Prayers for Sale (20 page)

“The next time you come again, we’ll remind you of that,” the barkeep told him.

“You won’t have to. I’m not going to follow drinking no more, neither,” Otto vowed, and Otto never took another shot of liquor as long as he lived. He never picked up a card again, either.

Missouri bemeaned Otto for a few days, until her fury was spent, and then Jake and Hennie went to the house, where Missouri was all packed up, and gave her the deed, made out in her name.

Hennie and the Tenmilers had worked it all out one day, after Missouri had gone to the Comfort house, bitterer than quinine, saying she didn’t have enough to feed the kids. “He’s took everything else. I know the house is next,” she’d cried.

The women had talked it over and decided there was nothing to it but to get that house away from Otto. Jake had known Jim Book when Book was a professional gambler, before he gave it up and became a preacher down in Denver. So he asked Jim to win that house off of Otto. “You keep the money. Just give us the deed,” Jake told him, and after the game was over, the preacher brought the deed right there to the Comfort house, and Jake transferred it to Missouri. Even if he’d wanted to, Otto couldn’t have gambled away their home again, because his wife owned it free and clear.

“Time to eat,” Hennie said. The women secured their needles in the quilt and stood up, moving to Hennie’s kitchen and the big dinner plates. Stacked like they were, the plates
were a series of red rims with white showing through where they had been nicked and chipped over the years. But they were real English china, and the women were proud to eat off them. While Hennie took Nit’s chicken from the warming oven and dished up her own pot roast from the back of the range, the others removed the dish towels from the platters and plates they’d brought with them and complimented one another on the offerings.

“Sugar bread,” Zepha whispered to Queenie, pointing to Edna’s pound cake. Bonnie commented on Nit’s chicken, and Edna told Zepha she’d hadn’t had ashcakes since she didn’t know when and had been hungering for them. Carla insisted Bonnie grew the best salad lettuce in Middle Swan; Hennie said she didn’t know how Carla could bake such fat loaves of bread at ten thousand feet. They all asked for half-moon pies. Someone even complimented Monalisa on her relish. The women took their chairs from the quilt frame and carried them to Hennie’s big table and sat to dinner, quiet while they ate. “It’s the best eating I ever did eat,” Nit said, as she fed the last of her sugar cake to Queenie, who was sitting on her mother’s lap, and the others agreed.

After they were finished with the dinner, they returned to the frame for a final hour of quilting. Drowsy with the big meal, the women were quiet now, gossiping a little, commenting on their stitching. Someone asked Hennie for another story, but she said, “My tongue’s been going like a clapper in a cowbell, and I best rest it. But first, I got something to say.”

Hennie paused until the others looked up from their stitching and stared at her.

She took a deep breath and blurted out, “This’ll be my last year on the Swan. I’m moving below to live with my daughter.” Hennie hadn’t intended to announce her plans that way, but she’d have to let her friends know sooner or later, and that afternoon seemed as good a time as any. She’d tell them all at once, so there would be less gossip about it.

The women were quiet for a moment.

“You’re leaving out?” Bonnie asked, stunned.

Hennie nodded.

“It won’t be Middle Swan without you here,” Edna said. “You’re as much a part of this place as the gold yet in the ground.”

“And the rocks on the dredge pile, too,” Hennie replied. “But it can’t be helped. After all, the Lord would be taking me soon enough anyway. The only difference is I’ll be leaving on my own two feet instead of being carried out.”

The women were silent then, until Hennie said, “Leaving’s not my idea. Mae’s been pestering me and wouldn’t give me any rest until I agreed to live with her. She keeps asking what if I fell or had heart failure. It’s for the best.” Hennie felt her eyes water but didn’t wipe them for fear of calling attention to the tears.

“Well, I think it’s a fine idea,” Monalisa interrupted. “Why would you want to spend another winter snowed in with days so dark you can’t see your hand unless the electric’s on. You made the right choice, Hennie.”

The others were quick to agree, interrupting one another to tell Hennie how lucky she was to have a daughter with a fine house with enough space for Hennie to have her own room. They said she wouldn’t have to clean out stove ashes
ever again, and that living in a town like Fort Madison, she wouldn’t have to worry about the milk at the store being sour—everyone glanced at Monalisa when Bonnie made that remark. Carla said Hennie could just sit all day and quilt, which gave the old woman a sense of dread. Quilting was pure pleasure in snatched moments, but Hennie would grow bored with it if she had nothing else to do.

The women chattered so, that Hennie wanted to cover her ears, for she knew they didn’t mean a word of what they said. They were as sorry as she was to hear of her leaving.

At last, Hennie interrupted them. “I’m not moving away tomorrow. I’ll wait till the end of the year, and I told Mae I’ll be back in the summers.”

“Of course you will,” Bonnie said fiercely.

“That’s why I’m keeping my house just like it is. I won’t sell it, or rent it, either.”

“Of course you won’t,” Carla said. She looked down at the quilt and announced they were ready to roll.

The women stood and adjusted the quilt so that the final unfinished section was set in. They sat down again, quiet now, waiting to see if Hennie wanted to speak about the move. The old woman told them, “Let’s not have any more talk of it. It makes me tired,” and the women nodded in agreement.

They stitched quietly, and when the quilt was almost done, Nit asked Hennie what had happened to Missouri Rice.

“I feared one of you would wonder about that. Sometimes you ought not to know the end of a story,” Hennie replied.

“You said he didn’t gamble anymore,” Zepha reminded Hennie.

The old woman gave a sad smile. “No, he didn’t gamble, and he didn’t drink. He got a job in the Big Minnie Mill and was as good a worker as ever was.” She glanced down at her hands, at the thin gold wedding band that was as much a part of her finger as the age spots. Then she looked up at Nit and Zepha. “The problem was Missouri. Maybe she’d put up with too much from Otto for too long. Whatever it was, in the end, she didn’t care any more for Otto than the hog cares for Sunday. One day, Otto came home and found Missouri’d sold the house and she and the kids had run off with a miner from the Pelican Kate.”

Hennie took a backstitch in the quilt and cut her thread. “That’s the end of the story,” she said, looking around the table at the other women, who were putting away their needles and thimbles. “And the end of the quilt,” she added. Hennie sighed and muttered to herself, “And just about the end of me as a Tenmile quilter.”

The girl looked peaked, her face white, and her breath came in gasps as she stumbled up the trail behind Hennie. The two were headed for the burn on the saddle on Sunset Peak. The old woman slowed to allow Nit to catch up with her. Each of the women carried two buckets. Nit’s pails were empty. One of Hennie’s contained their dinner, the other a canteen with water enough for the trip up the peak. They would refill it from one of the streams that fed into the Swan before they went downhill. Nothing refreshed a body more than mountain water.

Hennie thought of the number of times that she had climbed that trail and stopped beside a stream, dipping her hand into the wet and wondering if the water Sarah had drowned in felt as icy cold to the baby as the snowmelt did to Hennie’s hand. It seemed odd to her, losing Sarah in the
manner she had, that she always found the mountain streams comforting. She’d made the hike along that very trail after she’d lost the first of Jake’s babies, and had stopped to put her toes into the stream and felt cleansed.

Hennie showed up at Nit’s cabin that morning, telling the girl she’d like to borrow a little of her time if she could spare it, because it was as fine a day for raspberrying as there ever was. “We can’t let the sun go down on it,” she said. The day was only a little past noon of the year, just the right time for picking berries. Besides, Hennie felt protective of the girl, who had been doing poorly. A walk in the mountain air would bring color to her cheeks.

You’d think she was your own daughter, the way you carry on about her, Hennie told herself. But they were kindred spirits, too, the two of them having lost their babies, and the girl still freshly grieving for hers. Only another mother who knew the agony herself could understand that particular pain, and Hennie hoped that her sharing the girl’s burden would help. Besides, Hennie thought, there was a reason the girl needed her more than ever now.

Nit had been glad to go, for she’d gotten up backwards that morning, she said, smiling her gladness at an excuse to be away from the house. “If I work at it like I have this morning, I’ll not get nothing done anyway.” She put aside her scrub board and laundry tubs, and the two women set out, walking at a leisurely pace down Main Street, because it was not a day for hurrying. They greeted Zepha Massie, the woman Nit had met at Hennie’s quilting party, and invited her along, but she was greatly agitated. Her face was flushed, her pale blue eyes red, and she admitted, “I almost cried my eyes
out this morning. I broke my needle stitching my husband’s shirt.”

“Don’t you have but one needle?” Nit asked. Before Zepha could reply, Nit added, “Well, don’t you worry. I’ve got a needle right here in my pocket you can have.” Hennie had reminded Nit to take along her quilting, so the girl’s gesture, while small, was generous, for it meant Nit wouldn’t be able to sew at their nooning.

“That won’t do any good. Breaking a needle when you’re sewing on something that belongs to your man means he’ll have himself a new love before what you’re stitching wears out. Everybody knows that. I’ll tell you the truth: If Blue threw me over, I’d die, me with two little ones and a dog.”

“There’s no need to fuss,” Hennie told her soothingly. “You can cut up the shirt to make you a quilt.”

Zepha mulled that over, but Hennie’s words didn’t satisfy her. “What if all the bad luck goes right into the quilt? What then? Tell me that.”

“It won’t. I know it for a fact,” Hennie insisted. “Barbara Annie Moon who lived over to Breckenridge broke her needle when she was stitching her husband’s pants, so she cut ’em up and made herself a britches quilt. Her husband was just as besotted over Barbara Annie after they wore out that quilt as he ever was.”

Zepha pondered Hennie’s words before she nodded. “I could try it. I could be real careful and use that quilt just for good, so it’ll last until Blue’s too old for devilment.” She nodded to herself. “I thank you, Mrs. Comfort. It’s a relief off my mind. You won’t tell him, will you? If Blue finds out, he’ll worry himself sick.”

“Not a word.”

After Zepha hurried off, the girl and the old woman paused to look at the bric-a-brac in Ye Olde Shop, mostly leavings from folks who had moved away or stuff that Maggie Fox, who ran the shop, had picked up around the mines. “Eli Nash had the first bathtub in town, and Ye Olde Maggie tried to buy it to sell to some tourist as an antique,” Hennie said, shaking her head. Maggie never sold much, for most of her merchandise could be found at the dump, but the shop attracted its share of summer tourists, and that was Maggie’s goal, Hennie said, because the woman did like to chatter. Nit’s eyes lit up when she spotted a white platter in the window, just below the word
C
URIOSITIES
, which was stenciled in black on the glass. The platter was feather-edged with blue, and there was only a tiny chip in it, but the tag said fifty cents, nothing short of robbery.

“Just wait. By the end of summer, she’ll sell the whole store for a nickel,” Hennie replied. “It’s a right pretty plate. I wonder where she accumulated it from.”