The Quilt (6 page)

“Here is the cloth from Sigurd's wedding suit,” she said. “And Pearl sewed it in with her own hands when Sigurd passed. His heart stopped while he was cleaning the barn in his fifty-second year and Pearl lived thirty more years after him, and she told me there was not a day that she didn't miss him, so much was their love.” She took a breath and whispered, “And that is the story of Sigurd, husband to Pearl, father to us all.”

And there was quiet again while they all thought of Sigurd.

The boy looked at the patches of cloth differently now, all of them with names, and did not like himself, because he couldn't read and understand the names, and swore he would learn to read the best he could and know all the names and what they meant.

“Are they all gone?” he asked. “Are they all passed?” And his grandmother nodded and he felt a great loss because he had not known them. He got off the wood box and went to the edge of the quilt and touched a piece of coarse wool sweater. In the middle it said
KARL MATHISON
and the boy whispered, “Who is this one?”

And his grandmother drew a breath, a quick intake of air, and said in a whisper, “That was my father, your great-grandfather, who passed long before you were born.”

And he said, “Can I know about him?” And she smiled and he saw a small tear in the corner of her eye and she said, “Come and sit on my lap and we will listen to Louisa tell the story of Karl, because Louisa is the best teller of all and my papa was the best man of all.”

The boy would never know that magic again in the way it came that evening and night, while they waited for Kristina to make the sounds and he learned the stories of the quilt. He listened hard, though he was exhausted, and drank the coffee with milk and sugar and looked first at the quilt while Louisa talked, but then watched the faces and hands of the women holding the cloth and saw all of it there as well.

“Karl was from the north part of the old country, where the winters were harder than even here, and he had learned the ax and two-man bucksaw and was so big his hands would cover stove lids. But the woods
were not for him because before he was fully grown the sea called him and he went for to fish in the banks, the Grand Banks between the old country and the new where the great cod were, to catch and salt and dry and make
lutefisk.
He fished from a great sailing schooner in the small dories and they talked of his catches, so huge they nearly sank his boat.

“Then he met Trina. She had many other suitors because she had dark hair and dark eyes, which were much prized, with everybody blond and light, and her beauty was such that he wanted to give up the sea, but he could not because the call was so strong. It was in his blood, you see, as it is in all the Mathison blood. They cannot leave the sea.

“But Trina married him anyway. Their love overcame the sea, and there were three children that lived. One was Gretchen, a girl of great beauty like her mother, and another, Alida”—here she paused and nodded to the boy's grandmother—“small and also of great beauty, and a boy named Gunnar, who went with his father and followed the sea. And it came that every summer when the light was long Karl and Gunnar
would go for the banks on the schooner and every winter they would come back and sit by the fire with Trina, repairing nets.

“But early one summer there was a late spring Norther and the seas grew huge in the Banks. Karl and Gunnar both were lost and that is the story of Karl.”

Here the boy saw his grandmother, who was crying softly, run her hand from the square with Karl's name on it to one next to it on which was embroidered the word
GUNNAR
and the boy looked at the faces of the other women.

Karl was there in their eyes while Louisa talked in the music of the old stories—and Pearl and all the ones who had passed and all the ones who would pass—and though he would never see the quilt again it would live with him forever.

He fell asleep in his grandmother's lap while Louisa was still telling stories and he vaguely felt her carry him to the soft bed and slept hard until just before dawn, when he heard the sound again from upstairs, only more piercing, and nothing could make him stay in the house.

He walked through the kitchen in his pajamas but all the women were up and dressed as though they had been up all night. They had a fire in the stove and were heating coffee and water and rinsing out rags in a large pan of hot water.

And the sound came again, louder, and he was frightened, but Louisa who had told the stories gave him a piece of bread with honey and smiled. She said: “Maybe the men should wait outside.”

“Is Kristina going to be all right?” he asked, dreading the answer, and her smile widened.

“This is the way it works, having babies. We heat water and drink coffee and there is noise and then it is over. You mustn't worry. She'll be fine. She is a great, strapping girl….”

Just then the sound came again, louder still, and he nearly took the screen door off getting outside, where he sat on the ground by the front gate with the dog leaning against him, feeding the dog bits of bread with honey on them while he waited for … he did not know exactly what.

He could still hear the sound, only greatly muffled
and ending in short gasps and grunts. He waited for it to stop—he didn't think men were supposed to hear such things. He was sure Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers would not have to hear them, and neither would any other men. And he realized, with something of a shock, that there were no men in these women's lives.

It was not like his mother's life. His father was in a place called Europe fighting in tanks against the enemy but his mother had other men in her life.

There were no men here. They had passed on or were gone like Kristina's husband, Olaf, who was fighting in the war. They were not here and the women were doing everything alone, even the man things— running the farms, driving the teams, all the hard work. Only the women and children. And while they seemed to like men and sometimes love them, which he could hear in their voices when they talked of Karl and Sigurd, they seemed to get along fine without them, and he petted the dog and wondered if Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers knew that they really weren't needed once they caught the rustlers.

He wasn't sure how long he sat petting the dog and not listening to the sounds as they grew closer and closer together, but he had just decided to take the dog and see if there was a small stream down in back of the barn where he could make stick and leaf boats to bomb with rocks when he realized the sounds had stopped altogether.

He stood, holding his breath, listening. He heard nothing for a full minute and then, in the quiet, the new cry of a baby, and moments later the screen door opened and his grandmother was there, smiling.

“Come inside,” she called. “Come inside and see.”

There came a time then of such gentle happiness, week folding on week until a month had passed, that he nearly forgot all the bad things in his life, like missing his mother, and his father having to fight, and just lived each day looking for what new thing would come.

He had never paid much attention to babies except to hear them cry on the elevated train in Chicago when he was going to the Cozy Corner bar with his mother. They always seemed loud and messy. But he liked this baby.

It was a boy, named Olaf after his father and his
grandfather—Olaf the grandfather who was gone now and whose name was on the quilt. When the boy had first gone into the house, into the kitchen, he had almost turned and ran out. There were rags everywhere, all messy and bloody, and women washing them out in the sink and singing and laughing and not seeming to care at all how it looked, and he thought at first that Kristina must be dead because how could she live after such a mess and then he wondered how hard it must be to have a baby. They must have done some terrible thing to her to get the baby out of her. He almost didn't dare to go up the stairs. “Ten pounds,” Martha said, washing her hands at the sink. “As sure as I'm standing here, ten pounds; what a little lunker for a first baby.” And that scared him more because he did not know what a lunker was, or how big babies should be if ten pounds was something called a lunker.

But when his grandmother led him up and into the bedroom it was all clean and the light was coming brightly through the windows and curtains, and Kristina lay back on her pillow looking very tired but
very, very happy, smiling gently at the bundle that lay next to her on the bed.

He stopped by the door but she said, “Come, look at what caused all the noise,” and he came over and she opened the blanket and his grandmother said, “He looks just like his father.”

“Is his father all wrinkled like that?” he asked, and they both laughed, although he meant it. The baby was all red and wrinkled and so tiny it didn't seem possible it had been the only thing inside Kristina, and he had a dozen questions, but she was so tired and he was so amazed that here was a baby, a little boy named Olaf, that he simply stood, staring, until his grandmother took him by the hand.

“Come now, let Kristina and Olaf rest. They've had a big day.”

And she led him away, back down into the kitchen where the women were still cleaning and there was still that mess that almost made him sick, so he went back outside with the dog and walked down in back of the barn and thought of how he was Roy Rogers and Jake was Roy's dog, Bullet, and they started looking for
rustlers on the edge of the pasture where rustlers might be trying to hide.

And that led to searching for robber gangs who were raiding the settlement in one of the movies he saw, and that led to thinking that he and Jake were fighting the war in Europe, and soon the day went to chores time and he helped the women and the next day was the same, playing with Jake.

In four days Elmer came and took two of the women home and two days later a wagon came and took three more and only Louisa was left to help his grandmother with the chores and not long after that a day came when Kristina left the baby in a cradle and slowly came to the barn for chores.

By the end of two weeks it was like there had always been a baby and the boy had become stronger, so he not only kept the cats off the cows and carried the stools but carried the milk buckets to the end of the barn as well, only spilling a little when he emptied them into the milk can.

Then Louisa left and it was just the four of them. Each morning the boy would look into the cradle with
his face close to the baby and one morning Olaf smiled at him and he knew it was a smile even though his grandmother said it was a burp grin.

Endless days of chores in the morning and helping his grandmother gather eggs and playing with Jake and the cats, who became enemies in Europe or rustlers that needed to be chased and cornered before they could run off with the ranch's cattle.

Once he asked his grandmother if he could have a metal plate and some beans to eat, and sleep in the barn with a hat over his face. And she found a can of pork and beans and an old felt hat and even though they had to use a horse collar for a pillow because they had no saddle the boy slept in the barn, or started to until there were some noises after dark, when he had the hat over his face, that he wasn't sure about and he and Jake came back to the house just in case it was something they couldn't handle. That was how he told it to his grandmother when he came back in after almost an hour in the dark barn wearing the too-large old felt hat and dragging the blanket.

“I wasn't sure I could handle whatever it was making the noise. You know, without a six-shooter.”

And she smiled at Kristina, but they nodded at his explanation as he went in to his feather bed in the small room off the kitchen.

In the evenings they would sit at the table and Kristina would nurse the baby and he would not look, because he felt—for some reason that he did not understand—that he wasn't supposed to watch, and his grandmother would try to teach him a card game called whist, which she was supposed to be very good at but which he never quite understood. He got the suits and sort of understood the numbering but the face cards and rules were impossible for him, and in the end they wound up playing a game called war, where his grandmother would lay a card down without looking at it and he would do the same and whoever had the bigger card took what was called the trick.