The Quilt (2 page)

But his grandmother and Clair were different. They took little sips from jelly glasses and even gave him a little sip, which tasted sweet and a bit sticky, and soon they were giggling and flopping the wallpaper over their
heads when they tried to hang it, and his grandmother began singing songs that made Clair blush, even though when they weren't laughing she sang along.

The wallpaper never did get pasted to the walls, and instead his grandmother and Clair sat in the kitchen and talked about when they were young. The boy sat listening because they laughed the whole time they talked, and he thought how much fun they must have had when they were young.

“I should have married Clarence,” Clair said once.

“He didn't ask you,” his grandmother said, laughing, “he asked me. And I married him. You married Sven, remember?”

“Yes, Alida,” Clair said, “but Sven was weak and Clarence was strong.”

“You had three sons with Sven before he died.”

“But you had four, Alida, and four daughters, before Clarence passed on….”

“That's true. But even so, you loved Sven, didn't you?”

“Sven was a poet,” Clair said, nodding, but then she smiled and added, “But poets don't always get the wood cut, if you know what I mean.”

And his grandmother laughed and blushed and said, “Oh, you, Clair, you're terrible!”

And they laughed and laughed, sipping the sticky wine, and the boy didn't understand most of what they said. As the evening came on he kept closing his eyes and opening them more slowly, and he finally felt himself being carried to bed and thought if his mother was this way when she drank he would not mind it so much.

The next morning the sound of his grandmother slamming pans in the kitchen woke him up and he went out in his pajamas to see her making pancakes.

“This morning,” she said, all smiles, “we are having buttermilk pancakes fried in bear grease with honey on top.”

“What's bear grease?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

“It's grease made from bears. Clair brought two quarts of it over when she came to help with the papering and I thought you might like to taste pancakes made with it. It's the very best for pancakes and doughnuts and rubbing on your boots.”

And while he tried to think of how you could get
grease from a bear or why you would use it for pancakes or doughnuts or why you would rub it on your boots, his grandmother's ring came from the phone hanging on the wall.

He loved the party line. In the city everybody had their own private phone but here all the phones were on the same line and each had their own special ring. His grandmother's ring was a short, a long and then another short, but they heard all the rings and often his grandmother would put her hand over the mouthpiece and hold the earpiece to her ear and listen in on other people's conversations.

It was called rubbernecking, and he loved it even though his grandmother said it was wrong.

“But you do it,” he said.

“Yes, but it's still wrong, and it's very wrong for you, my little Norwegian.”

But this time the ring was for her and she wiped the flour from her hands and took the earpiece from the hook on the side and rose on her toes to reach the mouthpiece.

“Hello, yes, this is Alida!” She always yelled in the
telephone and she started every sentence with “Hello, yes,” as if she needed to constantly reestablish that she was still there listening. “Hello, yes, Kristina, go ahead!”

The boy heard only the one side, though he listened hard.

“Hello, yes, I see.”

And: “Hello, yes, that will be fine. How soon?”

And: “Hello, yes, I'll have to get Elmer to give us a ride out. It depends on his truck. With the gas rationing he has to run it on tractor fuel and sometimes he can't keep it running. We'll see you when we see you.”

She listened again, then: “Hello, yes, there's no problem. He's a good boy and no trouble. Yes, then, we'll see you.”

And she hung up and turned to the boy and smiled and said, “We're going to go spend some time with Kristina. Her man is off in the war and she needs some help on her farm.”

Which is how it happened that the boy learned of the quilt.

The boy had not been raised on a farm. Most of his life he had been in Minneapolis, living in a small apartment with his mother while she worked at a laundry and then in another small apartment in Chicago when she went to work at the munitions factory. He knew a little about city living, about how to say “hello” and “please” and “thank you” to the super, how not to make noise in the hallways, how to play in one place so his mother could find him easily, how not to make noise when his mother napped because she worked the night shift, how not to go outside the building because there were bad men, how to turn the radio on and listen to the Lone Ranger
and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and Red Skelton, how to be careful of Mr. McAllister, who lived next door and did not like children.

But he knew almost nothing of farms. He had seen farms when he visited his cousins at Christmas for a day or two but had no real concept of what happened on one and so he was very excited all through the evening while his grandmother packed.

“Is it a big farm?”

“Not so large. I think they have a hundred and sixty acres with about eighty acres cleared.”

“Does she have animals?”

“Of course, silly. All farms have animals.”

“What kind of animals?”

She looked at him. “Farm animals.”

“Are there cows?”

She held up a denim jacket that had seen better days, then shrugged and put it in the box she was packing. “Yes, cows.”

“And horses?”

“Of course. You can't farm without workhorses. Who would do the work?”

“Chickens?”

“Yes. Chickens and ducks and horses and cows and pigs. All the farm animals.” She sighed as she put a worn dress in the box. “Now, get ready for bed. Elmer is coming to get us early in the morning to take us out to Kristina's farm and we have to be rested and ready.”

He put on his pajamas and she washed his face and tucked him into the small cot next to her bed, but at first he was too excited to sleep. He listened to her moving around, packing, and just as he started to doze off he remembered something.

“Will she have a dog?” he called.

“A dog, yes. And cats, too, I suspect. She might even have fish or a kangaroo. Now go to
sleep.
”

But still sleep wouldn't come and he turned and tossed, until at last his eyes closed for just a second. Then he heard his grandmother say, “Come on, sleepy bones, Elmer will be here soon and we have to have breakfast ready for him.”

It was hard to decide on who was older or in worse shape, Elmer or his truck. In the layers of family in the north part of Minnesota, where it seemed that almost everybody was related in some way, Elmer was some distant relation to the boy's grandmother but older, much older, than her and broken by his years.

He was short and bent, with an old wool jacket that seemed almost to reach the ground, and a beard that was gray and roughly cut with a scissors, and tufts of hair that grew thickly out of both ears and both nostrils.

The top of his head was completely bald and around the sides there was a white ring of silver-gray hair that he apparently also kept trimmed with the same hacking scissors he used on his beard.

There was not a tooth in his head and he had long ago broken what served as his dentures so that he had callused gums that were so hard he could actually chew, and the boy watched with outright fascination as he ate pancakes. His manners were fastidious and he carefully dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief after each bite, and when he had finished eating he
sipped coffee into which he dipped two sugar lumps, which he put inside his lower lip while drinking the coffee.

He then turned to the boy's grandmother and said something that seemed completely made up of lisps and whispers. The boy could not understand a word, but apparently his grandmother could because she turned to the boy and said, “Get your travel bag and go out to the truck. We have to leave. It's a long way and his truck is acting up.”

“He said all that?”

“Of course,” she said. “In perfect Norwegian. Now, hurry. Elmer is a busy man. He's the only one around with a truck that can take us anywhere. All the rest of the men are in the war.”

The boy took his small tote bag, which he had used to carry his three favorite toys from Chicago: a small stuffed dog that he'd had since he was little (that was how he thought of it, had since he was little); a rubber statue of the Lone Ranger and his horse, Silver, the heroes of his favorite radio show; and a little metal tank, which he kept because his father was in tanks.

With the bag over his shoulder he went out into the summer morning to get into the truck. He stepped out of the door and stopped.

It was a truck in name only. Somewhere in the past—the ancient past, because the truck actually had wooden-spoke wheels—Elmer had taken a car, a four-door sedan, and cut the roof and doors off and made a wooden-plank bed that came up to the rear of the front seat and hung out the back over what might have once been a rear bumper. There was no roof, no stuffing left in the seat—Elmer had put two burlap sacks over the bare springs sticking up—and the windshield, which provided a minimum of protection, was such a maze of cracks and chips that it was impossible to see through it.

And then, as a finishing touch, for twenty or so years Elmer had hauled loads of wood, straw, feed, dead animals, live animals, dirt, concrete—countless loads of everything imaginable—and each load had left a deposit of some kind on the planks.

“Where am I going to sit?” the boy asked.

Elmer rattled off some words to his grandmother and
she said to the boy, “Just sit on the boards in back of the seat.”

“They're covered with potty.” He knew the other word, had heard his mother say it many times, but also knew he would get in trouble for saying it. “It's everywhere.”

She looked and then shrugged. “It's just chicken manure. It will wash out. Go ahead and sit down— you'll be walking barefoot in it before long.”

“In
potty
?”

She laughed. “It will squeeze up between your toes like mud. You'll like it. It's good for you.”

“Potty?”
he repeated, but she was stuffing boxes and bags in back of the seat. When she was finished he climbed onto the top of the pile and sat down—far away from the potty. Elmer moved levers on the steering wheel. Then, with further lisping and loud hissing (his grandmother reached around and covered the boy's ears), he went to the front of the vehicle and, using a crank and more swearing (the boy was sure it was swearing, because some of the words had the same sound in any language), he cranked and jiggled and
levered until the truck gave a loud gasp of smoke, hesitated and finally started wheezing into life.

Elmer ran around the truck, worked the levers some more—there was no foot accelerator and the throttle was a lever on the steering wheel—and with further sputtering and coughing and grinding sounds the truck started moving down the road in an absolutely blinding cloud of smoke.

On top of everything else the truck had no muffler. The explosions from the four cylinders, when they chose to fire, was deafening.

Elmer leaned over and screamed something to him. His grandmother turned and nodded at Elmer and yelled to the boy, “He said that usually it runs better. A little better. It's just that he has to use low-grade tractor fuel and that's why it's so rough and smoky.” She turned and looked out through the cracked windshield, then looked back at the boy again and smiled.

“What a nice day for a drive. We'll be there in no time at all.”