That, gentlemen, is when it happened. With a strength dredged up from hatred and desperation I rushed out of the room and down the stairs. In the hallway I found the halberd, its steel point glittering. I grasped it and with a loud shout leaped into the livingroom where Dara and her father were watching television. Professor Kassachian rose from his chair and turned to face me just in time to take the point of the halberd full in the chest. The scimitar, which hung above the fireplace, did, in turn, for Dara.
What’s that, sir? Oh, you ask if I’m now sorry for what I did. No sir, I’m not. I will not lie about it, even though a lie might possibly earn me my freedom.
You see, gentlemen, lying there in bed staring at the ring, I suddenly realized that while the ring’s getting stuck on my finger was blind chance, everything that occurred after that was a plot; a plot by Professor Kassachian to provide a husband for that impossible daughter of his, and I have no doubt that Dara, desperate for a mate, aided and abetted him in every way possible. An opportunity had presented itself, and they had seized it mercilessly, with no regard for me.
No, no. You misunderstand. This is not merely an assumption on my part. You see, when I finally got the ring off, there was an inscription on the inside of the band. I’m unable to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, but I could read this all right:
The Patchwork Quilt
by Pauline C. Smith
There seems to have been more under that hood than people thought.
I didn’t think Tommy should go up on the mountain that morning, but it was the day for Miss Mattie Jackson’s quilt, and since Tommy’s got a calendar in his head instead of brains, he was, of course, determined. I argued thieves and killers until I was out of breath, with Tommy’s only rebuttal a firm and stolid reiteration that Miss Mattie Jackson would be finished with her quilt and expecting him.
Tommy takes his responsibilities very seriously, probably because it’s the first time in his eighteen years he has had any. He does all my running around for me, and believe me, that’s some running around. I own and operate the Jane Flagg Old Time Store in Mountain Hollow, specializing in stitchery done in the old-time manner — cross-stitch mottoes, appliqued coverlets and patchwork quilts, crewel and other embroidery, needlepoint, wax-work, feather-work, quill-work, all lovely, and offering these hill women a pride of achievement and a bit of independence they have never known.
My best worker, Miss Mattie Jackson, lives alone, high up in a narrow gulch of the mountain. She was old when I was growing up in these parts, so she must be ancient now. Nobody ever sees her; nobody except Tommy, who drives the jeep up those treacherous roads on the first day of each month, carrying supplies and materials, and returning with her newest quilt.
Her patchwork quilts are wonderful, the stitches fine and true — with, each month, an old and different historical pattern, such as Tippecanoe And Tyler Too, reminiscent of the William Henry Harrison campaign, and Clay’s Choice, a memory of the bitter Calhoun and Clay days. She does the old and favorite patterns and those that are old and rare.
My mother was a quilter, as was her mother and grandmother before her. They all lived in this house and left here records of the quilts of their times. I can identify most of Miss Mattie Jackson’s patterns by searching through the detailed and titled sketches carefully recorded by these women of my family and stored in a suit box. Sometime I plan to copy them on graph paper for publication, except that nobody quilts anymore, nobody but the hill folk who quilt for the few traveling customers willing to leave the fast traffic of the superhighway and slow down for the old Mountain Hollow road.
I don’t know exactly when I decided to come back to Mountain Hollow to stay, but it was long after I finished college, married and had Tommy. Probably Tommy and his father Brian finally decided me — poor Tommy, whose body grew but whose brain did not, and arrogant Brian who accused my hillbilly blood of causing the retardation.
I didn’t argue the matter. Who could argue with an uptight businessman who thought of a wife as decorative background to his ambition, and a slow-witted boy as something to hide? I just went on getting my hair done each week, being nice to the right people, and trying to find someone who could spark the few brains Tommy was born with to make of him a reasonably functioning facsimile son of a rising executive.
Well, after a series of pathologists, psychologists and special schools, at last I did what was best for him — for me, too — and came home to Mountain Hollow where the people wouldn’t know the difference between a rising executive and a falling star, and where Tommy was accepted with love and admiration both for the calendar in his head and his way with a jeep.
“Tommy sure can drive that jeep,” Mountain Hollow folk exclaim in wonder; and he can. He also understands what is under the hood and keeps it in perfect running condition. Tommy has realized his potential and now I don’t have to get my hair done each week, which is a big relief.
I like breathing the clean air and living the slow life of Mountain Hollow. I like the unsophisticated goodness of the people. Nothing touches us here; nothing until those hoodlum killers got close — or were they close? Nobody really knew. Actually, nobody knew who they were, how many there were or what they drove. Nobody knew anything about them except that where they had been, they’d left death.
The radio newscasts dropped separate announcements: liquor store robbed, all witnesses killed; drugstore looted, proprietor slashed to death — until the separate announcements made a chain of identical iniquity along the superhighway, still far away, but heading toward the turnoff that entered Mountain Hollow. Then, after seven murders, the newscasts reported nothing new. It was as if these phantom killers had vanished, evaporated somewhere before, beyond or between the roadblocks set up along the highway — they and their phantom vehicle.
The hillbillies of Mountain Hollow, not having any great imagination, breathed a sigh of relief and I began to worry. If the killers weren’t killing, where were they now? I worried more actively on the morning Tommy insisted on driving up to Miss Mat-tie Jackson’s cabin in the gulch because he had this calendar in his head instead of brains, and the page had flipped to the day Miss Mattie’s quilt would be finished.
“All right, all right,” I finally cried, “go on,” and he loaded the jeep with supplies, as happy as a dumb lark, doing his thing on the day he was supposed to do it.
I had a radio going in the shop, which used to be the parlor of the house when my folks and my folks’ folks and their folks lived here. Tommy and I live in the rest of the house. I didn’t give much ear to the country music, which is about all we have on the local radio station, but I did listen to the news spots that offered such shameful items as Big Jed Bartlett’s drunken tangle with the law at the local tavern and juicy little bits about Mary Louise Plunkett’s latest hair-pulling melee; but nothing new about the killers who were “at large,” the newscaster vaguely announced.
It took Tommy an hour to make the trip up to the gulch... what was it they used to call that place...? Well, I can’t remember now. Anyway, it was about an hour’s trip up there, then fifteen minutes to unload the supplies and load on the new quilt, so all in all, I figured Tommy should be back in two hours and fifteen minutes, if everything went all right...
We’ve got a sheriff; well, actually, we don’t have him, the county has him, and it’s a pretty big county. After Tommy had been gone a little over an hour, I phoned the sheriff and got him, too. He wasn’t out chasing killers or standing beside roadblocks, he was right there at the sheriff’s station, answering the phone!