Elm Creek Quilts [06] The Master Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  For each quilt and each friend or relation, Agnes affixed an identifying tag and added the information to her list. She intended to type up the list, sign it and date it, and keep it with her will in the fireproof box beneath the bed in Stacy’s old room. After going through the quilts, she would consider the furniture and other belongings. She had already decided what to do with the contents of her sewing room. Since neither of her daughters quilted, she would bequeath her fabric stash, pattern books, and all her tools to Elm Creek Quilt Camp. They would surely find a good use for them.

  Agnes was nearly finished when the phone rang. She climbed to her feet, shook the stiffness from her legs, and picked up in her bedroom. “Hello?” she said, gingerly lowering herself onto the edge of the bed. She should have known better than to sit on the floor for so long.

  “Grandma?”

  “Why, hello, Zachary,” she said. “This is Zach, right, not Norman?” His voice sounded so much like his father’s that it was difficult to tell.

  Zach laughed. “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “What a lovely surprise. How are you? Are you back at school already?”

  “I moved back into the dorm this morning. Classes don’t start until Monday,” her grandson said. “Grandma, the reason I’m calling is that—well, my mom and dad were talking in the car on our way home from your house last week.”

  Agnes could guess the topic of discussion, but she said, “Talking about what, honey?”

  “About your will. Mom said you asked her and Aunt Stacy what they wanted to inherit, you know, if there was something in particular they wanted.”

  “I imagine your mother didn’t discuss this calmly.”

  “You know Mom. She was kind of upset, but Dad said it was thoughtful of you to spare them a tough job at what would obviously be a stressful time.”

  Good old Norman. “What do you and your sister think?”

  “Rebecca’s like Mom. She thinks if you pretend something can’t happen to you, it won’t. She made Mom and Dad stop talking about it.”

  “And you?”

  “I didn’t like talking about it, either. I don’t want to think about you dying, Grandma. I don’t want you to ever die.”

  “I appreciate that, honey.”

  “But since you asked—” He paused. “I know you just asked Mom and Aunt Stacy, not the kids, but”

  Gently, Agnes asked, “Is there something special you would like?”

  “You know that quilt with the different colored triangles and all the black?”

  “Of course,” said Agnes, surprised. She was not aware he had ever given the quilt a second glance. “Would you like it?”

  “Yes, please. And—your journals.”

  “My what?”

  “Your journals. You know, the ones you started keeping during World War II.”

  Agnes had to think a moment before she understood. Her notebooks. She had begun the first when Richard went off to war to note news from home to include in her letters. After he was killed, she continued out of habit for nearly ten years, filling fifteen notebooks with reminders to herself, appointments, to-do lists, and the like. She wondered when Zach had learned of them, then vaguely remembered an occasion several years before when Laura was filling out a medical form and needed to know if she had ever had a particular illness. Agnes had consulted her notebooks and determined that Laura had been vaccinated at age eight.

  “Why would you want those old things?” asked Agnes. “They’re not very interesting, just a lot of lists, mostly. They don’t read like a story, even a dull one.”

  “I don’t care. They’re an important record of our family history.”

  Agnes had to laugh. Her old grocery lists and hairdresser’s appointments, family history? “There aren’t any fascinating family stories in those old notebooks, Zach. I should have thrown them away a long time ago.”

  “That’s exactly what you shouldn’t do, and that’s why I want you to set them aside for me. Someone might throw them away not knowing what they are. You’re wrong to think they’re trivial or worthless. They’re irreplaceable and important, and that’s the truth, even if you don’t think so.”

  “Why, if they’re that important to you, they’re yours, of course,” said Agnes, surprised.

  He thanked her, and they talked of other, more pleasant matters. After they hung up, Agnes rummaged in the kitchen cabinet until she found a large padded envelope. She located her old notebooks under her sweaters in the bottom drawer of her bureau, frowned ruefully at their battered state, and slipped them into the padded envelope with a shrug. She still couldn’t see why Zach wanted them so badly. Likely he would read the first few pages and wonder the same thing. Agnes ought to save him the trouble of discarding them by taking care of the job herself, but she couldn’t now, not after promising to save them.

  She wrote his name on the outside of the envelope and added her notebooks to the list on the pad. Then she took Summer’s name from the Pinwheel quilt and pinned Zach’s in its place, marking the change on the list. She would have to find something else for Summer to supplement the leftover Amish solids from her fabric stash. Summer would understand. Friends were dear, but grandchildren came first.

  The invitation to participate in Sylvia’s bridal quilt had arrived in the meantime, but Agnes already knew the requirements and had not bothered to read the letter thoroughly. When she had finished sorting out the future ownership of her quilts and a few other special belongings, she filed the list and decided to turn her attention to her quilt block. This time she read the letter over carefully, and tsked when she read that Diane had said Sylvia deserved to go without a wedding quilt since the surprise wedding on Christmas Eve had thwarted her friends’ plans for an elaborate June affair. Agnes could imagine Diane thinking that, briefly, but not blurting it out where someone might overhear. Despite her sometimes abrasive manner, Diane cared for her friends too much to wish them any disappointment. If she had gone a bit overboard in planning the couple’s wedding, it was only from the desire to please them and spare them the trouble.

  It was too late to ask Sarah to change the letter, so Agnes could only hope she and Summer had been wise enough not to send Diane a copy, and not only because she might be hurt. They could not afford to discourage anyone from participating, especially one of their own. While Sylvia had many friends and admirers around the world, 140 blocks were a great many to collect in such a short period. Even if Sylvia and Andrew had not surprised them with an early wedding and had married in June, as the Elm Creek Quilters had anticipated, they still should have begun the quilt much earlier, ideally as soon as the couple announced their engagement. Agnes blamed the demise of their weekly quilting bees for the delay. Their business meetings were so full of details for Elm Creek Quilt Camp that the friends rarely had the opportunity to chat just about quilting. Finding such a time when everyone but Sylvia was present was even more difficult, since Sylvia never missed a meeting unless she and Andrew were traveling. Agnes considered the quilt camp a great adventure and was thrilled to be a part of it, but she missed some aspects of the old days.

  “So many blocks,” said Agnes with a sigh as she sorted through her fabric stash for hues suiting those described in the guidelines. The other Elm Creek Quilters had gladly accepted her offer when she had volunteered to assemble the blocks into a quilt top, since they knew the task meant much more than simply stitching all 140 blocks together. To avoid a cluttered or chaotic quilt, she might need to separate the blocks with strips of fabric called sashing. If not enough blocks arrived, she would need to employ more elaborate tricks, such as setting the blocks on point or alternating them with squares of solid fabric. Either way, she ought to make a few extra blocks just in case. If, as Summer had predicted, they received enough blocks or more than they needed, she would simply save her extras for another project.

  Since she could not think of one single block that represented all that Sylvia meant to her, she decided instead to make blocks remi
niscent of their shared history. She began with a Bachelor’s Puzzle block. How shocked Sylvia would be to learn that Agnes had known about the nickname almost from the time the Bergstrom sisters had bestowed it upon her! Long ago, Agnes and Richard had been unable to send word when Agnes decided on the spur of the moment to accompany him home from school in Philadelphia for the Christmas holidays, and her presence—and Richard’s obvious affection for her—had confounded the sisters. Sylvia, especially, was jealous that someone had stolen away her beloved baby brother’s attention, and decided to find nothing redeemable in her rival. She saw Agnes as a flighty, spoiled, pampered princess, and nothing Agnes said or did could persuade her otherwise. It was a puzzle, Sylvia said, what Richard saw in her.

  Agnes chuckled to herself as she worked on the block, imagining how flustered Sylvia would be to discover her little meanness had not been a secret for decades. So as to not spoil the joke, Agnes would allow Sylvia to believe Agnes had overheard the sisters using the nickname. She would not reveal that while their menfolk were overseas, Claudia had confided the secret in a spiteful attempt to win Agnes to her side after an especially heated argument with her sister.

  Next Agnes pieced a Sister’s Choice block for Sylvia’s rash and oft regretted decision to leave Elm Creek Manor upon learning that Claudia’s future husband, Harold, could have saved the lives of Richard and Sylvia’s husband, James, but, out of cowardice, had done nothing. Sylvia’s decision to abandon her ancestral home transformed her life, her sister’s, and the manor itself. Perhaps nothing more than Agnes’s own choice to marry into the Bergstrom family had influenced the course of her fate more than Sylvia’s departure from the manor. If Sylvia had remained to run the family horse-breeding business, Claudia and Harold would not have driven it into bankruptcy. If the couple had not depleted the family fortune and begun selling off parcels of land and precious family heirlooms, Agnes would not have met the history professor who advised her on antique markets and later became her husband. If she had not married Joe, she would have lived out her days in the manor that had become as full of grief and despair as it had once been blessed with love and prosperity. She would not have become a mother and a grandmother. She would not have known the greatest joys of her life.

  Upon completing that block, Agnes somberly began a Castle Wall. Sylvia would know at once why Agnes had chosen the pattern. More than a year after Sylvia’s departure, in a rare moment of regret, Claudia had agreed to help Agnes complete a memorial quilt for Sylvia, whom they still believed would soon return. Together Agnes and Claudia had sorted through James’s closet, selecting shirts and trousers and ties they knew Sylvia would recognize. From the cloth they cut diamonds and triangles and squares and sewed them into the pattern whose name conveyed all that the founders of Elm Creek Manor had wanted their descendants to find within its walls: safety, sanctuary, family, home. For a year the forsaken sisters pieced the tribute to the husband Sylvia mourned, but Claudia’s own marriage had begun to crumble under the strain of grief and guilty secrets, and as she withdrew into her solitary bitterness, Agnes layered the top in the frame and quilted it alone. It had yet been incomplete when she had left Elm Creek Manor to marry Joe. After Sylvia’s return to the manor, Sylvia and Agnes had finished the quilt together, and it now hung in the library, where Sylvia and James had spent so many happy hours discussing the family business, planning for a future that would not come to pass.

  Rather than evoke only sorrowful memories, Agnes next pieced a Christmas Star in celebration of Sylvia and Andrew’s Christmas Eve wedding. That pattern called to mind Sylvia’s favorite block, the eight-pointed LeMoyne Star, and all the variations that found their way so often into Sylvia’s quilts: Virginia Star, Snow Crystals, Blazing Star, Carpenter’s Wheel, St. Louis Star, Dutch Rose, Star of Bethlehem. Once Agnes completed these, she made her own favorites, the appliquéd Whig Rose, American Beauty Rose, and Bridal Wreath.

  By the end of February, Bonnie had collected thirty blocks at Grandma’s Attic, which she delivered to Agnes so that she might begin planning their final arrangement. To these Agnes added her own twenty-four blocks and arranged them on the design wall Joe had put up for her when she had converted Laura’s old bedroom into a sewing room. The pieced and appliquéd blocks clung to the flannel surface where she placed them, and as she admired their beauty and variety, she decided that a border of split LeMoyne Stars would be just the thing to set them off best. She would start on it right away. She could always stitch a few more blocks later, if they were needed.

  Agnes dreamed of a balmy summer day, Joe in his shirtsleeves cooking steaks and hot dogs on the charcoal grill, her daughters shrieking with delight in pink and yellow bathing suits as they ran through the sprinkler. She threw the red-and-white checked tablecloth over the picnic table and returned inside for plates and napkins, where she found Zach sitting at the kitchen table reading one of her notebooks. He looked up and smiled. “This is an important family record,” he said, grinning. “But what the heck is oleo?”

  She opened her mouth to reply but was distracted by a distant ringing. She turned to find Laura, suddenly a grown woman, ringing the doorbell on the screen door. Her expression was solemn and she did not speak. Confused, since the back door had no bell, Agnes watched as Laura rang again.

  “You should probably get that,” advised Zach. The summer day vanished, and Agnes woke to the dark winter night of her bedroom. She jumped and clutched her quilt, heart pounding, as the doorbell rang downstairs. She glanced at the clock on her nightstand. Good news never came to the door at nearly one o’clock in the morning. She put on her robe and slippers and hurried downstairs, remembering to check through the window before opening the door. What she saw made her fling it open.

  “Bonnie, honey,” she said, gasping at the sudden cold. “What’s wrong?”

  Hollowly, Bonnie said, “May I spend the night?”

  “Of course,” said Agnes, opening the door still wider and ushering in her friend. Her mind raced with questions, but Bonnie seemed dazed, shocked, lost in an uneasy dream. “You must be exhausted at this hour,” Agnes said instead, leading Bonnie upstairs to Stacy’s old room. “I won’t need but a moment to set everything up for you. Would you like a cup of tea while you wait? A nice glass of warm milk? I like to put just a touch of vanilla in it.”

  Bonnie shook her head, eyes downcast. She seemed to be fighting back tears.

  At a loss, Agnes made nervous small talk as she showed Bonnie the adjoining bath and set out fresh towels for her. Bonnie would need a nightgown, she thought, noting for the first time that Bonnie had brought nothing with her. She hurried to her own room and retrieved the largest and warmest nightgown she owned, and hoped it would do. Bonnie took it and shook her head again when Agnes asked her if she wanted to try it on first, if Agnes should look for something better.

  It was apparent Bonnie wanted nothing more than to surrender to a dreamless sleep. “I’ll say good night, then,” said Agnes, lingering with her hand on the doorknob. “Just call me if you need anything.”

  “Thank you,” said Bonnie, stroking the flannel nightgown absently.

  Agnes shut the door and went to her own room, where she lay awake in bed listening to floorboards creak, water flowing in the pipes, the settling of bedsprings. When all was silent once again, she drifted off to sleep.

  Agnes woke at six, her first thoughts of Bonnie. What on earth had brought her friend to her door, on foot, on a cold winter’s night? It could not have been a disaster with the children; Bonnie would have remained at home with her husband and called her friends to her side. Knowing Bonnie, she would have waited until morning to trouble them no matter how she longed for the comfort of their presence. No, the most logical explanation was a fight with Craig. Trouble with a husband was what most often sent a woman from her home in the middle of the night.

  Agnes bathed and dressed, then tiptoed downstairs, pausing by Bonnie’s door. When she heard nothing, she continued on to the kitche
n, where she put on a larger pot of coffee than usual and fixed some waffles. She read the newspaper while she ate, and a large ad for Fabric Warehouse reminded her with a jolt that Bonnie worked on Fridays. She would surely be in no fit state to work today, especially considering that her husband would be right upstairs. Agnes waited until half past seven before phoning Diane and asking her to fill in. Diane agreed, but not before asking too many questions that Agnes evaded with difficulty. Agnes hung up, hoping she had not given Diane any reason for suspicion besides the obvious, calling on Bonnie’s behalf when Bonnie typically took care of such matters herself. With any luck, Diane’s harried morning rendered her too distracted to notice, which was why Agnes had phoned her instead of the more perceptive Summer.

  Still listening for noises above, Agnes washed her breakfast dishes, then crept softly upstairs to her sewing room and gathered the fabrics for the pieced border, her rotary cutter and ruler, and a cutting mat. She set up her tools on the dining room table and cut fabric pieces in silence, working off her worries in the familiar, repetitive motions of measuring and cutting. Shortly after eleven o’clock, she heard Bonnie walking about upstairs, followed by the sound of the shower. Agnes set her work aside and met her friend in the kitchen. Bonnie appeared fairly well rested given the circumstances, but was clad in the clothing she had worn the previous night. Agnes had not thought of that or she would have searched around for an alternative.