by Donna Ball
Then he returned the treasure box to Pearl with a tender look, but she did not linger to thank him. She ran away as fast as she could to Mama Madie’s cabin, and she thought that God must be in bad trouble indeed if He needed the likes of the bearded man to fight His battles for Him.
That night, Pearl and Mother moved into Mama Madie’s cabin, which was small but warm, and smelled like the dried plants and flowers that hung from the ceiling. Mother was real pleased to have her treasure box safe, and she hugged Pearl hard when she learned of it. Then Mother said she thought it wouldn’t be so bad, having the soldiers camped here, because there wasn’t anything left to steal and at least they would keep the gray-coated soldiers away. But Mama Madie said she didn’t trust nobody in a uniform, and good thing they’d buried the silver in the stream bed and turned the hogs and cows loose months ago.
They sat piecing together a quilt top and talking like that in tight, nervous voices, and Pearl, whose stitches were fine and even, helped a good bit. Mother said she felt bad for all the sick soldiers and maybe she’d take some willow bark and blackberry tea up to the house in the morning, and Mama Madie said angrily that it wasn’t her place to go ministering to white trash that drove her out of her own house like that, and then Mother’s eyes began to flash as she said that the captain seemed a decent Christian man and it was her boundin’ duty to help the sick. Then Mama Madie said that no Christian man would wear the coat of a soldier and, because Pearl didn’t like to hear them arguing, she said, “Tell me the story of this quilt, Mama Madie.”
All of Mama Madie’s quilts had stories hidden in their patterns. Some were stories of the Far Country, where the sun shone on dry rivers and the hunters carried spears and eyes hid in the tall grass, that her grandmother’s mother had told to her. Others were stories of nearer times, and slaves that hid beneath the bridge at Four Corners on a night when the moon was full, awaiting rescue by something called the Underground Railroad, which did not run underground and which was not a railroad at all. Mama Madie said the only way her people had to tell their stories was through songs and women’s work, because the white Master didn’t pay attention to either one of them.
Mama Madie had been a slave once, and the man she loved who fathered her twin baby girls had been sold to Georgia, then the twin babies died and Mama Madie had come to raise Pearl’s mother, whose papa had made her a free woman. Pearl knew all the stories of all the quilts. But when Pearl asked her the story of the newest quilt, Mama Madie got a strange, kind of sad look on her face and said, “Why, child, I don’t rightly know just yet.”
Pearl looked at her mama. “Maybe this quilt could be our story, Mother.”
Mother smiled, but in a way that said she was thinking of something else, and agreed that maybe it could.
Pearl dragged Mother’s treasure box out from under Mama Madie’s low rope bed, and put it in Mother’s lap. A soft look came over Mother’s face as she opened up the lid. It smelled of cedar and dust and old, dear things. Inside were scraps and pieces of lives that had gone before—a snippet of lace from a wedding dress, a knitted baby sock, brass buttons off one of Papa’s coats, a spool of delicately spun thread too fine to use for everyday work, a cluster of pressed dried violets pinned to a square of lavender silk, and, finally, the greatest treasure of them all: a square of strong dark wool, tattered now and a little frayed at the edges, embroidered with brightly colored silken threads in the shape of a flying horse against a red and gold shield, and over it a banner with words written in a language even Mother couldn’t read.
As she traced it with her fingers Pearl said softly, “Tell me again, Mother. Tell me our story.” And so Mother told again the story of the emissary of the king who had come to Virginia long ago with the flying horse embroidered on his wool cloak, so that everyone would know he was a nobleman from the king, and how he wrapped his newborn baby in the cloak and went off to fight the Indians, and was killed and never came back, and how for years and years the cloak had been passed down through Mother’s family until it got so worn-out all that was left was the embroidered horse.
And she always ended the story by saying, “And one day you will pass this down to your daughter, little Pearl, so that she will never forget where she came from.”
But Pearl worried that the scrap of cloth, which seemed to be getting smaller with each generation, would be too small to see by then, and the beautiful flying horse would be gone. So her heart leapt with joy when, as her mother finished the story this time, she looked thoughtfully at all the treasures in the box again, and said, “Do you know, sweet Pearl, I believe you may be right. These scraps and pieces are doing no good locked away in this box where the moths can get them. Let’s make our own story quilt, and you can start the center square.”
4
Discoveries
“I don’t know why I have to be the one to dig up the rocks,” Lori said, poking at a knot of granite with the tip of her shovel.
Noah, who was chopping at the ground with a hoe a few yards ahead of her, favored her with a disparaging scowl over his shoulder. “If you’re having trouble working that shovel, you can come up here and work this hoe. What kind of girl don’t know how to dig a hole, anyway?”
“The kind who’d rather get her workout in a gym,” Lori grumbled, but Noah either didn’t hear or didn’t care. He went back to swinging the hoe, breaking up the weeds and root-webbed ground, and Lori resignedly dug her shovel into the ground and turned up another rock.
They had been at the chore of clearing the garden spot for almost two hours, and Lori was dismayed by how little ground had actually been cleared. While Noah went ahead of her, turning over earth with the hoe, her job was to gather up the big clods of grass and weeds and carry them to the wheelbarrow, as well as dig up the rocks when the hoe struck one, and carry those to the wheelbarrow. When the wheelbarrow was full, Noah would roll it to the edge of the woods and dump it. Even though it had sounded like a fair division of labor when Bridget had first spelled it out, Lori soon began to suspect she had gotten the worst of the job. Her short denim overalls, stylishly accented with rhinestones on the back pockets, were smeared with mud, her work boots were clogged with it, and her leather work gloves were grimy and damp. She wore a wide-brimmed straw garden hat over her long copper braid, which only made her sweat. Moreover, every time the hoe opened up a section of ground, it seemed as though another swarm of tiny insects clouded the air. It was miserable.
“This is why man invented the plow,” she said, heaving the rock out of the ground and carrying it, double-handed, to the wheelbarrow.
“Will you stop your griping? It ain’t that hard. Half the plot is already cleared from last year. If you’d shut up and work we’d have this done before noontime.”
Now it was Lori’s turn to scowl as she waved away a cluster of gnats. “What’s your hurry? Have you got an appointment?”
“Gotta get your taters and peas in the ground before St. Paddy’s Day, or you won’t get a crop.”
“Who told you that?”
He tossed a sneer over his shoulder. “Everybody knows that.”
Lori carried more grass clumps to the wheelbarrow. “You know why she’s making us do this, don’t you? It’s The Little Red Hen all over again.”
“What hen?” He did not look around. “We ain’t got no chickens.”
She made a grimace of impatience. “You know, the story about the little red hen who was going to make bread and she went around asking all the farm animals to help her gather the wheat and grind the flour and bake the bread and everyone said, ‘Not I!’ but when she said ‘Who will help me eat the bread?’ everybody who couldn’t be bothered to help make it lined up and said ‘I will! I will!’ ”
Noah turned around, leaning on the hoe, and stared at her. Sweat dripped from his lank dark hair and left rivulets in the dust on his face. His eyes were narrowed and his lips were twisted with contempt and disbelief. He demanded, “Something wrong with your head, girl?”
“Don’t tell me you never heard the story of the little red hen!”
“There ain’t no such thing.”
“Come on, didn’t your mother ever read it to you when you were a kid?”
He turned back to the hoeing. “Ain’t got no mother.”
He said it with such casualness, such an utter lack of interest, that Lori was compelled to pursue the subject a wiser—and perhaps more sensitive—person would have dropped. She took a step to follow him. “Everyone’s got a mother!”
“Not me. Ain’t got no father, either.”
“Well, I know they’re dead,” Lori said with a touch of impatience. “But that doesn’t mean you were hatched. You have a mother and a father, and you need to claim them.”
“What for?” He kept working. “They never did nothin’ for me.”
“Well . . .” Lori was momentarily taken aback. “Because they’re part of who you are.”
He gave a short harsh laugh, and didn’t turn around. “My pa was a no-account drunk and my ma—who the hell knows what she was? That’s what’s part of me, all right.”
Lori did not have the first idea how to respond to that.
Noah’s hoe hit something with a clink, and Lori, feeling a little awkward, went forward to dig up another rock. But all her shovel turned over was a small, dirt-encrusted glass bottle. “Hey, look at this.” She sat back on her haunches and rubbed some of the dirt away, revealing the pale celadon color of the glass.
Noah cast a glance over his shoulder. “Just an old piece of glass.”
“Wait, there’s writing here.” She began to scrape off the dirt with her gloved thumb, revealing the raised letters imprinted in the glass. “R... m... e... d... i... s... Remedies!” She looked up at him, excited. “This is a medicine bottle!”
“So?”
“So, Ida Mae said this place was a hospital during the Civil War. This could be an antique!”
“So?” he repeated.
“So people pay a lot of money for antiques! This could be worth something.”
He dropped the hoe and came over to her, his expression guarded. “Let me see that.”
She handed him the bottle, and watched as he rubbed more dirt away with his T-shirt. “When was the Civil War?” he asked.
Lori rolled her eyes. “And Aunt Lindsay thinks you’re smart.” She thought a moment. “Eighteen sixty to eighteen sixty-five.” A pause. “Or something like that.”
He returned the bottle to her. “Well, if it wasn’t 1896, this ain’t from the Civil War.”
She looked at the bottle, the raised writing now fully exposed to read: Dawson’s Reliable Remedies, Richmond, Virginia, 1896. “Well,” she said, her tone only slightly disappointed, “it’s still old. It might be worth something.”
“Nobody’s gonna pay for an old empty bottle.”
“People will pay for anything,” Lori assured him, and stuffed the bottle into her back pocket. “Besides, Aunt Lindsay likes to display the things that show the history of the place, so it’s worth keeping.”
He grunted and picked up the hoe again. “Not worth as much as that ole hen of yours.”
She frowned. “What hen?”
“That red ’un. I knew a fella over in Boulder Creek that made a fortune raising red chickens.”
“Do you mean he had a chicken farm?”
“Nah. Not like eggs and chicken houses and such. These here was show chickens. Cost a couple of grand a piece.”
Lori stared at him. “They have shows for chickens?”
“You gonna dig up this rock, or what?”
Lori came forward and dug up the rock without complaint, her expression skeptical. “I never heard of chicken shows.”
“Guess there’s a lot you never heard of.”
“I guess.” She carried the rock to the wheelbarrow.
When she returned, he was still chopping at the ground with a hoe. Without turning around, he said, “You really think somebody would pay cash money for that ole bottle?”
“Sure. You see stuff like this in antique shops all the time.”
“How much, do you think?”
“I don’t know. Maybe fifty dollars.”
The chopping slowed. “Fifty dollars?”
“Maybe.”
He turned, looked at her, then gave a contemptuous shake of his head. “I never heard of such foolishness.”
Lori replied complacently, “I guess there’s a lot you never heard of.”
He gave her a final glowering look, then turned back to his work without a reply. But the next time his blade clinked against a glass bottle he looked around quickly to make sure Lori hadn’t noticed, then dug it up himself and put it in his pocket. Before the garden plot was finished, he had a dozen such specimens hoarded away, and was already counting his fortune.
Lindsay said, “Here it is.” She led the way across the floor of the loft of the dairy barn, gesturing toward the far corner. “I remember seeing it from when we were trying to get the house ready for Christmas and bringing down all the furniture that was stored up here.”
Cici glanced around the dusty, cluttered space with interest. “Obviously, you didn’t get all the furniture that was up here.”
Cici, whose arm had been in a sling at the time, had been limited to standing at the bottom of the stairs and directing Farley as to where to place the pieces of furniture they had recovered. She had forgotten how much still remained in the loft.
“Well, some of it’s no good. I’m going to pay Noah to start clearing this place out before it gets too hot. But this little vanity table would look great in that nook in the guest room, and I’d like to get it down before Paul and Derrick get here. I think we can handle it, don’t you?”
They started lifting cardboard boxes off the canvas-covered surface. “I can’t believe we’ve been here a year and we still haven’t cleaned out the attics,” Cici said. She set one of the boxes on the floor and it rattled. “Or even inventoried everything we own.”
“Well, we’ve been a little busy,” Lindsay pointed out dryly, “what with tearing out wiring and putting in plumbing and moving walls and all.” She pulled off the canvas sheet to reveal a pretty little cubbied vanity with a cherry finish that was only a little dulled with age. “Isn’t this precious?” She tested its weight by lifting the two front legs off the ground. “I think we can get it up the stairs if we take the drawers out.”
The loft was accessed via a ladder, but during the Great Christmas Furniture Exodus Farley had devised a method of lowering the heavier pieces to the ground via the large double loft doors on the west side of the building using a pulley and ropes. The only difficulty then had been carrying the furniture to the house and up the stairs to the bedrooms . . . which was another reason they had been in no hurry to clear out the loft over the winter.
Cici did her own weight test with one hand and agreed. “I wonder why they stored all their old furniture out here instead of in the house attic.”
Lindsay shrugged and started removing drawers. “Ida Mae said there used to be a lot of servants. Maybe they used the house attic for sleeping space.”
“Probably.” Cici sank down on her haunches and began to poke around in one of the boxes. “What is all this stuff ?”
Lindsay said, “Well, will you look at this?”
From one of the drawers she had pulled out a round cardboard container that was decorated in a rose pattern. She carefully prized the lid off and sniffed inside, smiling. “Talcum powder.”
Cici sniffed the box, too, and a similar pleasurable smile crossed her face. “It smells like my grandmother.”
“Mine, too. Gosh, it must have been here for years.”
“Well, they don’t make artificial rose scent like they used to.” Cici turned back to the box she had been sorting through. “Linds, look at this.”
Lindsay recapped the box and put it aside, frowning in puzzlement at the tinted glass square Cici had removed from the box. “What is it?”
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“Look.” Cici turned the glass toward the light that poured in from the high windows opposite the loft, and an amber image became visible.
Lindsay gasped and dropped to her knees beside Cici. “Good heavens! That’s a glass plate from one of the old shadow-box cameras.” She took the plate in her hands reverently. “Look at that! This must be from the turn of the century—look how the woman is dressed. And—why, that’s our house! Cici, this must be one of the first photographs taken after the house was built!”
The plate depicted a woman in a long pale dress with leg-o’-mutton sleeves, standing on a lawn beneath the limbs of a spreading oak. Her dark hair was pulled back into a poufy bun, and her features were fair. She looked to be in her midthirties but, by the standards of that day, she was almost certainly younger. There was a wicker chair beside her, and in the background stood a very familiar house.
“It has to be one of the Blackwell women,” Lindsay said.
“Maybe it’s her wedding picture,” suggested Cici. “After all, she is wearing white.”
“It’s possible,” agreed Lindsay. “Maybe it’s part of a set.”
“There are dozens of them in this box,” Cici said, pulling out another.
Lindsay eagerly took it from her, while Cici resumed her study of the first picture by holding it up to the light.
“Gosh, I wish this were clearer!” Cici said. “I’d love to see the detail on the house. How it must have looked when it was first built.”
“I wonder if there’s any way to develop these things? Or whatever you have to do to them to print them on paper.”
“There must be. This is the age of technology. You can do anything.”