Prayers for Sale (18 page)

Nit nodded importantly and said, “I’ll do the best I can.”

Hennie explained that three of the Tenmilers had moved below the year before, because they couldn’t take the altitude anymore, and if the club wanted to finish a quilt in a day, it had to find new members. Since Hennie was the only founding member of the Tenmile Quilters left in Middle Swan, she could invite anyone she liked to join. Zepha’s quilting skill wasn’t the only reason Hennie had asked her to come, of course. Zepha wasn’t young; she looked like she’d never been young, but she wasn’t as old as the Tenmilers, and Nit needed a friend close to her own age. Much as she loved Nit, Hennie knew she was more like a mother to the girl than a friend Nit could gossip and giggle with. “Mrs. Massie didn’t say where she’d come from, and I didn’t ask. Sometimes it’s best not to,” Hennie said.

“You think she’s done a wrong thing?”

“No, I didn’t get that from her. But you never know why a person comes here. It’s been that way since ever in a mining town. There’s always those that want to get away from the past and start fresh, especially now, with times so hard. You don’t know what a person’s had to do to keep body and soul together. Mountain folks have their secrets, and it’s best not
to pry. They don’t want you to know, and sometimes you’re better off not knowing.”

“Have you got secrets, Mrs. Comfort?” Nit laughed at the idea.

“I’ve told most of mine or forgotten them,” Hennie said. She added quickly, “I don’t reckon I’ve got any secrets you’d want to hear, at any rate.” Of course, there was one secret she’d kept, a story left untold. Hennie couldn’t tell it until it had an ending, and she hadn’t decided yet what the ending would be.

Nit didn’t ponder Hennie’s reply, because they heard footsteps on the flat stones that led from the street to Hennie’s door, and two ladies entered the house, their arms filled with sewing baskets and plates of food covered with dish towels.

“Why, make you acquainted with Bonnie Harvey and Edna Gum,” Hennie cried, glad that the two had arrived before Monalisa Pinto.

Edna, a portly-looking woman, set a pound cake on the table and exclaimed, “Are those half-moon pies? I haven’t had half-moon pies since I moved to Colorado. I’ll bet you brought them. I’m just so glad you came, Mrs. Spindle. Are they peach?” she asked Nit, who nodded and twisted her hands nervously. Hennie smiled, for the women were as friendly as she had hoped.

Bonnie put down a big bowl of salad and went to the quilt frame. “What’s this design?” she asked, frowning. She walked around the quilt and answered her own question. “It’s coffee cups. I was looking at it upside down. Coffee cups. Isn’t that fine!”

“And every one’s a different fabric,” Edna added. “I’ll have to ask you for your pattern, Hennie.”

Hennie swallowed a smile, because Edna knew full well that Hennie hadn’t made the quilt top. Hennie liked the old patterns. Besides, some of the Coffee Cup blocks were askew, and the corners didn’t come together properly. Hennie would never put in such a quilt for her friends to see. In that nice way Edna had, she was trying to make the girl feel at home.

When Hennie pointed out that Nit had made the top, the girl stammered, “It’s just an everyday quilt.”

“That’s the best kind. They ought to all be everyday quilts. If you don’t use them, what good is a quilt?” Bonnie asked. “I never saw the sense of making a quilt that gets stuck away in a drawer.”

“I hoed corn to get the money to buy the goods for the sashing,” Nit told her, as Carla Swenson entered the house, ducking her head as she came in, because she was taller even than Hennie. She set two loaves of bread, still warm from the oven, and a jar of pickled beans on the table.

Right behind her was Monalisa Pinto, clutching a little jar of relish. Monalisa was the only one in the room wearing a hat. “How’s yourself?” she asked Hennie.

“As good as if I was half my age, except my arthritis troubles me some.”

“Same,” Monalisa said.

They didn’t hear the new quilter, Zepha Massie, a pale, gaunt woman who walked across the stones as quietly as a cat and was standing in the doorway, looking in. She’d have stayed there a long time if her little girl hadn’t begun to chatter.

“Just you come in,” Hennie said, taking Zepha’s thin hand, noticing that although her dress was patched, Zepha, too, was wearing a hat. It was a worn straw one, the back edge a little ragged, as if it had been nibbled by a mouse, but nonetheless, it was a hat, and it was set at a fashionable angle on the woman’s yellow curls. “Make you acquainted with your new neighbors.”

“You brought a child,” Monalisa said, her lips, which were as thin as crackers, turning down a little.

Carla interrupted, “The dear little thing. I’m sure glad to meet you.”

“She’s just a little cotton-top feller, not bigger than a cricket, much. Well, I’ve been awful little all my life, too,” Nit said, stooping to look the child in the eye, but the tiny girl grasped her mother’s hand and wouldn’t return Nit’s gaze. “She can sit under the quilt frame. Someday maybe I’ll have a little girl to sit under the frame,” Nit added wistfully.

“I did that when I can first remember. Isn’t that right, Bonnie?” Carla said.

“We sat there when we were just being raised up. Then the women asked us to thread their needles. I thought it was because we were getting responsible. I didn’t know those ladies couldn’t see well enough to thread them theirself. Now we’re just like them.” Bonnie laughed. She asked Zepha, “What’s your little girl’s name?”

“Queenie. I named her myself.”

“Well, who else would?” Monalisa muttered, stretching the sides of her rayon dress, because her slip peeked out below. “Named her for the Queen of England, did you?”

“I named her for a real nice lady,” Zepha said. She handed
Hennie a flour sack and explained, “I brought you a bag of ashcakes.”

“My favorite. We’ll eat royal,” Hennie said. Now that all the women were there, Hennie assigned them places on either side of the quilt frame, putting Nit and Zepha side by side and as far away from Monalisa as possible. The women exclaimed over the quilt top, even Monalisa, for none of them would be so rude as to criticize another woman’s quilt to her face.

Zepha took out a worn thimble, a china one that had been broken and glued back together, and picked up a needle and thread. She pulled it through the fabric and began to take stitches the size of sand grains. Hennie complimented her, and Zepha said shyly, “I’m pretty well acquainted with quilting. I like it better than anything in the world nearly.”

Nit asked if Zepha’s husband worked on the dredge, and Zepha, not looking up from her sewing, shook her head. “We came here because we heard there was work for a fellow that could fix things. Blue—that’s my man—if there’s ever a good fixer that ever lived, it’s Blue. You got anything that needs done, you ask him.” She seemed exhausted from talking and let out her breath, looking down at Queenie, who was sucking her fist.

“Where’d you come from?” Monalisa asked, stopping her stitching to peer through her rimless glasses at Zepha.

The others glanced sharply at the storekeeper’s wife, for such a question was a violation of good manners. “My, my needle goes through this quilt nice. I’m glad you didn’t make an overalls quilt,” Carla said quickly. “You can’t hardly get a needle through an overalls quilt, even for tacking.”

“A Mormon blanket. That’s what you call an overalls quilt,” explained Bonnie.

“Why, I didn’t know that,” Hennie said.

But Monalisa wouldn’t let them change the subject. “I ask where you came from.”

“Kansas,” Zepha told her, staring at Monalisa with eyes the palest shade of blue Hennie had ever seen. “We come from Kansas. Don’t let anybody tell you different.”

“You don’t sound like Kansas. I hope you’re not from Texas. I don’t trust a man that’s from Texas,” Monalisa persisted.

“I believe my husband was born in Texas,” Edna said quietly. She ran her hand through her permanent wave, catching Hennie’s eye and letting her right eyelid dip just a little. Mr. Gum was no more from Texas than Jesus Christ. Edna loved to bait Monalisa.

“That gambler was from Texas, you know, the one with the palomino horse. What was his name, Hennie?” Bonnie asked, changing the subject. Hennie was pleased, for she had an excuse to tell a tale. “I was just a little towhead then, but I remember him,” Bonnie added.

Hennie finished stitching around the Coffee Cup square in front of her and leaned back in her chair. Jake had bought her the chairs one Christmas when he’d leased the Madonna Mine and had found a pocket of high-grade—sturdy oak straight chairs that would last a hundred years, he’d said. Only Jake hadn’t lasted that long. “I was a grown woman, getting my first gray hair back then,” Hennie replied. “His name was called Mutt Elmore.” She smiled at the memory.

The women were quiet, watching Hennie, until Nit, who
could hardly keep herself still, asked, “Gee, are you going to tell us about him?”

Hennie pulled herself out of her reverie. She was getting old, she thought, because she didn’t often allow her mind to wander and let an opportunity to tell a story slip by. My, she would miss telling stories, for in Fort Madison, no one seemed to care about what had happened in the Colorado high country. “I guess I could. It’s not much of a tale. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

“Hello, yes!” Nit burst out, then reddened as the others turned to her.

Hennie paused to cut a piece of thread and lick the end, then after two or three tries, she thrust it through the eye of her needle. The women smiled at each other, for they knew Hennie liked to take her time beginning a story.

“I heard some of your Hollywood people gamble,” Monalisa barged in. Edna sent her a sharp look, and Monalisa looked down at her quilting. She’d finished a Coffee Cup, too. “I’m almost ready to roll,” Monalisa said.

“Hold your horses. I’m not,” Bonnie told her.

“Tell us about the gambler, Hennie,” Edna said, before Monalisa could interfere again with comments about film stars. She liked to talk about movie stars as much as Bonnie did religion.

“All right,” Hennie agreed quickly, so that no one else would interrupt. “His name was Mutt Elmore, but you already know that.”

In those long-ago days, the miners spent their leisure time hanging around the saloons, for they slept in shifts in the boardinghouses and had no place else to go when they weren’t
underground, Hennie explained to Nit. “For a nickel, a man could buy hisself a glass of beer and get a free meal thrown in. Of course, there were plenty who got drunk—and gambled. Mutt Elmore was one of the gamblers.”

Hennie had held her needle in the air since she began the story, and now she stopped talking to catch up with the other quilters. “Ready to roll?” she asked.

“Not yet,” Bonnie said. For a woman who took such big stitches, Bonnie ought to have been faster. “I’m rougher than a cow’s tongue when it comes to quilting,” Bonnie admitted.

“You’re better than some,” Hennie told her, for not for the world would she say a critical word about her friend’s stitching.

Then the old woman continued, “One day, when Mutt was as drunk as a boiled duck, he rode that horse—Starlight, its name was—through the door into the saloon. It wasn’t a regular door, but a pair of those swinging kind you see in the picture shows, wide enough for Starlight,” she explained to Nit. Tables and cards and glasses went flying, but Mutt didn’t care. “He rode right up to the bar and ordered hisself a beer, sat there in the saddle and drank it, while the horse did its business on the floor.”

“How disgusting,” Monalisa said. “I think we’re all ready to roll now.”

The women stood up and loosened the quilt in the frame and rolled it over one of the side rails to expose an unquilted section, which they fastened in place. Then they sat down again, all but Monalisa, who went to a little side mirror to study herself. Although on the hard side, she was nonetheless a pretty woman. Monalisa reached into her pocketbook for a tube of lipstick and rubbed it over her lips,
then touched her finger at a dab of color that extended beyond her mouth. She wiped her finger on a handkerchief, for even Monalisa would not want to stain someone’s quilt.

Hennie waited until Monalisa sat down before she continued. “That’s not the whole story,” she said, rolling her thread over her finger to make a knot, then pulling the knot through the quilt top to hide it in the batting. “Mutt thought that riding into the Gold Pan on Starlight was so funny that he got to doing it every time he came into town. The barkeep took a pure fit at the Gold Pan smelling like a stable and him having to clean up after that horse, and he told Mutt if he didn’t quit that, he wouldn’t be welcome anymore. But Mutt kept right on riding into the Gold Pan, and if the bartender wouldn’t sell him a beer, Mutt would sit there on that horse all night anyway. At first, the other fellows thought it was pretty funny, but after a bit, they got mighty tired of Mutt and Starlight.”

“What did they do?” Nit asked. She was so absorbed in the story that she had stopped quilting. So had Zepha, who sat motionless, listening to Hennie.

Hennie glanced at the quilt in front of her and saw that she had lagged behind again. She held her tongue while she worked her needle in and out of the fabric, then noticed that a corner of one of Nit’s squares had been stitched too close to the edge, and raveling showed through. Hennie secured the piece. She took a few more stitches, pulled the thread through, then paused with her needle in the air. “They sawed out all around the floor in front of the bar. The next time Mutt rode through the door, the floor gave way under him, and him and the horse both fell through.”

“Served them right,” Monalisa said, while the others laughed.

“Maybe not the horse,” Hennie told her. The saloon was built right over the Swan River. Hennie didn’t know if Starlight hit his head going down or just what happened, but the horse drowned as dead as four o’clock.

Zepha clucked her tongue and exchanged a glance with Nit. The two younger women looked tickled with the story.

“They just left Starlight there. But then he got to smelling, and they had the darnedest time getting him out, had to take out most of the floor. Now that’s the dyin’ truth,” Hennie said.