Prayers for Sale (27 page)

“Fort Madison’s a nice enough place. I’ve been there,” Tom told her. “And you’ll have your daughter and your grandchildren.”

“Oh, I know. It’s as fine a place as you could ever live. The trouble is what am I going to do there? Mae has a room all ready for me, with a view of the Mississippi River. But I don’t want a river that’s slower than I am.”

“Oh, it has to be better than Middle Swan in January. And you’ll be back summers.”

“Will I, Tom?” Hennie rocked back and forth a little. “I don’t wonder but what I’ll wear myself out sitting and not be up to coming back.”

“You put too fine a point on it, Hennie. You’ll never wear down.” He reached over and took her hand, and the two sat silently, watching the fire. “I believe you’d adjust, just as you did when you came here.”

“I was seventy years younger.”

Tom laughed. “Do you really want to go to China?” He maneuvered himself to his feet.

“I do. China, Persia, the Holy Land, anyplace but Iowa.” She laughed, too, at such a notion.

Hennie followed Tom to the door, where he kissed her cheek, lingering a little before he started down the walk. At the gate, he turned, and Hennie called, “Tap ’er light, Tommy.”

“Same. Good night, old friend.” He touched the first two fingers of his right hand to his lips, then turned and walked along the trail, his steps surprisingly sure for a man of his years. Hennie watched until he was out of sight, then stood longer under the sickle moon, smelling the scent of the pines on the breeze, listening to the gurgle of the Swan River and the screeching of the dredge, which seemed comfortable now, because it was familiar. And she thought that it was an evening to be remembered long after she was gone from the Swan.

Hennie Comfort was surprised to see the young girl at the funeral service, for she had not expected Nit Spindle to attend. After all, Nit didn’t know Frank Slater, although he had worked side by side on the gold boat with the girl’s husband. Maybe the girl came because it could have been Dick instead of Frank lying in that coffin. Hennie sighed, hoping the girl didn’t think too hard about that possibility but, instead, just thanked the Lord that her husband was safe. After all, Hennie was certain the Almighty had intervened, granting Nit’s prayers and her own to look after the boy. The old woman only hoped that God would continue to keep an eye on Dick.

Hennie had heard the dredge go silent two days before, just as if somebody had pulled the switch on the electric and turned off the gold boat. She listened, expecting the dredge
to start up again, but after a long time, when it didn’t, she went outside and stood on her doorstep. One by one, the doors up and down the street opened, and women stepped out. The women always seemed to know. They sensed the difference between the dredge breaking down and an accident.

“Sure is quiet,” one of them said, and they smiled at one another and nodded, as though the boat was giving them a reprieve from the noise. But they were anxious. Hennie could tell from the way they wrapped their hands in their aprons.

“Must be the bucket line. The damn thing is always busting down,” Thelma Franks said, walking over to Hennie’s fence.

“Must be.”

“It’s too quiet. Jesus God, I don’t like the dredge down in the middle of the day like this. Something isn’t right.” She didn’t say “accident,” on account of it was bad luck to say the word.

“Maybe the bucket line,” Hennie said, but the two women feared it wasn’t.

“Damn dredge,” Thelma muttered again. Her man didn’t work on the dredge, but that didn’t make any difference. Middle Swan was a mining town, and when something went wrong, it was everybody’s sorrow.

Hennie hoped it wasn’t the Spindle boy who was hurt. Silas Hemp still had a disliking for him, and it was only a matter of time before the boy was hurt or maimed or worse. With a baby on the way and no other jobs available, Dick couldn’t quit the dredge.

As the women stood shivering in the cold wind, rubbing
their hands over their arms to keep warm, they heard men running down the road from the dredge, running past the row of open doors. “Who is it?” one of the women called.

The man in the lead ignored her as he turned off on the trail that led to the doctor’s office.

“Who is it?” she asked the second man, demanding now.

“Frank Slater,” he yelled.

“Is he going to make it?”

The man stopped and ran his tongue across his lips. He shook his head and started up again.

Hennie saw the women relax a little as they passed the name along. Their own men were safe. Hennie, too, was relieved that Dick Spindle was all right. But one of their kind would be needing them. “I’ll bake a cake,” a woman called. Another said she already had a meatloaf in the oven. Hennie volunteered an apple pie that was cooling on the drainboard. Even Thelma muttered that her bread was about to come out of the oven.

As the women turned to their tasks, another man came running up from the dredge. “Mr. Spindle!” Hennie called, and the boy stopped beside her gate.

He leaned over, taking deep breaths as he held on to her fence post. “Best you say a prayer for Frank Slater and them,” he told her. “It was a poor way to die, worse than most.”

Hennie waited until the boy caught his breath, for she knew he had the need to tell someone what he’d seen.

Dick exhaled and said, “Frank’s an oiler—was. He got crushed betwixt the belt and the pulley of the winch.” Dick closed his eyes as if to shut out the scene, and swallowed. “The winchman shut down so’s Frank could do his work.
Then Frank signaled to start up again. I don’t know what happened. Maybe he reached in the machinery, thinking he could oil a spot he forgot, or might be he caught his sleeve. I was standing right next to the winchman, and he knew something was wrong. So I went in the winch room, and there was Frank caught up in the machinery. His head was crushed, and his hand was almost tore off.” Suddenly, the boy broke into sobs.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Spindle. It’s a terrible thing for a person to see.”

“Mrs. Comfort, it could have been me. Frank was having a hard time, him being stove up from drinking too much last night, and I offered to take his work for him. He was going to let me do it, too, but he saw Mr. Hemp watching him and knew we’d get Hoovered if we switched. Mrs. Comfort, I could have been caught in the machinery, and then what would Nit do?”

Dick wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and Hennie put her hand on his arm. “But you weren’t the one, Dick. You can’t worry about a thing that didn’t happen.”

“Next time it could be me. There’s always a next time on a dredge.”

Hennie nodded, for she was not one to deny the truth. This accident wasn’t Silas Hemp’s fault, but the next one might be. “You be extra careful,” she said.

“I’d be obliged if you’d say a prayer for me.” Hennie nodded, although she already prayed daily for the boy’s safety, and Dick started off down the street. “I got to catch up with the boys.”

Hennie went in the opposite direction, toward the Spindle
house. The girl would be worried about the silence, and Hennie wanted to tell her that Dick was all right. Halfway down the trail, she ran into Nit. The girl puffed a little from hurrying. In just two months since the dinner with Tom Earley, Nit had filled out, and her dresses strained across her stomach. She tired easily, so Hennie had stepped in to help ready the cabin for the baby. The two women knitted sweaters and booties, and cut and sewed sheets for the cradle. Hennie had taken over Nit’s jam- and jelly-making, too, for standing over the hot woodstove made Nit go limp. She wasn’t mollycoddling the girl, Hennie told herself, only obliging her a little.

“Dick?” the girl asked.

“Sound as a dollar. He’s just gone to fetch the doctor.” Not that there was any reason for it, Hennie thought. She’d seen the bodies of men carried off the dredge—the arms and legs twisted, the faces mangled—and she told Nit, “Best to go on home and see to supper.”

Nit stared at the old woman a long time before she said, “I know what goes on with the gold boat. I heard a man tell Dick that a person that gets caught in the dredge dies worse than the soldiers he saw in France in the war. Mrs. Comfort, Dick’s got to get off that boat.”

So at first, the old woman was sorry the girl had come to the funeral, worried sick about her husband the way she was. Besides, the poor thing still mourned the death of her infant daughter, and funerals had a way of making a person feel the loss all over again. With a new baby inside her, the young
woman did not need to be reminded that death came unexpectedly. There were some who said a funeral could mark a babe in the womb, too. Hennie was not amongst them, although who was she to speak for the Lord? So it might not hurt for the girl to be cautious. Lord, I’d be obliged if you’d take especial care of that one, she prayed, adding, I’m willing to do my part, but I haven’t got much time. Indeed, there was a fall chill in the air, and Hennie knew it wouldn’t be long until the first snow.

After pondering the funeral situation, Hennie changed her mind and decided that it was a good thing Nit was attending the service, which was held outside at the End of Day Cemetery. Being there marked Nit as one of them. Oh, she’d be a foreigner for years yet—some in Middle Swan were still outsiders after twenty years of living there. But Nit showing up to honor Frank would be noticed and appreciated. Even Monalisa Pinto would give her the least little bit of credit for it.

There was another reason that she was glad the girl had attended the burying, Hennie decided after giving it even more thought. A mining camp was a harsh place, and Hennie never held with being ignorant about a thing. The girl should know that death was the cost of tearing gold out of its resting place at bedrock. The earth took its retribution. Hennie wouldn’t be around much longer to explain such things to the girl, and Nit would have to learn them on her own. Pray God, nothing ever happened to Nit’s husband, but the girl ought to be prepared a bit, just in case. There was no circumventing providence in a mining town.

Hennie turned her attention back to the Reverend Shadd,
who had just finished his preachment. He told the mourners that God’s ways were mysterious to men. The man was right about that, Hennie admitted. She never understood why the Lord took men in the prime of life. There was her first husband, Billy, killed just as that long-ago war between the North and the South ended, a man who didn’t live to see twenty years of age. And then her second husband, Jake Comfort, dead in a mine accident at sixty. He was as healthy as a man half his age, and Hennie had expected to live out her life with him, but here she was, a widow for more than thirty years.

Frank Slater was far younger than Jake had been, on the shy side of forty, with three children—and two or three others that’d died of pneumonia or influenza when they were brand-new. Terrible illnesses took little ones in that altitude, Hennie thought as she glanced at Nit. The remaining Slater children stood bewildered now, the least of them clinging to the mother. The oldest child, a boy, stood at the mother’s side, trying at the age of twelve to look like a man. And well he might, for who else was to take care of the widow?

The boy would quit school now to go to work, unless his mother found a job, but that wasn’t likely. There was little employment for women in Middle Swan, unless it was at the Willows, and even then, a mother with three children was ill-set to work nights at the hookhouse. Unless she was willing to entertain at home, Mrs. Slater would have a hard time of it. But she’d never turn out, Hennie knew, for Mrs. Slater was a righteous woman. Besides, she looked like a Middle Swan housewife, and a prowling husband might just as well stay at
home as visit a hookhouse to spend the evening with the likes of a woman who was an image of his wife.

Hennie glanced at the coffin, which was closed, telling everybody gathered at the burial ground that Frank had died a hideous death. The coffin was shut only when the body was blown to bits or the face so disfigured that the undertaker couldn’t do his work.

“Dust to dust,” the Reverend Shadd said, stooping to pick up a handful of dirt. The minister was old, older even than Hennie, and she wondered why he didn’t quit, go outside and live what remained of his life, but she didn’t waste her sympathy on him. The aged reverend grabbed the arm of a mourner to steady himself as he stood up. He opened the fingers of his hand and let the dirt sift through them onto the coffin—a fine pine box with silver handles that the dredge company had paid for. Hennie could hear the sound of the dirt and pebbles as they hit what the miners called “the wooden suit.” She’d never liked that “dust to dust” saying. It made life sound useless, as if everything a person accomplished during his lifetime was gone with the wind after he died.