Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (2 page)

“It’s all right,
mija
,” Rosa assured her, on her hands and knees with the rag and bucket of soapy water. “It’s not your fault.”

Drawn by the sound of Ana’s sobs, Marta darted into the
adobe with Lupita close behind. “What’s wrong?” asked Marta, eyeing the scene from the doorway before hurrying to take Miguel from Ana.

“Breakfast didn’t agree with them,” replied Rosa as calmly as she could manage, but Marta caught her eye, and she saw her own worry reflected in her eldest daughter’s face. At twelve, Marta had seen two younger brothers and two sisters waste away, and she knew as well as Rosa did that not one of them had reached their sixth birthday. At eight years old, Ana had endured the affliction longer than any of her siblings. Sometimes Ana’s refusal to succumb gave Rosa hope that Ana might yet survive to adulthood. More often, Rosa feared that each passing day brought Ana closer to the end. Miguel, who had fallen ill shortly after his second birthday, was much weaker than his sister and probably would not reach his third birthday.

Quickly Rosa turned her head away and closed her eyes to hold back her tears. If she gave in to her grief and anger, she might never stop weeping. She must not let the children know how close she had come to despair.

While Rosa finished cleaning the floor, Marta took charge of her younger siblings, carrying Miguel on her hip as she led her sisters outside. When Rosa went to empty the bucket, she spotted the children in the shade of the barn playing school—Ana’s favorite game, one she could play while seated and without tiring herself. Although her sisters preferred to run and dance, they indulged her, knowing Ana longed to attend the Arboles School with them. She had for a single year, but when she began missing too many days, the teacher suggested that it would be best if Rosa kept her home.

“But Ana is so bright,” Rosa had protested. “She loves to learn. Her heart would break if we didn’t let her go to school.”

“The long day exhausts her,” the teacher had gently replied. “And some of the other parents are…concerned.”

She didn’t need to elaborate. Rosa had already lost three children by then, and the Barclay children’s mysterious illnesses had become the source of much speculation and suspicion throughout the valley. Rosa was well aware of the rumors, the whispered conversations that fell silent when she approached neighbors and former friends in the grocery store. She knew some parents warned their children not to play with her girls, and entire families changed pews if the Barclays sat next to them in church. There had even been talk of moving the Arboles Valley Post Office from the Barclays’ front room, but since John was postmaster and no one wanted to spend the money to build a new post office, the grumblings eventually faded. Rosa told herself that her neighbors did not mean to be unkind, that it would be difficult not to be suspicious, even fearful, when so much misfortune had beset their family. But understanding her neighbors’ fears did not mean giving in to them, especially when her daughter’s happiness was at stake.

“The other students are in no danger,” Rosa had replied tightly. “Marta and Lupita are with Ana every day, and they haven’t fallen ill.”

“I’m not agreeing that their fears are reasonable, but either way, Ana would be far better off at home with you. And for your sake—” The teacher hesitated. “In the years to come, won’t you regret every moment you didn’t spend with the poor dear?”

Rosa’s throat closed around a retort, and without another word, she gathered up her girls and took them home. She taught Ana herself after that, going over Marta’s old lessons in reading, math, and spelling at the kitchen table. Some days Ana was too weary to study, but when she was strong enough, she absorbed
every lesson with quiet, solemn purposefulness, as if she were determined to learn as much as possible in the brief time fate would grant her.

She rarely studied anymore, and when she was too tired to hold up a book, Marta read to her. “If I grow up, I want to be a librarian,” she told Rosa dreamily one evening as Rosa tucked her in. “Think of all those books. Think of reading all day long, every day.”

“I think there’s more to being a librarian than reading all day,” said Rosa, with a catch in her throat. She longed to assure Ana that of course she would grow up, that it was nonsense to think she might not, but Rosa wouldn’t lie, and Ana wouldn’t believe her if she did.

While the children played outside, Rosa made the beds, brought in the laundry from the line, and tended her garden. Gray clouds filled the sky from west to east, so she worked quickly, spurred on by the threat of rain. At noon she called the children in for lunch—corn tortillas and rice with fresh tomatoes and mild peppers, with water to drink, since they had no more milk. Miraculously, Ana and Miguel kept the food down, but the nourishment failed to invigorate them, so Rosa put them down for a nap while Marta and Lupita played with dolls in the front room.

She was tidying the kitchen when she heard an automobile approaching—not the smooth purr of John’s roadster but the rattle and growl of an older and far more welcome vehicle.

Quickly she smoothed her hair back from her face and snatched off her soiled apron. When a knock sounded on the door, she hastened to answer it only to find Elizabeth Nelson standing on the doorstep, a tan cloche with a jaunty upturned brim upon her bobbed blonde curls. Behind her, Rosa glimpsed
the Jorgensens’ car parked near the garage, but Lars was nowhere to be seen.

Rosa quickly quashed her disappointment. Elizabeth, a newcomer to the Arboles Valley, had flouted local custom by befriending her, undeterred by her children’s strange sickness and John’s sarcastic malice. She and her husband, Henry, had moved to the Arboles Valley a few months before, carrying with them the photographs and maps of the thriving cattle ranch they believed they had purchased from a land agent back in Pennsylvania. When they came to the post office to pick up the deed of trust, they discovered that they had been swindled. Triumph Ranch did not exist—or rather, it had once, but Rosa’s great-grandparents had sold it to the Jorgensen family long ago and the old Spanish name had all but faded into memory. Suddenly penniless, the Nelsons found work as hired hands on the Jorgensen ranch, and ever since, John had never missed an opportunity to mock Elizabeth when she came to the post office to collect letters addressed to Mrs. Henry Nelson of Triumph Ranch. Apparently Elizabeth would rather endure his jeers than admit to her family back in Pennsylvania that she and Henry had been cheated out of their life savings.

Before Rosa could greet her, Elizabeth’s pretty features drew together in concern. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” When Elizabeth looked dubious, Rosa quickly amended, “Nothing new. Nothing that hasn’t been wrong for a very long time.” She opened the door wider and beckoned Elizabeth inside. “Please come in while I get your letters.”

Marta and Lupita glanced up warily when Rosa led Elizabeth into the front room, but they quickly recognized the pretty young farmwife with the blonde bob, so after returning her bright smile with bashful grins, they returned to their play.

Rosa left them and went to retrieve the Nelsons’ and Jorgensens’ mail from the kitchen. Although John bore the title of postmaster and collected the paycheck, Rosa sorted the mail and was most often the one who met the valley’s residents at the door when they came to collect their letters and parcels. Since purchasing the roadster, John had been too busy touring the countryside to pay any more attention to the daily mail than he did the ripening crops. The work had fallen entirely to Rosa, and as she sorted envelopes and boxes on the kitchen table in between tending children and folding laundry and preparing meals, she wished that she could claim John’s wages for herself. She couldn’t help tallying his income in her mind and calculating how many months he would have had to work, saving every dime, in order to purchase that loathsome automobile. How could he have amassed enough money unless he had mortgaged the farm?

Rosa had to know.

As soon as Elizabeth left, she would search John’s desk for bank documents. She had already checked the strongbox where they kept the deed to the farm and other important papers safe from brush fires and earthquakes, but of course he had not put any mortgage papers there, where she could easily find them. He would have put them somewhere out of sight, someplace where she wouldn’t accidentally discover them while dusting or putting away clothes.

Rosa brought the bundles of letters back to the front room and gave them to Elizabeth, who thanked her and added, “I found something in the cabin that belongs to you.”

The ramshackle cabin on the Jorgensen ranch? Rosa had visited it many times, long before the Nelsons had made it their home, but she had always been careful to leave nothing behind.
Bewildered, Rosa waited while Elizabeth took the mail out to Lars’s car and returned with two folded quilts—but Rosa knew she had never left any quilts at the cabin.

While Rosa, Marta, and Lupita looked on, Elizabeth set one quilt on the sofa and began to unfold the other. Rosa glimpsed homespun plaids and wools in deep blues and dark barn reds and forest greens, sturdy and warm—and suddenly she recognized the pattern. With an eager gasp, she reached out to take the bottom corners of the quilt, lifting them so the quilt unfurled between her hands and Elizabeth’s. The quilt was comprised not of square blocks but of hexagons, each composed of twelve triangular wedges with a smaller hexagon appliquéd in the center where the points met. The quilt had been well used and well loved, with tiny quilting stitches outlining each piece and many more arranged in concentric curves so the hexagons resembled wagon wheels in motion. The slight shrinkage of the wool and batting in the wash throughout the years had created a patina of wrinkles all over the quilt, and Rosa could almost imagine she knew each one by heart.

“
Dios mío
,” she murmured.

“It is your great-grandmother’s, isn’t it?” prompted Elizabeth. “I recognized it from the photograph you showed me.”

“Without a doubt, it is hers.” As Rosa’s gaze traveled over the quilt, long-forgotten memories came alive—her grandmother in a rocking chair, the quilt tucked around her lap. Rosa and her younger brother, Carlos, draping the quilt over a table and pretending it was a tent high in the Santa Monica Mountains. Climbing beneath it and snuggling up to her mother after fleeing to her parents’ bedroom in the dark hours of the night, frightened awake by nightmares. Yes, she knew the quilt intimately. “It is just as I remember it.”

“Almost but not exactly,” said Elizabeth. “It needed some mending. I matched the fabric as best as I could when I replaced worn pieces.”

Rosa smiled, touched by her friend’s thoughtfulness, pained by the realization that it had been a long time since anyone had shown her such kindness. “Then it is even lovelier than I remember.” She sat down in a rocking chair, draped the quilt across her lap, and ran her hands over it. The fabric had softened with age, the colors mellowed, but it was no less beautiful. “I remember my mother cuddling me in this quilt when I was a little girl no bigger than Lupita. My great-grandmother made it when she was a young bride-to-be in Texas. Her parents had arranged for her to marry my great-grandfather through a cousin who lived in Los Angeles. The first time she saw him was the day he came to San Antonio to bring her back to El Rancho Triunfo.”

“Triumph Ranch,” said Elizabeth.

“Yes, and for many years the name rang true.” Rosa could almost hear her grandmother’s voice as she remembered her stories of days gone by, so full of happiness and sorrow, joy and disappointment. “They raised barley and rye. One hundred head of cattle grazed where the sheep pasture and the apricot orchard stand today. But my family lost everything in a terrible drought, the worst ever to strike the Arboles Valley. Every farm in the valley suffered. Some families sold their land after the first summer without rain, but by the time my great-grandparents decided to put El Rancho Triunfo up for sale the following year, there were no buyers. My great-grandparents sold all the cattle to slaughterhouses rather than let them starve. They were thankful and relieved when Mrs. Jorgensen’s grandfather bought the ranch and permitted them to remain on the land in exchange for their labor. The rains fell two months later. My
great-grandparents never forgave themselves for not holding out a little while longer, for giving up too soon and accepting less than the land was truly worth.”

“They never forgave the Jorgensens either,” said Elizabeth carefully, “or so I’ve heard.”

“That is also true.” The elder Rodriguezes had passed their anger on to their children, who had passed it on to Rosa’s mother, Isabel. Isabel had mourned the loss of the land all her life, and she had resented the Jorgensens from the time she was a young woman until she took her last breath. Her enmity extended even to the Jorgensen descendants, who had nothing to do with the sale of El Rancho Triunfo.

Rosa stroked her great-grandmother’s quilt in wonder while Elizabeth unfolded the second quilt and held it up high by the corners so that only the bottom edge touched the floor. “It’s lovely,” Rosa said, wondering why Elizabeth believed the wrinkled, faded quilt belonged to her. Instead of the dark homespun plaids and wools of the hexagon quilt, it had been pieced from a variety of cottons, satins, and other fabrics that looked to be decades more recent. Rosa admired it politely, but she soon felt her gaze drawn back to her great-grandmother’s quilt. She could hardly believe she held it once more, and she could not imagine how it had come to be in the dilapidated old cabin on the Jorgensen ranch, especially knowing how her mother had felt about the Jorgensens. The last time Rosa had seen the quilt, it had been spread upon her parents’ bed in her childhood home.

“I call this quilt the Arboles Valley Star.” Elizabeth folded the second quilt in half with the pieced top showing and draped it over the sofa. “I found it with your great-grandmother’s. Don’t you recognize it?”

Although Rosa didn’t, she examined it more carefully for
Elizabeth’s sake. The complex, intricate pattern resembled the traditional Blazing Star in that each segment of the eight-pointed stars was comprised of four congruent diamonds, but the smaller diamonds fanned out in a half star in the four corner squares of each block, giving the quilt the illusion of brilliance and fire. Great care must have gone into the making of each block for the divided stars to fit the corners exactly so. Few quilters had the patience for such painstaking work, and she knew only one personally—her late mother. But Rosa had never seen this quilt among her mother’s collection.