Prayers for Sale (4 page)

“I will.” Nit’s tears brought an aching to Hennie’s own heart, for she understood the girl’s sorrow. “You don’t have your people there?”

Nit shook her head. “When we got married, Dick and I wanted us to go out to ourself. So we moved away from our homefolks.”

“Then God will tend that baby’s grave.”

The girl stared at Hennie.

“You’ve got to believe that. Besides, it’s just a grave. Your baby lives in your heart now.” Hennie seemed to debate something with herself, and the thinking took a long time. Was there any reason to bring up what had happened so many years before? If she let herself talk about it, she wouldn’t sleep that night but, instead, would thrash about, reliving that time, because the pain never went away but only lay hidden in her mind. The story took such a toll on her that she rarely told it anymore. But she felt a kinship with the girl, who seemed little more than a baby herself. Besides, Hennie had asked the Lord to let her be the answer to Nit’s prayer, and He sometimes answered prayers in the oddest way. The old woman couldn’t overlook that. So, sighing, she said deliberately, looking down at the sewing in her hands, “My baby’s eyes were that color, too. She’s buried in Tennessee. I never went back. Not once.”

“In seventy years?”

Hennie shook her head. “I couldn’t go back. I have my grievements.” One still needed to be attended to, she thought, but didn’t tell that to Nit.

“Was she dead-born, too, like Effie?”

“She was eight months and two days when she got taken. Or maybe three days. I never knew for sure.”

“Why couldn’t you go back, Mrs. Comfort?” The girl leaned forward. Her eyes still glittered with tears, but there was a questioning look in them. “Did you think you’d left her all alone, and you were afraid to see what became of her grave? That’s what it’s like for me. I feel I just left Effie by
herself in the cold. If she’d been born alive and got sick, I could have helped her. I’m real good with the herbs. There’s a plant for every disease if you have the sense to find the right one, but Effie never lived long enough to get a disease. She was just born a small, puny little old thing that never took a breath.”

Hennie patted the younger woman’s hand but did not speak.

“Didn’t you ever want to see your girl’s resting place once more? I couldn’t bear it if I never saw Effie’s again. They say you shouldn’t name a dead baby, but I did anyway, named her for Mrs. Effie Pickle, who tended me during my labor.”

Hennie shook her head. “I just couldn’t stand to be there again, knowing my little Sarah was under the ground and never deserved it—God’s precious child. I couldn’t look at the place where she’d died. Sometimes, it’s easier for me to look ahead than back.”

Snow, which had stopped when Hennie set out for Nit’s cabin, was falling again, big, wet flakes, a sloppy spring snow, not one of the screaming mountain storms of winter, and the light was gone from the room, but neither of the women thought to strike a match for the kerosene lamp. “How did she die?” the girl asked in a whisper.

Hennie went as rigid as a drill bit. “Drowned. Drowned in the creek where there wasn’t six inches of water.” She sighed deeply, recalling that tiny body, clad in a white dress that Hennie had embroidered with forget-me-nots.

“Oh, Mrs. Comfort! There’s been a lot of suffering in it for you.” The girl cried softly now.

Nit’s quiet sobs went to Hennie’s heart, and in a minute,
a tear wet the scrap of quilting in the old woman’s lap. Hennie sniffed. She was not a woman who cried much, and she didn’t want to add to the girl’s misery. “There’s some here that know the story. I’m known in Middle Swan for my stories, but not this one. I haven’t told it in a long time, not since I stopped going to church. There’s not many that remember it.”

“Do you need to tell it now? Do you feel the need of it?” The two seemed to have changed roles, and it was the girl now who offered solace to the old woman. Nit stood and took down the dipper hanging beside the stove. She filled it with water from the bucket, and held it out to Hennie. “Would you drink?” she asked.

Nit’s concern made Hennie’s hands shake, for there was not a great deal of tenderness in a mining camp. She steadied the dipper and drank the water, which was cold. Most likely, it was melted snow, because the cabin didn’t have a well, and the stream was a long walk away.

The girl took the dipper and hung it up. “I don’t mean to pry.”

“You didn’t.” Hennie picked up her needle and took two or three stitches on the quilt square, but it was too dark to sew, and she knew the stitches were crooked and she’d have to take them out later. She stabbed the needle into the cloth. “I try not to bother folks with my troubles, and this happened so long ago that it’s best forgot. But you never really forget a thing like this, just like you’ll never forget about your little Effie.” She paused, still debating with herself. “It’s not a pretty story.” The old woman looked at Nit, half hoping the girl would stop her, for she still didn’t want to tell the
story. She’d have a bad case of the blue devils tomorrow if she did.

Instead, Nit leaned forward, her eyes on Hennie’s face, waiting for the woman to continue. Hennie felt a hairpin loosen in her white hair, which was pulled into a knot at the back of her neck. Without thinking about it, she scooped up stray hairs with the loose pin, which she secured in the knot. After a minute, she folded the sewing, although she did not put it into her pocket. Then taking a long breath, which was more of a sigh, she began. “Back then, I wasn’t Hennie Comfort. In those days, I was called by the name of Ila Mae Stubbs.”

In the golden days before the start of the War Between the States, Ila Mae was the precious only child of Obadiah Stubbs, a successful miller, and his wife. They lived in White Pigeon, Tennessee. The girl was raised with advantages, attending a school for young ladies where she was taught to cipher and write a fine hand, sew a seam with stitches as tiny as specks of salt. Her framed sampler, with its embroidered house and willow trees and a verse about serving the Lord, hung in the place of honor over the mantel in the parlor.

Ila Mae was not a pampered child. Although the Stubbses had servants—paid servants, because Obadiah Stubbs opposed slavery and owned neither man nor woman—Ila Mae helped at the cook stove and the laundry tubs. She loved the days spent in the barn and the garden, and truth be told, she was happier at the flour mill where the men argued about whether to join the North or the South if Mr. Lincoln were
elected president than she was dressed in satin over corset and hoopskirt, gossiping at the tea table with her mother’s friends. Like her father, Ila Mae did not hold with human bondage, and as a girl of strong opinions, she sometimes joined the men’s conversations. Even at that age, she was one to speak her mind.

“Teach her to curb her tongue, and she’ll make a good match,” said Barton Fletcher, foreman of the Stubbs Mill.

“Some like a woman that speaks her mind,” Obadiah replied.

“None I know. A husband could teach her.”

“A husband that harms a hair on her head will be the worse for it,” Obadiah thundered.

Both men were aware that Barton’s son, Abram, had a fondness for Ila Mae, but they knew, too, that she would have none of him. Abram Fletcher was a handsome-made man, but he was randy and ill-tempered as a hornet and had too high an opinion of himself. He’d been spoiled by his mother and never made to work by his father. “Rather than marry with him, I’ll betroth myself to a hog,” Ila Mae told her father when he asked her view of the young man. Obadiah was not upset by his daughter’s answer, for he considered Abram to be a fortune hunter.

While Obadiah did not hold with the war, he thought nonetheless that when the fighting broke out, it was his duty to enlist for the South. He was killed at Shiloh. Had Ila Mae been older, she might have been trained to run the mill, for she had a clear head, and her father had no quarrel with a woman who was ambitious. But she was a girl yet, so the mill was entrusted to Barton Fletcher. The mother left business
affairs to him, while, dressed in widow’s weeds, she sat long days in the parlor, the curtains drawn against the light. Death, when it came only a year after her husband’s, was welcome to her.

By then, Barton Fletcher was running the mill with a free hand. Because her father had trusted him and he had eaten at their table, Ila Mae looked to him for guidance. She did not know a man would cheat a girl out of her inheritance, and when he told her to sign a paper, Ila Mae did so. Barton smirked at her then, handed her forty dollars, and claimed that she’d just sold him the mill and the house where she’d lived all her life, and every other thing that had belonged to her mother and father.

She could stay on in the house, Barton told her, if she would marry his son. But Ila Mae would not allow Abram Fletcher to court her. Besides, she thought the world and all of Billy Lloyd and had promised herself to him. Billy wasn’t pretty like Abram. He was short and square-built, and at times, when riled, he had a temper. But he was a better man than Abram, kind and quiet-spoken, almost always showing a sunny disposition. Some thought those qualities made him soft and cowardly, and hoping to eliminate him as a rival, Abram used some trifling matter to challenge Billy to a duel. Given the choice of weapons, Billy selected fists, and he beat Abram nearly senseless. Ila Mae worried that Abram would try to even the score, but Billy said that Abram was too afraid of another fisting.

Obadiah had liked Billy, had told Ila Mae he would not mind if the boy joined him in running the mill one day, although he asked the young people to wait until Ila Mae was
sixteen to wed. But homeless now, with both of her parents dead, Ila Mae found no reason to postpone marriage.

Ila Mae and Billy moved into an old log blockhouse on land Billy had inherited when his own parents died. The house was hidden away in the timber just off the Buttermilk Road, so-called because a farmer had blazed it to haul his milk into town. Ila Mae loved her new home, with its thatched roof and a fireplace that Billy himself built out of mud and rocks. He put in a window, too, because he didn’t want Ila Mae to live in a blindhouse. “It’s okay for a mole like me, but not a girl as pretty as stars.” Billy blushed then, because he was not much for fine words.

Ila Mae reddened, too, for she knew she was not pretty. Her face was strong, not soft, and brown from working outdoors, and she was as tall as Billy. “You’re not a mole,” she said fiercely. “You’re as finely built as an oak tree and just as strong.” He picked her up then and carried her to the house to show her how strong he really was.

Billy was gentle, too, and Ila Mae loved the way he stroked her as they lay on a bed on the ground under a strip of cheesecloth hung from the branches of a tree as a mosquito net. They slept outside in the heat of the summer, and Ila Mae joyed to the touch of Billy’s hand on her hot body. Sometimes, warm with lovemaking, they lay on their backs looking up at the stars and talked about their future. Although the war had intruded into their young lives, they saw years stretching out ahead of them filled with children and a fruitful farm. “Lordy, we’ll live good,” Billy promised.

They planted a garden, and what they raised was about what they had. Billy hunted, and Ila Mae cut the meat into
strips and hung it to dry from a rope that they stretched from the tree in front of the house to the fence. They weren’t more than a few hundred feet from a creek, but Billy still dug a well for Ila Mae. The two lived outdoors most of the time, except when the weather was bad, Ila Mae cooking over a campfire. Billy made a frame for Ila Mae to lay her quilts on, made it from pieces of seasoned oak so it would last, and she stitched outdoors, too. They were young, not jelled yet, but Lordy, they were full of life. When to no one’s surprise, Sarah was born just nine months and three days after the wedding, “I didn’t know a person could be so happy,” Billy told Ila Mae.

The couple figured that being back in the woods like they were and Billy not very old and with a family to care for, nobody would expect him to go for a soldier. They talked about whether Billy ought to join up. He was willing, for he was more of a Confederate than Ila Mae. Besides, other young men had left their families to fight for the South, he said.

But Ila Mae pointed out that by then, everyone knew the South wouldn’t win the war, and what was the good of risking his life for a cause that was lost? Better to stay where he was and help the families of Confederate soldiers, as he had been doing. There wasn’t a widow along the Buttermilk Road who didn’t know she could ask Billy Lloyd to mend her fence or hunt a lost cow. “You’ll be here to rebuild after the peace. The men coming back’ll be wounded and sick, and you can help them,” Ila Mae told Billy, and he agreed. They were green yet and didn’t know they were fools.

White Pigeon had a home guard. It was made up mostly
of old men and the lame—soldiers who’d come back missing a leg or an arm or who’d gone queer in the head from the noise of the guns and the cannons, and the fear. But there were local boys in the guard, too, single men who ought to have joined up themselves. Ila Mae didn’t understand why they weren’t made to be soldiers. The guard was supposed to protect the women whose husbands were fighting the Yankees. But instead, they strutted around, threatening to arrest anyone they didn’t like for not being patriotic. They stole guns and crops, saying such was for the army, but the home guard sold it all and kept the money. Folks around White Pigeon knew to stay away from them. Ila Mae knew that, too, because Abram Fletcher was one of the guards.