by Amy Isaman
I wait for her to speak.
“Sarah.” She relaxes a bit and grins.
Agnes rests her hands on the quilt. “Harper, I want to tell you this story.”
“Okay, I’m listening.” I lean back and relax. I’ve spent hours sitting with her on her porch swing or inside on her couch during Portland’s rainy winters listening to her stories, and she listened to mine. All of them, the middle school drama, the high school angst. Maybe this will help her to feel more at home here.
She shakes her head. “Not just listen, Harper, you need to listen and write for me.”
I have a brief moment of panic. Hopefully it’s a short story. I haven’t written anything in…forever, not since before my mom died. “Why don’t I bring you a notebook and you can write it down? It might even be more interesting in your own handwriting.”
She holds up her right hand. Arthritis has disfigured her knuckles. She can no longer knit or crochet, let alone write.
“Right. I forgot. Sorry.” I feel like an asshole. I won’t even mention her using a computer. I tried to teach her to play solitaire on my laptop and that was a technological disaster that ended in her telling me to “put the damn thing away and get the cards.” She refused to even attempt email or Facebook.
“You,” she lowers her eyebrows, glowering at me, “need to write this. I don’t know how much time I have. I think you’ll like Sarah, too.”
“You have plenty of time.” I don’t want her talking about dying. Moving here has been bad enough.
“You’re right. I could live another ten years, but you and I both know that by then, I probably won’t remember a word of this story. It’s the story I grew up hearing, and the story my mother grew up hearing, passed down for generations, Harper, and I don’t want it to be lost.”
Panic builds in my chest. I can’t think about Agnes dying or even the dementia destroying her mind. When she’s gone, who will I have? A father I haven’t seen since I was eleven. Who knows where he is. My mom passed away two years ago. I’ll be alone. She can’t leave, but I don’t think I can do this either. I started college with plans to go into publishing, either as a writer or editor, but those dreams fell apart. I quit when mom got sick, and now I wait tables. It’s about all I can handle at this point. What if I can’t do it? What if I don’t finish? I’d be letting her down, failing her last request of me, kind of like I failed to finish college even though that’s all she wanted for me.
I lean back and study the quilt. “Agnes, why don’t you tell Rosemary? She’s your daughter. Don’t you think she’d be interested in it if it’s a family story?” If she told it to Rosemary, maybe they’d have something to talk about, and Rosemary might understand that even though the quilt is ancient and faded, it’s still pretty cool.
Agnes sighs. “This quilt is its story, Harper. It’s not just the cotton and thread that make it up. Rosemary doesn’t care about that. She’s her father’s daughter. She does…facts, numbers. You do stories.”
“What do you mean? I ‘do stories’?”
Her eyes narrow. “I’m not telling it to Rosemary because I want to tell it to you.” She doesn’t answer my question. Instead, Agnes points to the small desk shoved in the corner of the room, then folds her hands in her lap and waits. Apparently, I’m supposed to get something to write with. Despite the fact that her hands won’t allow her to write, she’s got an old mug full of pens sitting on top as well as some pink stationary in a drawer. Not my usual note-taking supplies, but they’ll do. I grab what I need and return to the love seat beside her recliner.
I wonder how long this will take. A few hours? Days? Can I get it all down before her memory goes completely? I’ve got about an hour before I need to leave for work, but I guess that’s enough time to get started. “So,” I ask, “Who’s Sarah?”
Most of her wrinkles are from smiling. At this, her entire face scrunches up in a big grin. She settles back in the chair and strokes the quilt, remembering.
I glance apprehensively at the clock on her bedside table. I won’t tell her no, I could never do that, but what have I gotten myself into?
Agnes leans her head back and begins, “More than anything, Sarah didn’t want to leave her granny behind in Indiana, but her Pa said the journey would kill her. She had to stay home.”
“The…journey? What journey?”
“Hush, Harper. I’ll get to it.” She pauses and stares out the window. “They were heading to Oregon. Walking there. On the Oregon Trail. Sarah’s Pa had heard of the bill Congress had passed. It gave free land to anyone who made it to the far west, and he decided to bring his family here. So, every night after Sarah and her Ma and Grannie had stitched and sewed in preparation for the journey, Grannie would get out her scrap bag and they’d work on this quilt. Granny’d pull the pieces out and tell Sarah the story behind each and every piece of fabric while Sarah cut them up. Granny could stitch but her hands were probably worse than mine. All the women worked with their hands back then.” Agnes held up her bent fingers, so I could see them.
“When was this?” I ask, brushing my blond hair out of my face. I feel myself already pulled into the story as I grab a ponytail holder from my pocket and pull my hair back while Agnes thinks.
“Ah, it’s right here.” She points to a square on the quilt which I study. It says 1847 in faded script.
Holy crap. This thing is…really old. “So Agnes, how do you know all of this? I mean, it’s not like your great grandma Sarah told you. Did she?”
“No, I never knew Sarah, but she told the story to her daughter and it got passed down. We all grew up on these stories, but I guess I never got around to passing it on myself. Rosemary wasn’t interested anyway.”
I wonder, then, what was real? Or what had been embellished over the years? I figured I’d never know but I take notes as Agnes continues, telling me of Sarah and her granny making the quilt and then having to say goodbye, forever. I can’t blame Sarah for not wanting to come. Why would she want to say goodbye to everything she ever knew and walk two thousand miles across the country? I can barely handle Agnes moving three miles away, and I have a car to visit whenever I want.
“You know, the story really starts when they reached Independence, Missouri, when Sarah first saw Jed and he mistook her for a whore.”
“Huh?” I lift my pencil and stare at Agnes, but she ignores me, fully ensconced in Sarah’s world.
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