Prayers for Sale (21 page)

A few steps away, they encountered Monalisa Pinto by the Skelly pump at the Pinto store and stopped a minute to exchange pleasantries with her. Now that Nit was a member of the Tenmile Quilters, Monalisa had softened toward her. “The store’s just got in a bolt of cloth in robin’s egg blue with kittens on it. You young girls always like kittens,” she said. Nit gave Monalisa a pretty smile at that, although when the woman went on her way, Nit told Hennie that she wouldn’t let a cat into the house. “Cats get in your bed when you’re asleep and suck your breath,” she said.

Just then, the Reverend Shadd passed them on his way to
the store and raised his hat. “Good morning, Mrs. Comfort, and Mrs. Spindle, is it?”

Nit appeared pleased that the man knew her name, for she was shy and scurried out of church on Sunday mornings instead of shaking hands with the minister. “It is. Good morning,” she replied, waiting for Hennie to greet the man.

But the old woman turned her back on the minister and was watching a man as aged as she was, taller and with a head of hair that shone like polished silver, come out of the barbershop. He hailed her, and she cried, “Tom Earley, I thought you were dead. Are you back in town? When was it you were planning to come around and see me and have a toddy and so forth?”

He didn’t answer her question but, instead, he grinned at Hennie, the smile lines around his eyes crinkling. “Slow down and tell me how’s the madam?”

“Couldn’t be better now that I’ve seen you. And you, Tom, you look stout as a mule. How’s your health?”

“Same.”

“Make you acquainted with Nit Spindle. She’s new to Middle Swan. Her husband, Dick, works the Liberty Dredge. Nit, this here is Tom Earley. Tom and his brother Moses came to Middle Swan not long after I did.”

“And if I’d seen her before Jake Comfort grabbed her, I’d have married her myself—prettiest girl I ever saw.”

“Oh, go on with you.” Hennie blushed, then said fondly, “You always had a way with you.” It hit her then that if she moved below, she might never see Tom Earley again, and that caused a pounding in her heart, for he was nearly her
oldest friend. To still the thumping, she put a hand on her chest and turned to Nit, saying, “Mr. Earley was one of the hardest-working prospectors on the Swan.”

“Not that it did me any good. All the gold dust I panned would fit into Hennie’s thimble.”

“That’s right.” Then Hennie explained, “But later on, he set up a plant to manufacture mining machinery, and that factory’s worth more than any gold mine ever discovered on the Tenmile. Mr. Earley lives in Chicago.”

Nit studied the man then. He was dressed in a fine white shirt and a good khaki suit, not flashy but much finer than the overalls and rough twill pants of the prospectors and dredge workers. He didn’t wear a ruby stick pin or a gold ring or any other jewelry, but nonetheless, he looked as rich as a Pikes Peak nugget.

“Tom’s had a cabin here for almost seventy years, and he can’t stay away from these mountains. They do that to you,” Hennie said.

“Can’t stay away from you, Hennie. Are you still selling prayers?”

“Are you in need of one?”

“It might restoreth my soul.”

“You sound like a stump-knocker.”

“I read the Bible more now that I’m getting old.”

“Old? Oh no. Not you, Tom.”

The two bantered for a few minutes, until Hennie insisted, “You come to supper tomorrow evening. I’ll bake a raspberry pie as good as you’ll never know.”

And Tom agreed. “Yep, old gal. I’ll bring a loaf of bread.”

“He’s a good hand to make bread,” Hennie told Nit. Then she turned to her old friend. “Us be going now. Tap ’er light, Tom.”

“And yourself, Hennie.”

As the two old friends paused in their good-byes, Nit wandered over to a deserted store with
CANDY, NUTS & LADIES UNDERWEAR
in dull gold lettering on the window. The shop’s door was secured by a rusty lock, and stuck inside in the window frame was a handwritten note: “Back in 15 min,” the words so faded that they were barely legible. Nit peeked into the display window, which was littered with dead flies. The corset on the headless, armless model in the window was dusty and yellow with age, and a slip that once had been pinned to the dummy had crumpled into a pile and was sun-faded.

When Nit turned around to ask about the store, she found Tom Earley gone and Hennie talking to the oldest couple the girl had ever seen in Middle Swan. The man had a face as wrinkled as that of a dried-apple doll, while the woman was as fat as mud, and the parchment skin of her face was powdered with flour. She was bent over, the upper part of her body almost parallel with the ground, and she carried a green birdcage with a yellow canary inside, which she held up for Nit to inspect. “We’re taking Henry for his walk,” she explained in a voice that was surprising for its youth and merriment. “I catched him gone this morning, but he was only up on the stove.”

“It’d kill her if she lost him,” the old man added in a voice scratched by mine dust.

“It’d kill me if I lost you, old feller,” the woman said, taking the man’s
hand and squeezing it, and they exchanged adoring looks. The couple moved on slowly then, the woman swaying from side to side as she walked, for her legs were angled from rickets, and his were as wobbly as dishrags. They held the birdcage between them and swung it a little as they made their way down the street.

“They’re as old as these mountains. I’ll tell you about them sometime,” Hennie said. The two women reached the edge of town and started up the trail that led to Sunset Peak. Hennie said again that it was a fine day for raspberrying. The sky was bright enough to hurt your eyes, and a breeze carried the scent of pines on it. Camp robbers and squirrels chattered along the trail, drowning out the screeching of the dredge, which grew fainter as the women climbed higher. The raspberry bushes would be full by now, Hennie guessed. The two would pick all they could carry, with plenty for pies and enough left over to fill half a dozen bottles. Before she left home, Hennie had taken down the jars and rubbers from her shelves and brought out the kettle, so that they could preserve the berries. The two would do the canning at Hennie’s house, for the girl didn’t have her own bottles. Or maybe they’d make jam. Nit liked her sweetness, and God knew, raspberry jam on a winter’s morning took away the blue devils. It was like tasting summer.

When they stopped, the girl leaned against a rock, panting, saying she didn’t know what was wrong with her, maybe the altitude. She thought she’d have adjusted by now, she said, “But I feel just like a baked apple.”

“It’s terrible hot, all right, Mrs. Spindle. Besides, up here, we’re a thousand foot higher than Middle Swan. This climb
would wind a mule,” Hennie told her, although she herself showed no signs of slowing. She reached over and slapped the girl’s arm, then held out her hand to show a dead mosquito squashed on the palm. “Drat thing! Did it bite you?”

The girl nodded, scratching her arm until there was a faint ooze of blood.

Hennie told Nit to stay where she was while the old woman walked a few hundred yards down a faint trail and returned with a handful of leaves. “I thought I’d find some by that old cabin. Rub you with tansy, and you won’t get you nary another mosquito bite.” She held out half of the leaves to Nit and rubbed the rest across her own face and arms. Nit watched the old woman, then wiped her skin with the leaves. “I forgot you told me tansy kept skeeters away. At home, we used tansy tea for the chicken pox.” Nit put a leaf into her pocket.

Hennie made a face, for tansy tea sounded bitter. “We’ll go ahead, if you’re ready. It’s not far,” she said.

Now that the girl was rested, the old woman started on, leading the way past a mine, whose head frame, weathered to the color of a slag heap, towered over young pines. Deserted cabins, their doors sagged open, were lined up near the mine. Through the door of one, the women could make out a white metal bed, its head- and footboards fanciful swirls of iron. “The Confederate Belle,” Hennie said. “It shut down before the century, but it’ll take a hundred years before the trees grow up again. They cut them every bit down for mine timbers and stove wood.”

Up ahead was a glory hole, its opening surrounded by the golden remnants of discarded ore. The range was potted
with the old prospect holes, their waste dumps trailing down the mountainsides like spilled cornmeal. When they reached the hole, which was circled by yellow mine waste, the girl walked over to it and peered down, inching forward. Hennie reached out and grabbed Nit’s dress. “Best not. Who knows how far down these shafts go?”

“They ought to fill them up then.”

Hennie shrugged and wondered who would do that. The prospectors who’d found the outcroppings and dug the holes searching for gold had moved on long ago or had passed over, most likely. Nobody owned the dead holes. “The bootleggers use them,” Hennie said. “In Prohibition time, we had dozens of stills in these mountains. Men here made more money from brewing tanglefoot than they did from mining. The bootleggers charged twenty dollars a gallon and the bars, five cents a shot. We’ve got stills yet that are running full out, because there’s some say homemade is better than anything you can buy legal. You ever see any such activity as that, you head in the opposite direction.”

“I know about those things,” Nit said, and Hennie bit her tongue at her overbearing way. Of course the girl did. There must be ten times as much moonshining in the Appalachian Mountains where Nit had come from than in all of Colorado.

Hennie held out the canteen. “God himself brewed this—mountain water. Drink,” she insisted, explaining that nothing wore out a body faster than lack of water in that dry altitude. The girl did as she was told. Hennie finished the water and detoured to a stream to refill the canteen. They were almost to the burn now, and Hennie led the way through
the pines, Nit following, until they broke into the clearing just a little below timberline, and Hennie pointed to the bushes weighted down by crimson berries.

Nit rushed forward and began pulling raspberries off the branches, shoving them into her mouth. In a minute, she remembered her manners and held out a handful to Hennie. “Would you have some?”

But Hennie was already picking berries and putting them into one of the pails. A red smear on her cheek told that she had sampled her share.

“I never saw such bushes,” Nit said, as she began filling her own pail. “We can pick them all summer long.”

“Not so long as you’d think. There’s the bears. Then if we get an early snow, the bushes freeze, and a petrificated berry isn’t worth eating.”

Nit made a face in agreement, then examined the berries in her hand to make sure she hadn’t picked a bad one.

The two worked quickly in the hot sun, Nit stopping every so often to eat a handful of raspberries. By the time Nit had filled one bucket, Hennie was almost finished with her second one. The old woman hurried to top off the bucket, then rose and stretched her back and asked, “Would you eat? I made us butter-and-sugar sandwiches, and there’s pickles and hard-boiled eggs. I thought berries would do for the hereafter, but I guess we’ve already ate our fill.”

The two women carried the pails to a spot shaded by a cliff and sat down on boulders left behind eons ago by a glacier. Nit scratched the lichen on a rocky outcrop with her fingertip, holding the gray flakes to her eye to study them. Then she picked up an orange rock that was imprinted with the
black outline of a leaf, its veins making a delicate tracery, like lace. “I had me a scrap of material like that once,” Nit said.

“It’s a fossil,” Hennie told her. “That’s a real leaf that got laid on the rock back when these mountains were young. You take it with you for a curiosity.” Hennie laid out the dinner on napkins and placed the rock in the bottom of the empty pail.

“Would you have it?” Nit asked.

“Lordy, I’ve got me too many rocks to count, ore samples that Jake brought home, mostly. I never could bear to throw them out. You’ll find near’ every house in Middle Swan has its collection of ore.” Hennie handed Nit a sandwich, and the two leaned back against the rock wall and ate their dinner, handing the canteen of water back and forth. Hennie wondered if she ought to get rid of her ore samples, along with the other useless mining debris she’d accumulated over the years—drill bits, miner’s candlesticks, Jake’s leather hat that he wore underground, his pick and shovel, his lunch bucket. That was all junk that Mae would have to throw away someday when Hennie was gone. But it would hurt Hennie’s heart to get rid of the things now. She’d leave them locked up in her house when she left Middle Swan.

“I never saw so many of those flowers. What do you call them?” Nit asked, pointing to a clump of blue and white blossoms.

“Columbine. In spring, there’s more of them up here than you can stir with a stick. They’re almost past blooming now.” She wondered if Fort Madison had columbine. Most likely it did, although not mountain fields full of them.

“I guess they’re the prettiest flowers I ever saw, pretty as their name.”

“Jake found this place—just this time of year. He was out one morning with his pick and shovel and was so tickled at all the raspberries he saw that he ran back to Middle Swan and taken Mae and me up here, said he’d hit paydirt.” Hennie smiled to herself. “But I knew before we started out that it was a bit of foolishness, because you don’t take a lard bucket with you to carry ore. I always said this berry patch was one of Jake’s best strikes.”

She chuckled at the memory. She and Jake and Mae would go there on a Sunday, after church—back when Hennie attended services—and pick the raspberries. Once, when Mae had stayed at home, Hennie and Jake had gone raspberrying by themselves and fooled around up there, not realizing until they were finished that their skin was stained red from where they’d lain on raspberries that had spilled out of the bucket. Hennie glowed at the recollection that her marriage had been good in that way. She hoped the girl’s marriage was just as fine, then told herself what the young couple did together was none of her business. Still, that business could be a good thing for a young girl, could help the girl bear her troubles.