Prayers for Sale

by Sandra Dallas

  Ila Mae glanced past Martha at the two men, and she saw right away that Mr. Grove was indeed a handsome-made man. And Mr. Comfort had a pleasing look. He was not quite as tall as Ila Mae, but he was shaven and wore clean clothes. She was suitably impressed—more than Mr. Comfort must be with her, Ila Mae thought, considering her bedraggled appearance. She was vain enough to wish she could have washed her face and dried her clothes before meeting him.

  Martha didn’t wait for Ila Mae to get out of the wagon but climbed in beside her and hugged and kissed her. Then after the men helped them out of the wagon, Martha took hold of her senses and said, “And this is my dear husband.”

  Ila Mae smiled and tried to curtsy, but her wet skirts nearly pulled her down. So did her surprise, for the shorter of the two men stepped forward and took her hand. In the name of peace, she didn’t know how she could have been more confused. Martha had told Ila Mae that her husband was the man on the right in the tintype, but she must have meant Martha’s right.

  “You’re Mr. Comfort?” she asked the handsome man, who stepped forward and bowed a little, taking her hand. His eyes were merry with amusement, for he understood at once that Ila Mae had expected him to be the short Mr. Grove.

  He looked her up and down, taking in her miserable state, and said, “And you are a little wet hen. Welcome to Middle Swan, Hennie.”

  The name made her smile. It was a new name for her new life. And so she buried Ila Mae, and at that moment, Hennie determined to marry Mr. Comfort if he would have her. She had hoped for a good man, a solid man, but she’d never expected one who would make her laugh. Or would make her tingle with wanting the way she had when she first glimpsed him. Perhaps he would even be a man she could love.

  There was no courting, no walking to church. Jake showed Hennie his cabin, and she remarked on the orderliness of it. He told her he wasn’t a rich man and wasn’t likely to be, because he didn’t believe he had the luck for it. But he’d work hard, he promised. She didn’t need to worry about that. And he’d do the best he could to take care of her.

  Still, Jake Comfort was a complicated man, and in those few days they allowed themselves to know each other, Hennie learned that he had a dark side. He was too fond of whiskey, and he had memories of the war that haunted him, made him jump when he heard a loud noise. He said he didn’t sleep well.

  “My first husband was a Confederate,” Hennie told him.

  “Martha said as much. I enlisted for the Union. What are your sentiments?”

  “I never wanted the war. I didn’t care who won. I just wanted it to end.”

  Jake nodded, satisfied with the answer. “War’s a terrible thing. I don’t intend to ever fight again.” His eyes glinted, and he turned away, pounding his fists into a jackpine. Hennie had seen soldiers in White Pigeon who struggled with things in their heads, and she stood quietly, waiting, until the darkness lifted from Jake. “I’ll not inflict my war on you,” he said.

  “Mr. Comfort, I would not want a husband who closed himself off to me.”

  “War’s not something to be shared.”

  “War’s griefs are.”

  “I said I’ll keep my demons to myself,” Jake told her harshly, and Hennie said no more. She knew when a subject was closed.

  A day later, he warned Hennie, “A mining camp’s a hard place for a woman.”

  “I’ve come from a hard place for a woman,” Hennie responded. “At least, in a mining camp there’s hope.” She loved that about Middle Swan—the hope as well as the excitement, the belief that with the strike of a pick, a person might find a fortune. What she liked best about a mining camp was that it had no past.

  “I come with encumberments,” Hennie told Jake, for she had picked up what the wagonmaster called a stray on the trail west. Jake would be taking on more than just a wife. But Jake replied that he would take Hennie even if she’d come with a wagonload of children, chickens, and dogs.

  Less than a week after they met, Jake took her into a grove of aspen trees and got down on one knee, taking her hand. “Hennie, it would please me more than a diamond ring if you would marry me.”

  Hennie was so happy she didn’t know anything. They were wed that afternoon, Martha and her husband standing up with them. Hennie’s wasn’t always an easy marriage, and she wondered more than once if she should have insisted the time they talked about war that Jake share his memories with her, because they haunted him until the day he died. Hennie believed she might have helped him if she’d understood his terrors. Still, it was a fine marriage, as good a marriage as ever was, and Hennie never regretted coming to Colorado. She’d been given a second chance at life, and she thanked Jake for it—and Billy, too, because Hennie always believed that Billy had showed her the way.

  Nit clapped her hands together and said she’d never heard anything so romantic, even on the radio. “Your stories comfort me,” she said. She finished off her thread and cut it with Hennie’s scissors, then looked through the window at the sun high in the sky and remarked, “I better get gone.” She paused a moment before she stood up, her brow furrowed in concentration. “I wanted to ask you something else.” Nit bent her head over the quilt, and Hennie couldn’t see the girl’s face, only her shining red hair. “How come you to have that sign about selling prayers if you don’t sell them?”

  Hennie chuckled. “That’s another story, but it’s a short one, and I’ll tell it. Jake and I had been married three or four years when I told him I was so happy that I had nothing else to pray for. ‘Why,’ says I, ‘I’ve got prayers to sell.’ He was so tickled by what I said that he made the sign for me and nailed it to the fence. It was a joke, but every now and then somebody like you comes along asking for prayers, and like I told you, no money will buy them, but I’m happy to say them for free. I’ve never lost anything by giving it away.” Hennie secured her needle in the quilt, then stood and helped Nit with her coat, walking her to the door. “I’ve got an abundance of prayers.”

  “Do you say them in church?” Nit asked.

  Hennie studied her a minute. “I say them wherever I am. I’m not well acquainted with the church in Middle Swan anymore. I have not stepped foot inside for some time.”

  The old woman thought Nit was going to ask the reason for that, because the girl looked at her, pausing in the doorway and staring intently at Hennie. But Nit seemed to have a sense about things, and instead, she asked, “Do they work? I mean to say, does the Lord answer your prayers?”

  Hennie shrugged. “The Lord takes His time, more than He ought to if you ask me, but He answers most of them.”

  The old woman watched as the girl went through the gate and disappeared down the trail. “You answer my prayers for other folks, but You’re not always so quick on mine,” Hennie muttered, looking heavenward. The Almighty hadn’t kept Billy or Jake safe. And there was Sarah’s death that troubled her yet. Now she had the quandary about moving away from Middle Swan, and of course, there was that other business that had gone on so long and left the pricker on her heart. She’d have to deal with that before she left Middle Swan, for it had to be settled. She didn’t want it to vex her in Fort Madison. No, not all of Hennie’s prayers had been answered.

  Chapter 3

  Hennie Comfort smiled to herself at the orderliness of the Pinto All-Cash General Store & Mining Supply. That Roy Pinto was as persnickety as a woman. Everything was in its place behind the U-shaped counter, and the places hadn’t changed since Theodore Roosevelt was president. The first time.

  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 cal
l 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.