The Quilt Walk (17 page)

“Of course,” Ma said.

Mrs. Bonner hurried to her wagon and returned a few minutes later to present Celia with an embroidered handkerchief. “You must carry this at your wedding. It is not so much, but it is clean.”

“Oh, was there ever a thing so beautiful!” Celia cried.

I had not noticed Ma go to our wagon. Now she climbed down from it, and standing beside Celia, she handed her a folded quilt. “This is for the bride, too,” she said, peeling back a corner of the coverlet so that Celia could see the design.

“It’s your Dove quilt,” I exclaimed.

“And perfect for a bride.”

As Celia was admiring the quilt, the Pitkin brothers returned with a man in a long black coat. They introduced him as a reverend, and said that he would perform the ceremony that afternoon at his church.

“But why not right here, in front of our friends?” Celia sounded like her old bustling self.

“Here?” Charlie Pitkin asked.

“Of course,” said Celia. “What better way to start a new life than with a ceremony in a place called the Elephant Corral? It will be something to remember when we are old and gray.”

“Well, if that’s your desire, I suppose we could,” Charlie Pitkin said, taking her hand and squeezing it.

So, standing in the mud of the big corral, with oxen moaning and teamsters shouting in the background, Celia married Mr. Charlie Pitkin. Then she and her children climbed into Celia’s wagon, and Mr. Pitkin flicked his whip against the oxen to get them moving. Paul Pitkin followed them in his wagon.

“Why, Ma?” I asked, as we watched them go. “Why would she marry him? He’s not at all like Mr. Potts.”

“She has three children,” Ma answered. “And he’s a good man. Besides, it’s like the scraps of a quilt, Emmy Blue. Sometimes a woman just has to make do.”

Chapter Nineteen

THE END OF THE
QUILT WALK

P
a had been right. I’d never seen anything so big as the mountains west of Golden. They made the bluffs on the Mississippi River look like sand hills. “Those are only the foothills. The real mountains are behind them,” Pa told me.

“Are there rivers, too?” I asked.

“Not rivers like the Mississippi or the Missouri, but streams. They rush at you like a steam engine, and they’re cold! You wouldn’t want to wade in one, even on the hottest summer day,” he replied.

Ma had been quiet, and Pa asked, “What do you think of the mountains now, Meggie?”

“I’m not as interested in the mountains and rivers as Emmy Blue. I want to see our home,” Ma replied.

We reached the top of a rise, and Pa held up his hand. “Whoa!” he shouted to the oxen. Uncle Will came up beside us and halted his wagon, too. “There it is,” Pa yelled. “There’s Golden!”

Pa hurried the oxen now, tapping the lead animal on the rump and yelling, “Get along there.”

Ma was walking beside the wagon. She took a few steps beyond the oxen and called to Aunt Catherine, “My goodness, Cath. Look at that.” I couldn’t tell what emotion she was feeling. Aunt Catherine put her hands to her mouth and said she’d never seen a setting so grand.

Ma, Aunt Catherine, and I rushed ahead of the wagons for a closer look at the log cabins, sod huts, and rough shacks that made up the town. Golden’s streets were as crowded as Denver’s, with freighters loading goods onto wagons. Pa said they were going to the gold camps. Men yelled and laughed, and I heard the sound of a piano.

We’d seen a few two-story brick houses when we went through Denver, but there was nothing like them in Golden. The houses here were rough and unpainted and not at all like the homes we had left behind in Quincy. There wasn’t a single house that was as fine as our farmhouse. I glanced at Ma, worried that she was disappointed at the plainness.

We walked into the town, past doors that were open. People called out to each other in a friendly way. Women worked vegetable patches, and I saw flowers everywhere. Children ran past, barefoot, kicking up the dust in the street. Two boys knelt in the dirt playing marbles, and a girl who was pushing a hoop smiled at me and shouted, “Hi.” When she saw Barebones, she held out her hand. “Come here, doggie. Is he yours?”

“His name’s Barebones,” I said.

“Ain’t he swell!” she said, before pushing her hoop ahead of us down the street. I thought Golden was swell, too.

“Well, Meggie?” Pa asked, as he caught up with us.

I looked up at Ma, trying to make out what she was thinking. But Ma’s sunbonnet hid her face. Pa was looking at her, too.

“I like it,” I said, but Ma didn’t respond.

At the end of the street, Pa turned off and stopped the oxen in front of a small house. It was made of logs, but they weren’t round. “We squared them off with an ax,” Pa explained. The house had a door that was painted red and a window with four panes of glass. There were glass panes in the second story, too. Each window had an iron bar across it to keep intruders from coming in.

“This is our house,” Pa said. “It won’t be clean inside, because nobody’s lived here since I left. I hired a man to keep a watch on it so that nobody would get in and claim it. Folks do that sometimes because buildings are so scarce. But it looks like it’s still ours.” He took a large iron key from a pocket in the wagon sheet and inserted it into a lock on the door. The key scraped, and Pa and Uncle Will had to jolt the door, but it finally opened.

Ma peered inside, taking in the rough wooden table and chairs and the two beds built into the corners. A cook stove stood at one end. Everything was covered with dust. The floor was dirt.

“Look at the view from the front door,” Pa said proudly. “The mountains are on your doorstep.”

Ma was quiet. I could tell she was thinking. She walked out back, where Pa showed her the space for her garden, a sunny spot where she could plant the seeds she’d brought along in our medicine chest. She came around to the front again and put her head inside, looking up at the second story.

“There’s a ladder inside to reach the loft. That’s where Will and Catherine will sleep,” Pa explained.

Ma said nothing. She had turned her head to look at the dirt roof. I thought that Ma would never want to live in a house that was dirt top and bottom. But then she began to laugh, the way she had that time Abigail and I had tied Miss Browning’s shoelaces together under the table.

Pa looked at her with concern on his face, while I wondered if Ma was so upset at the house that she’d gone crazy.

But at last, Ma caught her breath. “Look at that, Emmy Blue,” she said, and pointed to the roof of the house. Dandelions and bluebells and red blossoms that Pa called Indian paintbrush were growing on the dirt roof, along with other flowers whose names I didn’t know. There were so many that the top of the house was a blaze of color. “We have flowers blooming on our roof. Did you ever see such a funny sight? Wait until I write Grandma Mouse about it. She will be charmed.” She chuckled a little, and then shook her head. “I believe I could live in a house that has a roof of flowers, a roof that makes me laugh. Come inside, Emmy Blue.”

“I am beholden to you, Meggie, for coming all this way and being such a dutiful wife,” Pa said. He grinned at me, then whispered, “I guess your ma’s going to stay.”

“She has a stout heart,” I told him.

Pa nodded. “I knew it all along.”

And then Ma said to me, “This is the end of your quilt walk, Emmy Blue. We are home.”

Chapter Twenty

RESCUING MRS. BONNER

“I
believe I will like this place, this Golden,” Ma told Aunt Catherine and me as we cleaned the cabin.

“There isn’t much to housekeeping in a home this size,” Aunt Catherine replied with a smile, her hands smudged with the blacking she was rubbing onto the cook stove. “We are going to have to sit on the bed while we cook.”

That day, we brushed the cobwebs off the ceiling, washed the walls and the furniture, and swept the floor, though Aunt Catherine pointed out there wasn’t much use to sweeping since the floor was dirt.

We met one of our neighbors on our first day in Golden, too. We were making up the beds when a woman from across the road came over with a loaf of bread still warm from the oven. “Wheat bread was the thing I longed for most during my months on the trail,” she said. “You just can’t bake it properly over a campfire. The first day I was here, I knocked on the door of a stranger and asked if I could use her oven for my bread. She understood.”

Ma had just unfolded her Feathered Star quilt to spread on her bed, and the woman peered at it. “God bless me, I can see you piece. And such lovely work.” She lifted a corner of the quilt and studied the stitches. “I brought four quilt tops with me, thinking I’d finish them here, but there’s not a place where I can find batting or muslin for the backing.”

Ma frowned at that. “No place to buy yard goods? I’ve never heard such a thing. Isn’t there a general store?”

“Yes, but all it stocks is shoddy, that cheap fabric that falls apart with one washing, and that at high prices.”

“I promised my daughter that as soon as we were settled, I would buy her a piece of material to back the little quilt she made on the trail,” Ma said. “And I would dearly love to make myself a dress or two. You see, there wasn’t room in the wagon for my clothes, so I had to wear them all for much of our trip. Now, instead of one worn-out dress, I have three. Women here will think I’m shoddy, too.”

Our neighbor only laughed. “Why, if you had new dresses, we’d think you were putting on airs. You’ll find things are different here. We don’t judge. We take folks as they are.” She started back to her cabin, then called over her shoulder. “I’ve been baking pies. I’ll bring you one for your supper if you don’t mind. It’s no botheration.”

“Dried apple pie?” I asked.

“Oh, heavens no. Pie plant.”

I didn’t understand, and Ma whispered, “Rhubarb.”

The woman smiled. “It was the first thing I planted when I came here two years ago. I couldn’t look another dried apple pie in the face.”

After the woman left, Ma said, “Did you hear that, Cath? She said there’s not a place in Golden to buy yard goods. I guess we will have to tear up our dresses for scraps for our quilts.”

“But first, we must find dresses to replace them,” Aunt Catherine said.

We were busy that first week, arranging the cabin, planting a late June garden, and cooking the things we had all missed on the trail. It wasn’t until several days after we arrived that we had time to visit the stores.

“That’s my only disappointment with Golden,” Ma said after we left the general store. “There are plenty of gold pans and men’s overalls and work boots, but not a thing for a woman to stitch.” The store had three bolts of fabric, which Ma had asked the clerk to take down. She’d fingered each one, then shook her head. “They wouldn’t survive a washing,” she said.

“Suit yourself,” the shopkeeper had told her. “You’ll find no better.”

As we walked along the streets, Ma glanced this way and that. At first, I thought she was looking for a dry goods store. But then she paused and stared at a woman climbing down from a wagon. Ma took a step toward her, then stopped and told Aunt Catherine, “It’s not her.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Mrs. Bonner. I thought she would have arrived in Golden by now. Perhaps their plans have changed.”

“I suppose we shall never learn,” Aunt Catherine said.

But as it turned out, we did learn.

Pa and Uncle Will had already started building the business block. While Ma, Aunt Catherine, and I took care of the house, Pa and Uncle Will used our oxen to grade the building site that Pa had purchased more than a year before. They needed help, so they went to The Prospector, a saloon and gambling hall, where someone had told them the bartender kept a list of men looking for work.

The first person they saw when they went inside, Pa later told us, was Mr. Bonner. He was sitting at a table, drunk as a pigeon, playing cards. Pa said he tried to ignore him, but Mr. Bonner spotted him, threw his cards on the table and greeted Pa like he was an old friend. “Hatchett, you’re just the man I want to see.”

Pa turned away and went to the bar to ask for the list of workmen, but Mr. Bonner followed him, Pa said.