Elm Creek Quilts [10] The Quilter's Homecoming (18 page)

“I wonder what your father will think of your answer.”

Rosa shrugged as if she were only mildly curious, but she bit her lower lip and glanced at the paper bag stuffed full of valentines. Isabel knew at once that the card for the flower was inside.

She resisted the urge to snatch up the bag and search through the valentines until she found the proof she needed. The Arboles School had only two classrooms, twenty-three students. It would not be difficult to figure out who had sent the flower. Carlos probably knew. Isabel knew and liked all the boys Rosa’s age, but there were other children she did not know. It did not matter, however, whether she liked Rosa’s unknown admirer. Rosa was too young to be accepting gifts and attention from boys.

She left Rosa alone to start her homework. Later, after the children had gone to bed, she told Miguel that she was astonished the teachers allowed tokens of affection to be exchanged in the classroom. “It’s a valentine,” said Miguel mildly. “At that age, a flower is a token of friendship, nothing more. It’s no wonder the boys admire Rosa. She’s a lovely girl, just like you were at her age.”

“I was not as beautiful as Rosa,” said Isabel, “but I was far more obedient. If I had come home with a flower from a boy, my parents would have been incensed.”

“Maybe the boys knew this and that’s why they didn’t dare send you any flowers. Otherwise I’m sure they would have thrown bouquets at your feet, and not only on Valentine’s Day.”

Isabel was too troubled to be charmed by her husband’s flattery. “We are talking about our daughter. Miguel, she’s growing up too quickly. We’ve given her too much freedom.”
I’ve given her too much freedom,
she thought.
I wanted her to have my share as well as her own.

Miguel smiled and kissed her on the cheek. “You were just as beautiful as Rosa, but you’re right, you were also more demure. Rosa is a good girl. Let her have her secret admirer. Nothing bad will come of it.”

But Isabel brooded over this unknown boy who had turned her daughter secretive. As the days passed, Rosa had taken to smiling to herself at unexpected moments—while washing dishes, folding clothes. She gazed out windows dreamily when she was supposed to be studying.

Finally Isabel could bear it no longer. One evening as Rosa sat at the kitchen table with a half smile on her lips, staring at the fire instead of the schoolbook open before her, Isabel asked, “Did you ever find out who gave you the flower?”

Her question snatched Rosa from her reverie. “What, Mami?”

“The flower,” said Isabel. “Who was it from?”

Rosa took a quick breath. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t really for me. Whoever he is, maybe he put it in my bag by mistake. I sit next to Julia, you know. She’s very pretty.”

“I see,” said Isabel. She gestured to Rosa’s book. “Finish up. It’s almost time for bed.”

She knew Miguel would tell her not to worry, that Rosa was fourteen and a half now and many years away from wanting to carry on with boys. She was flattered by the admiration, nothing more. It was a harmless crush that would swiftly fade unless they made a fuss.

But Isabel knew differently. First her daughter had kept a secret from her, and then she had lied. Rosa knew who had given her the flower, but she did not want her mother to know.

1925

E
lizabeth was grateful for the work that kept her too busy to write a letter home, work that filled up her hours and exhausted her so that she was too numb to feel fully the pain of her disappointment. For weeks she carried out the tasks Mrs. Jorgensen assigned her without complaint, as if she were watching someone else haul water and sweep floors and cook three meals a day for fourteen. As her hands grew calloused and shoulders strong, she observed the changes in herself with detached disbelief, as if a beloved character in a favorite book suddenly began saying and doing things that had never happened the other times she had read the story. This wasn’t right, she thought as she went through her day, from the time she hurried to the yellow farmhouse before the sun had peeked over the eastern hills until she trudged back to the cabin as the last rays of light disappeared behind the Santa Monica Mountains to the west. Something had gone terribly wrong, but if she just went along and made do with her circumstances for a little while, eventually the error would be corrected and everything would return to its proper course.

After the shock wore off, she realized that she would have to make do for much longer than she had imagined when she had made Henry promise not to send her home without him. She found comfort in knowing that their exile couldn’t last more than a year or two, and at the end of that time, Henry could resume his rightful place with his father and brothers at Two Bears Farm. From the Nelsons’ house it was only a short, pleasant walk through the woods to Elm Creek Manor and all the familiar, beautiful places she had loved since childhood. Knowing what awaited her, Elizabeth resolved to endure any hardship, any humiliation, until their homecoming. She did not need Great-Aunt Lucinda’s Chimneys and Cornerstones quilt to remind her of the welcoming fires on the hearth back home.

In the meantime, she resolved to make the best of things so that Henry would know she did not blame him for their circumstances. After all, she had wanted an adventure, and in the years to come, she would certainly be able to say she had found one.

As the weeks passed, the days took on a sameness, a pattern of daily chores and mealtimes that altered only in the work performed and the food prepared. Even that showed little variation. Sundays were not as restful as she had thought they would be when Mary Katherine had arranged for her to have the day off, for even though she could set aside the usual work of the week, she still had her own housekeeping to attend to, and Henry. On Sundays more than any other time of the week, she missed Elm Creek Manor, where all the women of the family pitched in and many hands made light work. Ruefully she told herself that she was fortunate that the cabin was so small, and that she had so little furniture to dust and linens to wash.

It was a small blessing, but fortunately not the only one Elizabeth was able to find. The Arboles Valley was truly as beautiful a place as she could have dreamed, with warm sunshine and balmy breezes that felt like a gentle benediction, a reassurance that all would be well in time. High, rolling foothills and low mountains sheltered the green and fertile land, in which it seemed any seed planted would flourish. The mornings were cool and misty, which Elizabeth supposed was a consequence of their nearness to the ocean. Sometimes she stood on the front porch of the cabin, looked toward the western mountains, and imagined waves crashing on the beach miles beyond them. Her heart stirred with the memory of happiness whenever she remembered how close the ocean was even though she could not see it, and how bracing the winds off the Pacific had been when she waded in the water for the first time. Sometimes she still felt the promise of prosperity in the air, although she did not speak of it to Henry, who seemed to have forgotten he had ever admired any part of the Arboles Valley.

Triumph Ranch was not quite as it had been described in the land agent’s papers, and although this was the least of the deceptions played upon them, it still caught Elizabeth by surprise. The Jorgensen farm was not a cattle ranch at all, but a farm much like the Nelsons’ back home, except that the Jorgensens grew barley and alfalfa instead of corn and wheat. Instead of herds of cattle, there were flocks of sheep, and a large, thriving apricot orchard on the southeastern portion of the property. Once Elizabeth remarked to Henry that she thought those particular crops and livestock suited his experience better than cattle would have done, but he merely returned a silent, bemused stare. She felt foolish and did not bother to explain that she had not meant to suggest that they were better off than if Triumph Ranch had been real. But perhaps, in the long run, they would be. They had been cheated and humiliated, but as a result, they would be going home to Pennsylvania. They were young enough to recover from a mistake even as great as this one, with the help of their families. In the years to come, they would look back with fond amusement upon their brief adventure in California and thank God they had returned to the people and land they so loved.

Elizabeth tried to say as much to Henry, but he cut her off abruptly whenever she said or did anything that smacked of optimism. Before long, she stopped trying, bewildered by his behavior. Would he prefer for her to mope and wail about how miserable she was, how homesick and lonely? She thought she was being a good wife by pointing out the bright side of things, especially the transitory nature of their predicament. He did not seem to hear her.

Elizabeth was grateful for Mary Katherine’s company while she worked, even though she could never replace Henry as a confidant. Mary Katherine was friendly and kind, and if she complained too often about her mother-in-law, she did not seem to mind when Elizabeth did not join in. For her part, Mrs. Jorgensen remained as formidable a woman as she had first appeared, forthright and demanding, with no patience for jokes or teasing. Elizabeth quickly learned to treat her with respect and deference even if it meant biting her tongue rather than defend herself when Mrs. Jorgensen criticized the way she scalded a pan or ironed a shirt. Her patience for the sake of household harmony paid off, for the more Elizabeth proved herself to be a capable worker, the more Mrs. Jorgensen trusted her, rewarding her with more important, more interesting responsibilities.

Working so closely with the Jorgensen family, she learned a great deal about them in a short time. The farm had been in the family for three generations. Mrs. Jorgensen’s grandfather, a Norwegian immigrant who had settled in Minnesota, bought the land after his physician diagnosed him with consumption and told him a milder climate would ease the suffering of his final years. The doctor’s remedy succeeded so well that he lived another three decades in vigorous good health and might have continued to do so for many years to come if he had not been thrown from a horse and struck his head on a rock two weeks after his sixty-second birthday. But until his untimely death, he had lived so robustly and had touted the attributes of his new home so tirelessly that other Norwegian friends and relations had been encouraged to settle on nearby farms, creating a Norwegian colony within the Arboles Valley. United by kinship and a common language, they mostly kept to themselves. Only in the most recent generation had the old mistrust of strangers begun to fade.

Because the farm was so remote, the Nelsons had little opportunity to meet any of the neighbors, who often lived as much as a mile away. Elizabeth expected that would change in the years to come, but perhaps not before she and Henry returned to Pennsylvania. A frequent topic of dinner conversation was the sale—or rumors of upcoming sales—of nearby farmland to developers like Mr. Milton and Mr. Donovan. Oscar Jorgensen received a few offers from time to time, offers so good he wouldn’t have believed them if he had not seen them in black and white with his own eyes. Developers encouraged him to sell the land, buy a cheaper farm in another part of southern California, and pocket a hefty profit, but Oscar refused. He would not sell the farm his father and grandfather had given their lives to cultivate so that their descendants would prosper. Sometimes over breakfast he eyed his two daughters as if wondering whether they would hold on, or if they would be the generation to sell out.

Strangely, or so Elizabeth thought, Lars never offered an opinion on whether the Jorgensen family should accept one of the offers for their farm. Elizabeth would have thought his opinion mattered, because surely the farm belonged to him as much as to Oscar, the younger of the two brothers. Mrs. Jorgensen, on the other hand, could not conceal her feelings on the subject, and it was readily apparent that she did not share Mrs. Diegel’s opinion that these new housing developments would allow the valley to thrive and prosper. Elizabeth suspected she hated to see the farmland give way to streets and houses, because whenever someone mentioned Oakwood Glen or Meadowbrook Hills, her mouth pinched in a tight line and she drew in a sharp breath as if she expected to smell something foul. It reminded Elizabeth of the expression Grandmother Bergstrom assumed when little cousin Sylvia and her sister Claudia argued at the supper table. Elizabeth understood Mrs. Jorgensen’s feelings; the folks at Elm Creek Manor would not like it if the Nelson family sold off their land and forty families built houses there, all closely packed together. Their rural seclusion would be gone forever, and the advantage of many new potential friends close by could not begin to compensate for that.

Although Elizabeth saw the other hired hands only in passing, she learned enough about them to know that Henry worked twice as hard as anyone except Oscar and Lars. He plunged himself into his work with a ferocity that worried Elizabeth, as if the unfinished tasks were an enemy he meant to wrestle into submission. At the close of day he was so exhausted that he fell asleep almost as soon as he drew the quilt over himself, leaving Elizabeth disappointed and lonely beside him, hungry for a kind word, a gentle caress. She missed those nights on the train when he could not bear to let her go.

At those times, alone in the dark with her husband by her side, she missed her family and Elm Creek Manor so much she did not think she would be able to bear it. She even found herself longing for her parents’ apartment at the hotel in Harrisburg and her own familiar room, which she had shared with her sister until she was sixteen, when her sister married. Their home had always seemed cramped and stuffily formal compared with the gracious country elegance of Elm Creek Manor, but it was a palace compared with the miserable cabin. She wished she had not taken for granted the comforts of home—or the presence of her family.

But as remote as home and family were, Henry seemed more distant still. Elizabeth told herself that their honeymoon had spoiled her, and that it was unreasonable to expect Henry to be her constant companion when there was so much work to be done. Even if he were the owner of Triumph Ranch, he would not have been able to grant her that. And yet, she had expected things to be different between them. Sometimes she wished they were still on the train heading west, with everything before them.

On nights when sleep eluded her, Elizabeth wrapped herself in the older quilt and settled in the front room with her scrap basket and needle and thread. The unexpected turn their journey had taken had not lessened Elizabeth’s desire to sew a patchwork album of her memories. To the scraps Mrs. Diegel had given her, Elizabeth had added a few squares cut from an old bedsheet, worn so thin from use that it was almost translucent. Worn cotton from the cabin contrasted sharply with the silk scarf from Venice Beach and the elegant chintz floral from the Grand Union Hotel, but she was determined to include them in her quilt, determined to try to make something useful and even beautiful from them. The fabric was good, sturdy, printed muslin, and use had only made it softer. The pink rosebuds were faded, but the blue background was the lovely shade of the California sky on a sunny afternoon. Those patches would always remind Elizabeth of her first night on Triumph Ranch, and whatever else befell her until she returned safely home, she did not believe her quilt would be complete without them. In the months to come she would do her best to collect more appealing scraps—something newer, or prettier, or fancier—but faded cotton was what she had and it would do for now.

Just as the fabrics she gathered for her quilt had changed, so too had the pattern altered in her mind’s eye. She felt herself drawn toward a Postage Stamp design, a straightforward arrangement of two-inch squares in horizontal rows, soothing in its simplicity. Artistic as well as pragmatic factors made a Postage Stamp quilt the appropriate choice. Her fabric scraps were too small for large star points or sweeping arcs or background panels for appliqué, and the use of so many different prints and colors almost required her to use a simple design or the quilt would be so dizzyingly busy no one could possibly sleep well beneath it. A Postage Stamp quilt required only simple squares and straight seams, making it the perfect sewing project for dim light and late nights when she wanted her thoughts to drift, when repetitive tasks would help ease her into sleep. She also found a certain ironic poetry in the name, considering that the troubles had begun with a visit to the Arboles Valley post office, and the only way Elizabeth could speak to the people she loved most in the world was through the mail. But most of all, she found comfort in reducing the troubles of her day to simple shapes, to cutting and shaping the upheaval in her life into simple two-inch squares.

Perhaps as autumn approached she could gather scraps of cloth made from the wool of the sheep Henry tended. Better things were coming. They had to be.