Prayers for Sale (26 page)

Tom studied her a long time. Then he nodded and said, “Well, you can wrap me up in your old measles-and-mumps quilt.” He explained to the young couple that the measles-and-mumps quilt was the one Hennie put over Mae when she was sick. “You could play checkers on the squares. I reckon it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to play checkers for eternity.”

“That’s not a quilt for burying. We’ll stuff you into a gunnysack and throw you down a glory hole,” Hennie said, with a fond look at her friend.

“It’s my remains, and I say one of your quilts. You can’t begrudge an old friend that,” he told her, his eyes twinkling. He stared into the floor for a moment. “I know Fort Madison because I had a friend who came from there long ago. It’s not so far from Chicago. Might be I’d turn up on your doorstep.”

“I’d like that,” Hennie said, almost choking from happiness. She hadn’t considered that her old friends might visit her in Iowa. “It’ll be a relief to do something besides quilt.”

“Oh, you don’t always quilt,” Tom told her. He turned to the young couple. “You may think she’s a sewing fool, but she’s a wild one. Why, she was known as a moonshiner.”

Nit and Dick turned to her, surprised. Hennie could not
tell if the look on their faces was awe or respect or condemnation. “Now, Tom. You know I never did that,” she said.

“You as good as did. Mick Kochevar said he’d have gone to prison without you.”

Tom smiled as he removed a package of ready-mades from his pocket and passed it around. The women declined, but Dick took two, placing the second one behind his ear. He picked a kitchen match from the blue glass slipper on the table beside him and struck it, holding the flame out to Tom before he lighted his own cigarette. He threw the match into the fire, which Dick had set a match to when they got up from the table. Now, the flames were settling down to an even burn, taking the night’s chill out of the air.

Hennie poured the coffee, and the others busied themselves passing around the spooner, cream pitcher, and sugar, doctoring their coffee, tasting it, and adding just a speck more sweetening. When they were satisfied, they turned to Hennie, who then took to her chair, a lady’s chair from long ago, constructed without arms so that a hoopskirt could fit over the sides. She preferred her wide rocker, now so old that the varnish was worn off the armrests and a wire replaced a rung that had been broken, but Dick was sitting in it. So she settled into the lady’s chair, like a hen into a nest, and began the story.

The miners along the Tenmile brewed Purple Jesus, White Mule, Sneaky Pete, and half a dozen others, but the best they ever made was Tenmile Moon. Most of the stills along the Swan were family affairs, and the moonshiners hardly
ever got caught. In fact, every time a moonshiner took the train down to Denver for his trial, he bought himself a round-trip ticket. That didn’t mean the government didn’t send revenue agents to arrest the bootleggers. But the federal men used passes, which the conductors recognized. They got the agents to talk about who they were after, then wired the details to the station.

Hennie was at the depot one morning when the wire came that the agents were after a man on Galena Street who brewed liquor with the help of his kids. “That’s Mick Kochevar,” Hennie told the station agent. Mick’s legs had been blown off in a mining accident, and his children pulled him around in a little wagon to make deliveries. The Kochevars were borrasca-poor, and those kids would starve if Mick were arrested.

Hennie left the station on a tear, almost running down Horace Wilson, who was getting out of a big truck. “Horace, come along. It’s a matter of life and death,” she told him, and the two hightailed it to the Kochevar place, where they and the little ones disassembled the still and loaded it into the truck. Horace drove away, and the kids cleared off like running cows. Hennie herself was about to leave when the two federal men showed up, acting friendly.

“How you doing?” one asked.

“I am well and good for nothing,” Mick replied.

The agents explained they were traveling men and had heard Mick sold Tenmile Moon.

“You don’t know nothing about it,” Mick replied. “I ain’t any no-account-for-nothing that makes rotgut.”

“That’s the truth,” Hennie said.

“Look out, lady. The rest of us knows a thing or two,” the agent told her.

Hennie retorted, “He doesn’t make whiskey, because he’s a member of the Holiness in good standing, too.” Hennie didn’t know where that came from, nor did Mick, who jerked up his head, because he was no more a member of the Holiness than Hennie was.

“You show us that shed you got there, and I’ll show you holiness,” the agent told him.

“I sure would like to if you’d give me a pair of legs,” Mick replied.

Until then, the federal agents hadn’t noticed that Mick was maimed, but that didn’t stop them from yanking the wagon with Mick in it over to the shed, nearly bouncing Mick out onto the ground. “You hurt my foot,” Mick cried.

“You ain’t got a foot,” replied the agent, mean enough to fight a steam sawmill. He told Mick to open the shed, and when the bootlegger couldn’t reach the lock, the agent yanked Mick’s arm and said roughly, “Do it this way, cripple.” He didn’t care for Mick’s feelings any more than a big groundhog.

“Do it yourself, then,” Hennie said, taking the key and throwing it onto the ground.

The agent grunted, then picked up the key and unlocked the door, and the minute it swung open, the smell of mash came rushing out, strong as lye. “Say, this is interesting,” one of the men said. The agents recognized the smell, of course, but although they searched high and low, they couldn’t find a kettle or a copper pipe or a drop of spilled Tenmile Moon.

“Those hammer-headed neighbor kids has been breaking
in and drinking again,” Mick explained when the agents grilled him about the stench. “If I had me some legs, I’d run ’em off. But I’m as slow as cream rising. All’s I can do is sit here and do nothing. It’s a terrible affliction I have.” Oh, he was the darnedest liar!

So the agents gave up and went back to the station, Mick calling after them, “By the jumping, cross-eyed Judas Priest, I don’t want to never see you again, coming in here and accusing me of sinful ways, you cussed devils.”

“That’s the best story,” Nit said, clapping her hands, and the others agreed.

“Mr. Spindle, would you put a little more wood on the fire?” Hennie asked, and Dick took a log from a huge iron kettle that served as a wood box and added it to the flames. He pushed at the wood with a poker, and when the log had settled in, the boy sat down, reaching for a cigarette from Tom’s package and lighting it. The boy nodded his thanks as he lifted his cup to his lips, and discovered it was empty. He looked at the stove, hoping Hennie would offer to brew more, but she took no notice of him.

Instead, she said, “Hold on. Wait a minute. That’s not the end of it. There’s one more detail. The mail was late that day. That’s because Horace Wilson’s truck was the U.S. mail truck.” She sat back and smiled.

Nit and Dick laughed, and even Tom grinned, although he’d heard Hennie tell the story half a dozen times before.

“Did he go back to making hooch?” Dick asked.

That was the sad part of it, Tom put in. “Mick took himself
off to a Holiness meeting just for the heck of it, and Lord, if he didn’t join up and stop his whiskey-making. ‘The Lord sees it all, marks it all down, and he knows I’m a sinner,’ Mick told me when I went down there to buy a bottle of hooch. He said we were living in the end of time, and the devil was after him. A good many folks grieved when Mick saved his soul.” He turned to Hennie. “I never did tell who turned Mick into a Bible-thumper.”

The old woman made to get up from her chair then, for she intended to make more coffee, but Nit put out her hand, which was smooth and plump like a baby’s. “I have a story for you,” she said, looking at Hennie.

Hennie smiled at the girl, as Tom settled back into his chair. “Well, let’s hear it,” Hennie said.

Nit looked at her husband, who nodded once to give his approval, and the girl leaned forward, her hands on her knees. She took a deep breath and began. “Back home there was a moonshiner named Oweny Buckley, and he was cussed mean, wasn’t he, Dick?”

“Amen to that. He was the meanest man I ever met,” Dick agreed. “You’d get the heebie-jeebies just being around him. I never just rightly knew how he could get three respectable women to marry him.”

Tom and Hennie didn’t react, so Nit explained, “At the same time. He was awful bad to them, wouldn’t let them have hardly a thing at all and made them wait on him like he was the governor. He kept one at the north end of the county, one at the sound end, and the third in the middle.”

“Did they know about the others?” Hennie asked.

Nit shook her head. “We lived in the south end, and none
of us knew about the other two wives until Oweny was taken in by the federal agents for making whiskey.” His south wife, Alice, went to the jail to bring him his dinner, and she found the north one sitting right there beside him on the bunk, Nit said. Those two wives went at it, tearing out each other’s hair and cussing worse than anything the girl had ever heard. They might have killed each other if the third one hadn’t come along. The three wives bawled and fretted so much that the sheriff came in along with the dry clothes man who’d arrested Oweny for making moonshine. When he found out what the fuss was about, the federal man told Oweny he’d broke another U.S. government law. He said if Oweny didn’t shed himself of two of his three wives and settle down with just one, he’d go to jail for polygamy, along with moonshining.

Nit ran out of breath and was red in the face. She leaned over a little further, and her husband patted her on the back. “Oweny said the women sure weren’t worth his spending extra time in the penitentiary, so he believed he’d settle down with just one.”

Tom slapped his knee. “That’s a good one. Which wife did he choose?”

Nit giggled and covered her mouth with her hand.

“You want me to tell it?” Dick asked her.

“No, it’s my story, Dick.” Nit waited until her husband nodded before she went on. “Oweny saw it was no use and said he wouldn’t choose one over the others. He told those three wives to talk it over, and they could decide which one got him.” She paused for dramatic effect, just the way Hennie always did. “So they all talked it over, and they all turned him down.”

Tom and Hennie laughed so hard that both of them
rocked back and forth in their chairs. When he finally got his breath, Tom asked what had become of the man.

Nit hunched her shoulders and looked sideways at Dick. “That’s how come us to leave home. Without a wife, Oweny wanted to live with Dick and me. He’s my old pap.”

Hennie’s eyes bugged out, and Tom’s mouth dropped. “That’s as good as any story Hennie ever told,” he said, and Hennie nodded in agreement.

They were all four of them silent for a while, drowsy with the fire and the dinner and the storytelling. Maybe too much storytelling, Hennie thought. Old folks liked stories about the past, but she wasn’t sure a young fellow like Dick cared so much about her mountain tales. The girl did, however. Hennie was sure of it.

At last, Dick stood up. “We better get off to bed. The bed won’t come to us.”

Hennie rose from her chair, protesting that they were welcome to stay. But it was late, and Dick had the early-morning shift on the dredge. So, he shook hands with Tom, and he and Nit removed their jackets from the hooks. Hennie walked them to the door.

“I’ll thank you till you’re better paid,” Dick said.

“Your friendship’s payment enough,” Hennie replied, watching the two until they disappeared in the darkness. She closed the door and went back to Tom.

“I’ll be shoving off in a minute, too,” he said, making no effort to stand. Hennie sat down in Dick’s chair and slowly rocked back and forth, waiting for Tom to speak.

“Do you want to move to Iowa?” he asked.

“No, of course I don’t want to move. This is my home,”
she said, stopping the rocker. Then her voice softened. “You know, when I arrived here, I never intended to spend my life in Middle Swan. I thought Jake and I would live here a few years and push on.” She tipped the rocker forward and chuckled. “I used to want to visit the Holy Land and London, even China. I’d read about those places when I was in school in Tennessee, but somewhere along the road I came over, I forgot about seeing the rest of the world. Now, I’m too old. All I’ll ever see is Iowa.” Hennie smiled. “And I’ve seen it before.”