Prayers for Sale Read Online Free PDF

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 wassixteen 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 intostrips 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 mostlyof old men and the lame—soldiers who’d come back missing a leg or an