The Quilt Page 2

  Lou Ann thought of the four quilts Mary had already done for them, the big one for their own bed and the three with patches of animal-covered fabrics for the children. “Mary makes the prettiest quilts I ever saw.”

  “Made, honey. Mary made the prettiest quilts. I didn’t say anything about that, now, did I. Not a peep. Wouldn’t trade anything for those pretty ones upstairs. Sell my car before I sold my quilt. Wasn’t talking about that for a minute. I just don’t want the old lady to get disappointed.”

  Lou Ann knew better than to hit her husband head on with any disagreement when he was in one of his moods. “She tell you how the Lord told her to do the quilt?”

  “No, she didn’t, and I’ll bet you it was because she was afraid I’d show her just how wrong she was to even think it.” He picked up the last bit of pie his littlest girl had left on her plate and pushed it in his mouth, then licked his fingers carefully. Lou Ann made just about the best brown sugar pie he’d ever tasted. She’d even managed to improve on the recipe Mary’d given her.

  “I don’t know, honey.” Lou Ann stood and started gathering plates. “Mary’s not the type of lady to say it was a message from the Lord when it wasn’t.”

  “Momma’s the best woman I know,” he said to her, retreating back, then added hastily, “except for you, honey. But I do declare she’s getting on. You know, she’s reached that point where maybe she’s not thinking so clearly anymore.”

  Lou Ann appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Don’t you let her hear you say that.”

  “What, you think you’re married to a crazy man?” Everett asked, rolling his eyes.

  Being an intelligent woman who loved her husband very much, Lou Ann hid her smile in the kitchen and held her tongue.

  “You know what I love the most about Mary?” Lou Ann told Jody, Jonas’s wife, the next morning. “She’s always so involved.”

  “That just about says it all,” Jody agreed. “She’s just about the most involved woman I’ve ever met.”

  But Lou Ann wasn’t finished. “You don’t ever get the feeling that she’s just sitting there on the sidelines watching you go through whatever it is that’s ailing you. Mary’s right in there with you. When I talk to her, sometimes it’s like I’m talking right to her heart. Like there’s not a thing between me and all that love.”

  “Just scoop out all you need and carry it away,” Jody added.

  “If I was sick, I’d rather go talk with Mary for five minutes than have fifteen doctors work on me all day,” Lou Ann’s next-door neighbor and best friend, Lynn Forrest, told them. Lou Ann and Mary were the only persons in the whole wide world who still called her Lynn. When her husband, Tommy, had started courting her, he had renamed her Rooster, on account of her red hair, her jerky way of moving, and the fact that her maiden name had been Rosters. Lynn said knowing that she was going to have to hear that for the rest of her life had just about done the marriage in before it had started.

  There were five of them gathered in Jody’s kitchen that morning. Amy Harris was a friend from down the road, a heavyset woman with the biggest laugh anybody’d ever heard. Her laugh wasn’t loud. It was just plain big. When Amy laughed, there was just too much happiness and humor there for anybody within hearing range not to smile. Her friends had the habit of looking over at one another when they heard that big bell-shaped laugh ring out. It gave them something to grin about without being so self-conscious. They would look at one another and chuckle like, there she goes again, Amy’s laughing. Can you believe it? Amy didn’t mind their laughing at her. It was enough just to have them laugh.

  The other woman was a tiny wisp of a lady Lynn’s husband Tommy had renamed Tidbit. Her real name was Nancy Starling, and she made up for her lack of size with an energy that was just plain awesome. She stood a full four feet ten inches tall in her lace-up shoes and weighed about as much as a wet breeze. She was a nurse at the hospital where Lynn worked as a physical therapist, and had the tendency to make her patients want to stand at attention in bed when she walked into the room. Nancy needed to stand on her tiptoes to take their temperature when the beds were cranked upright, but even the doctors had long since learned not to cross Nurse Tidbit, as everyone called her behind her back. Tommy’s names had a habit of sticking like burrs in a horse’s mane.

  “That woman is a saint,” Nancy said quietly, washing blackberries with a speed that made her hands blur. “Every time I see her I tell myself I wish there was something more I could do for her.”

  They had been out picking blackberries and were getting ready to make cobbler. They were all itching from redbug bites and stained from forehead to knees with blackberry juice, and all were having an enormously good time. Jody was known for making the best blackberry cobbler in three counties. But the pies were really just an excuse for five good friends to get together and ramble through the woods and laugh and spend a morning catching up on one another’s lives.

  “It’s hard to do anything for Mary,” Jody agreed, pressing out a dozen mounds of pie-crust batter with her rolling pin. One of the secrets of her cobbler was that the crust was made with butter-cookie dough. “She makes me feel like a little girl playing with her mother’s things whenever I say I’d like to help her with something.”

  “Maybe so,” Lou Ann said. “But just the same I’m worried about her this time. She’s too old to be taking on a quilt by herself.”

  “Maybe if we all went together she’d listen to us,” Nancy said doubtfully.

  “We’ll take up one of the cobblers and talk to her,” Jody decided for all of them.

  But it sure as goodness wasn’t all easy street, taking a fresh-baked pie or cake into Mary’s house. She was the legendary baker to three generations. The highest accolade a cake or pie could receive was, you’ve been taking lessons up at Mary’s, haven’t you?

  Mary rarely said anything when somebody brought baked goods by. She’d just sit and smile her heartfelt smile, take a little silver pie fork, and taste the first tiny sliver. The guest would slide up close to the edge of her chair and hold her breath. Mary would take this teensy bite, close her eyes a minute, open them, and smile again. That gave the guest signal to smile back—which was pretty hard, what with their heart in their throat and their palms slick. Then came the verdict. If Mary put the cake down, it was back to the kitchen, girl, and try again. But if she took another bite, well, rest assured there was a winner here.

  So Jody was understandably worried when she walked up the long-hill drive from her home to Mary’s. Unconsciously the others all kind of pulled in behind her. But their worries were forgotten when they walked into Mary’s sitting room and found her sorting through a pile of beautiful old clothes.

  “Been up since dawn washing all these old things,” Mary said in greeting. “That after spending half the night trying to remember where I stored them.”

  In Mary’s typically neat fashion, the quilt frame was set up against the far wall, as much out of the way as a seven-by-seven wood frame with three-foot corner-posts could be in a formal sitting parlor. Especially a frame which was fitted with a stretch of the prettiest pastel-blue cotton backing any of the ladies had ever seen.

  “I brought you a home-made blackberry cobbler,” Jody said, her eyes caught by the frame and the backing. “Momma, where on earth did you get that beautiful cloth?”

  “Bless your heart, child, just put it on the kitchen cabinet and we’ll have it in a bit.” Mary straightened from the pile with a grimace and a hand pressing hard on her back. “Been bent over for too long, I reckon.”

  “You ought to sit down for a while,” Jody said, handing the pie to Nancy and hurrying over.

  To their surprise Mary did not object. She let herself be led over and seated by the window. All she said was, “Got an awful lot of work ahead of me.”

  Jody knelt beside the chair. “Momma, you just have to let us help you with this.”

  “Isn’t that pretty cloth?” Mary said in reply, looking over at the quilt
frame. “It came to me late last night. I found that, oh, it must be five years ago if it’s a day. You remember old Mrs. Lane, used to run that fabric shop downtown?”

  “’Course I do, Momma, but it was more than five years. Mrs. Lane passed away, my goodness, it must be ten or eleven years now.”

  “Whenever. It was just before she closed that pretty shop of hers. She came by for coffee one day and gave me that fabric you see over there. Said she’d been saving it for someone special.”

  Amy walked over to the quilt frame, ran her hand down the cloth and exclaimed, “Will you just come over here and feel this? That’s the softest cotton I’ve ever seen.”

  “Feels like velvet,” Nancy agreed.

  “What is it, Miss Mary, some mixture with silk thread?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know. All I remember is what Mrs. Lane said to me. The first time she felt it, she knew it’d make somebody a very special quilt. Mrs. Lane planned to use it herself, but what with one thing and another she never got around to it.” Mary was quiet for a very long time. “It just came to me. Wasn’t more than a week after she gave me this material that we laid Mrs. Lane in her grave.”

  “She was a fine woman,” Jody said, a small smile of remembrance playing on her face. “She used to teach my Sunday school.”

  “Her boys used to help us out around the place,” Mary said. “Big, fine boys, both of them.”

  “I didn’t know she had any children, Miss Mary,” Lou Ann said.

  “That was back before your time, honey. Didn’t either one of them come back from the war.”

  “This sure is nice fabric,” Nancy said. “I can’t seem to stop touching it.”

  “Know just exactly what you mean,” Mary said. “Been walking around it and looking at it and playing with it ever since I got up.”

  Rooster was on her knees by the pile of brightly colored clothing. She lifted up one dress, made of printed fabric, with a high hand-knit collar and ruffled sleeves. It was a long dress, so long that when Rooster stood and held it to her body the hem almost touched the ground. The print was a simple one of tiny red roses, so many a dozen would barely cover the space of a child’s palm, and even tinier pink hearts. It was the kind of print dress that was once sold in every general store in every small town in America, and today wasn’t found outside of old-time movies and the attics of people who didn’t ever like to throw things away.

  And it was beautiful.

  Rooster did a little swirl around, letting the full skirt billow out around her ankles. “Miss Mary, this is just adorable.”

  “Thank you, child,” Mary replied, a small smile of memories playing on her lips.

  “I don’t remember ever seeing this before.” Jody walked over and lifted the hem. The skirt was richly flounced and trimmed with the same hand-crocheted lace as the sleeves and neckline. “How old is this?”

  “Older than any of you, I can tell you that for sure,” Mary replied. “I was married in that dress.”

  Jody let the hem drop. “And you’re going to cut it up for a quilt?”

  “I most certainly am. Can’t imagine what on earth I was doing, holding on to that old thing for so long. Wasn’t even sure I still had it. Found it down on the bottom of my hope chest. It was still wrapped in the same old paper I put it in, my goodness, it must be sixty years ago. Smelled of camphor and mothballs so bad I had to wash it six times. It’s a wonder the thing’s still in one piece.”

  “But, Momma,” Jody searched for words. “This dress is priceless.”

  “It’s in such good condition,” Rooster said, lifting so as to inspect the dress more closely. “I can’t believe it’s so old.”

  Mary laughed, a short sound which showed her age. “I bought that dress at Jones’ General Store. Back then, folks came from all over the county to shop there. I can still remember crocheting the lace late at night, praying all the while I would make that man a good wife.”

  Lou Ann reached into the pile and came up with a beautiful blue satin dress. The body looked made for a large doll, but the skirt hung down a good four feet. “Miss Mary, what on earth is this?”

  “What I spent all last night looking for,” Mary replied. “That was the first nightie Jody’s husband ever wore.”

  The ladies had a good laugh over that. Mary went on, “I learned this tradition from my own momma, God rest her soul. That’s the way we used to dress up our children for their first look at the world.”

  “There’s six of them here,” Lou Ann said, sorting through the pile.

  “That’s right, honey. I had six children. Only two of them lived past their first year.”

  “I didn’t know that, Momma,” Jody said.

  “Times change, child. Back then, there were lots of sicknesses just waiting to snatch the little ones away. All we had was a traveling country doctor and our prayers to see us through.” Mary spent a long moment staring down at a beautiful pink gown, said quietly, “Sometimes it just wasn’t enough.”

  “But you can’t go cutting these up to make a quilt, Momma.”

  “Oh can’t I?” Mary grasped the sides of her chair and pushed herself erect. “You just hand me those scissors over there on the ledge and watch what I can’t do.”

  With a swiftness based on long experience Jody saw she had taken the wrong tack. She moved to Mary’s side and tried again, “Momma, you’ve just got to let us help you with this.”

  Mary let herself be seated again. “I’ve been thinking about that too,” she admitted. “All the while I was rummaging around upstairs and seeing just how tired this old body could get, I’ve been wondering how on earth I was going to get this quilt finished.”

  “We’d love to help you,” Lou Ann exclaimed.

  “Sure to goodness would, Miss Mary,” Nancy agreed.

  “That’s all well and good,” Mary said. “And I’d be grateful, there’s no question about that. But you’re all gonna have to promise me one thing before you even think about picking up a needle.”

  “Anything,” Jody said for them all. She looked at the wizened old lady sitting crouched over to one side in the big horsehair settee, saw the hands twisted up sideways with arthritis, and felt down in her heart the lady’s incredible burden of years. A lump gathered so big in her throat she thought for a moment she was going to have to go get a drink of water.

  “This is something the Lord’s called me to do,” Mary said in that quiet way of hers. “I can’t explain it to you, but I know just as sure as I know my own name that this is something He wants done. And if I do it for Him, it’s got to be the very best quilt I’ve ever made. Not a stitch out of place, not a piece of material laid wrong.”

  “We understand,” Lou Ann said, caught up in the seriousness of the moment.

  “There’s something else. It came to me this morning as I was putting these things in the wash. For every stitch that goes into this quilt, I want you to say a prayer. And it can’t be just any prayer. It has to be a prayer of thanksgiving.”

  A moment of silence greeted her words. Finally Jody said, with eyes warning her friends, “Why, that sounds just fine, Momma.”

  “Far too little thanks given these days,” Mary said, more to herself than to the others. “With everything the Lord gives us, all we can think of is what we don’t have. Like a bunch of spoiled children.”

  “We’d be happy to do that for you, Miss Mary,” Lou Ann said, her eyes mirroring the blankness of Jody’s.

  “Not for me, child. Not for me. For our Lord. This is His quilt.”

  “Yes ma’am, that’s what I meant.”

  “Then say what you mean,” Mary said with a touch of sharpness. “I won’t have a hand touch this quilt that doesn’t have heart and mind fastened on their Father.”

  That pretty much put a stop to further talk. But as soon as they left, the talk bubbled back up like water from an underground spring. And that night the telephone lines near to melted from the heat.

  “I just don’t know what to
think,” Everett said to Jody over the phone. His brother Jonas never did talk enough to suit Everett when he was in one of his hyper moods. Talking to Jonas was like dropping a stone into a deep, dark well. You had to wait forever, and then there was only this distant plunk. Though he’d never admit it, Everett liked somebody to get all excited back at him, so he’d have a reason to do his little two-step and shout till his face got red.

  Jody usually enjoyed Everett’s little show. She knew it kept him from doing his song and dance in front of Lou Ann too often, and it always made her glad to have married the other brother. “It was awful funny looking at all those clothes laid out on the floor like that. I do believe I saw all her embroidered linens in that pile.”

  “I don’t know, sister. I just don’t know what to think,” Everett repeated, feeling the pressure rise. “Maybe it’s time I went over and talked to the old folks home about a place for Momma.”

  That shocked Jody awake. Strange as Mary seemed over this quilt business, having her shipped off to some home was the furthest thing from Jody’s mind. Jody opened her mouth, closed it, wondered how she could stop this before it went any further. “It’s not as bad as all that, Ev.”

  Everett wasn’t so easily slowed down. “Honey, maybe you don’t see how she’s slipping, living out near her and all. We oughtta have one of those specialists go out and give her a good check-up, listen to these stories of hers. Have her tell him about this call from heaven to make a quilt. At her age.”

  Jody had trouble answering right off, on account of her having this image flash inside her mind. It was one of those little things that didn’t usually have any meaning since she saw it every day.

  She saw herself standing at the kitchen sink, looking up the rise back behind their house as she did every morning while she was fixing breakfast. The sun was just clearing the woods behind her, throwing out that first golden beam. It caught Mary’s white-work and turned it the color of molten gold. The rainwells Jonas had put in along the roof four or five years ago were galvanized and didn’t need painting; when the sun hit them, they shone like a crown of light around her home. Jody stood there holding the phone and listening to Everett work himself up and saw herself looking out the window one dawn and knowing that someone else was living up there in Mary’s home.