“What happened to your shawl, Susie? It’s got a pretty rose on the back, don’t it?” I asked cause I want her mama and daddy to know everybody knew what her shawl looked like.
“Yeth. I lawthed it,” she said in her pitiful, muddled lisp. Her homely face all innocent-like, unafeard, when she should have been scared for her very life.
“Well, it’ll turn up, and you’ll remember where you left it.” I put on my biggest smile, said my farewell, and walked away, surprised to feel my stomach turn sour.
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Now the rain that pounded on the roof stops quick as it come, and the quiet makes me leave Thomas and Susie back twenty-five years where they belong. That sour taste stays with remembering. I swallow and open the door as Miss Shaw steps outta her car.
She’s a long-legged giant of a woman who’s got on man’s trousers, for Lord’s sake! Her hair’s chopped off, too. She’s an insult to womankind is what she is. She’s a talker, too, and she talks to hear her mouth rattle on bout the ride up the mountain like she done something special. I watch her mouth move but don’t listen close. She puts out her hand and I take it, but not really. Miss Kathleen Shaw has got a lot to learn. She come to the right place that’ll do the teaching for her.
“I’m sorry, so very sorry you had to wait on me,” she says, like two sorries will make it stick better. I don’t like this big, old person and hope she goes back to the valley quick. Brother’s gonna be surprised. He’s gonna feel puny beside this one.
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I get home from meeting Miss Shaw and got me a headache like I get a time or three a year. It starts small but it’s gonna grow, so I take to bed in the late afternoon and put a warm rag over my eyes to block out the harsh light. My world goes small on headache days. Brother knows to fend for himself and leave me be.
I pull up the crazy quilt from the foot of my bed made from scraps of cloth in colors of faded leaves. This won’t a hand-me-down. Mama made it just for me. She used pieces of our dresses, Daddy’s work shirts, and some of Nana’s dresses I never saw her in but know they’re hers cause Mama said.
There’s one curious piece. It’s a sky-blue scrap with red specks. I never saw that color in a dress Mama or me wore. I asked Mama where something that bright come from, and she always spoke in riddles. The first time she said, “From a dress I wore a long while back.” Another time she said, “It’s from a store-bought dress that got torn.” When I needled her too much, she said, “Prudence, you ask too many questions. Let it be and appreciate it cause it’s special.”
Sometimes I saw her smile when she touched that blue scrap. Once, she cried.
I don’t like a mystery in my quilt but I can’t rip it out and mess up Mama’s fine stitches, so I let it be. She holds me together with her tiny stitches. I feel close to her when I’m under my quilt. It’s a comfort is what it is, and my life is sparse of comforts.
Mama used to quilt with the ladies from church till she got sick. She had a fine stitch the others don’t, but Mama don’t boast. She knew it was a sin, and she was a righteous Christian woman with few blemishes on her soul. She took me quilting with her most of the time, and I stayed right by her side, quiet, while she stitched and the other women gossiped more than they sewed. My stitches won’t fine enough to put in, so I sat on the floor when I was little and on a stool when I got bigger. I practiced my stitches on a quilt square nobody wanted.
I heard who had trouble with a husband, whose gout flared up, and whose conscience bothered em. I heard bits bout babies who don’t get born, the key to secret recipes, and pieces of meanness nobody had use for. I heard about places I’d never see. Land as flat as a tabletop covered with waves of wheat. A river so wide you can’t see the other side. On the way home, Mama said, “Prue, don’t believe everything you hear. Folks like to talk, and some like to talk too much, specially when stitching is going on.”
When Mama passed, a lot of things left with her. One of em was the answer to the mystery in my quilt. Today, my headache sends me to bed, and like I do sometime when I lay under my quilt, I hope for a clue bout a piece of blue.
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I was four when Nana died in this bed I rest in. She lived with us till then and did the cooking. When she won’t working in the garden, cooking, or canning, she held me and brushed my hair, singing “Jesus Loves Me” in a shimmy voice. I slept with Nana most nights to keep her warm. I rubbed her cold, knotty feet with my hands, and wrapped em in my scrap of baby blanket, and curled up behind her knobby knees with very close veins.
In the quiet of the night she whispered bits of truth to me. Nobody else said, “They shame to say it was your great-granddaddy gambling that won us this place. They kind of leave that out of the telling, don’t they?” She laughed when she said it. Nobody cept Nana ever said a sin brought us to Baines Creek and give us a home.
Another time, she said, “Your mama got two stillborn babies between Brother and you, don’t you know. Babies got started, but their little lumps fell out in the chamber pot when your mama’s pains come early. They was no bigger than a doe’s heart. Your daddy held em in the palm of one hand, they be that small.
“Church said a baby who never breathed on this earth can’t be baptized, but Eli done it anyway. He built little coffin boxes for em and buried em in a corner of the cemetery cause your mama cried. Your mama and daddy worried bout them lost babies, and where the good Lord put em since they won’t go to heaven.”
Another night, she said, “Do you know what Eli means, child? Did they never tell you? It means Defender of Men. That’s what my Eli and your daddy do. They defend all men.”
Even being four, I wondered who defended us girls. I was too shy back then to ask. Now I know—it’s nobody.
I smelled Nana’s leaving on the night she died. The oil lamp stayed lit so Death could see to take the right one. It was just Nana and me when she pointed to the table Granddaddy built for her when she was young, when she could stay warm on her own. I got out her Bible from the drawer. The old book was falling apart from so much studying. I fit her fingers round it, and she pulled it to her milky eyes to read by the light of the lamp.
I should have been scared by myself to know Death was close, me being four, but Nana’s face was peaceful and the smell won’t bad. I missed her already and she won’t even gone. When she passed, who would tell me the truth bout my people? Who would get the tangles outta my hair without the hurt? Who would sing “Jesus Loves Me” and make me believe?
More than Nana’s feet turned cold that night, and me and my blanket couldn’t make her warm. When Nana whispered, “Sweet Jesus, I’m ready,” I heard him take her, like an open window with a breeze going out stead of in.
I took the news to Mama.