middle Swan long enough to see the baby safely born.

Tom reached over and slapped Dick on the knee, then raised his glass to Nit. “Here’s luck, Mrs. Spindle.” Hennie and Dick toasted the girl, too, then Hennie asked Nit how she was feeling.

“Pretty fine, just a little trouble breathing every now and again.”

“Just like me,” Tom said, and they all laughed. “There’s nobody can breathe right up here on the top of the world,” he added.

Dick told them they expected the baby after the turn of the year, and Hennie, who thought no, the baby was due sooner than that, warned, “Babies come early in these high mountains. You best be prepared for it.” She began quizzing the girl about what she had on hand for an infant, deciding Nit would require help. Hennie’d found a cradle at the dump once and hauled it home, knowing someone would need it one day. It was stored in a shed out back, and with a little fixing, it would do fine for the baby. She wondered if Blue Massie, Zepha’s husband, could repair the hickory that was
bent like embroidery hoops in the front and back of the cradle but was splintered now.

Hennie and Nit would make quilts and flannel sheets for the bed, and there were receiving blankets to be stitched, layettes to be knit. Oh, they’d have a time, Hennie thought, and smiled to herself at the pleasure of the work ahead for a baby. It would relieve Nit’s loneliness—and her own, Hennie realized, for being with the girl kept away her own blue devils. Making baby clothes would keep her from thinking too much about leaving. Weeks before, when she’d realized the girl was expecting, Hennie had gone through her rag bag and pulled out scraps that were just right for a baby’s quilt. Now, she’d give thought to the pattern.

Nit and Hennie chatted about babies. The girl was excited, and this was a time for talking joy. Hennie would wait until later to find out if Nit was scared, what with losing her first child before the tiny thing had even taken a breath. If the girl was worried, Hennie would do her best to comfort her. The old woman was glad she’d never told the girl about her own babies who hadn’t been brought to term.

But now, she listened to Nit chatter, all the while keeping an ear on Dick and Tom’s talk about dredging, about Dick’s work on the gold boat. She thought it was a wonder he hadn’t been hurt bad on the dredge; most likely, it was just a matter of time before something happened. The old woman hoped Nit’s husband wouldn’t lose his footing when the boat iced up, maybe slide off the gangway on one of those days when the temperature fell to ten or twenty degrees below zero. His winter clothes would drag him through the broken
ice to the bottom of the pond, and that was the worst way to die. It would be bad if something happened to him, especially with his wife carrying a baby. What would the poor thing do if Dick got maimed—or killed? Hennie didn’t feel good about the boy working on the dredge, not a bit good. She’d asked once if Dick could get transferred to the dredge shop, where the gold boats were repaired, but Dick said that he’d already asked. Silas Hemp had told him the only job the boy would ever have was on the boat.

“I hope it’s a boy. Dick wants him a boy,” Nit was saying when Hennie turned back to the girl’s conversation.

Suddenly, Hennie jumped up. “Lordy! That tom turkey’s about to burn up. Here I am talking and not thinking. I’ll get it to the table.”

The girl stood, too, saying she would help. And since Middle Swan people weren’t much for coddling women, even those who were pregnant—and Hennie herself had taken the girl on a hard climb just the day before—the old woman set the girl to mashing potatoes with the heavy wooden smasher. The girl worked the mallet up and down, just like the stamps that crushed the ore in a stamp mill. The old woman herself lifted the turkey from the oven and transferred it to a platter, letting it sit while she made a heavy gravy with flour and canned milk. Then she set out the food, the beans and potatoes, the creamed spinach and Tom’s bread along the center of the table, the turkey at the head, where she asked Tom to sit so that he could carve. “There’s nobody carves a bird like Tom Earley,” she told the young couple.

They said no formal blessing, for Hennie was not one to pray in front of an audience, but set to as soon as the food
was passed, talking little, because eating a meal such as Hennie had prepared was serious business. A time or two, Hennie looked up to find Tom watching her, and the thought crossed her mind that maybe the two of them should have married, after all. She’d loved him best of all the men she’d ever known, except for Billy and Jake, of course. But back when she and Tom might have had a life together, she’d made it clear she would not leave the mountains to live in a city; she’d have dried out like a marsh marigold plucked from its damp. And what she’d told the girl was true: She didn’t want to spoil the friendship. Besides, Tom had never asked her.

She touched one of the side combs and smiled at him, and he smiled back, making Hennie think what a wonderful thing it was to have a friend for seventy years. “You want you another toddy, Tom?” Hennie asked. The old man said he wouldn’t mind and made to get up from the table, but Hennie, mindful of her friend’s bad leg, told him to stay, and she fetched the bottle. She poured whiskey into his glass, then offered the bottle to Dick, who added a slug to his tumbler. Nit shook her head, and finally Hennie poured herself a nip.

Tom tasted the liquor and smacked his lips, which was what Middle Swan folks did to compliment the whiskey. “I guess there’s not so much bootlegging on the Swan anymore,” he said, ready for conversation now that he was almost finished eating.

“Oh, there’s some, but it’s not like it used to be,” Hennie replied, turning her mind to the subject of illicit whiskey. She looked at Dick and said, “Most folks in Middle Swan weren’t in favor of going dry. There was the Order of the
Bent Elbow that fought Prohibition, but the temperance ladies were too strong.” Still, Prohibition didn’t have any more effect on Middle Swan than on the place where Dick and Nit had came from. Fact was, she said, some of the bootleg was better during repeal than the legal stuff had been before Prohibition. And it was cheaper, too—pure Tenmile Moon, made from Colorado beet sugar and the sweetest water in the world, cooked at eighty degrees for ten days and strained twice.

You could buy a drink in any candy store in town, Tom added. Confectioners operated speakeasies because they could buy all the sugar they wanted without the federal agents getting suspicious. “Some of them did turn out a little candy, although you wouldn’t want to eat it.” Tom laughed. Most of the soft drink parlors were just fronts for bars, too, he added.

“There were eighteen saloons in Middle Swan that got shut down in nineteen and sixteen when Colorado went dry, and by nineteen and seventeen, sixteen soda parlors had opened up in those saloons. Imagine that,” Hennie said. “Remember that ditty, Tom?”

Hush little saloon, don’t you cry

You’ll be a drugstore by and by
.

The drugstore, the barbershop, the hardware, the cigar shop, Hennie added. All of them were blind piggers, too. And the St. Philomena Catholic church. “When all the other Catholics taken out, Doyle Hannigan—‘the deacon,’ we called him—stayed on and turned the church into a speakeasy. He advertised services all day long. He wasn’t
even a member. His wife was Catholic. He was just a common moonshiner.”

Even Roy Pinto at the mercantile sold Blue John, although he was never thirsty enough to try it, Tom said. “Do you recollect, Hennie, that he kept the bottles in the boxes with the ladies’ corsets?”

“I never bought drink off him or a corset, either one,” Hennie said. She didn’t add that she hadn’t worn a corset in forty years.

Tom chuckled. “I figured he cooked up his brew in those pipes he kept in the back room.”

“He did, for a fact,” said Hennie. “He stored it in the bed of that old truck of his. And he kept rattlesnakes in the back of the truck, too, to keep folks from stealing his hooch.”

“Pick your poison,” Tom said, “rattlers or rotgut.”

There was one old fellow who made his whiskey in an iron kettle and held a horse blanket over it to collect the steam, Hennie went on. When the blanket got too wet and heavy to hold, he wrung out the whiskey and bottled it. “Of course, you could get liquor legal for medicinal purposes,” she added. “Middle Swan had the distinction of being the sickest incorporated town in Colorado.”

Hennie remembered about dessert then, and she went to the drainboard and cut her raspberry pie into quarters, set them on clean plates, admired them for a moment, and carried them to the table. It was a good pie, maybe the best one she’d ever made, the berries peeking out of the thick lattice of the top crust. Tom, Dick, and Nit made over it so much that Hennie turned the color of the raspberries. Tom asked where she’d accumulated the fruit.

“We picked it yesterday, right after we saw you, up on the burn on Sunset Peak, past that old plater ground,” she replied. Hennie turned to Nit. “The word’s ‘placer,’ but ‘plater’ is what the old-timers call it. Placering was the first way we got out the gold along the Swan. Tom was one of the prospectors back then. He and Moses and Charlie Grove worked a claim on the Swan. Charlie was the unhandiest man I ever saw with a gold pan.”

“We sure left that river a mess,” Tom told them. He was right about that. The Swan was lined with “sandbars” of yellow waste, the residue of gold panning that had taken place years before along the river. Nothing, not a weed nor a wildflower, grew in the waste, and the water turned a toxic orange as it ran through the tailings. “We fouled our nest, you might say. We hadn’t planned on staying, none of us, and we didn’t care what we did to the land. When one place was used up, there was always another waiting,” Tom told the girl. He looked at Hennie and said, “But some stayed, and the Swan’s a better place for it.”

Hennie attacked her pie, and the others followed suit, pausing now and again to grunt their approval. “I saw Charlie Grove today. I think he still pans a little gold,” she said.

“It gets in the blood,” Tom told her, eating the last of the pie and picking up the crumbs of the crust with his fingers.

When they were finished, Tom told Dick, “Light the fire, and let’s us have a smoke.” He stood awkwardly. Gripping his cane, he limped a little as he made his way back to the easy chair. Nit began to clear the table, but Hennie told her to leave be. The old woman was enjoying the company too much to waste time washing dishes.

As Tom passed the quilting frame shoved against the wall, he stopped to admire Hennie’s quilt, the Coiled Rattlesnake, which was made up of pieces that were every color of the rainbow. “I believe I remember you had a dress of that,” he said, pointing a gnarled finger at an indigo shade sprigged with black.

“You remember it because you bought the goods for me,” Hennie said, bringing cups and saucers and a coffeepot to the table. “I’d admired it at the Pinto store but said it was too dear,” Hennie told Nit. “That was just after Jake was killed. Next thing I knew, a length of that cloth was sitting right here in this room.”

“I’ve never been here when there wasn’t a quilt in the making,” Tom said. “Every quilt must have its story.”

“Yes, and some aren’t worth the telling. This Coiled Rattlesnake is one of them.”

“I reckon you’ll breathe your last right there at that frame, Hennie,” Tom said, laughing.

Nit glanced up at Hennie then, and the old woman sighed. “I guess you haven’t heard about it, Tom. I’m leaving the Tenmile Range when the new year comes. I’ll be moving to Fort Madison to live with Mae.”

Tom stared at Hennie, stunned. “For good?”

“Mae says I can come back summers, so I’m keeping the house. But I can’t say I’ll ever be back. Most likely, she’ll find some reason to keep me there. I know she’ll try. Still, I got the rest of the summer and fall before I go below.” Hennie shrugged. “I always thought I’d die here, be wrapped up in a quilt and planted. Not a crazy quilt; crazy quilts are a confusion. Maybe my flower quilt. Yes,” she added, “it doesn’t
have flowers in it, but I call it the flower quilt because there’s blue like columbine and turkey-red the color of paintbrush, yellow for butter-and-eggs, and magenta just like summer’s-half-over. I wouldn’t mine spending glory wrapped up in all that color.” Hennie stopped, knowing she was chatting from nervousness. “We’ll talk about the moving later on. I don’t want to spoil a nice evening.”