“What makes you think, Mrs. Flagg, that they’re around Mountain Hollow?” he asked with slight surprise.
“I didn’t say I thought they were here,” I shouted quickly and vehemently. “What I said was I thought they might be here, holed up somewhere.”
“Well, I suppose they might be at that, Mrs. Flagg,” he said with the drawl all mountain people have, probably because they live so slowly, their thoughts slow down and their tongues too, to match. “And if they come out, Mrs. Flagg, we’ll try to catch them.”
I sat there at the phone, shaking with inward rage. I could see the sheriff in my mind’s eye, lolling back in that old swivel chair of his. How could he catch anything, lolling in a swivel chair — even flies?
“If they’re holed up somewhere, Mrs. Flagg,” he said, “they’re probably holed up maybe fifty miles from here because that’s where the hoodlums were last heard from...”
I banged down the receiver in despair, thinking: These people! There’s not an ounce of imagination in all their pea-brains rolled together. I set about to rearrange the entire shop, hoping to keep my mind off of what my imagination was conjuring up while I waited for Tommy — who drove up to the shop, exactly on time, two hours and fifteen minutes from the time he had left it! Thank heaven!
I hugged him between the quilt he carried in his arms, and plied him with questions: Had he seen anyone on the way? Had he heard anything — like shots? Were there any dead bodies around? Was Miss Mattie Jackson all right? To which he answered, Heck-no-Mom, and Sure-by-golly-Mom, and went outside to shine up the engine of the jeep.
I stood there in a grateful daze, holding the quilt, and looking through the big window I’d had put in the front of the shop, at Tommy leaning lovingly inside the open hood of the jeep. I stood there quite a while with a heart full of thanksgiving and a bit of regret for banging down the receiver on the sheriff, who had probably been right in his assumption that the killers were holed up fifty miles away.
Then I spread the quilt out on a table. It was a bright and cheerful pattern, done in different shades of orange and yellow, the sunshine colors, and I ran for the suit box to find out whether it was the Sunbeam or Rising Sun pattern. I couldn’t be sure as they are very similar; the one a circle with curved triangular patches forming a larger circle, around which are stitched smaller sunray triangles on a block; the other, a square with alternating shaded triangles. I studied the sketches.
It turned out to be the Sunbeam, simpler of the two blocks, and very lovely. I admired it for a few minutes, reached down for the part of the quilt that draped over the table and extended almost to the floor, then bent frozen, with my hand outstretched in rigid shock as I saw the bottom blocks of the quilt, which had none of the Sunbeam pattern, but was all in somber color, each different from the other!
I cried, “Oh, no!” and moved at last, yanking the bottom of the quilt to a heap on the table. “Oh, no!” thinking for sure that Miss Mattie Jackson had flipped her lid.
I had here a quilt, five 12-inch blocks wide by six 12-inch blocks long, regulation size, regulation Sunbeam pattern in variegated shades of orange and yellow, a beautiful and classic quilt until that very bottom row with its dark colors and strangely blocked patch work. I leaned over the quilt in a kind of limp supplication — poor Miss Mattie, she must have popped her cork.
I brooded for a while, then I went to the front door of the shop, opened it and called out to Tommy. “Tommy, did Miss Mat-tie Jackson say anything strange when you were up to her cabin today?” I had to call Tommy’s name four times before he pulled his head out of the jeep engine long enough to stare at me blankly. Then he said, “Heck no, Mom,” and stuck his head back under the hood.
He wouldn’t know.
I closed the door and went back into the shop. Well, if Miss Mattie Jackson had become psychotically senile after a lifetime of living alone up there in that mountainous gulch, she had the right, I guess, and the years.
I picked up the phone and called Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn, who said she’d be right over even though she was cluttered with trouble and busy as a bumblebee in a bucket of tar, which was probably true, what with a bunch of grandchildren and great-grandchildren always underfoot. Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn was as ancient as Miss Mattie Jackson and had just as much right to go crazy with senility, but probably wouldn’t since she lived in the valley with all her posterity to keep her mentally alert.
I showed her the quilt, with the last row tucked under, as soon as she arrived all out of breath. “Look,” I said. “Look at that!”
“As pretty a Sunbeam pattern as ever I did see,” she admired.
Then I whipped the last row of blocks free on the table and watched her expression, which didn’t change one iota.
“Well...” I said at last.
“Looks like Miss Mattie Jackson changed her mind a bit before she finished this here quilt,” she offered.
“It looks like maybe she lost her mind,” I said dryly, and Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn studied me with the remote gaze of the hill folk for outlanders.
“I mean,” I said desperately, “it looks as if maybe something is very wrong; a quilter like Miss Mattie Jackson, an expert, an artist, suddenly going off the beam like this, throwing in just any old block pattern...”
“Maybe it ain’t just any old block pattern.”
“She might be sick. She is, after all, very old. And living alone the way she does... Well,” and I spread my hands helplessly in an attempt to explain senility to one who was ready for senility, “she might not have really known what she was doing. What do you think?”
“I ain’t had time yet to think,” Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn chastised me. “I am still at the ponderin’ stage.”
So there she stood — pondering — without intellect, without imagination, while her friend, a poor little lady alone on the mountain, went crazy with old age. “What I mean,” I said, “I think she needs help and somebody ought to go up there and bring her down where she can be taken care of.”
Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn nodded, but instead of racing out of the shop to round up some able-bodied nonworking men to go up the mountain and bring down that poor crazed woman, she leaned over the quilt and drawled thoughtfully, “I reckon Miss Mattie Jackson is offerin’ up a message and it’s up to us to unscramble it. Now this, what would you say this block meant?” as she pointed at the first block in the last row of five, a seemingly helter-skelter design of different colored patches forming a staggered diagonal pattern.
“It’s a crazy-quilt block,” I said impatiently, and Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn tolerantly answered that no, it certainly was not, it was an Old Maid’s Puzzle block, probably put there purposely to make me read the rest of them, or for someone to read, she added with the barest hint of scorn that made me suddenly feel like a dull-witted clod before such bright perception.
“Miss Mattie Jackson is sharp as a pin. Always has been, always will be. These blocks ain’t just staggerin’ off course. They’re tryin’ to tell us somethin’ here.”
Looking down at them, I regained my equanimity. Those blocks weren’t trying to tell us anything, not unless they were trying to tell us that poor Miss Mattie Jackson had finally come unstrung after all the years alone up there on the mountain and, each time she made one of those blocks for that last row, thought she was starting a whole new quilt... “For instance, that block,” I said, pointing at the second one. right after Old Maid’s Puzzle, “that’s a Bat in Flight and, really now, what meaning could it have?”