Read Elm Creek Quilts [10] The Quilter's Homecoming Online

Authors: Jennifer Chiaverini

Tags: #Historical, #Adult

Elm Creek Quilts [10] The Quilter's Homecoming (6 page)

BOOK: Elm Creek Quilts [10] The Quilter's Homecoming
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They were about to disembark when suddenly Elizabeth felt a whiff of perfumed air on her cheek as Mae came swiftly up from behind them and linked her arms through theirs. “Let me leave with you,” she said in a low, urgent voice. “Just until we cross the Midway. Act natural. We’re old, dear friends traveling together.”

Elizabeth was too surprised to say anything, Henry, too reluctant to make a scene, so they allowed Mae to lead them off the train, down the platform, and past the waiting policemen. After they rounded a corner and ducked out of sight between a cigar shop and a newsstand, Mae released their arms and breathed a deep sigh of relief. “Thanks, kids,” she said. “That was a close one.”

“Listen,” said Henry, his voice stern but too low to draw attention. “If you’re in trouble with the law—”

Mae’s eyes went wide. “Me? I haven’t done anything. It’s Peter they want. I’m just afraid of getting dragged down as an accomplice.”


Are
you his accomplice?” asked Elizabeth.

“Of course not,” said Mae reproachfully. “But that’s not what it looks like, and that’s all the Feds care about. I’m his girl, aren’t I? That’s enough to condemn me right there.”

“What did Peter do?” Henry quickly shook his head. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. If you say you weren’t involved, we’ll take your word for it.”

“Thank you.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Elizabeth.

“I can’t go back for my luggage, that’s for sure,” said Mae, regretful. Then she smiled. “Don’t worry about me. I have a little money tucked away—” She patted her leg, close to where her garter probably was. “I’ll find work and earn the fare back to New York. With any luck, they’ll spring Peter soon and he’ll come home to me.”

“Are you sure you want him to?” asked Henry. “Whatever he’s done, he’s obviously trouble.”

“I know it doesn’t make any sense.” For a moment, Mae’s mask of surety slipped and a more wistful, vulnerable woman looked back at them. “But Peter’s the only man for me.” She touched Elizabeth’s shoulder and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “Good luck to you both. I hope California suits you.” She darted off and lost herself in the throng of people passing to and fro on the covered transfer area.

After a moment, Henry took Elizabeth’s hand. “Come on,” he said. “We don’t have much time before our next train.”

As they crossed the Midway, they passed within two yards of Peter being led away in handcuffs. His gaze slid past them as if he had never seen them before.

1885

Isabel was fifteen when illness forced her mother to quit her job cleaning rooms at the Grand Union Hotel. The lump beneath her arm had become so swollen and sore that she could not sweep or scrub floors without pain. Isabel’s father insisted upon taking her to the doctor in Oxnard, who told them that she had a cancer of the breast and less than three months to live.

The doctor gave them medicine for the pain and sent them home with little hope. Friends and neighbors brought food and said prayers. Isabel’s father wept on the back stoop at night while he thought the children were asleep.

A day came when Isabel’s mother called her to her bedside, gripped her arm, and told her to visit her cousin in San Mateo. She was a
curandera,
a healer, and she would know what to do. She would know more than that doctor, a man, how to treat a woman’s illness.

Isabel hitched a ride to San Mateo and found the address of the
curandera.
Her mother’s cousin, an old, wizened woman with long gray hair and gnarled hands, offered her coffee and listened intently as Isabel described her mother’s symptoms. “Your mother’s cancer is caused by grief and longing,” she said. “Has she lost a child? Has her husband strayed?”

“No,” Isabel told her.

The
curandera
said she could prepare a remedy, but unless they could figure out what secret grief festered in her mother’s heart, the cancer would return.

The
curandera
sent Isabel home with a list of ingredients she must gather: a bottle of holy water blessed by her mother’s confessor, wild raspberry leaves from a plant growing no more than a hundred paces from where her mother slept at night, and fifty seeds from fifty freshly picked, unblemished apricots.

Two weeks passed while Isabel waited for the harvest to begin, two weeks while her mother’s pain increased until even the doctor’s medicine could not abate it. “What did my cousin say?” she demanded. “Has she nothing for me?”

“She says you must not ask questions or her cure will not work,” Isabel lied. “She’s working on a poultice. In the meantime you must keep saying the rosary twice a day, at morning and at night.”

When harvesttime came, Isabel slipped into the line of men and women seeking jobs at the orchard. To her surprise, the hired hand who issued her a punch card did not react when she gave him her name. Yes, she had expected to be compelled to explain, I am Isabel Rodriguez, whose parents once owned all the land you see from the eastern hills to the Salto Canyon. But the hired man either was not paying attention or he had never heard the story of how her father had sworn that neither he nor his descendants would ever again toil for those who had stolen their land. He merely waved Isabel toward the cutting shed and told her to take a place at one of the tables.

A girl she knew from school glanced at her in surprise as Isabel took an empty place at her table, but she said nothing. Isabel took up her knife as a man left a box of apricots beside their table. Isabel worked in silence with her eyes downcast, unwilling to draw attention to herself as she carefully chose unblemished fruit, swiftly cut out the seed, and placed the apricots cut-side up on the table. A bag sat on the table for collecting the seeds; Isabel brushed the bag with her hand as if she were dropping the seeds within, but instead she tucked them into her apron pocket.

Suddenly a hand closed around her wrist so hard she dropped the knife. “What are you doing?” a young woman said in her ear.

Isabel jerked her arm free and stepped back. “Nothing.” She recognized the brown-haired girl, although she wasn’t sure Hannah knew her. They had played together as young children, in the cabin as well as in the yard of the farmhouse where Hannah lived with her family.

“I saw you put something in your pocket,” Hannah said in a low voice. Her discretion came too late; already the other cutters had stopped working to watch them. “Are you stealing apricots?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why are your pockets bulging?”

Slowly, aware of all the eyes upon her, Isabel reached into her apron and withdrew a handful of seeds. When she opened her palm, Hannah barked out a laugh. “What in the world are you going to do with those? Plant your own orchard?”

“Of course not,” said Isabel. “My family has no land for an orchard.”

Hannah flinched. Perhaps she recognized Isabel after all. “You can’t eat the seeds, you know,” she said sharply. “They’re poisonous.”

No, Isabel thought. They are medicine. “That’s what I need them for,” she said. “Poisoning rats. We grind up the dried seeds and sprinkle them on the floor, in the corners.”

“I never heard of that.”

“You probably never needed to know. I doubt that you have to worry about rats in your home.”

Hannah fixed her with a hard stare for a moment before looking away. “Take all the seeds you want. If you need food, ask first.”

Isabel nodded and resumed cutting fruit, her face hot with shame. She needed no charity from Hannah or her family. She had only taken what was needed to save her mother, something that otherwise would have been discarded.

At the end of the day, she collected her wages and told the hired man she would not be back.

The next morning, Isabel returned to the
curandera
and waited while she prepared the medicines for her mother. Others waited in the parlor—an old man with a pain in his chest, an angry mother with a nervous girl not much younger than Isabel, a sad woman with the first streaks of gray in her hair and no wedding band on her finger. The old man, wheezing and spitting, told Isabel that she was lucky—
muy afortunada!
—that the
curandera
had agreed to help her. “Her power never fails,” he confided. “You will see, my girl. All will be well.”

The
curandera
returned from the back room with two parcels wrapped in cheesecloth for Isabel, one large and one small. The first was a poultice for her mother to wear upon the skin between her arm and her breast. It would draw the cancer to the surface, roots and all, where it would be expelled by the body. The smaller parcel was a tea. Isabel’s mother should drink a strong brew of it every morning upon waking, then take the leaves from the bottom of her cup and mark a cross upon her heart.

“How long until she will be better?” Isabel asked. A month, perhaps two. If the cancer had not been expelled by the end of the second month but her mother yet lived, Isabel should return for a stronger poultice.

That evening, Isabel helped her mother tie the poultice to her arm to keep it in place while she slept. For the first time in weeks, her mother smiled. “The poultice has a familiar smell,” she said as Isabel drew her favorite quilt over her. It was one Isabel’s grandmother had sewn as a young bride-to-be, and it seemed to remind Isabel’s mother of more hopeful times.

Her mother slept well. In the morning Isabel brewed her a cup of the tea and brought it to her in bed. Her mother sat up, thanked her, and sipped from the steaming cup. A slight frown clouded her face. “What do I taste?” she asked, inhaling deeply.

“It’s better not to ask,” said Isabel. “As long as it works, it doesn’t matter how foul it tastes.”

“It tastes of raspberry leaves,” said her mother. She brewed a similar tea to ease her monthly pains. “But also of apricots. I haven’t tasted apricots in years.”

Isabel busied herself with folding bedclothes that had fallen to the floor.

“Isabel,” her mother said, her voice rising. “Are there apricots in this tea? In this poultice?”

“You would have to ask the
curandera.
She made them in a back room. I wasn’t watching.”

“But I know she gave you a list of ingredients to gather. I know you took them to her. What was in that bag you carried?”

“Just drink the tea, Mami. It will make you well.”

“It was harvesttime that week. Were you there? Are these apricots from the ranch?”

Isabel could not lie to her so she said nothing.

Isabel’s mother set the cup aside and tore off the poultice. “I want nothing from those people. Their apricots are poison to me.”

“What does it matter where the apricots came from?” cried Isabel. “The apricots don’t know who owns them.”

“But I know.
I
know.”

Isabel argued and fought with her mother until they were both in tears, but her mother was resolute. She ordered Isabel to carry the offending medicines far away and bury them deep within the ground.

Isabel obeyed, her heart brimming over with helpless anger. Without the
curandera
’s remedies, her mother would die.

If only they had never left the cabin. If only Hannah’s family had not made them go.

If they lived there still, her mother never would have refused the gift of the land.

Chapter Three

1925

H
enry gripped Elizabeth’s arm tightly as they left the Midway for the Headhouse. “This way,” he said, guiding her beneath the Grand Hall’s gothic arches. Elizabeth marveled at the cathedral ceilings and stained glass windows. Her traveler’s eye was drawn to a tableau of three train stations—the castle-like structure of St. Louis’s Union Station framed by the New York and San Francisco rail hubs, all rendered in lead and glass. Her gaze continued upward until it settled upon the Whispering Arch she had heard tell of on board the train. A person could reputedly speak softly at one end of the arch and be heard with perfect clarity at the other end, nearly forty feet away. Elizabeth had intended to try it out for herself, but Henry looked determined to quickly and cleanly distance them from her new friends.

The Headhouse contained the ticket office, a hotel, and a restaurant, where Henry and Elizabeth joined the queue at the door. The brakeman had taken the passengers’ orders earlier that day before they crossed the Mississippi and had wired them ahead to the restaurant.

“This is a marvel of convenience,” Henry said as he sampled his dinner. “Tasty, too.”

“It’s quite good,” said Elizabeth. They were the first words they had exchanged since leaving Mae, and purposefully innocuous, until she forged ahead. “I feel like Saint Peter at the high priest’s palace.”

“You can’t be serious,” Henry replied in an undertone. “Allowing them to face the consequences of their actions is hardly denying Jesus three times. If they’ve done something wrong, they need to face up to it. If Peter’s innocent, which I doubt, he’ll be released. If anyone asks, we’ll tell the truth. We’ve done nothing wrong.” He hesitated. “Except in letting Mae go. We probably should have turned her in.”

After finishing their meal, Elizabeth and Henry hurried down the Midway to catch the
Pacific Coast Limited
to Los Angeles.

Their encounter with Peter and Mae had left them wary of other passengers, so they remained in their compartment throughout the trip except for visits to the dining car. Eventually their unease faded, but they had come to enjoy their comfortable isolation and ventured out only rarely. Elizabeth had to laugh one morning when she caught Henry tipping the porter extra to straighten their bedcovers but not fold the bed away.

As the train crossed the Central Plains, the flat landscape stretched and rolled into hills and mountains. Although Elizabeth relished the undivided attention they were finally able to give each other, she noticed that Henry grew more pensive the farther west they traveled. He seemed fully at ease only when he held her in his arms.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him one evening as the train crossed the Arizona desert. “Are you still upset about Peter, or are you just sorry that our honeymoon’s nearly over?”

Henry gave her a brief smile and laced his fingers through hers. “As far as I’m concerned, the honeymoon is never going to end.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

“I just want the ranch to be perfect for you.” He hesitated. “Maybe I should have come out to inspect it myself before buying.”

She was reluctant to point out that he probably could not have afforded an additional round-trip, cross-country journey. “You saw the pictures, didn’t you? You have the surveyor’s map.”

“It’s not the same as seeing it with my own eyes. I’m also wondering how I’m going to manage the ranch crew. I’ve never farmed with anyone but my father and brothers and hired hands I’ve known all my life. Now I’ll be giving orders to men who understand that ranch better than I do. Why should they listen to me?”

“Because you’re their boss, that’s why,” said Elizabeth with more certainty than she felt. “You’re a natural leader, and if you show them confidence, they’ll cooperate. Consult them about their knowledge of the land and then make the best decisions you can. The men will respect you if they know you respect them.”

Henry smiled. “Asking you to marry me was the best decision I ever made.”

“I couldn’t agree more. Don’t you see? Once the hired hands meet me, everyone there will know you’re a man of sound judgment. Of course they’ll listen to you.”

She was rewarded by Henry’s rich, rare laughter, but even that could not put her own nagging worries completely to rest.

They reached Los Angeles by midafternoon the same day. Their last train would not depart until the following morning, so Henry had arranged for them to spend the night in a modest boardinghouse not far from the station. Elizabeth was eager to see the ocean, though she was surprised and somewhat disappointed to learn that not every place in Los Angeles was convenient to the ocean.

“You could take the trolley to Venice,” their landlady suggested.

“Venice?” said Henry, grinning. “That’s for us. My wife has always wanted to see Venice.”

“I meant Venice, Italy,” said Elizabeth, amused. “Not Venice Beach, California.”

“It was my Harry’s favorite place,” said their landlady. “He used to take me there on weekends. We always had a grand time—dancing under the stars, riding the roller coaster, poling along in a gondola…. But that was before our favorite pier burned down. And before the Great War.” She made an abrupt gesture to a framed photograph on the mantel. A sailor in uniform regarded the camera with steady pride. Flanking the photograph were a folded American flag in a triangular wooden case and a smaller frame enclosing two medals.

Their landlady watched them hopefully, awaiting their reply.

“I didn’t know they had real gondolas,” said Elizabeth. “I wouldn’t miss that for the world. Henry, please say you’ll take me.”

Their landlady brightened and gave them directions. From the station a few blocks away, they rode a Pacific Electric Red Car southwest out of the city, marveling at the sight of streets washed in sunshine and lined with palm trees. Elizabeth wished she had a camera so she could capture the scenes for the worried folks back home. Never had she imagined such a bright and promising place.

They disembarked at Windward Avenue. Following the breeze off the ocean, they strolled along canals filled with couples in gondolas and children paddling canoes toward streets of shops and restaurants. Elizabeth gasped at the sight of roller coasters looming above the amusements. “We have to ride one,” she exclaimed, seizing Henry’s hand and pulling him in the direction of the nearest.

“Hold on,” said Henry, pausing at the entrance of the Great Dipper. “I thought you wanted to see the ocean.”

“I do.” She tugged at his hand when he did not budge. “We will. Let’s try this first.”

“Sweetheart, we’re running low on money. It’s ten cents apiece.”

“We can spare twenty cents.”

“Not if you want ice cream and lemonade on the beach.”

“You just don’t want to ride. You’re afraid you’ll sick up and embarrass yourself.”

“How do you know
you
won’t sick up?” he countered. “You’ve never been on a roller coaster.”

Elizabeth considered, scanning the height of the lacy wooden structure. She jumped and clutched her hat in place as a car full of screaming riders hurtled overhead, swirling sand and debris in its wake. “All right,” she said shakily. “You can have your way this time, but only because I love you and I don’t want an upset stomach to spoil your day.”

“Thanks,” said Henry, struggling to hide a grin. “That’s kind of you.”

They strolled along Ocean Front Walk past cafés and beach houses, where the breeze off the ocean was strong and cool.

“I’m going in,” Elizabeth declared.

Henry watched with alarm as she peeled off her stockings. “You’re kidding.”

“I’ll only dip my toes in,” she assured him. “I want to tell the folks back home that I set foot in the Pacific Ocean. Don’t you want to be able to say that?”

“I’d rather have dry feet.”

Disappointed, Elizabeth handed him her shoes and stockings. “Then you can watch these until I get back.”

She marched unsteadily across the beach toward the water, then stood on the wet sand and let the ocean come to her. The first wave upon her toes shocked her with its coldness. She gasped from surprise, and then, as she grew accustomed to the cold, she waded in up to her ankles. A second wave swept up to her knees and tugged at her gently, beckoning her forward into the deeper water.

She laughed aloud and took a step back toward dry land, but a sudden wave rushed forward and seized her, knocking her off balance. A firm hand on her arm caught her before she fell. “Careful,” said Henry, his voice carried away by the wind.

He had removed his shoes and socks, but the rolled cuffs of his trousers were soaked through. As he helped her regain her footing and led her from the water, sand collected on his cuffs in a layer that thickened as they crossed the beach.

When they reached the pavement of Ocean Front Walk, he tried to shake his cuffs free of sand. “I’m sorry,” said Elizabeth. “It’s my fault you’re such a mess.”

“Never mind.” He handed her her shoes and stockings, which he had left beside his own on a bench. “I’m sure I’m not the first man to walk the streets of Venice covered in a good portion of the beach.”

“It was sweet of you to come along after me.”

He sat down and brushed sand from his toes. “I wanted to be there to witness it if you decided to dive in headfirst.”

Elizabeth laughed. She had never been happier, not even on their wedding day. She had waded in the Pacific Ocean, something no one in her family had ever done. She had seen sights they had never seen. Every day of the rest of her life would be an adventure, with Henry nearby to steady her if she should stumble.

Walking out on the Venice Pier—past the Flying Circles aerial ride, the Dragon Bamboo slide, and the Ship Café—Elizabeth and Henry came upon two dozen couples in just that predicament. On the maple floor of a spacious dance hall, partners dragged their feet to a lively Irving Berlin tune. Some of the women slung their arms about their partners’ shoulders and clung to them to keep themselves upright. Several of the men had apparently nodded off with their heads on the shoulders of their smaller partners, who struggled to keep them on their feet. Suddenly a woman appeared to faint; at first her partner grappled to catch her but then he too collapsed onto the hardwood floor. Three men rushed out to drag them out of the way while the other couples danced on, oblivious and glassy-eyed.

“How long have they been at it?” Henry asked a man who stood near the orchestra pit sipping a ginger ale.

“Three days,” said the man, shaking his head in amazement.

“How do they stay on their feet?” marveled Elizabeth. “I’d want to pass out.”

“Some of them do.” The man indicated a man at least six feet tall dancing with a petite, red-haired woman. “See that couple over there? That’s my brother and his girlfriend. They soaked their feet in brine and vinegar for two days straight beforehand. They’ll be going strong for a long time yet, you just wait and see. They’ll take home that thousand-dollar prize sure enough.”

“A thousand dollars?” Elizabeth touched Henry’s arm. “Isn’t it a shame we didn’t arrive in time to enter?”

“It’s a shame, all right,” replied Henry, sounding not at all disappointed. “Do you want to stay and watch the action, or see more of Venice?”

“Let’s stay for a while. Maybe we’ll see who wins.”

“Probably not,” said the man. “Some of these marathons last a week or more.”

BOOK: Elm Creek Quilts [10] The Quilter's Homecoming
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