The Quilt (5 page)

He did not see his grandmother all day and when it came time for milking, two of the other women came out with the buckets and he went to the barn to help. They were both nice to him, but they carried their own stools and he spent most of the time chasing the cats from the cows' backs. On one of his runs after a cat, he got to the back door of the barn and came face to face with a team of workhorses.

He had not seen them the day before, perhaps because they'd been back in the trees in the pasture. He stood transfixed, in awe of their size. He had seen the other teams bringing the women, but he'd been
well off to the side of the yard. Now he was almost directly beneath them and it was like looking up at giants.

He did not feel afraid. Something about them seemed gentle, peaceful, and he stood studying them, looking at their feet, which were a foot across, and their shoulders and the muscles in their sides …

“She has good horses, Kristina,” one of the women said, standing next to him with a bucket of milk she had just filled. She was thin and had a little gray in her hair and small lines at the sides of her eyes from smiling. All the women seemed to have the lines from smiling. “Always the Jorgensons have had good horses. Good men and good horses.” She turned and said, “Come, the milking is done and we have to turn the cows out and get back to the house,” and walked to the other end of the barn while the other woman released the cows. The cows backed out of their stanchions and made their way carefully back to the pasture.

It was evening and the boy was very tired—not so long ago he had been young enough to take afternoon naps. But it was still light, the sun well up.

Maybe, he thought, he could stay out all night. Maybe he could sleep in the barn. Cowboys did it—in one of the Roy Rogers movies, he'd seen that cowboys slept in the barn. They ate from metal plates filled with brown beans and slept in the barn with their horses, and their hats over their faces, and their saddle for a pillow. He could try that—if he had a saddle and a hat to put over his face.

The house didn't seem to be a place for him, but only meant for women. He'd never thought of it that way, about there being places for men or boys and women or girls. There had always been just his mother and sometimes his aunt Evelyn and of course his grandmother and him. Just all one thing.

But if those women could sit and make jokes about the sound that came from the upstairs bedroom he wasn't sure he was supposed to be there. He walked with the dog toward the house, but slowly.

The gray-haired woman turned and saw him stopping and seemed to know what he was thinking. “Come along. We have to eat supper and get some sleep to do chores tomorrow. Don't worry, Kristina is
resting. She needs all the rest she can get because she has many hours of work to do.”

He followed her then and decided he would just stay inside to eat, and if they started joking about the sound again, he would look for a hat and go back to the barn to sleep.

But the women were not joking now. He sat on a chair in the corner of the kitchen and they worked, cooking and filling pans with hot water and making bread, and he thought he had never seen so much food. Meat and potatoes and loaf upon loaf of bread, each wrapped in waxed paper and put in a metal bread box, and even after they ate and he was so full he could hardly walk, there was still more food left.

After the meal they made coffee in a big pot on the hottest center part of the woodstove by just dumping a handful of coffee grounds into boiling water and then adding some broken eggshells.

He did not understand the eggshells and thought it might have something to do with the baby, and because his grandmother was still gone with Martha and Kristina and because the woman in the barn had
talked to him he asked her, “Are the eggshells to help the baby?”

She laughed, but not in a bad way, and ruffled his hair. “The eggshells take the bitterness out of the coffee. Here, try a sip.”

He took a mouthful from her cup, which seemed so hot it must be on fire and so bitter he almost threw up. “How can you drink that?”

She laughed again. “After a while you can't live without it, eh, girls?” And she turned to the other women, holding her cup up to nods and smiles, then back to the boy. “You'll come to like it when you grow to like grown-up things.”

Then there was a quiet time. The dishes were done and he had helped to wipe them. He felt that he should do something more but there wasn't anything he really knew how to do. They set him to filling the wood box next to the stove and he brought the wood in four pieces at a time until it was heaping and then went back to his chair in the corner to be out of the way.

His grandmother came down then and said something
in Norwegian to the group, and one of the women said in English:

“So how long since the last pain?”

His grandmother came over to him and kissed him on top of the head and held him, which felt very right. She said, “Over an hour. Perhaps it was just false labor.”

“What's labor?” he asked, and they went back to speaking in Norwegian and he realized they did that when they were talking about things they didn't think he should hear.

But the one from the barn said, “It's not so good when they've had hard labor and then stop this way, is it?”

And his grandmother shook her head and looked down at the boy and answered in Norwegian again, with a little snap in the words so the woman from the barn said:

“I'm sorry but my Norski isn't so good. It gets rusty.”

His grandmother sat at the table then and ate a plateful of food and drank hot coffee steaming from the cup. She smiled at the boy and said, “Little pitchers have big ears.”

“So it will be a long night, do you think?” one of the other women asked.

“That's what Martha said.”

“So if the night is long maybe it is we should do quilt stories?”

Which was the way the boy started to learn about the quilt.

There was a new, strange energy in the house that he had not felt or seen before. They ate again; he had never seen so much food so often. They ate all the time they weren't working. And they drank hot, scalding hot, coffee with eggshells in it and ate rolls and jelly and bread with honey and pie and cake and meat and potatoes. Breakfast lasted to what they called forenoon lunch and then to the middle meal of the day, called dinner, and then afternoon lunch and then the evening meal called supper and then what they called a snack before going to bed.

He had not seen the dark yet in this summer because
his grandmother put him to bed when it was still light—nine or ten o'clock and still light—and the sun came up before he awakened.

But this time it was different. After the evening snack the gray-haired woman put on yet another pot of coffee to boil, and when it was finished his grandmother gave him a cup of coffee with milk and sugar in it and set him in a corner on the wood box and even as late as it was he did not feel sleepy because of the excitement in the air.

The women cleared off the kitchen table and spread the four chairs out and in a circle around it, well away from the table, and brought in two more wooden boxes from the porch to sit on. Another woman got the sheet bag with the colored cloth in it and put it on the table, and for a moment they all sat in chairs or on boxes sipping coffee.

They seemed to be waiting for something, and at first the boy could not tell why they were waiting and then Martha came down the stairs and into the kitchen. She was wearing a man's work shirt over her dress and had the sleeves rolled up past her elbows and
held a washbasin with cool water and a small cloth hanging on the side, and she looked very, very tired.

“How is our girl doing?” one of the women asked.

“Resting now. Sleeping. She's pretty tired but I think all right. Sometimes early labor like that is false. There are no new pains and everything feels positioned right. I don't know what to do but wait. I will have coffee now … oh, are we going to look at the quilt?” She had seen the bundle on the table. “Were you waiting for me?”

His grandmother stood and nodded and said, “Sometimes it is good to think of old things, old ways, and do the old stories when there is nothing to do but wait.”

And now the gray-haired woman took a folded quilt from the bag and the women stood and put their cups down on the counter, well away from the table, and each took a portion of the quilt and spread it out so the table was under the center, and the boy stood up on the wood box so that he was higher than the quilt and could see that it was very large, almost as large as the center of the kitchen, and made of dozens of patches
of cloth, all cut square and all sewn in a plain, rectangular pattern.

There was no real design to it, other than a simple checkerboard pattern, each piece about six inches square, and of all different colors.

Almost all the squares had words embroidered in the middle and the boy wished he could read. He knew the letters and could sound them out, and sometimes if two or three of them ran together he could make the sound of them, like
k-aaaaa-t
when he saw the word
cat
spelled on a piece of paper, but long words were hard for him and many of the words on the quilt were long.

The quilt was spread out, held by the women. They looked down at the cloth and then up at each other. The room grew quiet, breathlessly silent, so the boy could hear Kristina breathing as she slept upstairs, and he looked at the women's hands holding the edges of the quilt and none of them gripped hard but seemed instead to almost caress the cloth and he knew that he was seeing a sweet thing, a dear thing, like when his mother's face was there looking down on him as he
awakened from a nap, or when his grandmother looked at him when she held him.

Love. He did not know for sure exactly what love was but his mother had said she loved him, and loved his father. And his grandmother had said she loved him when she had that soft look, and he thought of it now. Love, they loved the cloth, no, loved the quilt, no, loved each other. They loved each other and the quilt and the cloth and it meant something he didn't understand.

His grandmother said, “We haven't gotten together to look at the quilt for a long time. Was it four, no, five months ago when … when Pearl passed?”

One of the women started to say something in Norwegian and his grandmother held up her hand.

“In American, please. English. The boy does not speak Norski and I want him to hear about the quilt. It is his life too, the quilt, as it is all our lives….”

“I said you were right. It was just after Pearl passed that we got together over to Martha's to look at the quilt. See, there's Pearl's patch right there, at the bottom.”

His grandmother put her hand on a square of white
cloth and turned to the boy. “See here? This was a piece of Pearl's wedding dress she saved for the quilt.”

“Where is Pearl?” the boy asked.

There was a moment of silence and then his grandmother said, “Why, she passed. She was old and she passed away last year, so we sewed the part of her wedding dress into the quilt.”

He still did not quite understand what passing or passing away meant. “Why do people pass things just because they're old?”

Another moment of silence and then his grandmother smiled and touched his cheek. “Not passing things. She died, that's what passing away means. Pearl was in her eighty-second year when she died and we sewed this piece of her wedding dress that she saved into the quilt so we would never forget her.”

He looked at the white piece of silken cloth sewn into the quilt with the name
PEARL
embroidered in the middle, and even without being able to read he began to understand.

“Pearl came from the old country and was so beautiful people named their children after her, hoping for her
beauty, and she married Sigurd,” the gray-haired woman said, “but either she couldn't have children or Sigurd was not able to father children. They made a good farm with a hundred and sixty acres of homestead land six miles south of here and had cattle and hogs and very good corn, but without young what is the use of it?”

And the women sat and held the quilt in their laps and nodded and listened. “Nothing is good without young …,” one of them said.

“But she was wise and knew that if she couldn't have one child, her own child, she could have all children and so she became mother to us all and in that time when things happened to us that we could not tell our own mothers we would talk to Pearl.” And here her voice softened. “And when we had questions about courting or dressing or marriage, we could talk to Pearl.”

There were more nods now, and sounds of assent.

“And when at last we were all grown and Pearl was old there wasn't a young girl or woman here or anywhere else in this township who had not talked to Pearl and been told of helpful things by Pearl and so when she passed she did not have one child, she had many children.
All of us here and all of our children and all of our men were her children, and that is the story of Pearl.”

And the boy realized that they all knew the story already and remembered it from the little square of white cloth and that the gray-haired woman had been telling the story for him, just for him. When she finished there was a moment of silence while Martha went upstairs to check on Kristina and just as the boy was going to thank the woman for telling him the story Martha came back. A woman to his right cleared her throat. She was named Louisa and wore her gray hair in a bun the way his grandmother did.