“Agnes T. Ritter is stepping into fresh cow pie—in your bare feet.”
“Are cow pies what I think they are?” Rita asked. I nodded, and she laughed so hard, she bent over double and then sat up straight, as if she’d picked up another splinter.
“You all right?” I asked.
Rita put her hand into her pocket and pulled out a needle. “I forgot this was here,” she said. She took out a wadded-up quilt square and held it up for me to see. “It’s bum, isn’t it?” It was.
“You’ll learn. My first one was worse than that,” I told her, although that wasn’t true. I’d worked so hard on my first piece of patchwork that it had turned out to be almost perfect. But I wanted us to have more in common than being short and not liking Agnes T. Ritter, which was nothing special. Everybody didn’t like Agnes T. Ritter. Then I reminded myself Agnes T. Ritter was a member of the Persian Pickle Club, so I had to like her and be her friend.
“I don’t seem to get the hang of it,” Rita said. “I keep pricking my fingers.”
“Put rubbing alcohol on them. It’ll toughen them up.”
Rita ironed the patches with her hand, then put the thread hanging down from the back of the patch through the needle. The thread was dirty. “The needle’s as sticky as that awful fly-paper Mom hangs in the kitchen. Well, I say it’s spinach, and to hell with it,” Rita said, wadding up the patchwork and throwing it between us on the bench.
Instead of letting Rita know I was too dumb to get what she said about spinach, I picked up the quilting and said, “There’s nobody who can sew in this weather except Ella Crook.”
“She’s a funny one. I can’t exactly figure her out. She looks like she’d fall down if you blew on her, but she walked all the way up here for a visit in the awful sun yesterday and didn’t even work up a sweat. She hardly said two words when she got here, just handed Tom a plate of fudge and muttered something about remembering how much he liked it. I thought she didn’t like me, but Tom says she’s as shy as anybody he ever met. Is that so?”
“Yes. Even when you get to know her, she doesn’t say much.”
“How come she takes in sewing? She couldn’t make much money at it, what with everybody in such a pickle about money just now. Who can afford to send out sewing?”
“She’s alone, kind of a widow. She has to make do. We all help her out a little when we can.”
“Does she live with that busybody?”
“Mrs. Judd? No, but Mrs. Judd looks out for her. We all do.” I pressed my finger on the main seam of Rita’s sewing so that it lay flat. “It helps if you iron the seams open before you start the next row,” I said, changing the subject. “Do you have a thimble?”
“I can’t use one,” Rita said, and I could tell I had my work cut out for me in making Rita a quilter.
“What do you mean, ‘kind of a widow’? Where’s her husband?” Rita asked.
“Whose?”
“Ella Crook’s?”
With Ben Crook, it was best to let sleeping dogs lie, as Nettie put it. I wanted to change the subject again, but Rita was looking at me with such curiosity, I knew she wouldn’t let me. “Nobody knows,” I said. “If you don’t use a thimble, you’ll poke a hole in your finger.
“You mean she’s a grass widow?” Rita reached into her pocket and pulled out a thimble, putting it onto her middle finger.
“This one,” I said, taking the thimble from her and putting it on the correct finger of my right hand. “What’s a grass widow?”
“That’s when a woman’s married but her husband’s ditched her or something. Is that what happened?”
I shrugged. “I personally think it was hard times. Ben Crook thought the sun rose and set on Ella. He was the best husband in the world, but he lit out a year ago, and nobody’s seen or heard from him since. I try not to think about it. Farming isn’t easy for men these days.”
“I think it’s worse for the women,” Rita said. “I hate house-work. The only time I ever agreed with Agnes was when she said we ought to wear wrinkled clothes and not waste our time with those flatirons.” Rita looked down at her quilt square. “This goes so slow. It’s enough to put me into a blue funk.”
I’d never heard of a blue funk before, but I had an idea what it meant. “Why don’t you turn it into a baby quilt? It won’t take any time at all.”
“Why that’s a swell idea. You’re a true friend, Queenie.” She looked up as the screen door banged and Mrs. Ritter came out with a pitcher and two glasses.
“There’s the true friend,” I told Rita. Then I called, “Mrs. Ritter, I think I’d sell my soul for a glass of lemonade.”
Mrs. Ritter tried to frown, but it didn’t work because she was such a jolly woman. “My stars, don’t let Dad hear you blaspheme, dearie, and call me Sabra. You know we always use first names for members of the Persian Pickle Club.”
“Not for Mrs. Judd. I think God would strike me dead if I called her Septima,” I said, and Mrs. Ritter laughed.
She looked down at Rita’s little mess of sewing. “Don’t you think she’s getting the hang of it, Queenie? It’s nice, isn’t it?” Then she turned and went back to the house.
“This is real tasty,” I called, then told Rita, “She cares a lot about you. Lemons must cost ten cents each.”
“I’d trade lemonade any day for a real drink. Bourbon. Yum,” Rita said, adding, “Tell me about those women at your club.”
“At our club,” I corrected her, because whether she knew it or not, she was a member, too.
There wasn’t much to tell about us, because we were all pretty ordinary. Mrs. Judd was the richest, which anybody could tell from the Packard, even though it was old. The Judds owned the biggest farm in Wabaunsee County, and Prosper Judd was the president of the bank in Eskridge; Mrs. Judd had inherited it from her people. But rich didn’t always mean lucky. Their only child, Wilson, who was a few years ahead of me in school, caught infantile paralysis, and the members of the Persian Pickle Club had exercised his legs every day for a year so that he could walk again. Then he walked right out of Harveyville and never once wrote to his mother.
Ada June was every bit as nice as she was the day she was the hostess for Persian Pickle, I told Rita. Buck raised horses, but people weren’t buying horses anymore, and since the Zinns had more kids than nickels in their pockets, they were hard up. Still, it didn’t bother them much, and they were as happy a couple as I ever saw. I liked Ada June a lot, but she was almost forty. Opalina Dux was the one with white hair so long, she could sit on it, I explained. You could always tell where she’d been by the trail of hairpins. Sometimes, she was as crazy as the crazy quilts she worked on, carrying on conversations with her chickens. There was no harm in that, however. Most of us talked to chickens at one time or another. But Opalina brought them inside the house so she could talk to them while she did her work.
Nettie Burgett had a goiter, so she always wore a scarf around her neck, which made her look like her husband, Tyrone, who didn’t have a neck at all. Tyrone ran a numbers game at the billiard hall over in Blue Hill, leaving Nettie and Velma, who was the only Burgett kid still at home, to do most of the farming. He’d turned to gambling after the government got rid of Prohibition, and his bootleg business went to heck. Of course, being on the wrong side of the law didn’t keep him from being almost as righteous as Foster Olive. We all knew he was a trial to Nettie, although she never complained. We also knew he was years behind in his mortgage payments, and the Eskridge bank would have foreclosed if Mrs. Judd hadn’t told Prosper to let it ride for Nettie’s sake. Nettie’s daughter, Velma, never came to Pickle, so I skipped her.
I told Rita that Forest Ann was Tyrone’s sister, but you wouldn’t know it, because she was so much nicer than he was. In fact, Forest Ann kind of made up for Tyrone being such a dope. She and Nettie were more like sisters than sisters-in-law. When Nettie turned fifty, Tyrone didn’t give her so much as a pin, but Forest Ann drove her into Topeka to see Captain Blood at the
picture show and have lunch at F. W. Woolworth’s, where they drank Nehis and ate weenies that were cooked on hot rollers in a glass case. Nettie said it was the best birthday she ever had.
Forest Ann was a widow woman because of the untimely death of her husband, Everett Finding, who was dumb enough to drown in a glass of water. He was sitting on top of a reaper one day, reading a girlie magazine, when something spooked the horses, and Everett toppled over into the machinery. The horses ran away, dragging Everett and leaving pieces of him all over the field. Being fertilized by Everett, the next year’s crop was the best that farm ever harvested.
“Forest Ann’s kids had all grown up and moved away by the time Everett died, and she said spending the evenings by herself nearly killed her. Sewing kept her from going crazy. She says a woman without a needle is like a man without a plow.” I didn’t explain to Rita that Dr. Sipes was the real reason Forest Ann kept her sanity, because he stopped at the Finding house every night for a glass of buttermilk. Or maybe Dr. Sipes drank the bootleg that Everett had received in payment for helping Tyrone with his still. Forest Ann had as many jars of hootch as tomatoes in her root cellar.
“A woman without a needle is like a man without a needle,” Rita said, and I laughed, even though I didn’t get it. “Who is that real old lady?” she asked.
“Ceres Root. She came out here from Ohio when she was a bride, marrying Cheed Root after she’d known him for only two weeks. She was about to get hitched to a fellow her parents picked out, even though she didn’t think much of him because he hadn’t gotten off his horse when he proposed. Then Cheed came along, and they ran off to Kansas and have been sweethearts all their life, just sweethearts. Quilting helped her, too, when she lived in a dugout and had no neighbors the first year. All she had was her quilting, and she went to sewing during the day instead of housework. Once, she looked under her bed and found grass growing eight inches high.
“Cheed was so happy she’d married him that he’d do anything for her. When he went to town one day, she asked him to bring her back a piece of fabric she’d admired. Instead of a length, he brought her the whole bolt of cloth. It was Persian pickle, what some call paisley. Ceres still has a few yards of it left because it’s so precious to her. She’s particular about what she uses it for or who gets the scraps. Of course we all have pieces of it in our quilts. That’s how come we’re called the Persian Pickle Club.
“Now, I’ve told you about all of us, except for Agnes T. Ritter and Mrs. Ritter, and you know them already. Of course, there’s Ruby. She’d still be a member if she came back to Harveyville. Ruby and Floyd lost their farm last year when the bank in Topeka took it over, so they piled everything into their Chevrolet truck and went to California.”
I stopped a minute, remembering my last look at Ruby and Floyd waving from the truck, with the kids in back, playing on a mattress. The Persian Pickle had gone over to see them pull out, and I cried and cried, until Mrs. Judd said, “Hush, up, Queenie Bean. Don’t make Ruby feel worse than she does already. They’ve got no choice. In times like these, it’s root, hog, or die.”
“Ruby was my best friend, but I haven’t heard from her yet. Nobody has. Grover said they’re too busy eating oranges.” I knew Grover missed Floyd as much as I missed Ruby, but that was partly because he’d cosigned a loan on a tractor for him, and when they left, we’d had to pay it off ourselves.
“Don’t you mind that all those women are so old?” Rita asked. She was right about them being old. Everybody in Harveyville seemed to be old nowadays, because all the young people had gone off to look for jobs.
“That’s why I’m glad you’ve come. We’re the same age, twenty-three. Of course, Agnes T. Ritter is only twenty-five, but she acts like she’s thirty. Forty, even.”
“I think she was born old and cranky,” Rita said.
I nodded at that, then took off Rita’s thimble, which I still had on. It made a sucking sound as it came loose from my sweaty finger. “I don’t care how old the Persian Pickles are, because they’re my friends. When my mama died, they saw me through it. The Pickles are family.”
Rita clucked her tongue to show she was sorry about my mother. “Do you have a father?”
“I’m an orphan now. Same as Grover,” I said. I told Rita about Grover and me, how my father passed when I was in high school, and Mama just wasted away from grief.
“Grover’s mother was a member of Persian Pickle, just like mine, but I never knew her. She died when Grover was born, and his dad raised Grover and David, who is Grover’s big brother. He lives in Oregon now. After we were married, Grover and I lived with Dad Bean until he died two years ago. David inherited half of the farm, but he said he’d never be a farmer like Grover, and he sold us his half cheap. The Beans are real nice people.”
I started to tell her how Dad Bean had brought me that bunch of meadow flowers stuck in a milk jug when I lost the baby, but it wasn’t right to tell a pregnant woman about a baby dying, so I put the thimble back on and finished Rita’s quilt square in silence. When I was done, I smoothed the seams with my fingers and turned it over. “Now, this looks just fine. The Persian Pickle will quilt it for you after you make the rest of the patches. You can do it of an evening, when you’re listening to ‘The Bob Hope Show’ or ‘Fibber McGee and Molly.’“
“I read,” Rita said.
I thought about that for a minute. “Reading’s all right, I suppose, but with quilting, when you’re done, you have a quilt. When you finish with a book, you don’t have anything.”
Rita looked at me kind of funny, as if she hadn’t taken in the wisdom of what I’d said. Then, I thought she had something else on her mind and was deciding whether to tell me about it. “I read all the time because I want to be a writer,” she said at last. “I’ve applied for a job at the Topeka Enterprise, and I’ll write stories about Harveyville. They want somebody they can call in case we have a bank robbery or something here. It’s called a correspondent.”
“Harveyville doesn’t have a bank,” I said. When Rita frowned, I added quickly, “Still, I think that’s wonderful.” I looked down at her stomach. “But how can you be a newspaper writer when you’re going to have a baby?”
“Somebody else will just have to look after it. I can’t miss my chance.”
I wanted to tell her that if I had a baby, I wouldn’t trade it for all the newspapers in the world, but it wasn’t my place to do so.
“Here comes trouble,” Rita said, looking up at Agnes T. Ritter, who’d just opened the screen door. She started toward us, with Tom behind her. The two of them were almost the same height, but Tom had inherited all the good looks.
“It appears you drank all the lemonade,” Agnes T. Ritter said, scowling at Rita. “So much sugar’s not good for someone in your condition,” she added, as if Rita had a disease. “At least Mom doesn’t get the sugar mixed up with the salt, like some people.” Tom rolled his eyes at me, and I figured Agnes T. Ritter would throw that salt and sugar mix-up at Rita for the rest of her life.
Rita grinned at Tom and said, “Hi, ace.” Then she winked at me and looked over at Agnes T. Ritter and added, “Hi to you, too … Agnes T. Ritter.”
Before I left, I invited Tom and Rita for supper the next evening. That didn’t give me much time to dust and Hoover the house and put out my best quilts and cook the supper, but with Agnes T. Ritter picking on Rita the way she had, I’d gotten an idea.
At noon, after I told Grover about our guests, he told me to serve pickled pigs’ feet and sauerkraut, which was his favorite as well as Tom’s, but I wouldn’t do it. After all, Rita was from Denver and ate in restaurants where the food was cooked by Mexicans and Chinamen. Grover suggested fried chicken, but I told him Mrs. Ritter fixed it better than I did. So he said to make up my own mind, and finally, I decided on ham and red-eye gravy.
Grover approved. “There’s nothing better than redeye gravy and mashed potatoes,” he said. “Put plenty of bourbon in the gravy so Tom can drink it. You
know how Howard Ritter is. Tom told me his dad’s farm is the driest place in Kansas, and he wasn’t talking about the weather. Why don’t you make a pie for dessert?” I knew Grover would ask for that.
“Okay. How about rhubarb?” It was Graver’s favorite.
“Rhubarb’s a little past its prime, isn’t it?”
“I found some late stalks that haven’t gone stringy yet,” I said, hoping Grover wouldn’t ask me where.
He didn’t. “I got chores to do before the old dog barks,” he said, leaving me in the kitchen as he headed out to the barn. That was just the way I wanted it. Men didn’t understand how much work there was in a supper invitation. It took me all the rest of the afternoon to do the cooking and set the table. There wasn’t a minute to spare.
In fact, I barely finished in time to go stand in the screened in porch with Grover to watch Tom and Rita walk down the the road, stirring up the yellow dirt that was as dry as ashes. It rose waist-high and stayed there, so you could see only the top half of them. The wind was blowing, too, not hard, just enough to get that darn dust all over my clean house. I ran back inside to close the windows, but they were already shut, with towels shoved into the cracks. Even so, little lines of dirt were forming near the openings.
Rita and Tom weren’t in any hurry and fooled around as they walked along. Every now and then, Rita bumped into Tom on purpose, and they laughed. Watching them reminded me of Grover and me when we were first married and liked to walk around the fields at dusk, kicking at the clods of dirt and jumping over the ruts that the rain had cut into the road.
Tom went off into our east field and picked up a handful of dirt and held it to his nose, then stood up and let it sift out of his fingers. It was powdery, like the dirt on the road. I saw him shake his head and frown and say something to Rita, but by the time they reached us, they were laughing and holding hands again, and so were Grover and I. Rita hugged me, and Tom kissed my cheek, and that was the start of just about the best evening we ever had. Tom and Rita said so, too.
The Persian Pickle Club Page 5