Prayers for Sale

by Sandra Dallas

  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.

  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.”