Prayers for Sale (14 page)

“Free to neighbors.”

“You’re an odd one. You say prayers for one and all, but you haven’t set foot inside the church for years. And you once a Christian woman! You’ve got your ways.” Thelma turned away and started toward the store, stepping into the only puddle of mud in the trail. “Jesus God,” she said, but there wasn’t much feeling in the swearing, and Hennie knew her neighbor was glad for summer, too.

Hennie scraped the remains of her breakfast onto a rock for the squirrels and went back inside. There was work to do, the summer clothes gotten out and the winter ones washed and put away, the drawers and cupboards cleaned, the quilts aired. She glanced at the sky and judged the sun would be bright for a while yet. She needed a cloudy day to hang the
quilts on the line, for the sun along the crest of the earth was so strong it would fade them before it slipped behind the Tenmile Range. She thought to wash the cupboards, but the day was such a gift that she could not bear to spend it indoors. Perhaps she’d walk up the trail to timberline, pack a lunch. She might even invite her young neighbor to go along. The girl would be almost crazy by now from being cooped up in her shack in the dying days of winter. If she were home in Tennessee, the child would have been barefoot for a month or two.

Hennie went inside and tidied the house, cleaning the ashes from the fireplace and carrying them outside to spread on the flower beds. She swept the floor, and when it was still too early to call on the girl, she cleaned the pie safe, washing the shelves and sides and rinsing them with clear water with a sprig of dried lavender in it. She hoped the lavender bushes hadn’t died over the winter. Nobody else could make lavender grow in the high country the way Hennie did, but nonetheless, the cold killed even her lavender some years. Then she cleaned the ashes from the firebox of her cookstove and spread them, too, in her garden. But the sunshine called her, and she went outside and raked and swept the yard of pine needles that had fallen during the winter. She’d wait for another day to grub out the sage.

When enough time had passed, Hennie returned to the kitchen and cut up yesterday’s potatoes for a salad, mixing them with oil and a little vinegar and a crumbled slice of bacon. Then she made jam sandwiches, using the last of the currant jam she’d cooked from the fruit picked last summer along the railroad tracks. She placed the potato salad and
sandwiches in a large lard bucket, along with pickles, a jar of chowchow, and a hunk of yellow cheese. She added two tin cups, for the water high up would be clear and sweet and cold from the melting snow. Then she wrapped a bit of quilting in a napkin and set it on top. When she was finished, she slipped a sweater around her shoulders. Who knew when the weather might turn again? Hennie had worn the sweater so long that she’d forgotten it had once belonged to Jake. She’d taken to putting it on after he died, when the warm wool on her shoulders reminded her of the way Jake held her before he went off to work in the mornings. Like most miners’ wives, she never bid her husband good-bye of a morning without thinking,
Will he come home in one piece?
She wondered if Jake thought the same, but she never asked. Talking about such a thing would have been bad luck. Perhaps he knew all along what would happen to him.

As Hennie shut the door, she saw Thelma again and thought it would be a kindness to invite that neighbor to come along on the picnic. Lord knew, Thelma might welcome a bit of Hennie’s dinner, plain as it was. The time Hennie had taken supper at the Franks’s house, she’d found the meat so tough, she couldn’t cut the gravy with a knife. But with all her complaining, Thelma would spoil the day for the girl. Besides, Hennie hadn’t prepared enough picnic for three. So with only a fleeting moment of guilt, she headed down the trail for the Tappan place.

The girl had pulled the old blue rocking chair out of the house and was sitting outdoors, her eyes closed, her face held
up to the sun. Already, her pale skin had turned a darker shade of pink. She heard the old woman’s steps and opened her eyes, then jumped up when she saw Hennie. “You must think I’m the laziest thing on earth. I tried to clean the house, but I just piddled with it, and it’s a mess. I couldn’t stay inside on such a day. I couldn’t at all,” Nit Spindle said.

Hennie knew that Nit’s description of the house wasn’t true, for the girl’s home was always as neat as her own. Most likely, Nit had finished her work and was wondering how to spend her day. “It’d be a sin,” Hennie replied, setting her lard bucket on a stump. When the girl pointed to the rocker, Hennie sat.

“Mommy gave me this chair when me and Dick moved away, so’s I wouldn’t forget her. But I would never forget my family. It was made by my great-grandpaw, made while he hid out in a cave from the Yankees. He painted the chair blue, for he didn’t want to forget the color of the sky.” Nit looked up at the mountain sky and shook her head, while Hennie thought that she had indeed picked the right person for the last telling of her tales. The girl had an ear as good as Hennie’s for stories. “I never saw a sky this color, so bright it hurts my eyes,” Nit added.

“You best protect your skin against it, dearie. Redhead’s skin’s the worst to burn,” Hennie warned. “Up here where the air’s thin, you’ll fry like a hotcake. Put you on a sunbonnet.”

“I haven’t one.”

“Then wear you your feller’s old hat.”

The girl nodded, but instead of going inside for the hat, she sat down on a rock beside Hennie. Young girls today
didn’t like a white face like they used to. They wanted to be suntanned, and the girl, Hennie thought, was just the slightest bit vain about her looks. You couldn’t force a person to take your advice. But one bad burn from the sun shining through the thin air and the girl would learn.

“I was going to sun my quilts,” Nit said.

“Same, but I’ll wait for a cloudy day. The sun’s too bright this close to timberline. It’ll fade them.”

Nit thought that over and nodded, and Hennie wondered why a woman would take such good care of a quilt and not herself. It was the way of most quilters, however. They prized their work more than they did themselves.

The old woman rocked back and forth in the sun, drowsing a little. Then she remembered why she’d come and roused herself. “I’ve got dinner in the bucket, and I ask would you like to go up above where the gold boat’s working and have us a picnic. The food’s slim pickin’s, just leftovers, but it’ll suit if you’re hungry.”

Nit clasped her hands together in delight. “I baked a chess pie this morning. We’ll take it along.” When Hennie looked confused, the girl explained, “Brown sugar and eggs mostly.”

“Kentucky pie! That’s what we called it. Why, I haven’t thought about Kentucky pie since I came to Colorado. It suits me fine. But what will your man think when he comes home to supper, and there’s no hereafter?” The boy, slim like he was, could use some fattening up, the old woman decided.

Nit frowned in thought. “We’ll take half of it,” she said, giggling at the compromise.

“Why, that’ll make a party.” Hennie glanced up at the
sun, which was edging up to the midpoint in the sky now. “Just us hurry. If it rains, it’ll come in the afternoon. Take your rubber shoes. The trail’s not dry yet.” The girl went inside and returned, bareheaded, with a pie tin, a dishcloth tied around it with string. She placed it carefully on top of Hennie’s picnic, then put the lard bucket over her own arm. Touched by the girl’s thoughtfulness, Hennie pretended not to notice that Nit had picked up her burden.

Just as they started, the girl slapped her arm and muttered, “Drat skeeter!”

“We’ll find us some tansy leaves to rub on us. They keep the accustomed pests away just fine.”

“For sure?” asked Nit. When Hennie nodded, the girl said she knew all about plants and their uses, learned from an old lady at home who kept a medicine house, a tiny cabin whose shelves were loaded with crocks and tins of dried plants and herbs, and jars of concoctions. “I know plants for any kind of hurting a person’s got,” Nit said. Hennie told her they’d look for plants high up. She knew a thing or two about medicinal herbs herself.

The two walked through the old town and out past the gold dredge, which squatted in a pond of its own making, silent as snow the whole morning. Dick stood on the deck, and the two women waved to him, Nit turning back a time or two to catch a glimpse of her husband. “I sure worry about him,” Nit said. “When the dredge was shut down, that Silas Hemp made Dick go over the side for something. Then the boat started up, and Dick almost fell off.”

“Mr. Hemp’s a mean one,” Hennie agreed. She remembered when the man had tried to mine one of Jake’s old
claims, saying it was abandoned. But it wasn’t, and Hennie had forced him out. To get even, he’d left dynamite lying in the drift, and if she hadn’t had a notion to look for a meanness, the stuff might have killed somebody. But Hennie didn’t tell Nit about the dynamite, for she didn’t want to increase the girl’s worries.

The two women continued along to where the road trickled off into a narrow trail, edged here and there with crusts of snow. As it grew steeper, Hennie slowed her pace, although not for herself. Despite her age, she could still climb a mountain as well as any man. But the girl wasn’t used to the altitude yet, and Hennie didn’t want to tire her.

“Here’s where I get rose hips for jam,” Hennie said, stopping next to a patch of wild roses so that the girl could rest. She pointed to currant bushes that were just leafing out under the fallen timbers of an old mill, but said she’d show Nit a better patch, the one beside the railroad tracks. “There’s paintbrush there and the pink flowers we call summer’s half-over.” Hennie almost hated to see them bloom, for it meant that Middle Swan was on the down side of summer and winter was coming.

“Anemones?” the girl asked. “What about anemones?”

“There’s only one yard in Middle Swan where anemones grow, and it belongs to a fellow in prison for selling whiskey mixed with wood alcohol. Nobody lives there now. Might be we could dig up some, although they never grew for me.” She paused. “They were Mae’s favorites—my daughter,” she added in case Nit had forgotten. “She loves an anemone best of all. I told her an anemone is proof God loves women, although I can’t say it makes up for childbirth.” The two
chuckled, and Hennie added, “Anemones and quilting. Yes, I’d say there’s a god, and maybe even that God’s a woman.”

Hennie looked at the girl to see if the blaspheming had shocked her, but the girl only laughed and asked, “Does Mae quilt?”

Hennie smiled, switching the lard bucket from one arm to the other, for she had picked it up at the stop. Mae never took to quilting, she said. “That one couldn’t sit still long enough to thread a needle. Sewing was a grievement to her.” Hennie slowed a little, for the altitude got to her now. She hadn’t climbed this high since the fall. Or perhaps it was age that slowed her. Hennie didn’t want to think so.

“Maybe she isn’t really your daughter.” Nit couldn’t help but laugh at her own wit.

Hennie was silent for a long time then, mulling something over, which made the girl fidgety. At last, Hennie said, “No, she isn’t, not my natural-born daughter leastways. But in every other way, she is the best daughter a woman ever had. Every day I thank the Lord for Mae, because Jake and I weren’t blessed with children of our own.” There was no reason to tell the girl about the half-made babies she’d lost when they were three or five months along, no need to remind Nit of her own sorrow or make her fear another pregnancy. Women weren’t supposed to count those babies, but Hennie mourned the little lives that had never been lived.

“Ah gee, Mrs. Comfort. I didn’t mean to ask a question of a personal nature.”

The girl looked so dejected that Hennie said, “It tires me to talk when there’s climbing to do, and this mountain’s as steep as a horse’s face, but I promise I’ll tell you about her
when we get to the toppen part.” She bent over and picked a red berry the size of the nail on her little finger. “Here’s you your first strawberry. Go ahead and eat it. There’s no use to save it. Why, it’d take most of a day to pick enough for a pie, if you could find them.” Hennie carried the bucket again, and the two walked on in silence, both winded, until they reached timberline. The pines were stunted there, and some were bare of branches on one side, where the wind had taken them. The trees grew in patches, as if they’d failed in their struggle to march up to the top of the mountain, which was bald and covered with snow.

“You can see the whole world up here,” Nit said, as they broke into the clearing. “I’ll bring Dick. We can make a camp. Why, we love sleeping outside in a summer night.”

“No such a thing,” Hennie warned, explaining that lightning storms sent huge balls of electricity rolling across the open field. Three summers before, she said, two foreigners sleeping in a tent hadn’t had the sense to go below when the rain came, and they’d been struck by lightning.

“There’s so much I’ve got to learn here. At home, I was thought right smart, but I don’t know a thing about these mountains.”

“You’ll learn. You’ve already got a start,” Hennie replied.

“Then I thank you for it,” Nit said. “Because of you, I’m coming on to feeling a kinship to this place.”