A Quilter's Holiday: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel

by Chiaverini, Jennifer

  His passion for justice caught fire the first time he heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., preach at his church. With inspiring eloquence, Dr. King asked them to practice nonviolent civil disobedience in order to win the civil rights that had been too long denied them. Louis marched with Dr. King, participated in Freedom Rides to challenge segregation in public transportation, and organized peaceful student protests in pursuit of equal access to education. His parents feared for his safety after he was attacked by a gang of white thugs outside a post office, and they begged him to withdraw from the movement after a cross was set aflame in their front yard, but Louis could not, would not, abandon the cause that he believed God had called him to serve.

  Then one afternoon as he, his girlfriend, Alice, and his best friend, Thomas, were leading a student march through the streets of Jackson, singing protest songs to drown out the angry jeers of white folks lining the sidewalks, a gunshot went off. As the students scattered, the police swept in and arrested as many as they could apprehend on the grounds that they were marching without a permit. Louis, Thomas, and twenty other young men were taken to a maximum security prison, where they spent five nights in cells with the furnace blasting despite the sweltering summer heat, were prodded awake with billy clubs every time they drifted off to sleep on the hard concrete floor, and were force-fed laxatives. Louis emerged from the ordeal shaken but more committed than ever to the cause of justice for all.

  He knew he had made enemies, but he had not counted on their bloodthirstiness, nor could he have imagined on that Saturday morning when he let Alice borrow his car to take her mother to the dentist that someone had planted a bomb beneath it, or that in an instant he would replay again and again in his nightmares for years to come, that it would kill his first love, the woman he had intended to marry, and to love and cherish and honor all the days of his life.

  Anguished, he swore to find the murderers, but his younger brother begged him for their parents’ sake to flee before the culprits realized they had missed their intended target. Louis packed a single bag and took the next train out of town, spending all but ten dollars to go as far from Mississippi as he could afford to go. The money in his pocket could take him as far as Pittsburgh, so that was where he went.

  His ten dollars soon was spent. With no prospects and no family to take him in, Louis ended up on the streets, sleeping in doorways, taking meals at a soup kitchen, finding odd jobs where and when he could. He dared not write home to his parents out of fear that the men who had tried to kill him would track him north, or that they would take their rage out on the loved ones he had left behind.

  As the hard days stretched into months, as he grew thin and bone-weary and began to wonder if maybe it would have been better to risk his life in Mississippi than to endure the harsh, friendless existence in a northern city, he prayed to God to deliver him from his misery, and he vowed that if he could get on his feet again, he would devote himself to serving others in need.

  Little by little, he made his way. A minister at a Methodist church helped him find a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant and a cheap room to rent. As he regained his strength, he took classes and earned his GED. His dreams of college not forgotten, he enlisted in the Marines, served in Vietnam, and attended Duquesne University on the GI Bill, earning a degree in Social Work.

  Louis never forgot how his prayers had been answered or the vow he had made. Shortly after graduation, he worked for a nonprofit organization serving the homeless in Pittsburgh, but he grew frustrated with bureaucratic obstacles that prevented immediate help for the people who needed it most and a short-sighted focus on short-term solutions instead of the more arduous task of addressing the root causes of poverty and homelessness. Conferences where well-meaning activists discussed how to fund and operate more homeless shelters irritated him. “These people don’t need shelters, they need homes,” he griped to a like-minded woman, Andrea, who had served with him on several committees. “Otherwise we’d call them the ‘shelterless.’ ”

  Frustrated, he severed ties with official government agencies and went off on his own, determined to spend every cent he earned buying abandoned properties in the inner city, restoring them to habitable shape with the help of volunteers, and giving them to the people who needed them most. The restoration of a three-story Victorian house near a Croatian immigrant neighborhood was well underway when Andrea, an obstetrics nurse who volunteered at a local free clinic, alerted him to the plight of homeless expectant mothers. As soon as the bedrooms and the kitchen were finished, Louis scrounged up donated beds, mattresses, and sheets and took in the first residents. The Abiding Savior Christian Outreach ran entirely on donations, and although Louis occasionally butted heads with representatives from government agencies who preferred people to work within the system, he knew his mission made a difference in his community. Now, five years later, he and Andrea were married with two children, and he had raised enough money to purchase a four-story apartment building a few blocks away, which they intended to remodel and rent out apartments at a dollar a year to people who would otherwise have nowhere to turn. Louis had already renamed the building “Thankful Abode” in remembrance of his gratitude for prayers answered years before.

  Gretchen listened, fascinated, each time Joe came home with a new tale about Louis Walker’s mission, his marriage to Andrea and their children, and their plans for the future. “I told him you were a teacher,” Joe said one day, “and I could almost see his ears prick up.”

  “Did you tell him I’m only a substitute home economics teacher?”

  “There’s no ‘only’ about it,” said Joe, indignant. “You have a lot to teach those girls, and to Louis, your flexible schedule is a bonus.”

  A few days later, Gretchen began volunteering at the mission, teaching the young mothers and mothers-to-be how to prepare simple, nutritious meals, how to sew, how to do laundry, how to keep a house clean and safe for a toddler, how to keep a household budget and balance a bank account— something a few of the girls claimed they would never need to know, since they would never have enough cash to open a bank account, never enough left over at the end of the month to save. “You should and you shall save something for a rainy day,” Gretchen told them firmly.

  “Maybe that works for you,” a resident told her once. “But it’s always the rainy season for us.”

  “Except when it’s snowing,” another chimed in.

  So Gretchen told the girls how no one had imagined a life for her other than to become a housemaid as her mother and grandmother had, but that she had worked hard in school and earned a scholarship, and now she was a teacher. “But I’m not finished,” Gretchen told them. “I have other dreams, too, plans that I’m saving for, and someday I’m going to fulfill them. You can, too. Your first duty is to your child, of course, but if you work hard, live frugally, and save, you can make a better life for yourself. I can’t do it for you, but I can give you the tools you’ll need—and that means learning to balance a checkbook, even if you don’t have a bank account yet, because someday you will.”

  Some of the girls still looked dubious, but they settled down to their studies, and in some of their eyes, Gretchen thought she glimpsed the light of possibility dawning.

  Gretchen also taught the girls to sew, certain that every mother needed to know how to sew on buttons, patch worn trouser knees, and mend torn seams. Most of them had never held a needle before, so to practice and perfect their stitches, their first projects were small, scrap Four-Patch quilts for their babies. Even the most ambivalent about motherhood warmed to the project, and as they sewed squares of cotton and poly blends together, they spoke about their hopes and fears for the future. Andrea, passing through the cramped front room on her way to the kitchen or the office, overheard bits of their conversations, occasionally lingering in the kitchen doorway to hear a shy girl express her most private fears about what might happen to her and her baby once they left Abiding Savior. Later Andrea told Gretchen that she marveled
at her ability to get the girls to share so openly. “It’s not any of my doing,” Gretchen said, embarrassed by the undeserved praise. “It’s the craft. Quilters talk when they’re gathered together, even beginning quilters. They always have.”

  In due course, Joe finished the kitchen project and resumed the work that had been accumulating in their garage, but Gretchen continued to volunteer at Abiding Savior at least two days a week, unless she was occupied with an extended substitute teaching assignment within the public schools. The girls Gretchen observed in the classrooms and passed in the halls were, for the most part, happy and well-adjusted, with plenty to eat, decent clothes to wear, and a caring adult at home to love and guide them. And yet she knew that some of the residents of Abiding Savior had possessed all the outward trappings of comfortable, secure, middle-class lives before they had ended up on the streets, and she wondered which of the girls who attended her classes and always turned in their homework felt unloved at home and contemplated escape through running away or through fleeting affection in the back seat of a boyfriend’s car.

  A world away at Abiding Savior, she taught the young mothers domestic skills and held their newborn babies when they were desperate for a few uninterrupted hours of sleep. Often, frightened and alone when the first labor pains began, they begged Gretchen to come with them to the hospital and stay with them until it was over, their babies in their arms. In the evenings at home with Joe, Gretchen would stitch quilts for new residents, gifts of love and comfort they would use during their stay at the mission and take with them when they departed, requiring the continuous replenishment of her supply. As the years passed, she saw many young women come and go, taking the quilts she had made them and their few belongings, their babies swaddled in bright quilts they had made with her guidance. But always they left, the difficult young women who balked when she tried to teach them to cook, the acquiescent ones whom she feared might need the outreach center’s services again within a year, the babies who squalled all night and left all the residents weary, the sweet ones whose adorable smiles belied their circumstances.

  “Doesn’t it ever make you too sad to go back?” Joe asked one evening when she told him about a young woman who had been working the streets but had sought sanctuary at Abiding Savior when her pimp beat her for getting pregnant. Two days after delivering a stillborn baby boy, she had fled into the night, taking nothing with her but a few dollars’ worth of change kept in a jar in the kitchen.

  “Most of their stories don’t end so tragically,” Gretchen said, thinking of how she and Andrea had held each other in the kitchen and cried when they realized the girl was gone, most likely reunited with her pimp and back working the streets.

  “I know,” Joe said, “but day after day, meeting all these girls who never wanted babies, and in the meantime, you and I …”

  His voice trailed off, and Gretchen reached for his hand and held it. Yes, in her more selfish moments, she wondered why God had blessed those frightened youngsters with children and withheld them from her and Joe, but then she thought of the many, many babies she had rocked to sleep at the mission, how many bowls of rice cereal she had mixed and diapers she had changed, how many young women she had consoled and advised, and she could not consider her life empty or herself barren. She had loved so many children, and she was thankful for every life it had been her privilege to touch.

  Every Christmas, the parishioners of Holy Family treated the residents of Abiding Savior to a celebration rich with the flavors of their Croatian traditions. Monsignor Paul would have a pair of young men of the parish haul a badnjak, or yule log, to the outreach center, which he would sprinkle with holy water as they set it in the fireplace, reciting a prayer of blessing for the household. Louis and his eldest sons would set up a small Christmas tree in the front room, which the ladies of the parish would adorn with licitarska srca, gingerbread hearts decorated with colored frosting. On Christmas Eve, Gretchen’s grandmother or one of her friends would give the residents a round pastry called a krstnica, a cake inscribed with a cross adorned with a pastry bird at the end and a hole in the center into which a candle was placed. Gretchen, who had heard her grandmother explain the symbols many times, would tell the residents that the cake represented the world; the cross, redemption; the candle, Christ as the light of the world; the four birds, the Four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The residents always wanted to know why they had to keep the cake on the table and not eat it until the first day of the New Year, but Gretchen’s grandmother had never given her any reason other than it was tradition. Although not all the residents of Abiding Savior were Catholic, Monsignor Paul encouraged everyone to celebrate Midnight Mass at the church, and afterward, the women of the parish served a favorite traditional meal of baked ham, kolbassi, potato salad, horseradish, nut roll, and cookies. They sprinkled straw beneath the table to remind everyone of Jesus’s humble manger, a tradition that never failed to amuse the girls.

  On Christmas morning, thanks to the generosity of the parish, the residents enjoyed sweet, flavorful apple strudel for breakfast and gifts beneath the Christmas tree. But despite all the merriment, Gretchen sometimes detected wistful longing in some of the girls’ eyes, as if they were missing their families or remembering the Christmases of their childhoods, as they were or should have been. She offered these girls extra hugs and a shoulder to cry on, if they needed it, or time alone away from the festivities if that was what they preferred. But for the most part, the holidays offered the girls a welcome respite from the cares of ordinary days, a time when they could enjoy luscious treats and joyful music, prayers and the warmth of the fireside. Winter would settle in around them soon enough, but the spirit of Christmas held it at bay for a little while.

  Over time, perhaps because Abiding Savior reminded Gretchen daily of how richly she and Joe had been blessed despite the hardships they had faced, the hope and optimism of their newlywed years gradually returned. Gretchen began teaching quilting to neighborhood girls, their mothers, and then to their mothers’ friends as a quilting revival swept the nation. She traveled to quilt guilds in Ohio, West Virginia, and throughout Pennsylvania to lecture and teach, and—as she had hinted to the young residents in her first weeks at Abiding Savior—she nurtured a dream of opening a quilt shop. Eventually she fulfilled a version of that dream, obliged by economic necessity to go into business with her on-again, off-again housecleaning employer. They enjoyed a long, successful run until her partner’s unquenchable need to have her own way in everything tarnished Gretchen’s dream—and then, just as she was wondering how she could keep her chin up and make the best of it indefinitely, she spotted a quarter-page ad in Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine announcing that Elm Creek Quilts needed two new teachers to join their accomplished circle of quilters.

  What a lovely, enchanted place Elm Creek Quilt Camp had seemed to Gretchen five years before when she and her partner had visited, although their trip was more of a spy mission than a vacation. Gretchen’s business partner had heard about the marvelous success of the Elm Creek Quilters and was toying with the idea of creating a similar quilters’ retreat in Sewickley. Gretchen had enjoyed her week at quilt camp tremendously, but she was neither surprised nor disappointed when her partner had concluded that they could not possibly reproduce the Elm Creek Quilters’ achievement. “If I had inherited an enormous mansion in the middle of the country-side, I could do it, too,” Gretchen’s partner grumbled as they drove home. Gretchen refrained from pointing out that she had indeed inherited something very much like it, along with an impressive trust fund. What she lacked was a group of close quilting friends she could rely upon to help run the business as Sylvia had in the Elm Creek Quilters.

  How wonderful it would be, Gretchen thought wistfully, to become one of the lucky applicants invited to join that elite circle of quilters. Well, why couldn’t she? The more she considered the idea, the more she realized that the job had come along at precisely the right time and could be an answer to her
prayers. She could leave the tarnished dream of the quilt shop shared with an unbearable partner and yet remain at the center of the quilting world. The ad mentioned that a live-in arrangement within the manor was possible, which would fulfill Joe’s fond wish of retiring to the country. The estate was large enough that they could surely find a place for him to set up a woodworking shop—perhaps in the caretaker’s red barn between the manor and the orchard.

  But moving would mean leaving behind cherished friends and their home of several decades—and the end of Gretchen’s days at Abiding Savior.

  As much as it pained her to think of leaving, she assembled her application packet with her résumé, letters of recommendation from favorite quilting students, sample lesson plans, and photographs of her very best quilts. She murmured a prayer as she took them to the post office and sent them to Elm Creek Manor. Six weeks later, Sarah called to invite her for an interview, and before she knew it, she was offered the job.

  It was a dream come true, a prayer answered, and yet she could not move away from Ambridge without regret.

  As the summer ended and moving day approached, Gretchen prepared herself for her last day at Abiding Savior, for tearful good-byes and promises to keep in touch, and for photographs with Louis, Andrea, and their children. Joe planned to take the day off to accompany her and offer moral support as well as to offer his own farewells. Gretchen took comfort from the assurances of a former resident, now a teacher herself, who had promised to take over Gretchen’s responsibilities and enlist the help of other teachers from her district to carry on her unfinished endeavors. Still, even though it comforted Gretchen to know that she was not leaving Louis understaffed, she expected her last day at Abiding Savior to be bittersweet.