Free Prayers for Sale by Sandra Dallas

to bear.
    One morning, after she came in from planting violets around Sarah’s stone, Ila Mae found a neighbor waiting. He’d been to the post office and brought her a letter that had been sitting there for a week or a month, he didn’t really know. Ila Mae never went for the mail, for anyone who would have written to her was dead, so she couldn’t imagine who had sent the letter.
    “You go over a sight of ground in your perishinations. I feared to leave this in the house where somebody might appropriate it. They steal such as you’ll never know,” the neighbor had said. “I’ll be bound to say, I wish you had a man like Billy to help you, for farming turns a woman old.”
    So does war
, Ila Mae thought, but didn’t say so, for she was not the only woman worn out by the past few years. She put the letter aside and drew water from the well and offered the man the dipper. Then they sat under a tree, talking about crops and the weather, little things, the way husbands and wives did. After he left, Ila Mae was more troubled than ever, for it was comfortable being with a man. It was always the little things—the talk of whether rain would come and how pretty the apple blossoms were that year—that brought home to her that she was alone. She remembered how Billy always picked the first apple blossoms and put them into a tin cup for her. They made the house smell like springtime. Billy said apple trees were a double blessing, first for the blossoms and then for the apples.
    After the neighbor left, Ila Mae only stared at the letter, not opening it. Her days were so much the same that a pieceof mail was an exciting event, and she wanted to savor it, to wonder who’d written the letter and why. She waited all day and until after she ate her supper and put away the dishes. It was dark then, and Ila Mae laughed to think she’d waited so long that there was no daylight to read by.
    She went to the little hanging candle cupboard that Billy had presented to her after Sarah was born. It was crude, with a single drawer and, above it, a shelf covered by a slanted flap on which Billy had carved stars and the year of Sarah’s birth—1864. Ila Mae kept her money in the drawer, under a rat trap, thinking no one would believe she had hidden the coins beneath such. Under the flap she stored her few candles, safe from mice. She hadn’t lit one since Billy went off to war, but why was she saving them? A letter was as special an occasion as she was bound to have. So Ila Mae removed one of the tapers, lit it with an ember from the fireplace, and placed it in a tin holder on the table, where it sent out a pale circle of golden light.
    She held the envelope for a moment, frowning at the writing, which was even, the capital letters a series of flourishes that seemed familiar, a little like her own. Using the knife she kept in her apron pocket, she slit the envelope. As she removed the sheet of paper, a tintype fell out. Ila Mae studied the picture of a woman and two men, and then she knew who had sent the missive. She propped the picture against the candlestick and smiled at her friend Martha Merritt. The two had gone to school together, until Martha’s father, a Northern sympathizer, moved his family to Pennsylvania, for the home guard had made things too hot for those not in favor of the Confederacy.
    Martha’s likeness, in a paper frame marked “W. G. Chaimberlain, photographist, Denver,” showed a woman much older than Ila Mae’s childhood playmate, but she was Martha nonetheless, and she sat between two men. Perhaps one of them was Martha’s husband. Hennie put the letter on the table, smoothing the fold lines so that the paper lay flat. Then she began to read out loud, so that she could linger over every word:
     
Dearest Friend Ila Mae
    I hope this finds you in good health. We have got through the war fine. I am sorry to hear from a mutual friend that Billy was killed and also your daughter, and I offer sincere sympathy. I