Prayers for Sale by Sandra Dallas Page B

boardinghouse—providing she had a house. Or she might take in washing, rubbing clothes on rocks instead of a scrub board and rinsing them in creek water coldenough to make your hands too numb to feel the cloth. Hennie figured entertaining might be a better line of work than washing clothes.
    For the most part, the hookers had a hard life, although some had happy endings. A few got married. Others moved in with men, and when it looked like it was going to stick, folks started calling the girl by the man’s name. There were half a dozen women in Middle Swan who lived as man and wife but never had the words said over them.
    One, in fact, who worked at Sweetie Purvis’s place, had been a nurse, and when the influenza came in 1918, she went over to the pesthouse and cared for the sick. She took up with one of her patients, a man who’d been using her for a year, and called herself by his name. She had a son about six months later; Hennie didn’t have the nerve to ask who the father was. The “husband” turned into the most biddy-pecked man on the Tenmile Range, as stuck in that marriage as if he’d taken the wedding vows.
    After she’d been in Middle Swan for a while, Hennie found it natural that the fancy women were part of the fabric of the town. They were a little like a scrap of bright damask in the middle of a crazy quilt, a little flashier than some of the other fabrics, but still nicely fitted in.
    Most hookers didn’t fare so well. The girls died from liquor or laudanum, and sometimes, they got beat up. They committed suicide, and a few were murdered. Some girls just wasted away from sadness. Most likely, that was what happened to Minnie Lincoln, who worked at the Briar Rose. A few weeks after Hennie arrived in Middle Swan, Minnie had a baby.
    Hennie had seen the girl walking around the camp, her belly swelling more and more every day. The two stopped to talk sometimes, for the hooker knew nothing about babies.
    “You’ve got to drink milk, lots of milk,” Hennie cautioned her.
    “Milk? Where’m I going to find a cow? All we’s got in Middle Swan is oxen. I ain’t going to milk a steer.”
    Perhaps Minnie had meant to make Hennie blush, but Hennie only laughed. She paid a farmer in the valley who kept dairy cows to deliver milk to the hookhouse once a week and tell Minnie it was from an admirer, for Hennie didn’t want Minnie to think she was interfering. But the girl knew, and she sought out Hennie for advice about caring for the baby once it arrived.
    “I guess I got to have me a house to leave the little feller while I’m working. Babies are undesires at a hookhouse,” Minnie said.
    “You can’t leave a baby by itself! All kinds of things could happen. What if it choked or the house caught fire?” Hennie replied. “You’ll have to hire someone to watch it.”
    “And how am I going to pay for that? You think men will give me tips when I tell them I got a baby needs tending?”
    Hennie was silent, a little ashamed, for she’d never considered how small an amount of money a prostitute made. She wondered how she could help Minnie, but she was stumped. She wouldn’t mind tending the baby nights while the woman worked, but she hadn’t been married long and didn’t know if Jake wouldn’t want a baby staying with them.
    Minnie gave birth to a boy, and in a month, she was back at work. One night, she got drunker than $700, ran off toBuckbush with a miner, and forgot about the baby for a day. “Lordy, he was screaming like a steam engine when I got home. I get so forgetful when I drink. What am I going to do with him?” Minnie asked.
    Hennie shook her head, thinking Minnie didn’t understand how precious a tiny life was, how easily it could be snuffed out. “You could find another line of work,” she suggested.
    “Doing what? You think if I was fit for anything else I’d be hooking? Maybe I ought to give him out,” Minnie said. “I didn’t know babies were so much bother.”
    She looked