“Maybe she isn’t really your daughter.” Nit couldn’t help but laugh at her own wit.
Hennie was silent for a long time then, mulling something over, which made the girl fidgety. At last, Hennie said, “No, she isn’t, not my natural-born daughter leastways. But in every other way, she is the best daughter a woman ever had. Every day I thank the Lord for Mae, because Jake and I weren’t blessed with children of our own.” There was no reason to tell the girl about the half-made babies she’d lost when they were three or five months along, no need to remind Nit of her own sorrow or make her fear another pregnancy. Women weren’t supposed to count those babies, but Hennie mourned the little lives that had never been lived.
“Ah gee, Mrs. Comfort. I didn’t mean to ask a question of a personal nature.”
The girl looked so dejected that Hennie said, “It tires me to talk when there’s climbing to do, and this mountain’s as steep as a horse’s face, but I promise I’ll tell you about her when we get to the toppen part.” She bent over and picked a red berry the size of the nail on her little finger. “Here’s you your first strawberry. Go ahead and eat it. There’s no use to save it. Why, it’d take most of a day to pick enough for a pie, if you could find them.” Hennie carried the bucket again, and the two walked on in silence, both winded, until they reached timberline. The pines were stunted there, and some were bare of branches on one side, where the wind had taken them. The trees grew in patches, as if they’d failed in their struggle to march up to the top of the mountain, which was bald and covered with snow.
“You can see the whole world up here,” Nit said, as they broke into the clearing. “I’ll bring Dick. We can make a camp. Why, we love sleeping outside in a summer night.”
“No such a thing,” Hennie warned, explaining that lightning storms sent huge balls of electricity rolling across the open field. Three summers before, she said, two foreigners sleeping in a tent hadn’t had the sense to go below when the rain came, and they’d been struck by lightning.
“There’s so much I’ve got to learn here. At home, I was thought right smart, but I don’t know a thing about these mountains.”
“You’ll learn. You’ve already got a start,” Hennie replied.
“Then I thank you for it,” Nit said. “Because of you, I’m coming on to feeling a kinship to this place.”
The old woman led Nit to a favorite spot of flat stones, recalling that she and Mae had come there when the girl was small. Drifts of snow remained under the trees and the tundra was spongy, but the spot Hennie chose was dry, and the women sat down. Hennie reached into the bucket and took out two tin plates, two tin forks. “I brought these forks with me to Colorado. When we went visiting for supper in that long-ago time, we took our forks with us, because nobody had them to spare. One woman there was who even gave her forks names—Big Andy and Little Bets.”
Hennie handed the girl a sandwich, which Nit opened, exclaiming over the jam. She’d brought jam jars with her, she said, but they’d been broken, and she was hungry for a taste of preserves. They finished Hennie’s lunch, eating everything, for the climb had sharpened their appetites. Then Nit removed the dish towel from her pie plate and offered a huge piece of sugar pie to Hennie, who held it in her hand and sampled it, telling the girl she’d never tasted better. “I remember now. I made Kentucky pie for Mae, brought it to this very place for a picnic. I’d forgotten about that.” She added for politeness’s sake, “It wasn’t as good as this one.”
The girl beamed. “Dick says it hurts his teeth, but he still eats it, mostly between slices of bread for a sandwich.”
“A man’ll do that.” She paused. “You’ve got a good man, Mrs. Spindle.”
“I couldn’t ask for better. Still, I’ve found out a husband isn’t everything to me. There’s lots of things I can’t talk to Dick about. I mean, he’ll listen. Dick’s good about that. But he doesn’t understand the way a woman does. Have you noticed that about a husband?”
Hennie nodded. She’d noticed.
“I wished he’d asked me if I wanted to come to Middle Swan. I’d have told him yes, because a wife’s supposed to, like the Bible says. She’s supposed to follow where he goes. But he could have asked instead of telling me. He could have had a consideration for my feelings.” She added quickly, “I don’t want you to think I’m finding fault.”
“There isn’t a wife who doesn’t feel like you,” Hennie told her. “That’s why the Lord made friends. They can be a burden, but most times, I’m gladder for my friends than I am for almost anything, maybe even quilting. I’m proud to say I have as many friends as I do quilts.”
“I’m obliged to say my friends are better made than my quilts,” Nit said. She grew still a moment. “I wish I could make more friends here. It seems like I’m not worth much without friends and . . .” Her voice trailed off, but Hennie knew the girl had meant to add, “a baby.”
The two were silent then, until they finished the pie, every crumb, and returned the dishes to the bucket. Then Hennie said, “We’ll go down in just a breath or two, but I’d like to sit a minute.” She opened the napkin and removed colorful shapes of fabric and laid them out on a rock, fitting them together to form a meandering line.
“Quiled Rattlesnake.” Nit seemed delighted to recognize the pattern.
Hennie frowned a minute as she picked up two pieces and pinned them together. Coiled Rattlesnake, she thought, for a quilt pattern could have a dozen names. She took out her needle and began stitching the pieces together. The girl reached into her own pocket and removed a quilt square that she’d begun. Hennie leaned over to look at the piecing. The girl offered the square, and Hennie studied it, turning it around and then exclaiming, “Why, it’s a coffee cup. Isn’t that the smartest thing? You could lay abed in the morning and drink your coffee under that quilt. I’d like to see that top finished.”
She leaned toward the girl. “When it’s done, we’ll have it put in at my place, since there’s already a frame set up; you remember it. I reckon you’ve got no room for a frame in that house of yours, unless you hang it from the ceiling. I never liked to quilt on a frame suspended.” Hennie handed back the piecing. “That’ll make a right pretty quilt. My, you’re a clever girl.”
Nit flushed under her pink sunburn, for like any woman, she was vain about her sewing, even if it was nowhere as good as Hennie’s. To hide her embarrassment and because she was as curious a woman as Hennie, she asked, “How come that girl Mae wasn’t your natural-born child? You said you’d tell me.” When Hennie didn’t answer right away, Nit mumbled, “Forgive it. Dick says I’m bad for asking questions.”
Hennie patted the girl’s hand and said the story wasn’t a secret. “You want to hear it?” she asked.
Nit grinned. “I expect that’s why I asked.” She took a few stitches in her quilt square, then lay back against the rock and placed the square over her face to keep out the sun.
Hennie pinned another scrap to her piecing, because she always talked better when her hands were busy, and waited until the girl was settled in before she began. “Mae wasn’t mine, and she wasn’t adopted exactly. I found her.”
Nit sat up quickly, letting the quilt square fall off her face. “You what?”
“That’s right,” Hennie said, picking up the bit of quilting and handing it to Nit. “I found her.” She added, “You remember me telling you that when I met Jake Comfort I had encumberments? Well, that was Mae.”
The little girl was sitting in a clump of trees someplace in Kansas Territory when Ila Mae’s wagon train crossed in 1866. She might have been hiding, Ila Mae thought, and she would have passed right by her, just as the others did, if it weren’t for the girl’s dress, which was homespun, dyed in the oddest shade of blue. Ila Mae thought someone had abandoned a quilt or a shirt, and she started for the fabric. Then the child held out her arms, which were sunburned and scratched from the bushes, and Ila Mae realized that she was looking at a girl. Ila Mae gasped, not only at finding a lost ch
ild but because the tiny thing looked just the way she’d imagined Sarah would have looked if she’d lived to be two—or maybe three. Who could tell the age of the poor little thing?
Ila Mae knew the girl was not from her own wagon train, but just in case, she scooped her up and went to each family and asked. No one claimed the child. There were but three women in the train besides Ila Mae—a mother with eleven children, a woman who drove her own ox team and had the care of a wagon by herself, and the sick mother whose little ones Ila Mae tended. None of them cared to take the girl, and of course, the men wouldn’t have her.
One said the child must have wandered off from a farm and ought to be let be, but there were no farms in the area; the train hadn’t passed one in days. Another man told Ila Mae the girl might have been on an earlier train and someone would come for her, so give her a biscuit and leave her behind. The others agreed that as how she had found her, Ila Mae was the one to take the responsibility. Ila Mae would no more have left that girl behind than stayed there herself, for her heart was tender, still bruised by the death of her own child.
Later, at their nooning, Ila Mae gave a man one of her dollars to ride on to the wagon train ahead and inquire if a girl was missing. He returned to say all the children were accounted for. But he’d learned that a few days earlier, a wagon had lagged behind the others and been attacked by Indians. Before the men in the train could reach the family, the Indians had killed and scalped the mother and father, and taken the children. The men found the bodies of an older boy and a newborn baby, but there was no sign of the rest of the children—two of them or was it three? No one remembered. Mostly likely, Ila Mae’s little girl belonged to that family and had wandered away when the Indians weren’t watching her, because the damn savages killed their hostages instead of letting them go. Ila Mae shuddered to think the girl’s yellow curls might have hung from a tepee pole.
So she kept the little child, whom she called Mae, after herself, and she cared for her all the way to Denver, the girl walking beside Ila Mae much of the time. She intended to leave the baby there, but Denver had no facilities for lost children. And although she made the rounds of the wagons camped about the city, she found no one to identify the child. Besides, the poor little orphan clung to her so, that Ila Mae had no choice but to take Mae along with her to Middle Swan.
When she arrived at the camp, riding on top of that freight wagon in the rain, the baby sleeping on her lap under the Friendship quilt that covered them both, she warned Jake Comfort that he might have to take on two females instead of one. Jake only grinned, replying that he was well satisfied with the bargain. All he could offer Ila Mae in return, he said, was himself and a yellow dog.
That first year Hennie lived in Middle Swan, she wrote letters to the postmasters at Mingo in eastern Colorado and Topeka in Kansas, inquiring whether anyone was searching for a lost girl. The man on her wagon train who’d brought her news of the Indian attack hadn’t asked the family’s name or where they’d come from, so Hennie wasn’t able to track down Mae’s relatives. She asked the Rocky Mountain News in Denver to print an article about the foundling, but the only response to it came from a woman who wrote to Hennie, asking her to make sure Mae wasn’t a boy, for her own twelve-year-old son had run off.
After a time, there was nothing more that Hennie could do, and she was glad. By then, Mae was as much a part of Jake’s and Hennie’s lives as if she’d been their own, and truth be told, Hennie didn’t want to find the girl’s people. As the years passed with no other children joining their family, Jake and Hennie came to believe Mae was the Lord’s blessing.
So Mae lived in Middle Swan as the Comforts’ daughter, but when she was grown, she left out, and the girl’s leaving had pained Hennie. That was Hennie’s own fault, however. She and Jake didn’t want Mae to live out her life in a mining camp, so they sent her down below to attend school. Hennie knew the day Mae enrolled at the University of Denver and saw what the world was like beyond the Tenmile Range that the girl would never return to the high country. That had been Hennie’s intention all along. For Hennie, leaving war-numbed Tennessee for Middle Swan had been a step upward, and now, leaving Middle Swan was a chance at a better life for Mae. Hennie didn’t want her daughter to have to bear the hardships that Hennie had endured—the brutal way of the mines, the harsh winters, the pneumonia and influenza that claimed women and babies not strong enough for the mountains. Oh, Hennie loved the mountains, but she knew Mae’s life would be easier away from them.
Mae married a man who started a fountain pen company in Fort Madison, Iowa, and the two moved to the banks of the Mississippi. Hennie visited, but she was a person who’d lived in the mountains too long, and her blood had grown thin. She’d as soon walk in a barrel of molasses as visit there in the summer. And in winter, that Mississippi River cold went clear through her. So the mother and daughter kept in touch through letters, as well as Mae’s occasional visits to the Swan. They were as close all their lives as if Mae had been Hennie’s own flesh and blood. It was Hennie’s love for Mae that had sent her out into the world, and now it was Mae’s love for Hennie that insisted the old woman move to Iowa.
Hennie stopped talking when the sound of thunder rolled across the mountain, and she looked up to see clouds hovering over the mountain peaks.
“It’s a-coming on to rain,” Nit said, standing up and dropping her patchwork in a cluster of pine needles.
Hennie picked up Nit’s sewing and dusted it off, handing it to the girl. “Just you come. We’ve got to get below before one of those electric storms hits.” She felt the hair on her arms stand up and shoved her own sewing into the lard bucket and grabbed its bail handle. “We’ll take our backtrack.”
The girl clutched her patching and followed the old woman as she scurried below timberline. Reaching the trees, they heard another clap of thunder as loud as a dynamite charge, and Hennie felt an itching in her scalp and the back of her neck.
“That noise pesters my ears,” Nit said, putting the palms of her hands over her ears. “I guess it’s not summer, after all.”
The rain began to fall then—chill silver mountain rain, not the gentle spring rain Hennie knew as a girl in Tennessee, the kind that she’d let wash over herself in gladness while the mud squished up between her toes. Mountain rain was as cold as melted snow.
“We can’t stand under these trees,” the old woman said. She continued down the trail, until she reached the faint impression of a turnoff and led the way through the pines, past drifts of snow that wouldn’t melt until summer was almost over, to a deserted shack. She removed two blocks placed so that porcupines wouldn’t gnaw the door, and pushed her way into the cabin. The shack smelled like a bunch of stewed owls, so Hennie left the door open, but that let in the cold. The girl shivered so that Hennie picked kindling off a pile and placed it in the fireplace, then found a baking soda can with matches in it and lit a fire. She took off Jake’s old sweater and placed it around the girl’s shoulders. “The rain won’t last but a few minutes,” she told Nit.
“This storm uneasies me. I wished there was a feather bed. We could lie down on a feather bed and never get struck by lightning,” Nit said, snuggling into the sweater. “Lightning never hits a feather bed. It’s a fact.” When the girl had warmed, she looked around the cabin, which had a built-in bunk in the corner and two rough chairs. She pulled one of them to the fire and sat down, reaching for a half-rusted Log Cabin syrup tin on the floor and showing it to Hennie. “This looks just like my little house. Do you think he’ll mind if I take it, the man who owns this place, I mean?”
“Take it. Nobody’s lived here since Joe Sarsfield. He’s been dead a long time. Some folks called him Vinegar Joe, on account of he was so sour. He was a sooty-looking man, a complainer, and as hard as a pine knot. He didn’t have to live up here so close to timberline, leaving Maudie snowed in for the winter. Wouldn’t give her hardly enough money to buy food, either.” Hennie’s face twisted in pain at the memory.
“His wife?” Nit asked, placing the syrup can in the lard bucket.
“Yes.”
“That sounds like another story,” Nit said.
“It is, or more of one I’ve already told you. Most of my stories fit together one way or the other,” Hennie said. She sat down in a chair beside Nit, took off her rubber shoes, and propped her feet on a box in front of the fire.
Maudie Sarsfield was the workingest woman on the Tenmile. She quilted for others for a half-dollar a spool. She spent a week using up all the thread on the spool, because she took six or eight stitches in an inch, but she liked doing the stitching. “Quilting keeps me from going queer,” she told Hennie. Maudie stitched her initials on quilts when she was finished. Not one in ten women she quilted for ever noticed the M.S., but Maudie took pleasure in it. She knew it was a bit of foolishness, but that was her way of being remembered. After all, a woman didn’t leave much behind in the world to show she’d been there. Even the children she bore and raised got their father’s name. But her quilts, now that was something she could pass on. Joe wouldn’t value her quilts after she crossed over and would likely tear them up for rags or horse blankets. But if her initials were hidden in some other woman’s quilts, why something of her would go on living.
Of course, Maudie kept all that to herself, because if Joe knew how much quilting pleased her, he wouldn’t have allowed her to do it. Joe Sarsfield was mean enough to insult Jesus Christ.
He was cruel to his wife in other ways. He could get out in the winter, go into town if he wanted. But Maudie was frail and couldn’t walk through the snowdrifts. She didn’t see a well day in her life living up here at the top of the Swan. The women knew that, and they made the trip up the mountain every whipstitch to visit with her and give her a little human comfort. One or two hinted that Maudie ought to leave Joe, but she knew he’d hunt her down and kill her, and there were some who believed he’d have that right. More than once, he threatened to put her in the asylum. Maudie never told these things to the women who were her friends, but they had a way of knowing.
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