The Quilt (4 page)

In the kitchen he found they were to eat again, a light lunch (as his grandmother called it) before going to bed. He sat in a chair at the table.

It had been a long day, with Elmer and the truck and the road and getting to the farm and milking and learning about roosters and cats jumping on cows and wagging dogs and cows with names and Kristina, and soon his eyes closed and no matter what he did he could not get them to open again, food or no food. The last thing he remembered was his grandmother carrying him, saying, “What a good little man you are,” and putting him into a bed with a feather mattress so soft he just sank and sank until he thought he would never come up and then, just, plain, nothing.

GARY PAULSEN

Morning.

He opened his eyes because bright sun was coming through a window across his face, and he heard something he had never heard before, the sound of a rooster crowing.

He lay for a moment, still half asleep, remembering where he was, thinking of the day before and his mother, wondering if she'd ever seen cows and geese and chickens, and he heard the two women talking in the kitchen, just off the bedroom where he lay.

“It started while we were milking this morning but I'm not sure about time, Alida. He was home on leave for two weeks and it seems like we spent most of it in the sheets. It could have been any time in those two weeks.”

“So what's the soonest, and the latest?”

“Three days ago was soonest … nine or ten days from now would be the latest.”

“And you waited until day before yesterday to call me?”

“I didn't want to be a bother.”

“Babies are never a bother. We have to call Martha.”

“But I haven't any pains yet; my water hasn't broken—”

“Kristina, I'm not a midwife. We have to call Martha. She knows what to do and it might take her a day or two to get her own things in order to come over here. I'll call her after lunch.”

“But—”

“There will be none of the buts. I know what they say, first come, late come. But you're so big…. We'll call Martha right away. And I'm going to call some of the other girls too. Sometimes you can't have too many women.”

A lot of it made no sense to the boy and he felt bad that he had missed morning milking and they had let him sleep. But he knew they were talking about the baby and when it might come, and he was excited at the prospect because he did not know anything about how babies came or what you did or how they worked except that it must be inside Kristina and had to come out, and he had many questions he wanted to ask.

But his grandmother's voice sounded tight and worried, the way it did when he asked bad questions about his mother. So he decided to hold back. He rolled out of bed and went into the kitchen and asked instead, “Where's the potty?” He hadn't seen a bathroom. Both women laughed and Kristina said, “Outside, in back of the house, there's a little house with a seat with holes in it. Just rip a page out of the catalog for paper. Or if it's just front potty you can go in the bushes.”

He had gone to the bathroom outside when he was at the cookcamp with his grandmother, just number one (he had never heard “front potty” before) and they had had a potty chair in the trailer. This was more serious than number one and he went outside and found the little house. He did his business, wondering while he was sitting there why they called it number one and number two. He stood and opened the door to see the roosters, all four of them, standing there staring at him, chukkering with their neck feathers out in threat. He closed the door.

At first he was frightened and chagrined that he had forgotten them. The dog, who was named Jake and
who had apparently followed the boy from the house, sat there too, watching the roosters, his ears cocked. After a time the boy collected himself, remembering what they'd told him about the roosters being cowards. He opened the door, raised his arms wide to make himself look bigger, screamed “Yaaaaahhhhh!” and ran right at them.

It was most gratifying. They were taken completely by surprise and as a bonus, Jake joined in the fun. Feathers flew as the roosters squawked and screeched out of the yard, the dog on their tails, and the boy almost strutted back into the house, his pajamas flopping.

“I ran into the roosters,” he said, sitting at the table. “Me and the dog had to chase them out of the yard.”

But the two women weren't listening. Kristina was standing, leaning against the wall, her face pale and drawn, and his grandmother was on the phone, cranking the one long ring that would get Central.

“You must go outside,” she told him, holding her hand over the mouthpiece, “and play alone for a little time. We have something to do now.”

“Is it the baby?” he asked.

“Play. Go play outside now, hurry,” and then, turning to the phone, she said, “Central, this is Alida out to Kristina's. Get Martha out here as soon as possible and tell her to bring the others. It's starting.”

Women came from everywhere. He had been in the yard for only a short time, making roads in the dust with a small wooden blade that he pretended was the bulldozer he had ridden the summer before at the cookcamp, when the first wagon came down the driveway from the road.

He had not seen horses pull before and he was amazed by the team that came with the first freight wagon. There were two of them, one gray with white markings on his forehead and the other all brown, and they were huge, like living walls of horses pulling into the yard. They had come at a trot and were covered
with sweat and surrounded by flies. Two women holding cloth bags and what looked like folded sheets climbed down from the high seat in front of the box, using the steel spokes of the wheels as steps. They left a boy in the seat holding the reins, a boy who did not seem that much older than he was.

He hoped the boy would stay to play, but instead the driver expertly slapped the reins against the rumps of the horses and they obediently pulled in a wide circle. Without waving or saying anything he started back down the driveway.

One of the women called after him. “You stop and water them in a ditch and let them blow, and don't you run them. You and your sister take care of the chores until I come back. I'll be home when I get there.” The other woman smiled and waved.

With that they made their way to the house.

Perhaps an hour passed, and the boy was very curious about what was happening but just as he decided to go inside or at least peek through the door, another wagon, pulled by two similar horses, both sweaty, came trotting down the drive. This time three women got off and
went inside and a girl who was perhaps ten or eleven sat holding the reins. She called after one of the women:

“I should stay and help.”

One of the women turned. She was plump and wearing an old-time dress that came almost to the ground, and she had red cheeks and dark hair up in a bun. “Not this time,” she said. “You're too young yet. You go home and tend to chores.”

“How am I ever going to learn?” the girl asked.

“You're too young,” the woman repeated, and then one of the other women pulled at her arm and said:

“Come on, Martha, let's get inside.”

With that the three women disappeared into the house and the girl turned the horses and wagon, as expertly as the previous boy had done, and the team walked down and out the driveway. The boy watched and thought of numbers. He liked to work numbers in his head and he thought, All right, there's Kristina and my grandmother, that's two, and then two women in the first wagon, that makes three, and four, and then three women in the last wagon, that makes five and six and seven.

He looked at the house and he thought of seven
women in there and how small the house was and where would he sleep? Then he heard a familiar slamming and wheezing and banging, and he looked up to see Elmer's truck coming down the drive and next to Elmer was another woman.

Whereas the rest of the women had been younger, she was old, like his grandmother, and she stepped out of Elmer's truck stiffly, holding a large bag, made from sheet material, that contained some kind of folded colored patches, and a smaller burlap sack that seemed to be filled with jars.

Elmer waved to the boy and smiled a toothless grin but like the wagons he did not stay, instead turning the truck and hammering back down the driveway.

There was a moment of silence and the woman looked at the boy. “You must be Eunice's boy, visiting with Alida?”

He nodded. “She's my grandma.”

“Well I'm her cousin Gerta, so that makes us … I don't exactly know. Third or fourth cousins. But we're related. We're
all
related, I guess. Here, carry this sack of jars for me. This quilt is so bulky.”

He took the heavy sack gladly. It proved to be full of jars of canned food. He was dying to get into the house and see what was happening, but once he did he was disappointed. It was just all noise.

Women filled the kitchen. The stove was fired up and in the heat everybody was sweating and all of them seemed to be talking at once, and not a word of it was English but was all Norwegian, and it meant nothing to him, just sounds mixed with banging and rattling from pans on the stove and the creaking of the pump handles.

He moved to a corner, out of the way, and they all ignored him except one woman, who had blond hair and blue eyes like Kristina but was not as young or quite as pretty. She smiled at him and gave him a slab of bread covered with butter and honey. He ate it wolfishly, realizing that it was well past lunchtime. Then he went to the pump, where a dipper hung on a hook, and held the dipper up to another woman, who pumped it full and handed it to him without really looking at him, speaking in Norwegian to a woman by the stove all the while.

He did not see either his grandmother or Kristina— or the woman called Martha—and stood back in the corner sipping, and guessed that his grandmother and Kristina and Martha were in the upstairs bedroom, which he had not seen. Then he heard the sound.

It was not, quite, a scream. He would grow to be something of a man and be in the army and later work on an ambulance and, somehow, live to become an older man, and he would see and hear and do many cutting and bad things but he would never, ever, hear anything like that sound.

It came from upstairs but seemed to fill the whole house, a deep, grunting, ripping sound that turned into a piercing shriek and ended in panting murmurs.

For a second the talking in the kitchen stopped and the boy was truly horrified, wondering how Kristina (he guessed she was the one who made the sound) could have lived through such a thing.

But then, to his even deeper horror, the women went back to talking. One of them said in English, “She's starting to push now. Maybe it won't be long.”

“First ones take forever,” another said. And then
added, “Easy to make, hard to take,” and everybody laughed and they started talking again, but as though a change had happened they did not speak only in Norwegian but mixed the talk with English.

The boy could not believe they were joking about that sound. He could not believe anybody would joke about the sound he heard coming out of that upstairs bedroom and he turned and started for the door, thinking he would rather be outside, walking, when the sound came again. Louder.

“They're close together,” one woman said. “She's pushing. Very soon …”

“Very soon,” another said, and they all nodded as though the sound, which cut the boy to the center, meant nothing. He ran from the kitchen out into the yard by the gate and sat there petting the dog, trying not to hear what came from the house.