The Quilt Walk (18 page)

“I could use the loan of a twenty-dollar gold piece. I’m a good poker player, but I have had a string of bad luck. That or someone over there is cheating.”

“Sorry. I haven’t got twenty dollars to spare,” Pa told him.

“Ten then.”

Pa shook his head.

Mr. Bonner sneered at him. “I guess that means I’ll have to put my wife to work,” he said, looking around him. “There’s always work for women in these places.”

Pa told us how angry he got at what Mr. Bonner said, “You would force your wife to work in a saloon? She is a lady.”

Pa turned around, walked out of the saloon, his hands balled into fists. “I was afraid I would hit him,” Pa told us.

“Poor Lucy,” Ma said. “I wish we could help. He’ll wear her out if she lives long enough.”

“It’s not our business,” Pa said.

The next morning, Pa and Uncle Will went to work early, as usual, but Pa didn’t come home for dinner. Uncle Will explained that Pa had gone on an errand. Late in the day, Pa came to the cabin and said to Ma, Aunt Catherine, and me, “Come with me, all three of you.”

“Whatever for?” Ma asked.

“You’ll see.” Pa led us to the edge of town where several covered wagons were parked. “Wait here,” he said, as he climbed onto the wheel of one and called, “It’s Thomas Hatchett.”

“Go away. Please,” Mrs. Bonner said in a voice so low that we could barely hear her.

“I’ve brought my wife and my sister-in-law, and Emmy Blue, too.”

“No. I can’t see them.”

Ma gestured for Pa to get down, then she stepped onto the wagon spoke and said, “Lucy, it’s Meggie.”

“No.”

That didn’t stop Ma. She climbed into the wagon and exclaimed, “Why, the monster! What has he done to your arm?”

“I fell.”

“No, he pushed you, or worse. And what about the fresh bruises? Oh. Lucy, come with us. Surely anything is better than this.”

“Where could I go? I’d be disgraced,” Mrs. Bonner said.

“You could go with us. We will take you in. And, disgraced? This is Golden. People in Colorado Territory are not so taken with convention as they were back home. I’ve learned that already. They would know your husband’s treatment of you is not your fault.”

Ma drew Mrs. Bonner to the edge of the wagon. As Mrs. Bonner came into the sunlight, she bumped her arm against her side and winced.

“Mrs. Bonner, you can sleep in Emmy Blue’s bed with her. You are coming home with us.”

“I would be such a burden,” Mrs. Bonner said, but she let Ma lead her from the wagon.

“Your ill treatment by your husband would be a greater burden on us,” Pa replied. “Meggie is right. We should have insisted you leave Mr. Bonner the moment you reached Denver.”

Ma helped Mrs. Bonner to the ground, then Pa climbed back into her wagon and removed the sacks and boxes that contained her things, and we all carried them down the street to our cabin. As we were walking along, Pa told us, “I searched all day for her.”

“You did the right thing,” Ma said. “Lucy is in misery so deep she can hardly talk. But what if Mr. Bonner comes after her?”

“I did some checking around. It seems Bonner is a known card cheat and troublemaker, and he is not welcome in Golden. The sheriff promised to talk to him as soon as Mrs. Bonner was safely in our hands. He’ll tell Bonner to leave, or else he’ll get thrown into jail. He’ll let him know that if any harm comes to Mrs. Bonner, the men of Golden will see to him.”

“You’ve said all along that we should not interfere. What changed your mind, Thomas?” Ma asked.

Pa smiled at her. “My wife was willing to give up her family and old friends to start a new life with me, a change she didn’t want to make. I got to thinking it was only right I change, too, and that meant interfering in something that isn’t my business. Your friend’s life is worth a little change of mind.”

If I had to think of something good to say about Mr. Bonner, it was that he did not make his wife wear all of her dresses at one time as she crossed the prairie. She brought trunks of clothes with her in the wagon. The first thing she did after she moved into our cabin was to give dresses to Ma and Aunt Catherine, much to their delight.

“We are so grateful to you. Our old clothes are in tatters now, all of them,” Ma said. “We will save the good parts for scraps, and the rest will do for rags.”

With the new dresses ready to be worn, Ma ripped up the old ones. She clipped the places that were not worn and cut them into diamonds for a star quilt. She saved one large square of fabric and said it would do for the backing of my Indian Rescue quilt. I had already stitched the squares together, so one afternoon, she cut a piece from one of my old dresses to fit Waxy’s quilt top. Ma, Mrs. Bonner, Aunt Catherine, and I sat in the yard, quilting the top to the back.

“There’s nothing to use for a batting between the two layers, except rags, and Waxy’s quilt is too good for that. So we’ll skip the batting. This will be a summer quilt,” Ma said. She shook her head. “I never knew a town that didn’t sell batting.”

There was no quilt frame either, so the four of us passed around the little quilt, each taking a few stitches.

“It’s too bad there’s not a special store where you can buy yard goods and batting and needles and such,” I said. The remark surprised me, and I wondered if I was beginning to like sewing.

“Yes, a pity,” Ma replied, then stopped her stitching. She turned to Mrs. Bonner. “That is exactly the solution to your dilemma, Lucy. You can open a sewing store that sells just what Emmy Blue mentioned. There isn’t a woman in Golden who wouldn’t be thrilled to have a place to buy yard goods. Now they have to write home for what they want, and it takes months before the goods arrive. You could sell calico and muslin, Lucy, maybe even silk and velvet later on if there is a demand for it. You could stock all the findings, too—buttons and snaps and twill tape, thimbles and thread, even trimmings. If there’s room, you could put up a quilt frame in the store so that women could set-in their quilts to be stitched.”

“And you would not only sell supplies to women but help them with their stitching. You are so clever with your needle,” Aunt Catherine said. “Before long, you could have them doing embroidery and tatting, too—all with supplies they’ve purchased from you, of course.”

“But I’ve never run a shop before,” Mrs. Bonner said.

“You’d never gone west before, either, but you got here. Catherine and I would help you. Emmy Blue, too.” Ma looked at my stitches on Waxy’s quilt. “Perhaps not so much with sewing, but Emmy Blue could stock shelves and help with customers.”

“I have a little money that I got from selling some of the things in the wagon,” Mrs. Bonner said slowly.

“Then it’s all set,” Ma told her.

“But where would I set up shop? I haven’t seen a vacant store in all of Golden.”

Ma’s eyes twinkled. “You leave that to me.”

That night, we left Tommy with Aunt Catherine, and Ma and Pa and I went for a walk along Clear Creek. We didn’t have a well yet, so we had to haul the water we used. Each of us carried a pail. When we reached the creek, Ma sat down on a rock and looked up at the sky. “There are thousands of stars, maybe more than that, but the mountains get in the way,” she said.

“Do you like the mountains now?” Pa asked dipping a bucket into the cold creek.

“They are comforting, especially at night. They are like having warm arms around me.” Ma sighed, then was silent for a moment, before she said, “I believe we have found an occupation for Lucy.” She talked slowly, as if she were choosing her words carefully. “She will open a shop that will sell yard goods and trims and findings. Women who have worn out their clothes traveling a thousand miles across the prairie will be anxious to make new ones. And they will want to go to quilting, too. There’s nothing that will make a cabin a home faster than bright quilts on the beds.”

Pa shrugged. “I don’t know much about such things.”

“We have checked around, the three of us”—she glanced at me—“the four of us, that is. There isn’t a woman who wouldn’t patronize such a shop. Of course, it will take a few months for the goods to arrive, so Lucy will have time to get everything ready.”

Pa stared at Clear Creek, which sent up white foam as it rushed over the rocks. In the moonlight, the foam looked like ice. He didn’t seem to be paying much attention as he dipped another pail into the water.

“There is just one problem,” Ma said.

Pa stopped, the pail only half filled.

“We need to find a place for Lucy’s store. We have looked all over Golden, and there isn’t a spot available. With the way Golden is booming, any store space is taken up the moment it is finished. I don’t know where in the world Lucy could open her shop.”

Pa turned to look at Ma then, his head cocked, waiting.

Ma smiled at him. “She wouldn’t need much space, Thomas, and you have room for several stores in that building.”

“But the space has all been promised. It will be much more profitable if we rent to a hardware store or a restaurant or a saloon.”

“A saloon!” Ma said. “Surely, you aren’t serious, Thomas.”

“I am. A saloon pays better than a bank. In fact, the space is already let. There’s nothing wrong with a well-run saloon. Where else would you expect men to go after a day’s work underground?” He added, “I doubt Lucy Bonner would want to be next door to such an establishment.”

“No.” Ma thought a moment. “But she could be upstairs. You could build a stairway on the side of the building. I don’t imagine you could rent that space to a saloon or any other business.”

“A lawyer or a doctor, maybe.”

“Lucy would pay every bit as much in rent, and her clients wouldn’t spit tobacco juice on the floor,” Ma said.

“Would women climb the stairs?”

“Women would climb a mountain to buy fabric for their quilts!”

“I don’t know, Meggie. I don’t like the idea of a woman renting from me.”

Ma turned to face Pa, her hands on her hips, “You listen to me, Thomas. A woman’s money is every bit as good as a man’s. When we arrived in Golden, you said you were beholden to me for giving up everything I cared about and for following you west. You said I was a dutiful wife. Now it is your turn to be a dutiful husband. I want you to rent that space to Lucy.”

Pa took a step backward, and still tending to a bucket, he put up his hands in surrender, water sloshing down his arms. Then he turned to me, the corners of his mouth lifted just a little. “Your ma does indeed have a stout heart.”

Chapter Twenty-One

THE QUILT THAT
WALKED TO GOLDEN

M
a and Aunt Catherine soaked in the afternoon sunlight that came through the windows in Mrs. Bonner’s shop, Golden Sewing Supplies. It was in an upstairs room of what Pa had named the Hatchett Block. The frame was small, and every so often, the women stood to roll up a completed section and expose a new portion of the quilt. Ma looked down at Tommy, who was sleeping in a basket beside her, then stretched and sat down again beside Aunt Catherine.

Mrs. Bonner picked up her needle and took several tiny stitches, but before she could pull the thread through the fabric sandwich of quilt top, batting, and backing, she stood up to greet a customer. It had been like that all afternoon. Mrs. Bonner would take a few stitches, then someone would climb the stairs to the store and ask for a spool of thread or a yard of calico.

“Emmy Blue, do you want to sit down and stitch for a few minutes?” Ma asked.

I had been putting away thimbles and buttons and spools of thread. This was Mrs. Bonner’s second shipment of merchandise. The first had all but sold out in a month. She paid me a dollar a week to help in the store after school and on Saturdays. “I have to finish this,” I said, and Ma and Aunt Catherine smiled. They knew I was better at stocking shelves than I was at sewing. I smiled back at them, as I placed the egg-rock on a paper pattern to keep it from blowing away. The egg-rock was the one that Joey had given me when he left our wagon train, and I had, in turn, given it to Mrs. Bonner the day the store opened. It was for good luck, I’d explained.

Ma ran her hand over the quilt she was working on. It was a giant star, made from pieces of the dresses we’d worn on the overland trail. “Remember this one, Cath?” She tapped her finger on a white sprig on a black background. “That was going to be my best dress when I reached Golden.”

“And this red was from Emmy Blue’s middle dress.”

“Back in Quincy, you made a dress for Waxy from those yard goods, too,” I said. “She still has hers. Waxy wasn’t as hard on her clothes as I was.”

“Nobody is,” Ma said with a smile.

Aunt Catherine held up a green diamond shape. “That’s the dress that was scorched in the campfire the first week of our trip. I learned to be careful after that,” she recalled.

Mrs. Bonner finished helping her customer, who admired the quilt before she left. She also told Ma she’d be back later in the week to give her a hand with the stitching.

“You’d better hurry up and finish before she comes back,” Mrs. Bonner said after the woman was gone. “She takes toenail stitches.” When Ma didn’t understand, Mrs. Bonner explained. “Stitches big enough to catch your big toe. You’d have to take them out.”