The Grub-And-Stakers Quilt a Bee (2 page)

“Whom are you calling, forsooth?” Arethusa demanded.

“Hazel, Dot, Minerva, and Zilla, of course. Much as I hate to admit it, Arethusa, you’re right.”

Many years had passed since Aralia Polyphema laid down her bow and gavel for the last time. After her death, John Architrave had lived alone. He’d managed his housekeeping much as he’d managed the water department, and that was as ill as anybody in Lobelia Falls cared to speak of the dead. Before they could start putting things into the museum, an awful lot would have to be taken out.

Osbert donated part of the advance on his latest Western, whose heroine had blue-green eyes, blondish brown hair with highlights the color of dawn on the mesa, and cheeks like the bloom on the yucca, or Spanish bayonet; and happened, by apt coincidence, to be named Dittany. That paid for the hiring of a dump truck to cart away enough trash so that the peeling wallpaper and cobwebbed ceilings could be got at.

Before restoration could begin, though, the problem of what to restore it to had to be resolved. After considerable wrangling, the trustees decided to do what everybody then claimed to have been in favor of all along: namely, to plan the museum as a typical Canadian home of the Early Lobelia Falls period. Only genuine antiques or accurate reproductions would be used, and decisions of the curator would be final. The curator would be kept firmly enthumbed by the trustees, but the general public wasn’t to know that. By this stratagem or ruse they hoped to keep out the carved coconuts and art deco smoking stands without antagonizing friends and neighbors who’d been kidding themselves that they’d at last found a place to park the family relics without upsetting the in-laws.

Finding a curator turned out to be a piece of cake. Dot CoskofFs sister’s brother-in-law had an uncle who had a cousin who’d just been retired as assistant curator from a museum down in Boston or Chicago or some other benighted outpost of civilization. He wasn’t finding retirement to his liking. Since he was already collecting a pension, he’d be willing to accept the meager stipend they could afford, provided the Architrave-that was the first time they’d heard it called that-threw in living quarters for himself and his wife.

That was no problem, either. Old John, in his infinite chuckleheadedness, had installed the one bathroom in a former woodshed off the back entry, as far away as possible from the upstairs bedrooms. Some said it was this inconvenience that had vexed the late Aralia into an early grave, but now John’s thoughtlessness worked to the museum’s advantage. The bathroom could stay where it was, the big old kitchen be turned into a sitting room, the pantry into a kitchenette, and what had been called the birthing room become a smallish but adequate bedroom. It was doubtful if a pair of retirees would be doing much birthing.

Mr. and Mrs. Fairfield, such being their name, appeared charmed by these plans and set to move in right away, but of course they’d have to wait until the transformation was accomplished.

Meanwhile, Minerva Oakes offered them free room and board.

Before coming into John’s money, Minerva had eked out her widow’s mite by taking in boarders, most of them spectacular duds. Undaunted by disastrous experience, she remained a hospitable soul, didn’t mind strangers at her breakfast table, and was still having qualms about her inheritance. Hence nobody tried to talk her out of having the Fairfields, and thus it came to pass.

Once they’d got to meet the newcomers, the trustees saw why Mr. Fairfield had remained an assistant all those years in his old job. He couldn’t have given orders to the museum cat, let alone the staff. Nevertheless, he seemed to know his artifacts and to have sound, though diffidently expressed, ideas about what the Architrave ought and ought not to contain.

Mrs. Fairfield was a different matter. Hazel Munson summed up the consensus best. “You sure can tell which of that pair never has to starch her undershirts.” The new curator’s wife was pleasantspoken enough, but she did show an awful lot of gum when she smiled. She wasn’t lazy, though. Despite a broken wrist sustained, she told them, on moving day by falling over a box, she insisted on pitching right in with the clean-up crew.

Lobelia Falls folk were born pitchers-in, by and large. If you wanted the ghastly old wallpaper stripped, for instance, you had but to drop a hint to Mr. Peavey at the hardware store. Before you could turn around, he’d be on deck with his wallpaper steamer, his four stalwart sons, and their four stalwart girlfriends. If you wanted spiderwebs swept down, you could summon whole platoons of broom wielders who gave neither jot nor tittle for the most fearsome arachnid ever hatched; at least never hatched in Lobelia Falls, where spiders aren’t usually very fearsome anyway.

If you had mice to be caught, and you did because old John had been an awful slob, you called in a few of the neighborhood cats.

Even Andrew McNaster, who owned the local construction company as well as the inn next door to the Architrave, sent a couple of busboys over one hot afternoon to help with the cleaning up. Everybody’s natural reaction was “What’s he up to this time?”

“He figures we’re all dying of thirst over here from the dust”

was Dittany’s theory. “He’s trying to get us to quit boycotting his lousy den of iniquity and start dropping over for cold beers. Then he’ll get us drunk and pull another of his cute tricks.”

“Such as what?” Hazel Munson asked, wiping a cobweb off her nose.

“I don’t know, but don’t try to tell me he’s doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He hasn’t got one. You know McNaster was hoping to get his mitts on this property so he could turn John’s house into a disco bar. We’d better search the place for incendiary devices after those kids leave.”

They duly searched, but found no sign of malfeasance. As the days wore on and McNaster workmen kept showing up with offers of free carpentry, free electrical wiring, free washers for the dripping faucets in the Fairfields’ new kitchenette and a free plumber to put them in, their wonder grew.

“Can you beat that, eh?” Hazel marveled. “He’s either got religion or gone soft in the head.”

“In a pig’s eye he has,” Dittany insisted. “He’s up to something, you mark my words.”

“Oh, Dittany, don’t be paranoid,” said Dot Coskoff. “Those workmen are on McNaster’s regular payroll. If he doesn’t happen to have a full day’s work for them, he packs them over to us so he can build up a reputation for philanthropy at no extra cost to himself. I wonder if we might finagle a few more feet of free shelving out of him before he gets tired of being Mr. Nice Guy.”

Dittany scowled. “Don’t we have enough money to buy the lumber ourselves?”

“Yes, but why should we if we can get it for nothing? We’ve got to think of the future, you know.”

So they did. Thus far, the trustees hadn’t been plagued by fiscal woes, thanks to Osbert’s handsome donation and Arethusa’s determination not to let a mere nephew head her off at the pass. Still, there was a long, cold winter coming. Therese Boulanger talked of bake sales but it would take an awful lot of brandy snaps to keep the boiler running. Dot Coskoff came up with the truly brilliant plan of accepting everything everybody was hell-bent on donating, with the proviso that whatever proved inappropriate for exhibition could be peddled at an ongoing flea market, or march6 aux puces. Donors’ names would, she stipulated, go down regardless in the handsome book provided for that purpose by Mr. Gumpert of Ye Village Stationer. Being a donor wouldn’t exempt anyone from having to pay membership fees, but it would keep the egos buttered.

This was all very well but, as Zilla Trott pointed out, they weren’t going to get rich in a hurry peddling secondhand arm garters and cracked shaving mugs. Nor were people going to flock to join the museum until they had something tangible to flock to.

Be that as it might, things were moving along well enough at the moment. Mr. Fairfield was finding a reasonable amount of wheat among the chaff. Mrs. Fairfield was cleaning and refurbishing what he found. By the first of August, the front parlor was actually painted, papered, and ready to go on view.

To be sure, they’d zeroed in on the front parlor first because it was the easiest. No Architrave had ever been known to enter the room except for weddings, funerals, tea with the minister, or ritual cleaning back in the days when there was still a housewife to clean it. The furniture, of the carved grapes and horsehair period, was mostly salvageable. There was a square rosewood piano whose ivories required only to be glued back on and whose finish responded nicely to lemon oil and elbow grease. It wouldn’t pky anything except a thunk, but it did look elegant under a gorgeously shirred and tasseled silk piano scarf Samantha Burberry’s mother-in-law donated. As to ornaments for the whatnot and mantelpiece, Mr. Fairfield had but to choose among a plethora of hair wreaths, wax fruit, souvenirs from Lake Louise, and bone china mustache cups.

The rest of the house hadn’t been such a happy hunting ground.

Once the place had been built and furnished, succeeding generations of Architraves had made do with what was already there. As tables and chairs wore out or collapsed, they’d been thrown down cellar or up attic and left to molder away. Thanks to Osbert’s dump truck, the cellar had now been cleaned out and was temporarily being used to hold the overflow of donations for Dot CoskofFs flea market. Even the most zealous among the clean-up crew shied away from tackling the attic, though, until one day when Osbert Monk was off in Toronto seeing his publishers and Dittany was feeling specially bereft. To take her mind off the pain of separation, she wandered up and began poking around. Less than three minutes later, Mrs. Fairfield joined her.

“Found anything interesting, Mrs. Monk?”

Dittany would have preferred to be alone in her bereavement, but good breeding prevailed. “I just got here,” she answered.

“Horrible, isn’t it? I’m going to fight my way over to a window and see if I can’t get a breath of fresh air in here.”

“That would be a great help. Do you think you could?”

There were few things Dittany wasn’t willing to have a shot at, especially with Mrs. Fairfield standing there flashing those shiny pink gums in challenge. She squirmed a path through the debris and managed after several attempts to wrestle open a window that had perhaps never been opened before. The window promptly fell shut again because the cords had either rotted out or never been put in, so she reopened it and propped up the sash with a bit of wreckage that lay close to hand.

The window was not very big, hardly more than dollhouse size, and recessed into the mansard roof to render it even less efficient at catching what breeze there was, but it did help a little. After a few refreshing whiffs and a brief rest, Dittany managed to reach and open a couple more. Gradually the air became almost breathable.

Sneezing a good deal, for the dust lay half an inch thick everywhere, she and Mrs. Fairfield got down to business.

Moths and mice, allowed to chew unchecked for half a century or so, can do a remarkable lot of damage. Most of the articles touched by the searchers crumbled to bits in their hands. Dittany did find a wrought iron trivet no predator had found palatable, and Mrs. Fairfield unearthed a flowered slop jar with only a minor crack in it. Spurred on by these small triumphs, they persisted.

There is a fascination about hunting for hidden treasure, even in places like John Architrave’s attic. Dittany got filthy and sweaty, and knew she was doing dreadful things to the hands Osbert loved to touch; nevertheless, she kept going.

Mrs. Fairfield put up a valiant effort, but she really couldn’t do much with that cast on her wrist. It was Dittany who forged ahead to where the dust lay thickest, Dittany who found the trunkful of old clothes, Dittany who almost had a heart attack when sixteen mice jumped out at her from among the shreds, and ultimately Dittany who came upon a package wrapped in brown paper, tucked between the remains of a redingote and a corset cover.

“That trunk might do for one of the bedrooms,” Mrs. Fairfield was musing when Dittany hauled out her find. “The clothes are hopeless, I’m afraid, but-what have you there, Mrs. Monk?”

“I don’t know. I’m scared to open it.”

Mrs. Fairfield took the package out of Dittany’s hands. “It doesn’t look as if it’s been gnawed. Feels like a box of some sort.

Perhaps it’s photographs or letters. Mr. Fairfield always gets excited over letters.”

Very carefully, Mrs. Fairfield eased off the wrapping without tearing the paper or breaking the string. That was important, it seemed, although Dittany couldn’t imagine why. She was rooting for a Bible or a family album herself, for the perverse reason that she didn’t want Mrs. Fairfield to have guessed right about the box.

A box, however, it was; and not just any box but a well-made little walnut chest with a neat hook-and-eye fastening. Mrs. Fairfield slipped the hook and opened the lid. The box was full of silk and satin scraps.

“Why, it’s a bride’s quilt,” she exclaimed. “Or rather the pieces for one. You’ve never heard of those, I don’t suppose.”

At least Dittany got to contradict her. “As a matter of fact, I have my own great-grandmother’s at home. She got it for a wedding present. All her girl friends took pieces of their best Sunday go-tomeeting gowns and embroidered pretty little doodads and whatnots on them. Then they featherboned them together into a crazy quilt for the nuptial couch.”

The nuptial couch rather slipped out. Perhaps she’d typed one too many of Arethusa’s roguish regency romances before Osbert lured her off to the wide-open spaces where men were men and didn’t go around slapping their garters. It didn’t matter, though, because Mrs. Fairfield wasn’t paying attention. She was turning over the charmingly embroidered patches, rubbing the satins and velvets between her fingers.

“I wonder why the quilt never got put together. Perhaps the bride-to-be died. No, it was more likely the groom. That’s why she’d have treasured the pieces even though it had become pointless to complete the quilt. We’ll have to do some research on who she might have been. What a pity the quilt never got finished. I can’t think how we’re going to exhibit all these loose scraps, but it would be a dreadful pity not to.”