Elm Creek Quilts [07] The Sugar Camp Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “So you plan to accept?” asked Robert.

  “If you think I can be spared from the farm. It is nearly sugaring time, and after that, spring planting. With Uncle Jacob and Jonathan gone, we will be shorthanded.”

  “We will hire hands, as we have done in the past,” said Lorena. Her mouth was concealed beneath her muffler, but her eyes smiled. “You can help me with the garden in the mornings and on Saturdays. We will manage.”

  “Then I shall accept the position, assuming the school board can scrape together the extra five dollars.”

  Robert chuckled. “I think you asked for that additional five dollars just to spite them, not because you felt underpaid before.”

  “I will not deny it,” said Dorothea. “If anyone else but Mr. Nelson had offered me the position, I probably would have accepted my original wages.”

  “This has been quite a successful night for you,” remarked Lorena. “You have your position back at a higher salary, your quilt was an overwhelming success—”

  “Not entirely,” Dorothea reminded her.

  “It earned a great deal of money for the library and that’s what counts.”

  “It was a successful night for me, too,” said Robert.

  His wife peered at him quizzically. “How so?”

  “From what I hear, I will no longer have to dread Cyrus Pearson becoming my son-in-law.”

  He shuddered so comically that Dorothea had to join in her parents’ laughter, though she was mortified that they had heard through gossip what she was too embarrassed to tell them herself. Worse yet was the genuine relief she detected beneath their sympathetic humor. If they were so disinclined for her to marry Cyrus, why had they not spoken up when he seemed to be courting her?

  FOR ALL OF THE unexpected happenings on the night of the Quilting Bee Dance, two more equally astounding revelations awaited her.

  The first came two days later. The school board had sent word that they agreed to the requested raise. After dropping by Mr. Engle’s office to sign her contract, she paid a call on her friend Mary, who was eager to share an intriguing bit of news. Mrs. Engle had not donated the quilt to the library, nor had Mrs. Claverton erred in saying the gift had been made. According to one of Mr. Schultz’s printing customers, who had witnessed the exchange, Mr. Nelson had purchased the quilt from Mrs. Engle for five dollars and had immediately given it to Mrs. Claverton for the library. “Perhaps Mr. Nelson thought Mrs. Engle would donate the five dollars to the library,” said Mary, “but she kept it. So in the end, Mrs. Engle came out well ahead.”

  “Unless you deduct her expenses. She did purchase all the materials for the quilt.”

  Mary tossed her head scornfully. Dorothea was trying to be charitable, but they both knew Mrs. Engle had spent far less than five dollars on fabric, batting, and thread. Why she had accepted the thanks of the crowd when she had not been the one to donate the quilt—and why Mr. Nelson had not claimed rightful credit for the deed—was a mystery neither Dorothea nor Mary could explain to their complete satisfaction.

  The second revelation came in a letter from Jonathan. He had thought about Mr. Nelson often since leaving Creek’s Crossing, and his curiosity and concern plagued him so much that he was compelled to send an inquiry to an acquaintance in Philadelphia. “Thomas Nelson was in prison for a crime he did without a doubt commit,” wrote Jonathan. “That much was never in dispute. However, I think it will interest you to know that he was convicted of helping runaway slaves.”

  Mr. Nelson had lived in Philadelphia, but he had often traveled to Virginia on business for his father. He used his frequent travels as a cover for business of his own. He routinely carried with him money, false identification papers, forged bills of leave, and other useful items for slaves determined to run away, which he distributed to plantations and households throughout several southern states. He earned the enmity of influential slave owners who conspired to catch him in the act. He was tried and convicted of forgery and assisting runaway slaves, and he was sentenced to six years in prison. He served two before his father managed to secure his early release on good behavior, with the understanding that any additional infractions would result in a lengthy imprisonment with no chance of leniency from any judge. Most people believed the senior Mr. Nelson had paid substantial bribes in order to have his seriously ill son freed just in time to save his life.

  After a lengthy recuperation, Thomas Nelson’s father made him swear an oath that he would tell no one the reasons for his imprisonment, and that he would obey the law no matter how much it tested his moral convictions, for following his conscience had almost killed him. After the Carters informed him of their intention to stake a claim out West, the senior Mr. Nelson sent his son to live on the family estate in Creek’s Crossing rather than find a new tenant family. It was believed that the father thought his son safer in a place far from his old temptations; it was also said that the senior Mr. Nelson could not bear to watch his son struggle with his decision to obey his father.

  “As you can see,” concluded Jonathan, “the scholars of Creek’s Crossing could do far worse than Mr. Nelson as a moral influence, although I wonder how long a man of his convictions will be able to keep the oath his father wrested from him. Though you might be tempted to speak to him on these matters, I urge you to refrain. Apparently the truth is known to only a few close family friends, one of whom disclosed these facts to me due to my concern about the safety of Thomas Nelson’s pupils. By all accounts, both the elder and the younger Nelson are determined to keep the entire unfortunate episode a secret, and it is their fervent hope that no one in Creek’s Crossing will ever know what has passed.”

  Of course her brother was right; the secret must be kept unless Mr. Nelson himself chose to divulge it. Mr. Nelson was fortunate that Cyrus Pearson’s inquiries had not uncovered it.

  Dorothea wished she could ask Mr. Nelson what part of his secret he considered shameful: that he had helped runaways, or that he had vowed never to do so again.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Dorothea hurried through her chores, eager to finish so that she could begin planning her lessons. She shivered in the barn as she milked the cow but she hardly noticed, her thoughts on the schoolroom a mile to the south. A few months earlier, Mr. Nelson’s offer to teach only the youngest pupils in the choir loft might have insulted her, since she had so recently instructed the entire school on her own. Now the very thought of teaching again, any teaching at all, so gratified her that she refused to see her diminished role as anything but a wonderful opportunity to foster in Creek’s Crossing’s youngest pupils the important foundation upon which the rest of their education would be built. That she owed her good fortune to Mr. Nelson unsettled her, but not so much that she would reconsider accepting the position. Perhaps, she told herself, her uncomfortable gratitude would remind her to be civil.

  As she carried the milk pail back to the house, she slipped on a patch of ice. A wave of white froth spilled over the brim before she could catch her balance. As she brushed the spilled milk from her skirt, she noticed that the ice underfoot had formed in the tracks of wagon wheels. Up and down the road, similar smooth pools of ice filled all the old ruts left in the mud of the previous autumn so that she could trace several distinct trails from the Creek’s Crossing road to the barn. Yesterday the entire road had been covered by a half inch of snow.

  She ran back to the house and burst into the kitchen, where her mother was frying potatoes for their breakfast. “We had a thaw yesterday and an overnight freeze.”

  “Yesterday was not the first thaw, either. It is just the first we noticed.” Lorena wrapped a towel around the handle of the skillet and pulled it off the fire. “Your father has already gone to the maple grove. He asks you to bring him his breakfast.”

  “Uncle Jacob—” Dorothea hesitated. “We should have begun tapping the trees days ago.”

  “I know that is what Uncle Jacob would have done.” Lorena gave her a small, regretful smile. “We were so distracted
by the Quilting Bee Dance that we neglected his records and ignored the weather. We will have to make up for lost time.”

  Dorothea ate swiftly as her mother packed the lunch pail for Robert, silently berating herself for ignoring the changing seasons. How many days of the sap run had they squandered? On her way to the sugar camp, she observed that already the rising sun was warming the earth. The sap would run that day, and they were not prepared.

  She found her father in the maple grove, moving swiftly from tree to tree, inspecting old spiles, hanging buckets to catch the drips of sap, drilling new holes where necessary. He thanked her for the food but did not interrupt his work to take it from her. When she realized he had forgotten it, and possibly her, Dorothea set the pail on the ground between the roots of a tree and went to help him.

  She had never done this part of the work of sugaring before, had only occasionally seen it done, but did not need her father’s silent swiftness to understand the urgency. They hurried to complete the neglected tasks, and before long, Lorena joined them. When they had seen to all but the last third of the sugarbush, Robert sent them to prepare the sugaring house. He came by later with the team to replenish the depleted stores of firewood and load the empty barrels into the wagon.

  Despite their haste, it was past noon before Robert returned with enough fresh sap to warrant building a fire beneath the three empty kettles. Evening had fallen before Dorothea and her mother poured off the contents of the last kettle into two sugar molds. They had not stopped to eat or care for the livestock, so Robert decided they would resume sugaring in the morning. After finishing the evening chores, they ate a cold supper of bread and cheese and went off to bed. Just before she fell asleep, Dorothea’s thoughts drifted to the school and the lessons she had intended to prepare. She promised herself she would rest her eyes for only a moment before retrieving her schoolbooks, but she fell asleep before she could summon up enough willpower to force herself to rise.

  At the sugar camp early the next day, Dorothea and her mother built the fire and awaited Robert’s delivery of the first barrels of fresh sap. He turned the team back toward the grove as soon as he unloaded the wagon, reporting, with chagrin and annoyance, that some of the buckets had overflowed, spilling their precious contents onto the ground. “I should have known that the trees I tapped first would have had time to refill their buckets. I won’t make that mistake again,” he said, giving the reins a shake and chirruping to the horses. As she and her mother poured sap into the first of the three kettles, Dorothea reflected that Uncle Jacob had always insisted upon emptying all of the buckets at the end of the day, even those only partially full. The sap retained its quality if it went swiftly from tree to kettle, he had often said, and he deplored wastefulness. She imagined him shaking his head in disgust at the sight of sap backing up into the spiles, oozing down the sides of the buckets.

  They grew more assured in their work as the week passed, but they missed Uncle Jacob’s advice and gladly would have endured his curt criticism to have his guidance. The sugar seemed to be as fine in quality as ever, though not as plentiful, and Dorothea felt they worked twice as hard as in previous years to get it. Evenings found her too exhausted to tend to the housework or plan her lessons. When she mentioned in passing that the school board expected her to begin teaching in two days, Lorena exclaimed in dismay for her own forgetfulness and sent Dorothea in early. “I can finish this myself,” she said, stirring the second kettle and peering into the third.

  Dorothea gratefully accepted her mother’s offer and returned to the house and her books. She took the time to build a fire in the oven and prepare a hot meal for the family—the first they had enjoyed all week—then turned her attention to her lessons. She set her work aside only long enough to eat with her parents after they came in from the sugar camp, steam-soaked and weary, and begged off helping her mother with the dishes so she could return to her books.

  “The temperature hasn’t fallen off much since sundown,” her father remarked when he came in from the barn, the evening chores completed late. Dorothea and her mother acknowledged his words with a nod. No other reply was necessary. Nighttime freezes prolonged the sap run. Without them, sugaring season would end.

  Though Dorothea’s work absorbed her, after her father’s statement, she brooded over their first attempt to make sugar without Uncle Jacob. They should have been as conscientious as he. Before she doused the lamp that night, unable to put her thoughts to rest, she stole into his room, the sensation of trespass lingering despite the many times she had made up the bed for runaways. Lorena had stored his papers in his steamer trunk—but it was Dorothea’s steamer trunk now; he had bequeathed it to her, and she had every right to lift the lid whenever she pleased.

  She found his farm journal and paged through the notes on sugaring. From his records she concluded that the sugaring season had indeed come upon them earlier than usual, but still well within the average. But even in years when a caprice of the weather had resulted in an even shorter sugaring season, Uncle Jacob had still managed to produce more maple sugar than the Grangers had done alone.

  Dorothea sighed, closed the journal, and returned it to the trunk. They were not finished yet. The sap run might endure another week or more. They would learn from their neglect and be better prepared the next winter.

  As she closed the lid, her gaze fell upon a familiar book with a worn cover of black leather. Her heart leaped as she reached for her uncle’s Bible. Until that moment, she had not realized how much she missed his blessings at mealtimes, his silent nightly devotions, those infrequent occasions when he would read aloud a verse and query her about its interpretation. At the time she had resented his intrusion into her reading or quilting, and suspected he hoped to catch her in a mistake. Now she wondered if perhaps she had misjudged him.

  She opened the cover and turned the thin, well-worn pages, thinking of her uncle and his mercurial tempers, his hidden depths. Her eyes blurred with weariness; she drew a hand across her brow and closed the book, but something written on the flyleaf caught her eye. Holding the page closer to the lamp, she discovered a phrase written in an elegant female hand: “For dearest Jacob on the occasion of our marriage. Deut. 23:15-16.” Below the words was a simple sketch of a forget-me-not in bloom.

  Dorothea could not recall the verse; likely it was another of her uncle’s favorite precepts regarding the proper conduct of a wife. She found the page and read the line, her breath catching in her throat: “Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.”

  She studied the verses, wondering whether the message was a request, a promise, a warning, or a directive to her husband-to-be. She wondered if they were instead an acceptance of a request he had made of her. She wished she knew. She knew that she could never know.

  The flickering of the lamp roused her from her reverie. Closing the lid of the steamer trunk, she took up the Bible and the lamp and carried them upstairs to her attic bedroom.

  THE NEXT MORNING DOROTHEA had to break ice in the well bucket, but the day after, she did not. The Grangers would try to coax the last drops of sap from the maple trees, but the sap run was essentially over. In the final tally, they produced little more than half of the sugar they had the previous year. Robert and Lorena worried whether they would have any left to trade after they set aside the usual amount for their own use, but Dorothea refused to dwell on their unsuccessful first outing. She had long prided herself on knowing the natural world of the Elm Creek Valley better than anyone. Next year she would be mindful of the shifting temperatures, as diligent as her uncle and as intuitive as the Shawnee woman who had taught her herb lore. Next year, she would not fail.

  Dorothea resumed teaching on the following Monday, and soon grew accustomed to the pleasant rhythm of the days. Each morning she led the twelve youngest
children upstairs to the choir loft, where she gave them their lessons and heard their recitations while Mr. Nelson instructed the twenty-eight elder students in the schoolroom below. Her pupils were sweet and attentive, and they seemed pleased to have their very own teacher and a separate place all to themselves. Sometimes while her students were quietly bent over their books, Dorothea listened to the lectures and recitations below. Mr. Nelson apparently preferred the Socratic method in many subjects, which Dorothea had never tried. It did give his students a great deal of practice in logic and reasoning, skills that Dorothea admitted would be more useful to them once they left school than the endless memorization of facts and dates.

  In this fashion they proceeded almost as if they led two separate and distinct schools, but when Mr. Nelson lectured in history, Dorothea took her students downstairs so they could listen. At first she had given her own lectures, but when she observed the younger children straining to hear Mr. Nelson’s voice over her own, she gave up and decided one history lecture would serve the entire school. She could not deny that Mr. Nelson’s university studies had given him a greater depth and breadth of knowledge than her own in many subjects, but in history, especially, he excelled. He brought the stories of the past to life with such detail and intriguing narrative that the students sat spellbound throughout the lessons. Dorothea had never seen the school so quiet, except for when Miss Gunther’s gentle monotone had put half the class to sleep.

  “You could have been a university lecturer,” remarked Dorothea one day after she and Mr. Nelson excused the students for lunch.

  “I was,” he said, to her surprise. He had been a tutor in the history department at the University of Pennsylvania for two years and had intended to become a professor.

  “Why didn’t you?” she asked.