Prayers for Sale (28 page)

She didn’t much care for funeral services, either. Nor had Jake, and Hennie had shocked the town by refusing to hold one after her husband died. Instead, six of Jake’s friends sat in the house beside the box where Jake lay, sat up with the body through the night. And the next day, men gathered from all over the county to pay their respects, for Jake had no enemies. Men at such an occasion could get drunk in a thought, but Hennie provided drinking whiskey so that they could get drunk the proper way, telling stories, laughing, and
singing. Folks heard them all the way up the Jackass Trail to the Yellowcat Mine.

A few of the women in town were scandalized by Hennie’s method of burying her husband without a service, but they didn’t dare say a thing to Hennie, for Hennie Comfort had lived in Middle Swan longer than any of them and, like her husband, was much beloved. They complained to the Reverend Shadd, however, but he said it was Hennie’s right and that God was more concerned about how a man lived his life than about the way he was put into the ground. Hennie didn’t care in the least what the minister said in her defense.

When the Reverend Shadd finished the words of the service, Roy Pinto and the choir from the church sang “In the Beautiful Isle of Somewhere.” Then as the Woodmen of the World escorted Mrs. Slater and the children to a Packard touring car, a brass band struck up “Going Home.” At that instant, not satisfied that it had taken the life of a good man, the dredge screamed in pain—or as a warning to the living, Hennie thought. She wondered why the company couldn’t shut down the dang boat for the day to honor Frank and let the dredge workers attend the service, but she wasn’t surprised the thing was operating. Dredge companies had no souls. The other mourners, so used to the wailing and groaning of the gold boat, paid it no mind, but went about their business, tending to the graves of their own loved ones, before gathering at the Woodmen Hall for coffee and cake.

The service had been held under aspen trees that had turned the color of the old gold coins that people in Middle Swan used when Hennie arrived there in the 1860s. The
mass of leaves was so bright that it brought a hurting to Hennie’s eyes. She all but closed her lids until the leaves were blurs of gold against the big blue humps of mountains. Hennie thought she would make a quilt of those shapes one day, using the last of the precious blue she had bought for herself so long ago. She’d hoarded the fabric, but now she ought to cut it up and be done with it. She had pieced so long—some eighty years—that she saw things in quilt shapes. Maybe she’d make the quilt after she moved to Fort Madison, to remind her of the high country, not that she’d need any reminders. Those mountains, like Billy, Sarah, and Jake, would live on in her heart.

“His time was nigh,” Monalisa Pinto said in her pinch-nosed way, as she came abreast of Hennie. The wind had started up, and Monalisa repositioned her long, lethal hatpin, anchoring her hat to her head. “How’s your health, Hennie?”

“I woke up with my joints stiff. Yourself?”

“Same.”

Bonnie Harvey interrupted. “The dredge isn’t God. It wasn’t God that took Frank, Monalisa. It was the fool gold boat, cussed thing!”

“At least he didn’t get his head cut right off by the hopper like that fellow a few years back. And remember the deckhand who leaned too far over and got hit by the bucket line and drowned? And oh, you can’t forget the shoreman who fell off the plank when the boat bucked. You recollect that, Hennie? Nobody saw him go in. They didn’t know he was missing until the winchman spotted that big red three-cornered thing floating on the pond.”

“I disremember,” Hennie said, giving Monalisa a hard look.

Monalisa ignored her. “It was his liver,” she finished. “Floating right there in the pond, big as a brisket.”

“Oh!” Nit exclaimed, putting her hand to her mouth as if she was going to be sick.

“Now see what you’ve gone and done?” Hennie told Monalisa, disgusted. “And her about to have a baby.”

“Well, she ought to know about such,” Monalisa said.

“Where you going, sweetheart?” Bonnie butted in, speaking to her sister, Carla, to Hennie’s relief, for someone had to quiet Monalisa. Carla Swenson didn’t answer. Instead she wandered off toward the grave of her intended, a man who had died in a mine forty years earlier, only days before the two were to be married. Bonnie sighed. “She loves that man more than if she’d wed him. Maybe if they’d been married a while, she wouldn’t still mourn him so. People feel sorry for spinsters and widows, but there’s more than one married woman that envies them.”

“Are you amongst them?” Monalisa inquired.

“No, I’ve done right good, as you know well enough, but there are plenty here with shabby marriages.”

Hennie nodded, not saying anything, because there was no need to name the women.

“I expect this will be your last funeral up here,” Monalisa said.

“I hope so—except for my own,” Hennie replied, for she intended to be buried beside Jake, no matter where she died. And she knew that Mae would do that for her. The old
woman turned to Nit, who’d moved off to one side, clearly ill at ease. “Why, it’s neighborly of you to come, Mrs. Spindle. Mrs. Slater will be pleased you were here,” Hennie told the girl, although she knew that Frank Slater’s widow was too distressed to remember a soul who attended the service.

“I hope it’s all right,” the girl said uncertainly. She clasped and unclasped her little hands in front of her coat, which was strained across her growing stomach. “I mean, I didn’t know him any more than a duck  . . .” Her voice trailed off. Then she took a deep breath and added, “But Dick did. And I’m thinking if something was ever to happen to Dick, I’d sure be proud to see folks at his planting.”

“Planting,” Monalisa repeated, a trace of disdain in her voice.

“I think that’s a real nice way to put it, much better than ‘dust to dust,’ ” Bonnie interjected. “You did the right thing, Mrs. Spindle. We all feel that way. I’d rather be surprised at who’s there than at who’s not.” She added after a minute, “My, there’ve been a lot of ‘plantings.’ ”

The women were silent then, each remembering the funerals of loved ones who rested in that place. The End of Day Cemetery was a large one, spread over a mountain meadow, new and old graves mixed together, Christian and Jew and those of no beliefs at all, good men and bad, pure women and some from the hookhouses.

In one spot rested the dozen miners who had been killed in a cave-in at the Pennsylvania Mine, their graves covered with wild daisies. The women of Middle Swan dug those daisies and planted them around their houses, for the daisies
from that cold spot of death were the toughest in the high country. The graves were marked by fanciful shapes—obelisks engraved with the deceased’s unit and rank in the Civil War, memorials cast in the shapes of angels and tree trunks, stones carved with lambs, bearing words of remembrance: “Bessie and Ruth, infant daughters of Geo. and Mary Storey” and “Lamb of God, But Died on Earth to Bloom in Heaven” and “Sacred to the Memory of Verna Griffin.” Hennie looked about for her favorite marker:

                                                   
Beneath this stone our baby lies

                                                   
He never cries or hollers

                                                   
He lived by 1 and 20 days

                                                   
And cost us 40 dollars

Hennie never failed to wonder who had put the verse there, whether it was a bereaved family with a sense of humor or some joker. She thought to show it to Nit, but no, the girl might not think it was funny.

The women broke up then. “I said I’d cut the cake at the Woodmen’s,” Monalisa told them. “Then I have to go home and fix supper. Cooking’s a botherment. I despise to do it.”

“My husband’s went to Denver, and I’m a woman of leisure. No cooking is good enough for womenfolks when the men are gone,” Bonnie said, turning to fetch her sister. “Come along, Carla. We’ll go to the hall, and after that, we’ll pop some corn and take it to the Roxy. Maybe there’s a picture show with dancing in it. I always like dancing, but the mister, he won’t watch it.”

“I’m not going to the Woodmen’s, but you’d be welcome,” Hennie told Nit, who only shook her head and replied she didn’t feel up to socializing. Hennie nodded in understanding and said she was going to stand a minute at Jake’s grave. “You can come along, if you’d like.”

“I don’t mind. I’ve got nothing to do.”

As the other women left, Hennie led Nit past the plots, some outlined with iron fences that were bent from the intense winters. Here and there a wooden fence lay on the ground or a wooden marker leaned crookedly, the name scoured off by the wind and snow. Hennie hoped the girl wouldn’t look too closely at the names and dates carved into the stones. So many of them told of babies, two or three or four of them in the same family, who’d died at birth or lived only a few months. And beside them might lay the mother, dead in childbirth.

She stopped at Jake’s plot, which had been swept clean of pine needles, showing that after all these years, Hennie still visited it frequently. There was no iron rail or pickets, either, for Jake wouldn’t have wanted to be fenced in. Jake was the only one who’d been laid to rest in the plot, because the two of them had buried the remains of the babies high up in the meadows near the sky, close to heaven.

Jake’s grave was marked by a large boulder with “Jacob Comfort” chiseled into it, nothing more. “I had some of his friends haul it down from near timberline. They put a rope around it, and down the mountain it came. I wouldn’t have Jake marked with a dredge rock,” she explained, running her hands over her husband’s name. Hennie had stood on that
very spot not long before, telling Jake she was worried about the pregnancy of her young friend, but the old woman didn’t tell that to Nit. The girl might think she was simple.

“It’s peaceful here,” Nit said at last. And it was, even with the racket of the dredge in the distance and the sounds of cars returning to town. The wind came up, and aspen leaves showered the two women. The girl leaned down and picked up one of them, placing it in the palm of one hand and smoothing it with the fingers of the other. “It’s such a pretty shape. It would work right well for a quilting pattern.”

“I never thought of that. Aren’t you the clever one!” Hennie exclaimed.

Then the old woman stared at the stone with Jake’s name on it, stood there so long that the girl wandered off, reading the names on the tombstones out loud. “ ‘Lilla Marz, a wife of Ben Marz’ and ‘Luther B. Smart.’ I wonder if Luther be’d smart or not,” she said and giggled to herself. Nit continued, reading the names in a plot surrounded by an iron fence: “ ‘John Hallen, lived 17 days,’ ‘Johnny Hallen, lived one year, three days,’ ‘Jody Hallen, lived two years seventy-two days,’ ‘Baby Jo, lived one hour.’ ” Nit stopped and frowned. “Do you think the Hallens ever named their babies anything but
John
?” Hennie muttered an answer, and Nit kept on reading the tombstones. “ ‘Our Baby Vandevier Boylan, Age 2 Years,’ ‘Sweet & Precious to the Memory of Merry Belle Grace.’ Isn’t that the prettiest name, Merry Belle Grace? I bet she had a happy life with a name like that.”

“Not so happy,” Hennie said, ending her commune with Jake, telling him he ought to put in a word with the Lord about Nit, and while he was at it, would Jake ask for help for
her in shaking the blue devils she had about moving. “George Grace fell off a cliff in a snowstorm, and a Denver lawyer cheated Merry Belle out of everything her husband left her. She’d gone to him to ask for help with George’s estate. George’s money was in shares of the Rosalie silver mine in Leadville. The lawyer said Merry Belle was lucky she’d come to him that day, because he knew of a report on the mine that was due to be issued in less than a week, telling that the Rosalie’s ore vein had pinched out.”

Hennie shook her head at the memory. The attorney said if Merry Belle turned the shares over to him right then, he’d move them for her for $1,500. In a week, they’d be worthless. So she sold George’s interest to the attorney. When the report came out, it told that the Rosalie had hit a rich new vein. The lawyer sold the shares later on for $10,000, an amount that would have taken care of Merry Belle for the rest of her life.

“What did she do?” Nit asked.

“
She
didn’t do anything. But
I
did. I got in touch with a friend of mine, Ma Sarpy. I’d done her a kindness once, and she’d always said she was beholden to me. Besides, this was just the kind of job she liked.”

Nit frowned. “Who?”

“It’s not a name that’s known much anymore, but once, there was a goodly number familiar with it, some to their sorrow. I’ll tell you about her,” Hennie said, pleased at a chance to sit and tell a story. There were so many stories yet to tell the girl. She looked around the cemetery until she spotted a stone bench beside a grave. “Sit yourself.”

The girl, too, seemed glad for the chance to get off her
feet, for her ankles were swollen, and she was peaked and drawn. It sapped a woman to be pregnant at that altitude. “Do you still think the baby’s due at the turn of the year?” Hennie asked.

“I’m not just sure. I haven’t had my complaint since before I came here, maybe a month or two before that, but I didn’t pay it attention, since I’d had the baby not so long before,” the girl replied. “I feel good,” she added quickly, “just a little tired.”

“Why, I am myself,” Hennie said.

“And you’re not even—” The girl stopped, not sure she should complete the joke.

“Pregnant,” Hennie finished for her and laughed.

Nit smiled, then grew serious. “I tell you, Mrs. Comfort, I get the all-over fidges sometimes. What if something’s to happen to Dick on the dredge, like Mrs. Pinto was telling, and I’m left alone to have the baby? And if I lost a baby again, why I can’t know what I’d do with myself. I might drown myself in that dredge pond.” She stopped and watched as a whirlwind of aspen leaves swirled around them. “I can’t tell Dick how scared I am. It would bemean him, because he works hard. But it festers at me, and he knows that.”