True Colors (9 page)

Hannah and I didn’t know where the cat spent her days, but each morning and evening she was waiting by the barn for her food. Already she’d become part of our lives and I worried about her. I wanted to scoop her up, hug her, and tell her I’d always take care of her, but whenever I got too close, she’d run. So I squatted as close as she’d let me and talked to her while she ate. I told her things I’d never told another living soul, not even Nadine: that I was scared of clowns, and that I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up (though after Hannah and I’d seen the movie
The Greatest Show on Earth
, I’d started thinking about being a trapeze artist), and—the biggest secret of all—that I was waiting for my real mama to come get me.

Sometimes, Hannah joined me out in the yard, where we watched the northern lights and listened to the frogs grumbling from the lake. Some nights, we saw the cat out in the orchard, hunting.

“Looks like she’s planning on staying awhile,” Hannah said, and my heart sang.

“What should we call her?” I asked.

Hannah thought a moment.

“Cat,” she said.

I should have known better than to ask. Anybody who’d name a child Blue wasn’t likely to think up anything better for a cat.

The next day, July 1, felt more like November. I put on a sweatshirt to work in the garden, but even so, I shivered. My fingers felt stiff as I picked potato bugs off the potato plants and dropped them in the can of kerosene. I remembered Miss Paisley telling us about 1816, the Year of No Summer, when they’d had snow every month of the year. No one then had known it was caused by a huge volcano the year before. I hadn’t heard of any volcano blowing up, so I guessed we weren’t going to have another year with no summer, but it sure felt cold. I thought about digging out my mittens, but that just seemed wrong, so I warmed my hands in my armpits instead.

Hannah was rubbing her hands, too.

“Gracious, it feels like we could get a frost tonight!” she said. “I think we’d better cover the garden.” (That’s the
thing about living in the Northeast Kingdom—you can get a frost even in July.)

I helped Hannah carry old quilts and blankets out to the garden. I loved fall, but that didn’t mean I wanted to see it coming in July! I didn’t want to even think about fall yet; that would mean school starting and Nadine going home, and I wouldn’t see her again till next summer.

I still hadn’t quite forgiven Nadine for what she’d said about me not having a father, and I hated to admit it, but I missed her. I didn’t want the whole summer to be ruined by some stupid words.

“Sometimes you just have to be the bigger person,” Hannah says.

I decided that as soon as Hannah and I were done covering the garden, I’d go over and apologize (even though I hadn’t done anything wrong) and make up with Nadine. So far, everything between us had been a disappointment, but that didn’t mean the whole summer had to be ruined. We could still save it. I just had to remind Nadine of all the fun we’d had over the years, make her remember that I’d been her best friend long before she’d ever met her other friends. We could build a fire down by the lake, and Nadine’s mom might let us make s’mores. Just the thought of Nadine and me sitting around a campfire eating s’mores made me feel better. Besides, I wanted us to make up before the July Fourth celebrations. With the parade and picnic, Nadine and I always spent the whole day at the fairgrounds and got
to stay up late to watch the fireworks. It wouldn’t even seem like the Fourth of July without Nadine.

Hannah and I covered the tomato and cucumber plants. As we worked, I saw Cat watching us.

“She’ll be cold tonight,” I said. “Maybe I could make her some sort of bed.”

“She’ll be warm enough in the barn,” Hannah said, but when she saw me biting my lip the way I always do when I’m worried, she smiled.

“I’m sure you can find some old thing in my closet that she can sleep on,” she said.

Before I left for Nadine’s, I rummaged around until I found just what I wanted, a small patchwork quilt, blue with little white daisies printed on it. It was torn, and frayed at the edges, but I didn’t think Cat would mind.

Hannah’s mouth formed a little O when I showed it to her.

“I won’t use it if you don’t want me to,” I said.

“No, it’s not that,” Hannah said. “It’s just, well, that’s the quilt you were wrapped in when I found you.”

chapter 12

I forgot all about going to Nadine’s.

“Who made the quilt?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” Hannah said.

I stared at the quilt as if it could tell me who my mother was. My own mama, my
real
mama, had touched it—had maybe even made it herself, before wrapping me in it and putting me in that copper kettle.

“There wasn’t a note on the quilt?” I said.

“No,” said Hannah.

“You looked all around in the kettle?” I said.

“There wasn’t a note,” Hannah said. Her voice had a sharp edge, so I didn’t ask her any more of the questions swirling inside my head.

I wondered what thoughts must have been going through my mama’s head when she left me. Did she walk away without looking back, or did she stop and wonder if
she was doing the right thing? Since then, had she ever thought and wondered about
me
, the way I so often wondered about
her
?

I tucked the quilt under my sweatshirt while I fed the animals, gathered eggs, and milked the cows. I sat on it while I ate supper and slept with it on my pillow, hoping it would whisper its secret to me, tell me why my mother had abandoned me.

The next day, I showed the quilt to Cat.

“This was my mama’s,” I told her. Finding the quilt was auspicious. Someone in the quilting club might know who had made it.

After supper, Hannah put on a sweater and picked up her basket of quilting.

“We’re meeting at Ida’s tonight,” Hannah said. “I’ll be home about ten.”

“I’m going with you,” I said.

Hannah eyed me suspiciously. I couldn’t tell her I wanted to learn how to quilt; Hannah knew I liked sewing about as much as pounding my thumb with a hammer.

“It gets kind of lonesome here when you’re gone,” I said. I felt bad lying to Hannah, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by telling her I was looking for my
real
mama.

“What do you do in the quilting club?” I asked Hannah on the way.

“Some weeks we work on our own quilts,” Hannah said.
“Other times we work together on quilts for orphans or the elderly. Right now we’re working on a display quilt for the celebration.”

I wondered what I was getting myself into, and there were butterflies in my stomach when Mrs. Barclay met us at her door.

“Why, Blue!” she said. “I’m delighted you’re joining us this evening. Finally going to learn how to quilt, are you?”

I nodded guiltily, not wanting to tell her the real reason I was there.

There were six other women besides Hannah. Except for Esther, they were all old, and they could have been sisters, all of them with gray hair and glasses and wearing aprons. They called each other by their first names—Ida, Bertha, Hortense, Mabel, Gertrude—but I called them Mrs. Barclay, Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Potter, Mrs. Fitch, and Mrs. Appleby, except for Esther, who was the youngest in the group (besides me, of course).

Mrs. Barclay sat me next to Esther, who smiled and showed me how to make stitches so small they wouldn’t show. Her fingers flew, while mine seemed big and clumsy.

I remembered all the things I hated about sewing. My thread knotted and broke, and I pricked my fingers so many times that my piece of cloth looked like it had the measles.

All around me, the women laughed and visited, chattering like a flock of starlings, and I saw it was going to be a
lot harder than I thought to come right out and ask them about my mama.

The club was called Needles in a Haystack.

“Of course we were all younger, and thinner, when we picked that name,” Mrs. Fitch laughed.

I thought it was a dumb name until Mrs. Appleby told me the names of some quilting clubs in nearby towns: the Nimble Thimbles, On Pins and Needles (sounded painful), Patchworks (I wasn’t sure what that meant), and Sew Far, Sew Good (that one I really didn’t get).

The display quilt they were working on was for the sesquicentennial and showed the story of the town’s history. Some of the buildings they’d sewn into the quilt were still around, like the Congregational church, Pierce’s Pharmacy, the
Monitor
office, and the town hall.

Scattered across all the tables were hundreds—no, thousands, it seemed like—of tiny pieces of cloth in every shape and color. I wondered how the women knew where all the pieces were supposed to go.

“It’s like a puzzle, isn’t it?” Esther said. “You have all these pieces, and each piece, by itself, is nothing, but put them together and voilà! You’ve made something beautiful.”

The only person I’d ever heard say
voilà
before was Mrs. Tilton.

I leaned closer to see what Esther was sewing onto the quilt.

“You recognize that?” Esther asked.

I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I hesitated.

“It looks like the Statue of Liberty,” I told her.

“It
is
,” she said. “Most people don’t know that our town
almost
got the Statue of Liberty.”

I looked at her close to see if she was kidding.

“No, it’s true,” she said. “Several cities and towns bid for it.”

“But we didn’t get it,” Mrs. Thompson said. “So I don’t think we should put it into the quilt.”

“We were one of the towns in the running for it,” said Mrs. Potter, “so I think we should include it. This quilt is about the town’s history, and
almost
getting the Statue of Liberty is part of our history.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem quite right, putting it in,” Mrs. Thompson said.

I didn’t think it seemed quite right, either, but I didn’t say so.

I recognized some of the people they were sewing onto the quilt, too: George Washington Henderson, Alexander Twilight, and Spencer Chamberlain. We’d learned about them in fourth grade when we were studying Vermont history. They were all people Mr. Gilpin was putting into his pageants, too.

George Washington Henderson had once been a slave, but had come to Vermont after the war, gone to college, and
become a professor, minister, and school principal, teaching six subjects, including Latin, Greek, French, and German.

The thought of all those languages made my head spin; I had enough trouble just with English!

Alexander Twilight, the first black man to graduate from Middlebury College, had come here and built a huge stone school, all by himself with only the help of an ox. It was called the Old Stone House, and we’d taken a field trip there.

But my favorite story was about Spencer Chamberlain.

Spencer was famous for outrunning Runaway Pond back in 1810. It had all started when Aaron Willson needed more water to run his mill.

Just five miles away sat Long Pond, a mile long and one mile wide. If only he could get water from Long Pond, Mr. Willson thought, he’d have enough water to run a hundred mills! So he came up with a plan: he would dig a ditch from Long Pond, and the water would fill the stream and get the mill running again. But he needed help to dig that ditch. So, on Wednesday, June 6, about sixty men walked to Long Pond and started digging. What they didn’t know was that right below their feet was a layer of quicksand.

That quicksand gave way under them, and all of Long Pond roared through the hole they’d dug. Mr. Willson thought of his wife, still in the mill.

“My wife!” he cried. And someone else cried, “Run, Spencer, run!”

Spencer took off running.

A wall of water forty feet high chased him down through the valley. He burst into the mill, grabbed Mrs. Willson, and dragged her far up the hillside just as the water swept the mill away.

Imagine running five miles at top speed, through thick woods, with a flood licking at your heels. Miss Paisley had said Spencer suffered from aches and pains the rest of his life. I should think so! Hannah and I lived five miles from town, and I couldn’t imagine running that far with a flood chasing me. The Wright brothers hadn’t interrupted Miss Paisley once when she’d told us that story, but then they loved hearing about any disaster: the
Titanic
, the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago fire, the Johnstown flood. It made sense. The Wright brothers and disasters just seemed to go together, like macaroni and cheese.