Elm Creek Quilts [12] The Winding Ways Quilt (18 page)

On her next trip to the library, Gwen searched for books on the history of quilts, but found only three academic texts among the many instructional booklets and pattern collections. Nibbling gingersnaps in front of the fireplace as she read, she found herself intrigued by the black-and-white photographs of antique American quilts from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as quilted clothing and other artifacts that were older still. One of the books included reproductions of old quilt block patterns, occasionally with captions noting the origin of the pattern, its name, or both. A certain Revolutionary War battle inspired one block’s name, the author noted in an aside, and resistance to an unpopular law another. The tantalizing glimpse into history alternately intrigued and frustrated Gwen. It seemed the author had expected her audience to be so familiar with her subject that only passing references to a common store of knowledge were needed. Apparently she had not anticipated an era when her book might be all that remained of traditions lost to history.

That same book included pictures of Pineapple quilts that closely resembled the one Gwen had rescued from the lost and found, as well as other Pineapple patterns completely different in design. To her disappointment, none of the books included that telling detail limiting the use of the Pineapple block to a specific social situation, era, or geographic region. The quilt could have been made anywhere during the last century for any reason. Undaunted, Gwen copied the books’ bibliographies. Though she had exhausted the resources of the closest public library, someday, perhaps, she might be able to continue the search elsewhere.

At the next meeting of the Brown Does, Gwen reluctantly reported that her search had stalled. “At least you tried,” said one well-meaning Doe. “We never expected you to find out who made the quilt.”

“Only because it’s been a mystery so long,” Gwen’s mother hastened to add. But Gwen, former valedictorian, failed academic prodigy, heard only that they had expected her to disappoint them. For all that she claimed not to care what the people of Brown Deer thought, their diminished expectations wounded her.

Late that night, lying on her childhood bed, hands on her rounding abdomen, Gwen thought about the quilt and about the eldest Brown Doe’s certainty that the unknown quilter must have been either lazy or incompetent, all because of the paper foundations left within the layers. How unfair it was to assume the worst of her based upon that single factor, that one mistake, if it was a mistake, when everything else about the quilt suggested that it was the work of a talented craftswoman! Perhaps she had left the papers intact by choice. Perhaps it was not a choice any other quilter would agree with, but perhaps to her, it had seemed the best artistic path to follow.

If only Gwen could ask her.

Gwen propped herself up on her elbows and studied the quilt, still draped over her vanity next to the library books. Perhaps there was a way, but if she set out upon that road, she could not turn back.

She crept through the darkened house, finding her way by touch and moonlight, stepping over the squeaky third stair by a longtime habit she had forgotten until then. Her mother’s sewing basket sat on the end table beside her favorite chair. Gwen risked switching on the lamp long enough to find her mother’s seam ripper, which she quietly carried back to her room.

Spreading the Pineapple quilt facedown over her bed, Gwen knelt on the floor and peered closely at the quilting stitches that held the layers together. For the first time, she realized that the quilting had been completed by machine. Of course. The paper foundations would have been very difficult to sew through by hand, a problem the quilter would have discovered within the first few stitches. At that point, she still could have removed the foundations and proceeded without the impediment, or she could have abandoned the quilt top altogether. Her choice to continue on by machine offered more proof that she had wanted the papers intact.

Gwen thought she heard the Brown Does gasp in horror as she slipped the sharp tip of the seam ripper through one of the stitches fastening the binding to the back of the quilt and severed it.

Once begun, it was easy to proceed. Gwen picked out the binding stitches along two perpendicular sides of the quilt, then began the more painstaking process of removing the stitches sewn through a single block in the corner. In case her hunch had led her down a false trail, she wanted to limit the damage to one small portion of the quilt.

When she had removed enough stitches to separate the layers, she peeled back the backing, wrinkling her nose at the scent of mildew. More carefully, she lifted the fragile inner layer of cotton, a dull white flecked with what seemed to be bits of twigs or hulls. Some of the white fluff clung to the paper foundations, so Gwen gently brushed off the remnants, her heart quickening when she spied not plain paper, but a printed page, yellowed with time.

Eagerly she scanned the faded lines, but as she read, her puzzlement grew.

It seemed, as far as she could discern, to be a page torn from an outdated legal text, a few annotated paragraphs about some obscure matter of property law.

In other words, scrap paper.

Disappointment flooded her. She left the seam ripper on the vanity, turned out the light, and climbed into bed. Another dead end, another failure. And now she would have to explain to the Brown Does that she had ruined the quilt in pursuit of a whim.

The next morning Gwen awoke hungry and cold. She had kicked off the bedcovers in the night, and as she rose shivering from bed, she saw that the room was filled with a familiar, diffuse light. Drawing on her robe, she went to the window to find the world outside blanketed in snow.

Without sparing a glance for the ruined Pineapple quilt, Gwen joined her mother and father downstairs for breakfast. Mulling over the previous night’s disappointment, she barely heard her mother’s cheery offer to drive her to the library.

“We’ll have to wait for your dad to clear the driveway,” her mother said. “Gwen? Are you listening?”

Gwen slapped the table, rattling the dishes. “It’s outdated now, but it wasn’t then,” she exclaimed, bolting from her chair as quickly as her ample belly allowed. She hurried upstairs, seized the seam ripper, and swiftly picked out stitches holding a second Pineapple block to the batting and backing. After long minutes, she worked enough thread free to peel back the layers, enough to see that this second foundation was different in color and texture from the first—coarser, less brittle, with broad ink strokes instead of printed text. Peering closer, Gwen realized that it was a page torn from a composition book, with a nursery rhyme written in a child’s careful, studied penmanship.

“Gwen,” her mother gasped from the doorway. “What have you done?”

Gwen whirled around, instinctively blocking the quilt from her mother’s view. “I had to,” she said. “It was the only way to know. But it was worth it. See? I was right! Whoever made this quilt didn’t choose pages from a single, outdated book ready to be pulped. She took them deliberately from several sources, and I’m sure she left the foundations intact just as purposefully.”

She draped the quilt on the bed and waved her mother over. Her mother’s alarm faded into puzzlement as she saw the page from the legal text sewn firmly to the child’s penmanship homework. With a knowing frown, she held out her palm until Gwen sheepishly passed her the seam ripper she had taken without permission. Gwen’s mother tentatively picked out more of the adjacent stitches until the two foundations directly below the first pair were revealed.

“It’s a recipe,” Gwen’s mother said in wonder, reading the faint, penciled words. “A yeast bread with anise, egg, and…I can’t make out the rest.”

“Does it continue on the next foundation?” Gwen peered at the adjacent paper. “No, it’s a shopping list, and the handwriting isn’t the same.”

“I have another seam ripper,” Gwen’s mother said, already hurrying from the room. Before long she returned with the tool and, starting from opposite ends of the quilt and working toward the center, she and Gwen worked together to carefully, swiftly pick out the quilting stitches. They uncovered more pages torn from legal books, though they were not numbered sequentially and did not seem to be from the same volume. They uncovered childish drawings, homework papers, a sentimental poem composed for Mother’s Day, a report card boasting straight As—all, apparently, the work of the same boy, at different ages. Nothing remained of at least twenty of the foundations, the paper long ago having disintegrated, with only brittle scraps clinging to the threads to prove that they had once existed. Newspaper clippings, envelopes—more than seventy squares torn from unlikely sources, a bizarre, frenzied scrapbook of one quiltmaker’s world.

“Could she have chosen them at random?” Gwen’s mother suggested as they interrupted their work hours later for supper. “Perhaps they were the only papers she had, and they only seem odd to us because we’re blessed with so many more suitable choices.”

Gwen had studied the pages for hours without discerning a clear pattern, but she couldn’t believe that the pages had not been chosen deliberately. “If she had one law book that someone had thrown out, why not take all the foundations from the same book? Or, since she obviously had access to many different law books, why didn’t she take one blank page from each? There are always one or two extra blank pages at the end of bound books. She could have taken those, but instead she tore pages from the middle.”

“And ruined lots of books in the process,” Gwen’s father said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be her when the lawyer, whoever he was, tried to look up some legal ruling and discovered that the page he needed was missing.”

“He wouldn’t discover it, not right away,” Gwen mused. “The quilter wanted to hurt him, but for some reason she couldn’t do it to his face. It had to be done secretly, so that she would be satisfied but he couldn’t discover what she had done until she was beyond his reach. The lawyer must have held some kind of power over her.”

Gwen’s mother attempted to conceal a shudder with a laugh. “I think you might be reading too much into this. Maybe she had already used all the extra blank pages for other quilts. Maybe she knew the lawyer well, and asked him which pages he could spare.”

Gwen read in her mother’s face her reluctance to accept the picture of the quilter that was emerging—a woman spiteful, destructive, and full of rage. Gwen found it unsettling, too, but the unknown quilter’s anger was the only constant in the wild assemblage of patchwork clues.

After helping her mother wash the dishes, Gwen returned upstairs, offering vague replies when her mother urged her to put the quilt away for the night and get some rest. Her thoughts whirled, making sleep impossible. Quietly, knowing her mother would wake at the slightest sound, Gwen spread out the quilt, studying one significant foundation near the center of the quilt: an envelope with a partial address.

The stamp was entirely gone, but part of the postmark remained: “November 13,” no year visible, from a town in Kentucky that began with “Hen.” Water must have soaked into the quilt while it languished in the lost-and-found box, for the blue ink had blurred and bled into the paper’s fibers, obscuring most of the mailing address. The first line read only “Mr. and Mrs. Jo,” and the second read “714 Junip.” The third line offered the most promising detail: “Richar.” Surely that meant Richardsport, a town about thirty miles west of Brown Deer. But what had been more important to the quilter: the letter’s destination, or its origin? The return address was lost in a smear of fading blue ink, revealing nothing.

But at least she had a partial address, a place to start in the morning. Gwen turned out the light and drifted off to sleep.

She dreamed of a woman in turn-of-the-century dress, sitting on the floor, fuming, tearing page after page from fine leather-bound volumes. Then something pulled her from her sleep, slowly, an unsettling sensation in her abdomen, unfamiliar and strange. She woke gradually and lay still, her hands resting on her tummy, almost afraid to breathe. She had felt the baby move before, a wriggling, tickling motion that came and went, but this rhythmic spasm felt entirely different. In the thin February moonlight, she could see the taut drum of her stomach twitching, almost like a pulse—her own heartbeat? Her fingers flew to the base of her neck, but the baby’s strange jerking movements kept a rhythm of their own out of step with the quickening beat of her own heart.

“Mom,” she screamed. “Mom! Something’s wrong with the baby!”

Within moments her mother was at her side. “What is it?” she gasped. “Contractions? Are you in pain? Are you bleeding?”

“No, no. I’m okay. But the baby—I think the baby’s having a seizure!”

“What on earth—” As her mother placed her hands on her abdomen, Gwen tried to hold perfectly still but couldn’t stop shaking. Then she watched the fear drain from her mother’s face. “Is that what you’re talking about, honey? That movement?”

“Yes, yes. That—” Gwen choked out, stricken. “What’s wrong with my baby?”

“Oh, honey.” Gwen’s mother smiled through her tears. “It’s nothing. Your baby has the hiccups. That’s all.”

“The hiccups?” Gwen stroked the top of her belly, where she imagined the baby’s head was. “They can get the hiccups in there?”

“Of course they can. You used to get them all the time.”

The hiccups. Gwen almost laughed, and yet—“Should we call the doctor just to be sure?”

“No, we shouldn’t,” her mother replied firmly, drawing up the covers and pulling the quilt over her. “It’s four o’clock in the morning. The doctor is sleeping and you should be, too.”

“I’ll try.” Gwen took a deep breath and willed her pulse to stop racing. “I’m sorry I woke you.”

“It’s all right. This isn’t the first time a baby’s woken me in the middle of the night, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.”

Gwen’s mother smoothed back her hair and kissed her on the forehead, then quietly left the room, leaving the door ajar. Gwen drifted back into dreams, lulled to sleep by the rhythm of her baby’s hiccups.