Prayers for Sale (10 page)

Hennie herself couldn’t abide disorder; she knew the instant she stepped foot in Jake Comfort’s cabin seventy years before and saw the covers pulled tight across the bed and the plate and cup and frying pan washed and stacked neatly on the table that the two of them would get along. Of course, she’d have married Jake if he’d been a messy old batch, but it was extra nice that he was as tidy as she was.

So Hennie looked with some satisfaction on the rows of tin cans lined up on the shelves of the grocery side of the store,
the pictures of the tomatoes and peaches and the little cows on the milk cans all facing forward. Bags of sugar and flour were stacked on the nearby shelves. Another shelf held the tin bins of spices and sultanas. The lettering identified them as sultanas yet, but most everybody called them raisins now, and they no longer had to be stoned. The black tins were once painted with scenes of castles and mountains, but the containers had been used for so long that the pictures were nearly scratched off. Hennie remembered when they were new, back when Roy’s father operated the general store.

She ran her eye past the shelves of foodstuffs and along the back of the room where the picks and gold pans and other prospecting supplies were kept, then continued along the hardware side, past the saws, the hammers, and the axes, the stacks of overalls and jumpers, work shirts, heavy caps, and gloves, to the housewares section, with its heavy white crockery and blue-and-white speckled pie tins, string mops and player piano rolls. Skillets and black iron kettles and red-handled egg beaters hung from the ceiling.

Hennie stopped as she always did to study the bolts of cloth, stacked by color, like a rainbow. She could tell without asking that Roy Pinto hadn’t ordered in any new blues. Then she glanced past the signs advertising Royal Gelatin dessert and Chase and Sanborn coffee, Ipana toothpaste and Tender Leaf tea, to the boxes of doughnuts and sacks of light bread lying on the counter next to the big glass candy containers. Their rounded glass ends stuck out toward the room to display the candy; the openings faced behind the counter. The lids were on springs so that tiny hands couldn’t slip into the
jar and snag the strings of rock candy, clear and faceted as quartz, or the licorice babies, hard as drill bits.

Hennie turned to the oil stove that glowed red in the middle of the room. Chairs were gathered around it, but they were empty. The miners of the Warm Stove Mine and Hot Air Smelter had gone home to dinner. They’d been there earlier. Hennie could tell from the dirty coffee mugs, the wet floor around the spittoon, and the apple peelings, still yellow, in the kindling box. The leather bellies liked to spit and jaw and eat the wrinkled apples that Roy Pinto kept in a barrel in front of the counter.

There were fewer of the leather bellies now. Most of the folks she’d known in her early days on the Swan were gone, and come winter, she would be among them. But she would savor every day left to her, and she told Mae that she wouldn’t leave until the end of the year; to Hennie that meant the very last day of the year, December 31.

The moving couldn’t be helped, the old woman thought with a sigh, because Mae wasn’t the only one who worried about her. There were the members of the Tenmile Quilters, who visited her house in winter storms, pretending they’d come on errands, when they really were there checking to see whether Hennie was all right, if she’d fallen or suffered a stroke. Although she wasn’t ready just yet to cross over, Hennie didn’t worry about dying. Even the thought of going to sleep in the cold while the snow covered her like a pure white quilt didn’t scare her. But she didn’t want to be worrisome to others, and her spending her last days in Middle Swan, she had to admit, would be harder on her friends than
on her. She’d never let herself be a burden before, and she wouldn’t start now. But oh, she didn’t want to go, to live out her days in her daughter’s upstairs.

Mae had written that Hennie would have a big, sunny room to herself. There was a place in it for the quilt frame, and Hennie could look out on the hills and the river as she stitched. But the old woman didn’t care about small hills and big rivers. She liked her mountains close up and harsh, and streams that rampaged with snowmelt in the spring. And as for quilting, while it was a part of her life, it was not the sum of it, and the old woman did not care to spend every waking hour with a needle and thread. But Hennie had no alternative to living with Mae. She’d asked the Lord for help, but He’d been busy elsewhere and hadn’t even given her a hint He remembered her.

Hennie glanced around the Pinto store, wondering how many more times she would see the familiar scene before she left. And although Mae had agreed Hennie could live in Middle Swan in the summers, the old woman wondered if she would ever really return.

Lost in thought as she was, Hennie believed she was alone in the store—except for Roy, of course. He was making a din in the back room, where he kept the pipes and rolls of tin and sheets of corrugated iron. He liked to tinker with them. Then she became sensible of two women standing at the end of the counter near Roy’s fetching stick. The gold dredge had been hollering and screaming so when she entered the store that neither of the women had heard her. Hennie peered at them a moment and recognized the girl Nit Spindle, looking as raw new as she had those two times
they had called on each other. The woman with her was Greta Garbo. Hennie wondered if Nit had any idea she was talking to Greta Garbo.

“We just moved here, and you’re the first girl I’ve seen that isn’t older than God,” Nit said, hugging her coat around her body, which was as thin as thread. It was warm enough inside the store, but being from Kentucky, the girl wasn’t used to the cold. She’d have to get a heavier coat if she was to stay the next winter. “I could die of lonesomeness, might near. A body doesn’t know how to get acquainted in a mining town.”

“I’ll bet,” Greta said, raising an eyebrow and scuffing her boot along the worn area in the wooden floor. Thousands of pairs of shoes had created a wear pattern like an outline along the front of the U-shaped counter.

“There must be a plenty of men, but not many girls in Middle Swan.”

“That’s about right.” Greta was wearing a little red straw hat, and she used the flat of her hand to push the veil into place. Now, why would a woman, even one as fool stupid as Greta Garbo, wear a hat like that in such weather? Hennie wondered.

When Nit smiled, Hennie thought again how young the girl was, especially for one who had married and lost her firstborn. Hennie knew how she felt, of course, and glanced toward the ceiling, sending up a reminder to the Lord that she was willing to be His way of helping Nit. But He’d better hurry up, because she didn’t have all that much time.

“I hope you won’t think me bold, but I wish you would come by my house for coffee. I’ve had but one caller. You’d be my second,” Nit said. “You’ll come, won’t you?”

Greta put her hand on her hip and sized up Nit. “Are you kidding me, honey, or are you just plain dumb?”

It was time to put a stop to things, for the girl was neither jesting nor stupid but just naïve. So Hennie shuffled into the room in her rubber shoes, and both girls turned to look at her.

“Mrs. Comfort,” Nit said, looking pleased at seeing the old woman. She turned to Greta. “Mrs. Comfort’s the one I told you about, the one who called on me. I got out my new china teacups and saucers. They’re real nice, aren’t they, Mrs. Comfort?”

“Nicest I ever saw,” Hennie answered.

Before Hennie could say more, Roy Pinto, a sawed-off runt of a man although a decent enough fellow without a little man’s cockiness, emerged from the back. “Here now, what’s this?” he asked Greta Garbo.

“I come in for my cigarettes. You got my Luckies?” she asked.

“Yeah.” He reached under the counter for a package of Lucky Strikes and handed it to Greta and took her money. Greta opened the pack and shook out a Lucky, tapping it on the counter, then fitting it into a black holder decorated with rhinestones. She looked at Roy expectantly, but he frowned and said, “Don’t expect me to give you a light, girl. I don’t like a woman that smokes. It don’t look right. No sir.”

Greta sniffed and reached into her purse for a kitchen match, which she struck on top of the stove, and lit the Lucky. She drew the smoke deep into her lungs, then blew it out through her nose. Ignoring Roy Pinto and Hennie, Greta tilted her head at Nit and said, “So long, kid. I’m sure glad
to meet you.” She didn’t sound as if she were, but Nit didn’t appear to catch the tone.

“I’m proud to make your acquaintance,” Nit told her. “Remember to stop by. It’s a log cabin on Nugget Street. They call it the Tappan place.”

Hennie thought that Greta started to say something smart but stopped herself and replied, “I don’t guess I could, but thank you just the same.” She raised her chin a little, and without a word to the other two, she left the store.

“She knows better than to bother the customers,” Roy Pinto said. “She’s downright spiteful. I think it’s because she hasn’t had her coffee yet. None of the girls are any good until they’ve had their coffee.”

“Well, who is?” Hennie asked.

“Oh, she didn’t bother me. I bothered her.” Nit thought that over. “I mean, I introduced myself to her. Maybe she didn’t like it that I was so forward, but I meant no misrespect. Or it might be she thought she wouldn’t be welcome to smoke at my place”—Nit glanced at Roy accusingly—“but I don’t mind a person that smokes. She didn’t tell me her name.”

Hennie and Roy Pinto exchanged glances and Roy shrugged. “It’s Greta. Greta Garbo,” he said at last.

“You’re fooling me! Ah gee, not the real Greta Garbo? You’re sawing off a whopper! Greta Garbo doesn’t live in Middle Swan.”

“I don’t suppose,” Roy snickered.

“Well, imagine having the same name. Isn’t that something?” Nit smiled so brightly at the other two that Hennie had to smile back. Roy didn’t.

“Before that, she took the brag name of Queen Marie. I
don’t know why they’re all the time changing their names,” Roy said sourly. He sucked the end of his mustache into his mouth.

Nit looked confused and turned to Hennie.

“You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?” Hennie asked Roy, annoyance in her voice. “Now see what you’ve done?”

Roy studied Nit a moment. “Greta works at the Willows. She’s one of Sweetie Purvis’s girls.”

“I don’t know the Willows,” Nit told him, even more confused than before.

“There’s no sense being dumb about a thing,” Roy said roughly, his teeth working the mustache. He’d been looking at Hennie, and now he turned to Nit. “The Willows is a hookhouse. I misdoubt you don’t know what the hookhouse is.” He rubbed the stubble on his face with his hand.

Hennie interrupted. “It’s been my experience you’re not so good at explaining things. I came for a nickel’s worth of yeast cakes. Roy, you go get me that yeast.”

“Have it your way, old lady.” As he went along behind the counter to the refrigerator, he said over his shoulder, “I wouldn’t want to miss out on a five-cent sale. No sir.”

Hennie turned to Nit. “Just you come.” Hennie took the girl’s arm and led her to one of the chairs beside the stove, then sat down herself, heavily, as if her bones hurt. But everybody’s bones hurt in the cold weather when there was no sign the snow would stop. Oh, there had been that false spring, but it hadn’t lasted long, and now it was snowing again.

The old woman took off her woolen scarf and folded it, setting it in her lap, then unbuttoned her old coat. As she
did so, she wondered when she’d accumulated the coat, maybe fifty years before. Well, it was made of good stuff. It would last another fifty, even if she wouldn’t. For a minute, Hennie ruminated about the coat. Jake had bought it for her when the ore assayed high, and promised to buy her a fur coat later on, but the ore was only a pocket, and he’d had to go to work for wages. Every time she saw a rabbit or a fox and thought about the poor thing dead in a cold steel trap, she was glad she’d never gotten the fur. She wasn’t soft, but she never saw the sense of a living thing dying such a cruel death just for some woman’s vanity. Still, she thought, a fur coat when the wind blew down off the Tenmile Range would feel mighty good. Maybe they made fur coats out of foxes that died of old age.

“The hookhouse,” Nit said after she was settled. “You don’t mean . . .” When she looked up at Hennie, the girl was flushed, but whether it was from the heat of the stove or embarrassment, Hennie couldn’t tell. “You don’t mean a whorehouse?” She pushed her elbows into her sides and looked at her hands.

“I think you understand,” Hennie said. She reached into the barrel and took out an apple, but it was mushy-feeling, so she got up and peered into the barrel until she found one with only a few dotty places. She polished it on her scarf and held it out to the girl. “There’s nothing to be upset about. I expect there’s been a hookhouse in Middle Swan since eighteen and fifty-nine, when the first prospectors came here. It’s a fact that when men outnumber good women, if you want to call them that, the other kind comes in. Not that hookers aren’t good in their way. I never minded them.”

Hennie herself was flustered, and Roy Pinto, watching from behind the counter with the yeast in his stubby hand, appeared to be enjoying the old woman’s discomfort. “You tell her good, Hennie.”

“Somebody had to tell me. I was as green as a willow shoot when I came to this camp—and Middle Swan wasn’t any more than a camp back then—not that it’s much more now. When I saw Cockeyed Lil strutting up and down the street in her red stockings, I told Jake I wanted a pair just like them. He had to tell me why I didn’t.” Hennie blushed a little, remembering that later on, Jake gave her a pair of red stockings to wear for him. “You remember Lil, don’t you, Roy?”

The merchant shook his thick head and said that was before his time.

“Lil was a beauty, except for that cast in her eye. She wore yellow, yards and yards of it. Yellow dresses, yellow hats. And she rode a horse astride. Nowadays, women think nothing of that, but back then, riding a horse astride like a man was a scandal. And then there were those stockings. I haven’t thought about them in a long time. I’d like a pair right now.” Hennie pushed her foot forward and lifted her long skirt a little, showing a flesh-colored cotton stocking.