Lover's Knot (7 page)

She had been relaxed, and now she wasn’t. “You want me to take Elisa home?”

“If you think you’re up to it.”

It seemed like a good way to start, even though Kendra was now breathing faster and her hands were no longer steady. “Elisa can take over if I can’t do it.”

“That’s what I thought. So I’m taking off now. If you don’t want to drive home alone, you can stay at our place until I get there, and we’ll drive you back.”

Elisa got up to see her husband out. When she returned, she went to the refrigerator. “Did you eat yet?”

“I was gathering strength.”

“Will you let me put something together for both of us?”

“I feel so helpless.” Kendra was surprised at the edge in her own voice. “I’ve been taking care of myself since I was nine and the nanny started passing out regularly after dinner.”

“Sounds like there’s a story there.”

“She had a bottle of scotch hidden under the sink with the cleaning supplies. I had to put her
and
my baby sister Jamie to bed.”

“That’s a lot of years.” Elisa took out plastic containers, opening them to peek inside. “You never told your mother?”

“Riva wasn’t much of a judge of people. I knew the possibilities weren’t good that the next nanny would be any better.”

“The devil you know?”

“I’m not trying to be maudlin. Just to say that it bothers me a lot that I need help now.”

“We are not talking about taking food out of the refrigerator, are we? I suspect we’re discussing the car.”

“I’ve driven coast to coast practically nonstop, on narrow winding roads where I might meet a car and have to back up a mile before I could pull over. And it’s not like the carjacker shot me while I was inside.”

“Which is not to say that if you get back inside, someone else will want your car and try to take it from you.”

Kendra was silent. Having someone else speak the truth and bring it out in the open helped.

“I should have bought a clunker,” she said at last.

“I’ll be with you.” Elisa turned on the stove and prepared to heat their lunch. “And if it doesn’t go well, we will just try again later. Sam wouldn’t have mentioned it today except that we’re both concerned you’re here alone. And since you won’t ask for help, we hope you will begin to drive soon.”

They ate outside on the porch, and Kendra told her friend about the snake. Elisa was properly impressed. When the conversation turned to the cabin, Kendra explained about Helen and the barn.

“Have you called Manning Rosslyn?” Elisa asked. “He sometimes attends the church with his wife. He’s an older man. Tall and broad. She is younger, blond and thin.”

“I haven’t called yet. But I’d like to see the barn. Maybe we could drive out that way and look at it.”

They finished eating and took their empty plates into the kitchen. As Kendra rinsed, Elisa prowled the living room, looking at the few personal touches Kendra had added.

She held up the corner of the Lover’s Knot quilt Kendra had draped over the rocker. “This is what they call a signature quilt, isn’t it? An old one.”

“I seem to collect them. That one is an heirloom from Isaac’s family.” Kendra had begun collecting antique quilts more than a year ago. She had four that she’d bought in D.C. area shops. But the Lover’s Knot was her favorite. She knew little about it—only that Leah had done her best to ensure that the quilt, along with this house and land, would make its way to the grandson she had never known.

The quilt was double-bed size and not an inch more. The binding was wearing thin. There were age spots, and about a third of the fabric blocks were noticeably faded. Although the color choices—scrap prints of greens, blues, purples and reds—were lovely, two things set the quilt apart.

The first were the signatures, all neatly embroidered in several strands of black thread but scattered over the surface as if they’d been sprinkled at random. The other was the quilting itself. Quilts of the era had often been stitched with parallel intersecting lines or half circles traced from dinner plates and saucers. Accomplished quilters had added complicated feathers and wreaths, vines or flowers. The Lover’s Knot quilt had lines that meandered with no discernible pattern or plan.

This was not a quilt that had won prizes at a county fair. Yet the top itself was far too well designed and the pattern too complex to be a simple utility quilt stitched in haste to warm a cold bed.

“It looks at home here,” Elisa said, smoothing it back into place.

Kendra hoped that if the quilt had been made in this cabin, Helen might know some of the people whose names were embroidered on it or where to find their descendants. But first she had to tell Helen about Isaac’s relationship to Leah. She had never wanted to hide their connection; she only wanted to proceed carefully. Now she realized that if she waited too long, it would look as if she was ashamed.

“The quilt never looked at home in the condo,” she told Elisa. “I doubt Isaac will notice it’s missing.”

“He’s not taking the move well, is he?”

Kendra dried her hands. “It’s not logical. He can’t get past that. But he’ll throw himself back into work now that I’m gone.”

“He will be visiting?”

Kendra wondered. Isaac had told her not to expect him for a while. She wasn’t sure if that was to punish her or merely because he had taken so much time off while she was in the hospital that he now had to make it up.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m supposed to call if I need anything.”

Wisely, Elisa said nothing.

Kendra brushed her hair and got her keys from the bedroom. Then she joined her friend on the porch. “Now or never, huh?”

“Now or later. The right moment is your decision.”

Kendra gazed at the car. It really deserved better than a driver who was terrified to turn the key. She wiped her damp palms on the legs of her jeans. “Let’s do it.”

“I will be right beside you.”

Kendra crossed the clearing and unlocked the door to slide behind the wheel. Elisa got in beside her and put on her seat belt. Kendra followed suit. She took a deep, shaky breath, then, before she could change her mind, put the key in the ignition. The car purred to life.

Kendra’s hand was trembling on the gearshift. But she shifted into Reverse and touched the gas pedal. She backed up slowly until she could turn the wheel and position the car on the gravel drive that led out to Fitch Crossing Road.

“How am I doing so far?” she said, her voice pitched too high.

“You drive like a pro.”

“That was only Reverse.”

“If worse comes to worst you can turn around and back up all the way to the parsonage.”

Despite herself, Kendra laughed. “I can do this.”

“I have no doubts. Let’s go see that barn.”

The driveway was worse than she remembered, but the new car knew exactly what to do with the ruts and bumps. By the time she finished carefully navigating her way to Fitch Crossing, she felt confident enough to pull onto the larger road. She had it to herself and gently increased her speed.

“Sam drove the car to the cabin,” Elisa said. “He claimed since it was new it might have some kinks that needed working out, so he told me to drive ours, and he drove this one.”

“And you fell for that?”

“I let him have his fun.”

Kendra drove faster until her speed approached half of what was considered normal on the country road. But her hands no longer had a death grip on the wheel, and her spine was unlocking, one vertebra at a time. In a matter of minutes they neared Carter’s Mill Road, and Kendra slowed to a crawl.

“I hope the barn will have a For Sale sign.”

They spotted it just before the crossroads. The two-story barn stood back on a hillside, about fifty yards from Fitch Crossing, an architectural skeleton that had been stripped of siding so that only the huge old logs were exposed. Kendra judged it had held perhaps six stalls on each side, with lots of room in between for extras. There was a hand-lettered sign tacked up on the end facing the road.

“It won’t last long,” Elisa said. “Somebody’s going to buy it. There is such an emphasis these days on using old things in new ways. Someone will see the possibilities.”

Kendra pulled into the drive leading up to the barn and stopped with the engine running. “It’s a lot of barn.”

“It would triple the size of your house.”

Kendra had seen enough. She was definitely interested. “I’ll call Manning Rosslyn and see what he has to say.” She backed out to take Elisa home.

At the brick ranch parsonage, Elisa patted her arm in congratulations. “You drive like you were born to it. You will be all right going back?”

Kendra didn’t want to give that too much thought. “I’m on the road again, I guess.”

Driving home, she forced herself to breathe deeply when other cars passed and panic stirred. But by the time she pulled up to the clearing, she knew she could get behind the wheel again tomorrow. And to make sure she would, she promised herself a shopping trip to buy porch furniture.

Inside, she hung the keys on a nail and settled into the rocker, pulling Leah’s quilt over legs that were still faintly trembling. As she rocked she fingered the panels, closing her eyes and letting her mind drift.

Despite Isaac’s lack of interest, she planned to indulge her curiosity about the woman he had never known. But even after seven years of marriage, she was just as curious about the real Isaac Taylor. She wasn’t sure what uncovering information about Isaac’s birth family would teach her about the man, but she hoped it would teach her something.

She snuggled deeper into the Lover’s Knot quilt and wondered if the woman who had pieced and quilted it had ever felt confused or lonely. Had Leah come to this cabin to escape someone, or to find herself? Had she accomplished either?

Not for the first time, Kendra felt a strong kinship with Isaac’s grandmother. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine exactly what Leah would choose to say about her life.

F
lossie and Dyer Blackburn were as healthy and strong as any residents of Lock Hollow. It was ironic that Flossie, who had doctored so many of her neighbors, succumbed to typhoid fever a week after her husband, when others with no healing skills were spared.

Birdie, Leah Blackburn’s older sister, claimed she was the first to know their mother would follow their father to his grave. She had taken over Flossie’s nursing care when Leah, who had been at the bedside for a full night and day, could no longer keep her eyes open.

“You go on now and sleep a spell. Let me watch over her,” Birdie told her sister, and Leah, who was afraid their mother would either get better or pass without anyone to note it, had let her.

Later Birdie had recounted the events of the next hours. She had stoked the fire in the woodstove, because Mama had complained of being cold despite three layers of quilts. As she moved the logs, a spark leapt from the fire and into the room.

“It appeared to me right then,” she said, “that Mama would be gone by morning. It surely was a sign.”

Leah was skeptical. She had witnessed sparks showering the room before. Once a big one had set fire to a rug that Mama had plaited from strips of wool, and Mama had gone after it so furiously that Leah had been forced to remind her that both the rug and broom were suffering. No one had died that day, nor on others when the fire burned white hot.

But Birdie needed comfort. Leah thought that, in some curious way, Birdie’s belief that she had predicted their mother’s death helped her through the aftermath. Birdie had always believed in signs and omens. They helped her make sense of the world into which she had been born, a world that had not been kind to her.

In 1919 poliomyelitis had come calling in the mountains and hollows of Virginia, and eight-year-old Birdie had been one of the first to feel its feverish fingers. She had nearly died from the encounter, and when the worst was over, she’d been left with a crippled leg and a body that into maturity remained as frail and weak as a child’s.

Two days before Birdie was struck down, their mother had visited a neighbor and walked through the house without sitting down before leaving by a different door. This was a certain invitation to bad luck. At Birdie’s bedside, the neighbor had reminded Mama of this foolish act, and Mama had ordered her never to set foot in the Blackburn house again. But Birdie, nearly delirious with fever, remembered that conversation. For years afterward she whispered the story, like a haunted bedtime tale, to Leah.

In the month since they buried their parents, Birdie had said little. It was not the way in these mountains to grieve loudly. Quietly she had turned the mirror to the wall and made certain the bodies of their parents were carried out of the house feet first, traditions that were important to her if not to Leah.

Twice, neighbors—some who had also lost loved ones—had filed silently past the coffins a neighbor had brought by wagon team to the Blackburn farm. Their parents had died within a week of each other, but there had been separate funerals, with the lumberjack preacher who lived down near Dark Hollow coming each time to assure those in attendance that the Blackburns were in a better place.

Since that time, Birdie had mourned in silence. She had been Mama’s pet. Flossie Blackburn had been known for many miles as a fine seamstress, and she had carefully taught those skills to her oldest daughter. “Sewing is something it don’t take strong legs to learn,” she told Birdie. “And up close, you can see right smart, Birdie girl.”

Birdie learned the finer points of making a home, their mother’s closely guarded recipe for green tomato pickles, the proper distance to mark and stitch a quilt so the batting stayed smooth. After butchering in the fall, Birdie always received the choicest cuts of meat. After harvest, she was given the tenderest vegetables. Every night Mama brushed Birdie’s hair more than the customary one hundred strokes. She embroidered the collars and cuffs of Birdie’s nightdresses with daisies and roses.

Birdie lost more than a mother; she lost the person who tried hardest to shield her from the reality of her life. At her mother’s graveside, Leah had silently sworn to Flossie that she would never abandon her sister.

Even without that graveside promise, Leah was certain her mother had known this. Birdie had been Mama’s pet, but Leah had been her confidante and helper. Flossie had tucked Birdie under her wing, but she set Leah free to fly as far as she desired. She taught her younger daughter to read and read often, to observe the world around her, to make friends with chores she was required to do so she always had something to look forward to. She insisted that Leah get the few years of formal education available to her in their remote hollow and performed her daughter’s chores herself, so that Leah could walk the necessary miles.

But best of all, Flossie passed to Leah the secrets of how to heal and give comfort.

Flossie herself had been the seventh daughter in a large West Virginia family, a position that nearly guaranteed she would have the healing touch. As if fate had wanted to make certain of it, two weeks before she was born, her father died in a logging accident. The granny midwife who presided over the birth told the neighbor women that Flossie, having never looked into her father’s eyes, was destined to heal folks far and wide.

Perhaps the granny really believed this, or perhaps she simply gauged the deep exhaustion and melancholy of the baby’s mother and knew that if she did not find a way to set this child apart from her many brothers and sisters, Flossie would not survive her childhood.

Whichever it was, the pronouncement that Flossie was special served her well. As soon as she was weaned, she was sent to live with a widowed neighbor known for her healing skills. And five years later, when the widow moved to Virginia’s mountains to be closer to her son, Flossie went along.

In the years that followed, Flossie took her role seriously. She served as an apprentice, learning the medicinal roles of plants, how and when to collect them, or grow them or nurture them so they increased in their forest habitats. She learned to dry and powder roots, to make tinctures, liniments and salves. Once she married Dyer Blackburn and moved to Lock Hollow, she read whatever literature she had access to, poring over the Watkins products almanacs, and
Domestic Medicine, or Poor Man’s Friend, in the Hours of Affliction, Pain and Sickness
by Dr. John C. Gunn of Knoxville, Tennessee. From observation she formed her own opinions and discarded superstitions. When she finally gave birth to a daughter who could tramp the mountains with her, she taught Leah to be thoughtful and attentive, and to relish the power that came from healing the sick.

“You’ll always be looked up to, where’er you go. Naught will make you dearer to friends and neighbors than to ease their pain and make their young’uns well.”

It was with that in mind that Leah rose early on a Saturday, dressed, and performed her morning chores quickly and efficiently. She brought in wood for the cookstove and fanned the coals to flame. Then, while the kettle heated, she went outside and fed the chickens and the hog that would provide meat for the winter come butchering time.

The air was cool and sweet with just the tinge of smoke from their fire. Somewhere beyond the yard, an indigo bunting sang. Leah swept the path leading to the picket fence that surrounded the house and examined the remains of the hollyhocks that Mama had planted at the beginning of the summer. There had been no frost, although it was nearly time. From each plant she broke off dried blossoms in which the seeds were fully developed and slipped them in her apron pocket. She would save them to plant in the spring, in case the originals didn’t reappear. Every year she would make sure some were growing right there against the fence in her mother’s honor.

When she returned to the house, Birdie was pouring water over carefully measured coffee grounds. The Blackburn farm was as self-sufficient as any in the Blue Ridge, but coffee was something they could not grow themselves. In the worst of times, people in Lock Hollow roasted and ground dandelion roots or corn kernels. But the Blackburns had never resorted to this. Their father had been a careful, wily farmer who made the best use of good land and ran a steam-powered sawmill on the outskirts when times were rough. They had never wanted for any necessity.

“Did you have good dreams?” Leah asked her sister as she went to the basin beside the doorway to wash her hands.

“I’ve a mind to just stay up all night. My brain goes a-running, and I cain’t sleep anyway.”

“I can give you something for that, you know I can.”

“There’s nothing you can give me that will bring back Mama and Daddy.”

“I can ease your misery.” Although Birdie only rarely complained, Leah knew she was often in pain. The polio that had damaged her muscles had not destroyed her ability to feel. Sometimes at night Leah would hear her sister sobbing, and she would rub her legs and smooth away the cramps.

“You’ve enough to fret over, Leah, what with this land belonging to you now, and me nothing but a burden.”

Leah had known that when her parents died, the farm would be left to her. Two years before her death, their mother had shown them the will and explained.

“This is our last will and testament, your daddy’s and mine. Now it says in here that the farm will belong to Leah alone, but, Leah, we know you’ll give Birdie a place as long as she wants one. We’re leaving it to you so’s you can do the work that’ll need doing without having to get papers signed. But you both understand what I’m saying?”

Leah hadn’t needed a piece of paper to confirm what she’d always known. Birdie might be five years Leah’s senior, but in the ways that mattered, Leah was the older sister. And caring for Birdie was no hardship. She adored her sister and always had.

“I sure won’t listen to that kind of talk,” she told Birdie now. “You couldn’t be a burden if you tried. Who would keep this house and cook the meals? I aim to make sure we’re both provided for, but that don’t mean we got reason to fret. We got food stored up. We got a pig to slaughter comes time. We got apples on the trees, and walnuts and chinquapins in the woods.”

“And you got men who come a-calling, all the while hoping you’ll look them over and make a choice.”

Leah saw her sister’s impish smile. Birdie was beautiful, particularly at times, like now, when she wasn’t wearing the thick glasses that helped bring the distant world into focus. She had black hair that fell in thick waves to her shoulders on those rare occasions when she wore it down. Her eyes were as blue as a June sky, and her skin was clear and rosy.

Perhaps it was her poor vision, or perhaps only the way she viewed life, but Birdie always appeared to be staring into the distance. Once Flossie had told Leah that Birdie had heaven in her sights. Leah knew her mother was convinced that before too many years, Birdie would be one of God’s sweetest angels.

“Men may be a-calling,” she told Birdie, “but that don’t mean I’m buying. I’ve set my sights as high as an eagle’s nest.”

“You mean your sights rise higher than Verle Lewis?”

“A heap.” Verle was just one of the men who had been nosing around the Blackburn farm with the excuse the sisters might need help. Leah thought he would work out fine for splitting firewood or picking apples, but she was afraid that the woman who married Verle Lewis would find him asleep in the sunshine more often than she would find him farming.

“You cain’t be too picky, Leah. We need a man working the land, and not a one is looking at me.”

Leah tossed back her long brown braid. “And that would be the problem with the ones who’ve come by. Not a one can see past a wart on his own nose. If they could, it’d be you they was after, not me. Not only are you the prettiest, nobody for three counties can make biscuits like you do, or fry up an old biddy hen and make it taste like a chick just peeked out of the shell.”

“I dried up on the vine before I fully bloomed.” Birdie didn’t look sorry. “No man’s looking for a puny wife, not so’s you’d know it, anyway. A man wants a wife he can kill off slowly with too many young’uns and too much to do. Me, I’d die before he could even get started.”

“His loss, then. And maybe mine. ’Cause now
I
got to put up with all that.”

“You’re strong. You’ll outlive any man.”

“And maybe kill off a few while I’m at it.”

Both girls laughed. Leah slung her arm over her sister’s shoulders. “Let’s have breakfast, then I’m off for the day. You’ll be fine without me?”

“My fingers are itching to get to them new red chicken sacks. I washed and ironed ’em good, and today I’m gonna cut the pieces for our Lover’s Knot quilts.”

Leah made a noise low in her throat, as if she was delighted that her sister was cutting fabric for both of them. In truth, she was glad that Birdie’s self-imposed mourning period seemed to be ending. For herself, quilting was as far from her mind as usual. She would rather shovel out the barn or smoke honeybees from a hollow tree than thread a needle. Quilting was something Birdie and Flossie had always done together. Now Leah was afraid that she was going to have to keep her sister company at the quilt frame, or in the evenings while she pieced blocks on the sewing machine.