An Elm Creek Quilts Sampler

by Jennier Chiaverini

  The Double Nine Patch block, Mrs. Compson explained, was one of many quilt blocks based on a three-by-three grid; they were called nine patches because a single large square was divided by the grid into nine smaller squares. In the Double Nine Patch, the smaller squares in the corners and in the center were further divided into nine even smaller squares.

  This time Sarah made two square templates, one large and one small. She cut four of the bigger squares from the cream background fabric, then used the smaller template to make twenty-five little squares from the dark red fabric and twenty from the cream.

  “The first quilt I ever made was a Nine Patch,” Mrs. Compson remarked, picking up some quilting of her own to work on while monitoring Sarah’s progress. “Not a Double Nine Patch, a Nine Patch. It looked like a checkerboard in all different colors.”

  Sarah looked up from pinning two of the tiny squares together at the corners. “Did someone give you lessons like you’re giving me?”

  “Hmph. My sister and I learned together, and our lessons were hardly this pleasant. Nothing ever went smoothly when Claudia and I were in the same room. See now, I think that’s where my mother went wrong. Instead of teaching us at the same time she should have taught Claudia first, a few years earlier, when I would have been too young to care.” She shook her head and sighed. “Perhaps that would have made a difference.”

  “What happened? Will you tell me about it?”

  Mrs. Compson hesitated. “If you’ll get me a glass of water first.”

  Sarah jumped up and quickly returned with the glass. Mrs. Compson took a deep drink, then set the glass aside. “Well, then, I’ll tell you,” she said. “But don’t get so distracted that you don’t pay attention to your quilting. If your stitches aren’t good enough I’ll make you take them out.”

  My sister, Claudia, was two years older than I, but since I was just as smart and almost as big as she was, people treated us as if we were the same age. Claudia was the pretty one; she had our mother’s thick brown hair rippling in shining waves down her back, while at that age my darker hair was always dull and wildly unkempt from running around outdoors. All the grown-ups said Claudia was the very image of Great-Grandmother Anneke, but they respected our ancestors too much to hold any of them responsible for my appearance. I did better with my lessons, but the teachers always liked Claudia best. Everyone did. She was always friendly and cheerful, while I was sulky and sensitive. I imagine it must have been a terrible disappointment to our mother, to have a child like me after doing so well the first time.

  The winter when I was five and Claudia was seven, we had a blizzard. It snowed so terribly that we couldn’t go to school. Claudia was relieved; she had not learned her lessons for that day and dreaded to disappoint our pretty young teacher, Miss Turner, whom everyone liked. I, on the other hand, fretted for hours, glaring out of the nursery windows and stomping about. What if the other children learned something and I missed it? My mother assured me that none of the other children would be going to school that day, either, but I was not consoled until she promised to teach us something new that day. “But not reading or math,” she said, to my surprise. “It’s time you two girls learned to quilt.”

  We had watched Mother sew before, but this was the first time we would be allowed to quilt, like our aunts and Mother’s grown-up lady friends. They used to quilt all the time. Some of their quilts may still be around here someplace—up in the attic, perhaps.

  So Mother showed us how to quilt, very much as I have shown you, except with scraps from her sewing basket. We scarcely wanted to stop for lunch, we were having so much fun. We carefully selected the prettiest scraps, cut our pieces, and sewed them together. By late afternoon we had each finished several small blocks.

  I counted the blocks in my pile, and then those on the floor by Claudia’s side. “I have four in my pile, and you only have three,” I said.

  “Maybe, but I’m almost finished with this one,” she told me. She held the unfinished block close to her eye and struggled to tie a knot at the end of a seam.

  “But I’m almost done with this one, too. That means I’ll have five and you’ll have four.”

  Claudia merely shrugged and yanked on the knot.

  “That means I should get to use the quilt first.”

  At that she finally looked at me. “I’ll get to use it first because I’m oldest and that means I’m first.”

  “I’ll get to use it first if I do more of the work.”

  “Well, maybe you won’t do more of the work.”

  “Well, maybe I will.”

  “Girls, girls,” Mother broke in helplessly. “There’s no need to argue. You’ll share the work and the quilt equally.”

  But we paid no attention. As soon as Mother left the room, the race was on. We both scrambled for fabric, fought for the scissors, pieced our blocks with the biggest stitches you’ve ever seen. Our piles grew, but although I blazed through my sewing, growing angrier and more determined with each seam, Claudia began to grow tired. She rubbed at her eyes and struggled over and over again to poke the same end of thread through the needle’s eye. Sometimes she had to take out stitches after sewing the wrong side of one piece to the right side of the other. She began to mutter a little under her breath, and let out a frustrated whine every now and then, but I paid her no mind. My pile of Nine Patches was growing and growing, and I was going to win.

  Suddenly she flung down her block and burst into tears. “It’s not fair,” she sobbed. “You always do everything best. You always beat me. I hate you!” She ran out of the room.

  I didn’t look up. I kept sewing, but more slowly now. I counted the blocks Claudia had scattered as she ran away. There were six. I had nine, including the one I was still working on.

  Mother must have heard my sister’s outburst, because moments later, she entered the room. “Sylvia, what’s going on here?”

  “Nothing, Mother. I’m just sewing, like you told us to.” The picture of innocence and obedience, I was.

  Mother shook her head, troubled. “Claudia’s in her bedroom, crying. Why is that?”

  I shrugged, not lifting my eyes from my sewing.

  Mother sighed and sat down on the floor beside me. “Sylvia, my little girl, what am I going to do with you?”

  I shrugged again. My eyes began to fill with tears.

  “I want you to go and tell your sister you’re sorry, and I want you to play nice from now on.”

  “But I didn’t do anything,” I protested. All I had done was sew faster and better than Claudia had done. I hadn’t called her any names or hit her or pulled her hair. Was I supposed to sew slowly just because Claudia did? That wasn’t right.

  Mother frowned at me, a sad and disappointed frown. I felt simply awful. She never looked at Claudia that way.

  I trotted down the hallway to Claudia’s bedroom. She lay facedown on the bed, her sobs muffled by a pillow.

  “Claudia?”

  “Go away.”

  “Mother said to say I’m sorry, so … I’m sorry I sewed faster than you.”

  “Go away.” She sat up and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “You’re just a mean, awful brat. Go away.”

  Then I started to cry, and I hated crying in front of other people. “I said I was sorry. Claudia?” But she’d flung herself onto the bed again. I backed out of the room and softly closed the door.

  She didn’t come out for supper, and I could hardly swallow a bite myself. All through the meal my parents and my aunts and uncles—and even Grandpa—frowned sternly at me as if I were the worst little girl in the world. My cousins just stared at me wide-eyed and wondering, whispering to each other.

  Claudia didn’t speak to me for the remaining two days we were snowed in. When school resumed, she finally forgave me and let me help her with her spelling.

  She never touched those Nine Patch blocks again. I put hers with mine and finished the quilt a few months later. I offered it to Claudia, but when she said sleeping under it
would give her nightmares, I gave it to my cousin, who had just turned four and had dark, unruly hair like mine.

  “Claudia did finally learn how to quilt, of course,” Mrs. Compson said. “She made a somewhat acceptable green-and-white Irish Chain quilt for Grandpa when she was eight.”

  “Whatever happened to the Nine Patch quilt?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine it’s long gone. A four-year-old can quite literally love a quilt to pieces.”

  “Did you and Claudia ever quilt together again?”

  “Hmph.” Mrs. Compson stood up and walked to the window. “Of course we did. But not for a long time. Maybe I’ll tell you about that another day.”

  Sarah certainly hoped so. If Mrs. Compson told her more about her life at Elm Creek Manor, Sarah might learn why she had left and what had hap-pened to her family.

  “Matthew is here.” Just as Mrs. Compson spoke, Sarah heard the truck pull up behind the manor. She set her quilt block aside and they went to meet him in the kitchen, where he gratefully accepted the glass of lemonade Mrs. Compson offered.

  “The orchards are in much better shape than I expected,” he told Mrs. Compson after taking a deep drink and wiping his brow. “From what you first told me, I thought the trees hadn’t been tended for years.”

  “They haven’t been tended well for years,” Mrs. Compson corrected. “But my sister did manage to hire help and make a bit of a harvest every year, as far as I know.”

  “With some care, you should be able to get a good harvest this year, too. I can’t do the work alone, though. I’ll need you to sign off on the additional expense.”

  “Certainly. That should be no trouble.”

  Matt finished his drink and set the glass in the sink. “I don’t think Waterford College has an agriculture program. It’s too bad we aren’t closer to Penn State. Ag majors would manage this place for you as interns, pretty cheap, to get the experience and to run tests. You know, new organic fertilizers, cultivation methods, things like that.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Sarah said. “We aren’t too far away. You had to travel farther than this for your internship, and I took a whole semester off for mine.”

  Mrs. Compson nodded. “It may indeed be something the new owners should consider.”

  Sarah’s heart sank. Just for that moment, she had forgotten that Elm Creek Manor was going to be sold.

  “Dear, is anything wrong?”

  “No—no, Mrs. Compson. I just remembered that—I forgot my quilting stuff.” Sarah returned to the sitting room and collected her sewing tools and quilt block pieces. Matt was watching her worriedly when she came back, so she gave him a bright smile to reassure him.

  On the way home Sarah thought about the library she had worked so hard to restore. Somebody else would probably come along and change everything, putting wall-to-wall carpet on the beautiful hardwood floor, covering up the fireplace with ugly wallpaper, and doing other things, worse things that would give any decorator with taste nightmares. Sarah frowned and stared out of the truck window. Maybe Mrs. Compson wouldn’t find a buyer. How many people in Waterford had that kind of money anyway?

  Then Sarah felt a stab of guilt. If Mrs. Compson wanted to sell her home, it wasn’t right for Sarah to hope she’d fail. But she couldn’t ignore the fact that Mrs. Compson’s success meant no more visits to Elm Creek Manor, no more job, no more quilting lessons, and no more interesting stories about Claudia and the Bergstroms. The best she could hope for was that buyers wouldn’t appear for a long time and that the new owners would appreciate Elm Creek Manor as much as the Bergstroms once had.

  The day’s mail did nothing to improve her mood. She received two rejection letters, both from jobs she’d thought she had a reasonable chance of getting. And there was a postcard. The photograph showed an enormous cruise ship anchored in a serene tropical bay. “Having a wonderful time, Darling,” her mother had written on the back. “Uncle Henry sends his love.”

  Uncle Henry. Unbelievable. If she were a child, Sarah might have tolerated calling her mother’s many boyfriends Uncle, but not now. Even the title boyfriend seemed inappropriate.

  Sarah crumpled up the postcard and threw it away before Matt noticed.

  Ten

  Since the library was finished, the next morning Mrs. Compson and Sarah began working on a bedroom suite near the library. “We’ll keep the furniture in the rooms until the auction,” Mrs. Compson said. “We’ll probably discard nearly everything else, though.”

  The furniture in these rooms, Mrs. Compson explained, was from Lancaster and had been handmade by Amish craftsmen. Sarah ran her hand over the dresser’s smooth wooden surface. A blue-and-rose Lone Star quilt, faded but still lovely, was draped over the bed. Net curtains hung across a thin metal rod over the large window in the east wall. A door on the left led to a dressing room, where she spotted a dusty overstuffed sofa with wood armrests carved to resemble a swan’s profile, and a small vanity with a cracked mirror.

  “These were my Aunt Clara’s rooms,” Mrs. Compson said. She removed the quilt from the bed, gave it a quick shake, and folded it carefully. “She died of influenza when she was only thirteen.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t be. It was a very long time ago. I never knew her. Almost everyone I’ve ever known is dead now, and you can’t feel sorry all day long.” Mrs. Compson placed the quilt on the floor. “Let’s start a ‘save’ pile and a ‘throw away’ pile, shall we?”

  “I hope that’s the ‘save’ pile,” Sarah said, indicating the quilt. “You wouldn’t throw it away after spending so much time on it, would you?”

  “Of course not! But I didn’t make this quilt. Claudia did.” She bent over and unfolded a corner so that the pattern was visible. “See how the corners of these four diamonds don’t meet? That’s a sure sign of Claudia’s piecing every time.”

  “I take it this isn’t a quilt you two worked on together?”

  “Certainly not.” Mrs. Compson sniffed indignantly. “I would’ve made her take out those stitches and do them over, and if you match your points as poorly, I’ll do the same to you.”

  Sarah grinned. “Don’t worry. I know better.”

  “As indeed you should.” Mrs. Compson opened a closet and began to sort through the clutter. “See if there is anything worth saving in the dresser. This room should be easy to finish. It hasn’t been used in a long time.”

  Sarah pulled open two empty drawers before she found one half full of worn handkerchiefs, scarves, and a few pieces of costume jewelry. “When did you and Claudia finally start quilting together again?”

  “Oh, let’s see.” Mrs. Compson tapped her chin with a finger. “Why, it must have been to make the baby quilt. Yes, that’s right.”

  Before we worked together on that project we both still quilted, just not together. The summer after the Nine Patch fiasco we both had quilts in the state fair, and we both won blue ribbons in the girls’ competition. The following summer I won a blue ribbon and Claudia took second. My, she was furious. She told me, when Mother and Father couldn’t overhear, that the judges gave me the ribbon only because I was younger. I stuck my tongue out at her, which, naturally, Mother saw. At first she said I would not be allowed to ride, as a punishment, but Father was so proud of my riding so well at such a young age that he convinced Mother to relent. I won a ribbon in riding, too, my first ever. That probably made Claudia even angrier. She was afraid of horses, and Father teased her about it.

  When I was seven and Claudia was nine, Mother and Father had such wonderful news. We were going to have a new baby brother or sister—

  “You never mentioned another brother or sister.”

  “You never asked.”

  “I thought it was just you and Claudia.”

  “Well, now you know differently. Are you planning to interrupt anymore, or may I continue?”

  “Sorry. No more interruptions. Please go on.”

  “Very well.”

  As I w
as about to explain, when I was seven and Claudia was nine, Mother and Father told us they were going to have another child. We were thrilled. Claudia couldn’t wait to help Mother take care of the new baby, and I was looking forward to having a new playmate. We were busy preparing for many months. One of the rooms was made over for the baby, and of course, the baby would need a quilt.

  Claudia said that she should be in charge of making the baby’s quilt because she was the oldest. I said I should get to be in charge because I was the better quilter. “If that’s the way you’re going to be, I’ll make the quilt all by myself,” Claudia announced.

  Naturally, I piped up that I would make my own quilt for the baby, too. Then we began to argue over whose quilt the baby would use first, and Claudia said hers, since she was the oldest. My, how that argument infuriated me. Claudia would always be the oldest, and there was nothing I could do about that, so she would always use age to justify everything, from who had to help Cook with the dishes to who got the best scraps from Mother’s basket.

  “I know,” I suggested. “How about this: the baby will use first the quilt that’s finished first?”

  Well, that just made her angry. I thought it might, which is why I suggested it.

  As the argument escalated, Mother decided we should both work on the quilt together. We pouted, but with Mother watching, we had to agree. We decided that I would pick out the block pattern and Claudia could pick out the colors. I selected the Bear’s Paw; there would be many triangle points to match, but since there were no curved seams or set-in pieces, Claudia couldn’t mess it up too badly. And then it was Claudia’s turn.

  “Pink and white, with a little bit of green.”