Aunt Jane’s hands were stroking lovingly a ‘nine-patch’ that resembled the coat of many colors.
‘Now this quilt, honey,’ she said, ‘I made out o’ the pieces o’ my children’s clothes, their little dresses and waists and aprons. Some of ’em’s dead, and some of ’em’s grown and married and a long way off from me, further off than the ones that’s dead, I sometimes think. But when I set down and look at this quilt and think over the pieces, it seems like they all come back, and I can see ’em playin’ around the floors and goin’ in and out, and hear ’em cryin’ and laughin’ and callin’ me jest like they used to do before they grew up to men and women, and before there was any little graves o’ mine out in the old buryin’-ground over yonder.’
Wonderful imagination of motherhood that can bring childhood back from the dust of the grave and banish the wrinkles and gray hairs of age with no other talisman than a scrap of faded calico!
The old woman’s hands were moving tremulously over the surface of the quilt as if they touched the golden curls of the little dream children who had vanished from her hearth so many years ago. But there were no tears either in her eyes or in her voice. I had long noticed that Aunt Jane always smiled when she spoke of the people whom the world calls ‘dead,’ or the things it calls ‘lost’ or ‘past.’ These words seemed to have for her higher and tenderer meanings than are placed on them by the sorrowful heart of humanity.
But the moments were passing, and one could not dwell too long on any quilt, however well beloved. Aunt Jane rose briskly, folded up the one that lay across her knees, and whisked out another from the huge pile in an old splint-bottomed chair.
‘Here’s a piece o’ one o’ Sally Ann’s purple caliker dresses. Sally Ann always thought a heap o’ purple caliker. Here’s one o’ Milly Amos’ ginghams – that pink-and-white one. And that piece o’ white with the rosebuds in it, that’s Miss Penelope’s. She give it to me the summer before she died. Bless her soul! That dress jest matched her face exactly. Somehow her and her clothes always looked alike, and her voice matched her face, too. One o’ the things I’m lookin’ forward to, child, is seein’ Miss Penelope agin and hearin’ her sing. Voices and faces is alike; there’s some that you can’t remember, and there’s some you can’t forgit. I’ve seen a heap o’ people and heard a heap o’ voices, but Miss Penelope’s face was different from all the rest, and so was her voice. Why, if she said “Good morning” to you, you’d hear that “Good mornin’” all day, and her singin’ – I know there never was anything like it in this world. My grandchildren all laugh at me for thinkin’ so much o’ Miss Penelope’s singin’, but then they never heard her, and I have: that’s the difference. My grandchild Henrietta was down here three or four years ago, and says she, “Grandma, don’t you want to go up to Louisville with me and hear Patti sing?” And says I, “Patty who, child?” Says I, “If it was to hear Miss Penelope sing, I’d carry these old bones o’ mine clear from here to New York. But there ain’t anybody else I want to hear sing bad enough to go up to Louisville or anywhere else. And some o’ these days,” says I, “I’m goin’ to hear Miss Penelope sing.”’
Aunt Jane laughed blithely, and it was impossible not to laugh with her.
‘Honey,’ she said, in the next breath, lowering her voice and laying her finger on the rosebud piece, ‘honey, there’s one thing I can’t git over. Here’s a piece o’ Miss Penelope’s dress, but where’s Miss Penelope? Ain’t it strange that a piece o’ caliker’ll outlast you and me? Don’t it look like folks ought ‘o hold on to their bodies as long as other folks holds on to a piece o’ the dresses they used to wear?’
Questions as old as the human heart and its human grief! Here is the glove, but where is the hand it held but yesterday? Here the jewel that she wore, but where is she?
‘Where is the Pompadour[17] now? This was the Pompadour’s fan!’
Strange, that such things as gloves, jewels, fans, and dresses can outlast a woman’s form.
‘Behold! I show you a mystery’ – the mystery of mortality. And an eery feeling came over me as I entered into the old woman’s mood and thought of the strong, vital bodies that had clothed themselves in those fabrics of purple and pink and white, and that now were dust and ashes lying in sad, neglected graves on farm and lonely roadside. There lay the quilt on our knees, and the gay scraps of calico seemed to mock us with their vivid colors. Aunt Jane’s cheerful voice called me back from the tombs.
‘Here’s a piece o’ one o’ my dresses,’ she said; ‘brown ground with a red ring in it. Abram picked it out. And here’s another one, that light yeller ground with the vine runnin’ through it. I never had so many caliker dresses that I didn’t want one more, for in my day folks used to think a caliker dress was good enough to wear anywhere. Abram knew my failin’, and two or three times a year he’d bring me a dress when he come from town. And the dresses he’d pick out always suited me better’n the ones I picked.’
‘I ricollect I finished this quilt the summer before Mary Frances was born, and Sally Ann and Milly Amos and Maria Petty come over and give me a lift on the quiltin’. Here’s Milly’s work, here’s Sally Ann’s, and here’s Maria’s.’
I looked, but my inexperienced eye could see no difference in the handiwork of the three women. Aunt Jane saw my look of incredulity.
‘Now, child,’ she said, earnestly, ‘you think I’m foolin’ you, but, la! there’s jest as much difference in folks’ sewin’ as there is in their handwritin’. Milly made a fine stitch, but she couldn’t keep on the line to save her life; Maria never could make a reg’lar stitch, some’d be long and some short, and Sally Ann’s was reg’lar, but all of ’em coarse. I can see ’em now stoopin’ over the quiltin’ frames – Milly talkin’ as hard as she sewed, Sally Ann throwin’ in a word now and then, and Maria never openin’ her mouth except to ask for the thread or the chalk. I ricollect they come over after dinner, and we got the quilt out o’ the frames long before sundown, and the next day I begun bindin’ it, and I got the premium on it that year at the Fair.
‘I hardly ever showed a quilt at the Fair that I didn’t take the premium, but here’s one quilt that Sarah Jane Mitchell beat me on.’
And Aunt Jane dragged out a ponderous, red-lined affair, the very antithesis of the silken, down-filled comfortable that rests so lightly on the couch of the modern dame.
‘It makes me laugh jest to think o’ that time, and how happy Sarah Jane was. It was way back yonder in the fifties. I ricollect we had a mighty fine Fair that year. The crops was all fine that season, and such apples and pears and grapes you never did see. The Floral Hall was full o’ things, and the whole county turned out to go to the Fair. Abram and me got there the first day bright and early, and we was walkin’ around the amp’itheater and lookin’ at the townfolks and the sights, and we met Sally Ann. She stopped us, and says she, “Sarah Jane Mitchell’s got a quilt in the Floral Hall in competition with yours and Milly Amos”. Says I, “Is that all the competition there is?” And Sally Ann says, “All that amounts to anything. There’s one more, but it’s about as bad a piece o’ sewin’ as Sarah Jane’s, and that looks like it’d hardly hold together till the Fair’s over. And,” says she, “I don’t believe there’ll be any more. It looks like this was an off year on that particular kind o’ quilt. I didn’t get mine done,” says she, “and neither did Maria Petty, and maybe it’s a good thing after all.”
17
Pompadour – marquise de Pompadour (1721–1764), the mistress of Louis XV, king of France; she was a well-educated woman and a patron of art and literature.