Endless Chain (14 page)

Elisa had hoped Helen might know something about the hidden room, but obviously that wasn’t the case. She wondered what Dovey knew and decided to ask if the chance arose.

Helen went to help Tessa with her borders, and Elisa practiced turning the wheel and rocking the treadle. The lessons she’d had seemed like a thousand years ago, and at first the needle moved up and down in fits and starts. After a while, though, she began to relax, and as she moved her feet and hand, she established a regular tempo. Eventually she tried stopping and starting after a few stitches. She pretended to turn the imaginary fabric, starting up again, stopping.

Helen came back and watched. “Looks like you’re more or less getting the hang of things. Thread it up the way I showed you, and see what you can do.”

Half an hour later, Elisa had managed to sew several seams without breaking her thread. She was tired but pleased. This was unlike anything else in her life. During the time she’d practiced using the treadle, she hadn’t thought of anything. Her mind had floated.

Helen and Tessa were ready to go back downstairs. “You coming?” Helen asked.

“I’ll just practice a little longer.”

“When you’re done, you look through that fabric and see if anything looks promising.” Helen pointed to a shelf against the wall. “I got lots I don’t have any plans for yet. It’s all stacked there. You look through it and take anything you want. Then bring it down and we’ll talk about a pattern.”

“Something simple.”

“Too simple and you’ll be bored silly.”

Elisa practiced until her shoulders began to ache. She cleaned up the scraps of fabric, then wandered over to the shelves where Helen’s extra fabric was stored. The accumulation was extraordinary. She had folded the pieces neatly and sorted most of them by color. A few shelves seemed to be sorted by types. One held fabrics that looked to be hand-dyed. Another held children’s prints of assorted colors and patterns, puppies and kites and frogs. But it was the bottom shelf that caught Elisa’s eye. She squatted on the floor and pulled out pieces of handwoven fabric in primary colors.

Helen found her there a little while later, surrounded by small piles of fabric in a circle around her. “Tessa’s making an early lunch. She’s setting the table for three.”

Elisa looked up. “Thank you.”

“What’d you find?”

“These are so beautiful.” She held up pieces of the fabric. “They’re from Guatemala, aren’t they?” It was a rhetorical question.

“I guess so. Peony Greenway, from the Bee, went there on a tour and bought a whole lot of pieces. She used some in a quilt and gave me the scraps when she was cleaning out her sewing room. Peony’s one of those people who just can’t stand a mess. She has more than three colors on the shelf, it makes her nervous.” Helen shook her head in wonder.

“You can’t really mean you don’t have plans for these.”

“No large pieces there. Just scraps of this and that. I don’t need it, but I just couldn’t throw it out. The colors are too pretty.” She read the expression on Elisa’s face. “You want this? You’d be doing me a big favor to use it up. There aren’t enough years left for me to use everything I have already, and that’s not something I got any plans for.”

“You’re sure?”

“We’ll have to find a pattern that lends itself to scraps, but that won’t be hard. You can combine this with that, and before you know, you’ve got a quilt. There’s plenty of fabric here.”

Elisa gathered up the scraps, folded those that needed it again, and set them in piles on the bottom shelf. She already felt like the scraps were old friends, and she was sorry to relegate them to disuse, even temporarily.

Downstairs, Helen told Tessa what fabrics she’d chosen, and Tessa offered to help look through quilt magazines after lunch to find a pattern she liked. Helen had promised to make a cake for a church bake sale, and after they’d eaten tuna sandwiches, she exiled them to the living room, where the most recent quilting magazines and her large collection of books were neatly displayed.

They sat on each end of the sofa, and piled books and magazines in between. “I want something graphic and bold,” Elisa said. “Something geometric.”

“Gotcha,” Tessa said. “Nothing fussy. You want the fabrics to speak for themselves.”

That was exactly right. They began thumbing through patterns. Elisa liked a lot of what she saw, but nothing was quite right for the wide collection of fabrics. The segments needed to be small, but large enough to show off the patterns.

Tessa showed her a few, and one—a traditional flying geese block set in vertical rows—interested her, but not enough for the work involved. They sat in companionable silence going through books, commenting on what they saw from time to time like old friends.

“I’m surprised the hikers aren’t back yet,” Tessa said, finishing one book and picking up a stack of magazines to leaf through next.

“How far were they going?”

“Almost to the river. But I guess it takes time to clean and winterize the houses. Dad wants to give any bird that needs one a warm place on the coldest days. Then early next spring they’ll remove the insulation and get the boxes ready again.”

“That sounds like a lot of work.”

“Have you seen bluebirds? They’re worth saving. I’ll take you bird-watching one day after the baby’s born. I took my daughter as soon as she was old enough to prop up in a backpack.”

Elisa wondered if she would be in Toms Brook that long. The thought of leaving saddened her. Despite her best instincts, she was making friends.

And then there was Sam.

“Mack’s not much of a bird-watcher, but he likes hiking,” Tessa said.

“He does lots of it?”

“No, he doesn’t have nearly as much time as he’d like. His law practice would take up every minute if he let it.”

Elisa knew Tessa was a high-school English teacher on maternity leave for the school year and that Mack was a lawyer, but she didn’t know any details. “What kind of law?” she asked.

“When it comes down to it, Mack just defends people who need him. Sometimes criminal law, sometimes civil rights, sometimes just lawsuits nobody else wants to bother with because the potential rewards are few. He tilts at windmills.”

“Don Quixote. I know the story.”

“Actually, Mack’s a lot more successful and perceptive than poor Quixote ever was. But sometimes he goes blindly into cases, absolutely sure he’s right even if he knows he won’t win. He takes on some very big enemies.”

Elisa stopped turning pages. “This doesn’t worry you?”

“Sometimes. I know it takes a toll on him.”

“But what I mean is, don’t you fear for his safety?”

Tessa looked up from her book. “No, he works with the poor and the disenfranchised, not the Mafia. To my knowledge, no one’s ever wanted to fit him with concrete shoes.”

“He speaks out for the poor, and this doesn’t threaten anyone?”

Tessa read her expression accurately. “In this country—and we’re not perfect, I know—but most of the time we’re safe when we express an opinion, even an unpopular one. Things aren’t as easygoing as they were before the attacks on the World Trade Center, but Mack sees his job as speaking for greater freedom. And that’s still legal.”

“Where I come from, speaking out has often been more dangerous than cancer or heart disease. What your Mack does is important.”

Tessa was silent a moment; then she nodded. “I don’t always remember that, I admit. But of course you’re right. I’m proud of him.”

Elisa thought of Sam again, another man who thought about what was right and not about results. Sam and Mack had more in common than energy and warm smiles.

“What do you think of this pattern?” Tessa held out a magazine to Elisa. “It’s bold and geometric. Small pieces, but I think bright colors and sharp contrasts would be very effective.”

Elisa took the magazine and examined the photograph of a quilt. “Endless Chain.” The blocks were hexagonal, with spokes radiating from a circle in the middle. The spokes connected, so that the design seemed to have no beginning and no end.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s like the fabrics are holding hands.”

“To keep out intruders?”

“No, in solidarity. To keep out those who would try to destroy them.”

Tessa touched her hand. “I’ve learned a lot from Gram. Quilts mean so many different things to different people. But in the end, the quilts we make are always about something in our hearts.”

Monday was Sam’s only real day off. He was careful to keep it that way, refusing any church obligations except emergencies. He was on call six days a week, and time away made him a better minister. But by evening he wished he had a meeting, a worship service, something to lead. He had been restless all day, and the usual Monday chores and errands had not kept him from thinking.

Christine had called early that morning before leaving for The Savior’s Academy, and they’d had a pleasant enough conversation. They had discussed his upcoming visit. She had told him about problems she was having with a teacher and about the new testing guidelines that were going to create extra work for her staff. He told her about the opening of
La Casa
and the eight children who were coming regularly to be tutored. For once she asked all the right questions, even promised to send books to help the children with their English. But he’d felt, as he often did, that Christine viewed his work here as a hobby to pursue while he decided what he really wanted to do with his life. He did not miss her after he hung up.

Sam knew Christine was part of the reason he had been restless. And if he was absolutely honest with himself, he knew the other part was knowing he would not see Elisa today or tomorrow. The break was good. It gave him time for stern, silent lectures about priorities and proprieties. But he missed her, and acknowledging it made him even more uneasy about his situation.

By the time the sun started to set he realized the house was closing in on him, and he had to get out. Shad and Shack were ready for serious exercise, and as the sun disappeared and the air cooled, he realized a run was exactly what he needed, too.

The dogs followed him into the bedroom and managed to make a dance out of changing into running shorts and shoes as he leapt and twisted to avoid them. He promised Bed he would take her for a walk when he and the big dogs returned, and gave her a dog biscuit to compensate for short legs.

Then, Shad and Shack at his side, leashes in his pocket, he started along a path behind his house.

He had developed a jogging route that kept the dogs off the road, and now the three of them wove through lanes and across open meadows and fields until they were nearly at the church, where he wanted to retrieve a book. He snapped the leashes in place, and he and the dogs jogged along the shoulder. There were no cars tonight, but he’d learned the hard way that country people ignored speed limits on “their” roads and took them at Indie 500 velocity. A few months ago Shad had nearly been hit by a van flying around a curve, and Sam was always careful now to keep both dogs tethered when traffic might be an issue.

He was almost at the church before he simultaneously saw and heard two pickups screeching out of the lot. A radio blared hip-hop from one. Tires squealed, and he heard shouts from the occupants, who sounded like teenagers.

He was immediately suspicious. Most of the time the church was deserted on Monday nights, a fact any locals who paid attention knew. He hoped the parking lot hadn’t become a Monday haven for drug and alcohol use. This was a school night, and he wondered if the parents of these kids had any idea where they were.

He checked the new sign immediately to see if it had finally succumbed to vandalism, and he was glad to see it was unharmed. Trash was strewn in the parking lot, fast-food wrappers and, as he’d feared, beer cans. He cleaned up as he walked, but he started to get worried when the trash didn’t stop at the edge of the lot. He followed the trail around the side of the building with the dogs scampering ahead of him, noses to the ground.

The trash ended eventually, but the dogs kept moving toward
La Casa.
He considered pulling them back. He felt certain the kids would have parked closer if vandalizing the old house had been on their minds, but checking would help him sleep better that night. He let the dogs off their leashes and followed in their wake.

The skies had darkened, and he was only yards away from the house before he realized that the teenagers
had
been here. Perhaps they had parked here first, or perhaps they had wandered the grounds until they came upon the house. Whichever it was, the cheery yellow paint of
La Casa Amarilla
was now marred by shiny black graffiti.

“Go home, wetbacks,” he read out loud. His hands clenched. “Spics get out.”

He was so furious, he was glad the boys had left when they did. He wasn’t sure what he would have done to them if he had found this first.

The dogs were up on the porch now, and he heard a yip from one of them. He jogged up the steps and found Shad standing amidst broken glass. He used the toe and side of his jogging shoe to clear a path for the dog and coaxed him away. He determined that Shad’s front paw was cut, but the cut didn’t look deep. The window looking out on the porch was broken, though, and in the last of the day’s fading light, Sam could see that the inside of the pretty little house had been vandalized, too. Furniture and shelves had been overturned. Every single poster had been ripped off the walls and thrown into a heap. He saw the wall quilt that had decorated the stairwell lying in a wad.