Elm Creek Quilts [10] The Quilter's Homecoming (32 page)

“We don’t need your help. My mother and sister came down from Oxnard to help out when the baby was born.”

His flat statement staggered her. “What? The baby—”

“A girl. Born three weeks ago. Isabel calls her Marta.”

“Three weeks ago! But—that’s much too early. And you sent no word to us. Is she—is my granddaughter—”

“She’s healthy. She’s fine.”

“And Rosa?”

His expression hardened. “She’s fine, too. But she doesn’t want to see you. If you come, I’m supposed to send you away.”

Isabel felt tears gathering. “But why?”

“You know you two haven’t always gotten along. Rosa needs peace and quiet. She doesn’t need someone around always criticizing, always questioning what she does, who she marries.”

Stung, Isabel said, “We didn’t object to you. It was just so sudden. We didn’t understand the reason for such haste.”

“Haste? I courted Rosa for years. We were practically engaged for most of that time.”

As his voice rose, Isabel suddenly wanted nothing more than to put the past behind them. “I’ve made many mistakes as a mother. I’ve done things I regret. But I have always loved my children and cared for them as best I knew how. Please don’t keep me from seeing her. Please let me see my granddaughter.”

“It’s Rosa’s choice, not mine,” he said. “I’ll tell her you came by.”

Isabel walked home in a daze.

At home that night, Isabel wept in her husband’s arms. “What did I do?” she asked over and over. “Why would Rosa turn me away?”

Miguel tried his best to console her, but Rosa’s thoughtless cruelty distressed and bewildered him. “She’ll change her mind,” he said, patting Isabel on the shoulder. “It’s new-mother nerves, that’s all. When things settle down, she’ll let us see the baby. You’ll see.”

Isabel desperately wanted to believe him.

She waited. Two months passed. She was in the Arboles Grocery picking out a chicken for Sunday dinner when from behind her, a voice she had ached to hear said, “Mami?”

She whirled around. “Rosa.”

Rosa smiled at her, soft and wistful, yet guarded. Isabel rushed forward to embrace her and stopped short at the sight of the baby in her arms, nestled in a familiar quilt, the one she had made, the one she had left in the basket John had taken. “Oh, my darling.” She began to weep for joy. “Oh, what a perfect angel.”

Rosa beamed and passed baby Marta to Isabel. Isabel held her gently, soaking in every detail—her sweet baby scent, her long eyelashes, her tiny nails on tiny fingers. She was precious, and yet she was larger and more robust than Isabel had expected of a child born nearly two months early.

She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the sudden thoughts that crowded in. It did not matter. Nothing mattered except that she held her grandchild at last.

“Thank you for the quilt,” said Rosa hesitantly. “And the tortillas and tamales. They were delicious.”

Isabel held the baby close as if some small part of her feared Rosa would snatch her away. “I wanted to do so much more.”

“I’ve missed you. I—I understand why you stayed away.”

Did Rosa have any idea how Isabel had longed, every day, to rush to her door and pound upon it until someone let her in? “I stayed away because you asked me to. Otherwise I would have been there, every moment.”

Rosa shook her head, bewildered. “I never asked you to stay away.”

Isabel did not want to argue. All she wanted was to savor that moment, to rain kisses upon her granddaughter and be thankful that her daughter had apparently forgiven her for whatever offense Isabel had inadvertently committed. “Your husband passed along your message.”

Rosa shook her head. “No. You must have misunderstood him. He wanted you to reconsider. He told me that you and Papi had disowned me when you heard about Marta, about when she was born….”

Isabel stared at her daughter, at her perfectly healthy grandchild, and suddenly could no longer ignore the truth. “Marta was not born early.”

Rosa flinched, and Isabel knew she had only at that moment realized her parents had not known her secret shame. She dropped her shopping basket and quickly took Marta back. “I have to go.”

“Rosa—”

“Tell Papi I’m sorry.”

Before Isabel could beg her to stay, Rosa fled from the store.

Sick at heart, Isabel went home and told Miguel what she had learned, that it was John Barclay who was keeping them apart. But that disturbing revelation was lost on Miguel, who heard only that his beloved, precious only daughter had been two months pregnant when she married. The daughter he had cherished had lied to them. She had disgraced herself and betrayed them all.

“What does it matter?” Isabel pleaded with him when he insisted that Rosa was dead to him, that Isabel must disown her as well. “They’re married now. They have a beautiful child. Their sins are between them and God. If Rosa confesses to Him and atones for her sin, God will forgive her, and we must forgive her, too.”

She said this for Miguel’s sake. She wanted Rosa and Marta in her life. She would have forgiven her daughter even if God could not. But Miguel had believed in Rosa’s perfection too long to recognize this flawed woman as the daughter he loved.

His heart had been shattered, and he could not endure a second betrayal. His wife and son must stand with him or he could not bear it. But even as Isabel promised to abandon her daughter to the fate she had willfully chosen, she resolved to break her promise as soon as she could. She could not forget John’s sullen dishonesty that June afternoon when he turned her away.

She feared for her daughter.

1925

W
ith freedom from upholding the pretense that they could return to Two Bears Farm came Henry’s determination to make the cabin a suitable permanent home. He told Oscar he could work only half days on Sundays and instead spent his Sunday afternoons sealing cracks in the walls, repairing the sagging porch, and making the outhouse more tolerable. He spent his evenings in Elizabeth’s company and his nights in her arms. It was in this way that Henry told her he would never again think of sending her back to Pennsylvania alone.

Elizabeth was so grateful to have her husband restored to her that the thought of Rosa’s unhappiness became increasingly unbearable. She readily assented when Mrs. Jorgensen assigned her sole responsibility for the weekly mail run and other errands, thinking that this would allow her more opportunities to look in on the Barclay family. Yet Lars squandered no opportunity to express his feelings of betrayal. For a time he hardly spoke to her, although he always happened to be in the garage when she returned from the post office, and pressed her to report on what she had seen at the Barclay farm. John glared at her ever more mistrustfully, but he did not try to prevent her from seeing Rosa. Ana and Miguel continued their slow and inexorable decline into sickness. Marta and Lupita played together beneath the orange trees as they had always done, so that Elizabeth thought they were unaware of the turmoil in the family until she saw how they darted away at their father’s approach. Once, when Elizabeth did not see John in the fields and knew he was not in the adobe, Marta confided that her parents had fought a few days before, after her father went to Oxnard one morning and came home with a new car.

Appalled that John could find money for a car when he had none to spare for a doctor for his children, Elizabeth concluded that his cruelty knew no limits. She kept a watchful eye out for any sign that he had resumed his violence toward his wife, but whenever she asked Rosa how she fared, Rosa forced a tight smile and said that every day with her children was a blessing. And yet she could not disguise her anger about the car. Whenever John left the fields early to go for a drive or raced up the gravel road to the house after an invented errand into town, her eyes narrowed and her mouth turned in disgust until Elizabeth thought she would rather endure another beating than the sight of that gleaming, elegant Chrysler roadster.

It seemed the entire Arboles Valley had an opinion about John Barclay’s new car. Some of the men acknowledged that he was entitled to spend his money as he saw fit, but they were surprised he would put his money into something so impractical when his tractor and tiller were falling apart. A handful of foolish, ignorant women envied Rosa and considered befriending her so she might invite them for a ride, unaware that Rosa refused to set foot in the car. Most of the other women shared Mrs. Jorgensen’s opinion that the roadster was a wasteful extravagance for a family with little money to spare.

Elizabeth agreed. “The only benefit of that car is that it takes John away from the farm for hours at a time,” she declared upon returning from one trip to the post office to find Lars waiting for news. “These days he’s more likely to be out tearing around the Arboles Valley than working in his fields.”

Lars helped her gather up the mail from the passenger seat. “Is that so?”

“Even I can see that he’s neglecting his crops. He’d much rather play with his new toy. I don’t know how he expects to feed his family if he doesn’t tend his farm. The post office can’t possibly pay that much.”

“Rosa will contrive something,” said Lars, more confidently than Elizabeth thought the circumstances warranted. She was not surprised when later that evening, Henry told her that Lars had left the orchards early, telling no one where he was going and returning just in time for supper as tired and dirty as if he had worked the barley fields all day. Elizabeth assumed he had gone to help Rosa, but she worried about what John might do if he found Lars working his fields, caring for his family in his absence.

Henry told her not to worry. As the summer waned, he had worked every day side by side with Lars—except for those few hours Lars stole off alone—and Henry had seen nothing to suggest that Lars was doing anything more than helping a neighbor in need, or that he had resumed drinking. Elizabeth considered herself a reluctant expert on that subject and after watching Lars carefully for several weeks, she was forced to admit that her observations contradicted her instincts. She could not believe a drinking man would tuck a bottle into his pocket unless he intended to empty it later, but Lars had never once smelled of alcohol, nor did his hands shake, his words slur, or his eyes grow bloodshot. He had become neither more violent nor more charming. Without a doubt, he had become more secretive about his comings and goings, but she knew he had other reasons for that. Perhaps, contrary to all the wisdom on the subject she had gathered since childhood, he had been able to quit after that one bottle, after that first drink. Perhaps he was made of stronger stuff than her father and had thrown away the bottle untasted.

By mid-July, the apricot trees were heavy with fruit. Elizabeth admired the flourishing orchard with some alarm until Mary Katherine explained that Oscar always hired high school and college students on summer break to pick the fruit. Helping with the apricot harvest had become a summertime tradition for young people from miles around, who came to the Jorgensen farm to work, earn money for school, and socialize with friends.

On the first morning of the harvest, young men and women from throughout the Arboles Valley and from as far away as Oxnard descended upon the Jorgensen farm in droves. Elizabeth reveled in the festive atmosphere, looking on with pride as Henry organized the most recent arrivals into work teams. Even though he had never worked an apricot harvest before, Oscar trusted his judgment so much that he had placed Henry in charge of the seasonal workers. When Elizabeth reflected upon how well Henry had proven himself, and how he had come to be second only to Lars in authority on the farm, she could not help thinking of how he would have thrived as the owner of Triumph Ranch. As she watched her husband issuing instructions to the new employees, she allowed herself a moment of regret that they had not taken Mae up on her offer to use Peter’s underworld contacts to track down the man who had swindled them. She quickly dismissed the notion. Justice would have to catch up with J. T. Simmons on its own. The Nelsons could not allow themselves to be drawn into any dealings with the sort of men Mae and Peter called friends.

Mary Katherine called Elizabeth over to help distribute buckets, hooks, and punch cards to the pickers while Oscar and Lars set up the cutting shed. Earlier, several yards from the first row of apricot trees, the hired hands had set tall, sturdy posts into holes that looked as if they had been dug years ago. The Jorgensen brothers made a roof by tying wooden trays about eight feet long and three feet wide to the top of the frame, then, in a similar fashion, they added a wall of trays along the southern side. By the look of it, Elizabeth guessed that the structure was meant only to provide shade, which was surely all the protection from the elements they needed. The clear, blue skies promised sunshine and warm breezes.

While the women worked in teams to arrange sawhorses in the cutting shed and place more of the long trays on top of them to make tables, the men dispersed into the orchard. They chose trees and set up their ladders, ten feet tall and broader at the base than the top. Using the hooks Mary Katherine and Elizabeth had given them, each picker attached a bucket to the top of his ladder and plucked all the ripe, sun-warmed fruit within reach. When a bucket was full, the picker climbed down the ladder and emptied it into a wooden box that Mary Katherine said could hold about forty pounds of plump apricots. When a box could hold no more, an empty box was stacked on top of it and filled in its turn. Up and down the ladders the pickers went, filling buckets and boxes, moving their ladders to find boughs still laden with fruit. They called out to one another as they worked, laughing and joking and grinning at the young women who watched.

The women did not have much time to stand idle and observe them. Not long after they finished setting up the makeshift tables in the cutting shed, Lars drove a flatbed wagon pulled by a team of horses through the rows of trees. Every few yards, the wagon halted and Henry and another regular hired hand jumped off to load the boxes into the back and to punch the pickers’ cards to indicate how many boxes each had filled.

When Lars turned the wagon around, the women hurried back to their places in the cutting shed, four to a table. Mary Katherine waved Elizabeth over to her side, so Elizabeth joined her, unaware that she had committed a serious breach of etiquette. “What did I do?” she asked Mary Katherine as a few of the younger women let out cries of disappointment.

“You took the best place,” remarked another woman at their table, who appeared to be in her early forties. “Newcomers are supposed to start out at the tables in the back and work their way closer to the orchard as they become more experienced.”

“I’d be happy to move,” said Elizabeth, reluctant to offend anyone who deserved the coveted spot.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mary Katherine. “If I have to be on my feet all day, I ought to get a say in who stands next to me. Those girls pretend they want these places so they’re closer to the truck, but the men unload the boxes and bring them to each table anyway, so what’s the difference? They just want to have a better view of the pickers.”

The last woman at their table, slightly younger than the first, shook her head. “Work slows down terribly when they do that. Me, I can cut apricots and admire a handsome young man without missing a beat.”

The first woman grinned. “I’m going to tell your husband you said that.”

“You go right ahead.”

Henry interrupted the teasing by emptying a box of apricots onto their table. Working swiftly, the other three women took up their knives and began slicing fruit even as the apricots were still rolling down the tray. Elizabeth scrambled for an apricot, but the other women worked so rapidly that they had already finished stoning their second and third fruits while she fumbled with her knife for a secure grip.

“Here. Watch me,” said Mary Katherine when she saw how Elizabeth struggled to slice the fruit cleanly with one swift stroke as the others did. She held the knife firmly in one hand and ran it around the fruit, separating the halves and removing the stone, which she tossed into a basket on the side of the table. Then she lay the halves split up in the center of the tray. “That’s all there is to it.”

Elizabeth nodded and tried again, and before long, the motions became more confident, smoother, though her pace still lagged well behind that of her companions. When they had cut all the apricots on their table, a hired hand named Marco brought them another box, which he stacked upon the empty box Henry had left beside their table. Elizabeth noticed that whenever the stack beside a table reached four empty boxes high, Marco collected the cutters’ punch cards and added one mark to each. They were given credit for finishing the four boxes as a team, Elizabeth understood, since it was impossible for Marco to tell who at the table had cut which apricots.

Elizabeth realized that the complaints over her joining Mary Katherine’s group had a second, more pragmatic bent. She quickened her pace, determined not to drag down her team and make Mary Katherine regret her decision.

When her table finished their first stack of four boxes, Marco put two punches each in the cards of the other two women. “What about Elizabeth?” asked Mary Katherine.

“I don’t have a punch card,” said Elizabeth. Since Henry and the other regular hired hands were receiving their usual pay for working on the farm, she had thought nothing of it. “Oscar didn’t give me one.”

“It must have been an oversight.” Mary Katherine beckoned to Marco. “Give Elizabeth a punch card, please.”

“I can’t do that, ma’am,” said Marco. “Your husband said only the harvest workers.”

“That’s nonsense. This is extra work on top of her regular duties, and she should receive extra pay.”

Marco grimaced as if he wished he were somewhere else. “I guess you’ll have to take it up with your husband, ma’am.”

“I’ll talk to him, all right,” said Mary Katherine indignantly as Marco walked away.

“That’s not necessary,” said Elizabeth quickly. “It’s not really extra work. I’d be working in the garden or cleaning the house if I weren’t cutting apricots.”

“You still have to help with the cooking,” Mary Katherine countered. “This is extra work, and it’s more taxing. I’m sure this is Mother Jorgensen’s idea, not my husband’s.”

Unwilling to be drawn into a public discussion of Mrs. Jorgensen’s faults, Elizabeth made no reply. On the opposite side of the table, the other two women pretended to be engrossed in their work, oblivious to the exchange.

When the entire surface of their table was covered with sliced apricots, they lifted the wooden tray and carried it from the shed to the truck, which would take the apricots to the sulfur house. Without pausing to rest, the other three women returned to the shed. Elizabeth hurried after them and helped place another long wooden tray on the sawhorses. In the few moments’ wait before Marco brought them another box of apricots, Elizabeth flexed her wrists and fingers, worked the knots from her muscles, and ruefully realized she would probably be too sore to quilt that evening, and possibly for many evenings to come.

“Do we ever get a turn to pick the apricots?” she asked Mary Katherine, who smiled and told her she was lucky they didn’t. The pickers had an even more difficult job, climbing up and down ladders and hauling forty-pound boxes of fruit in the hot sun. Just then, Lars pulled up in the wagon with another load of boxes. Elizabeth stifled a groan and picked up her knife.