“Smoke’s good for the sinuses, Sandra. Clears a person right out.”
That is what Lyle Becker said to me across four strands of wire fence, with a piece of rebar in his hand and a trash fire going in a rusty barrel at his knee.
Then he laughed. It was not a mean laugh. I want to be fair to the man from the start. It was the laugh of somebody who has decided a thing is small and would like you to decide the same so he can get back to it.
Behind me, on my clothesline, hung my mother’s wedding quilt.
It had gone out at eight o’clock that morning the color of strawberry ice cream and a summer sky. It was now the color of a dishrag.
“Lyle,” I said, “I asked you to look at my line.”
“I looked at it.”
“And?”
“And it’s wash.” He poked the barrel. Something in there popped, and a curl of black went up with the gray. “Wash dries, smoke or no smoke. My mother hung hers out next to a coal stove chimney her whole life.”
“Did it smell like a milk jug?”
He thought about that, which I will also give him credit for.
“I couldn’t say,” he said. “I was a boy.”
I stood there. I am fifty-nine years old and I have been married thirty-six years to a man who drives a truck, which means I have had a great deal of practice at standing still while deciding what not to say.
What I did not say was whose quilt it was. I don’t know why. I think I knew that if I said the words “my mother’s wedding quilt” out loud to a man who was laughing, and he kept laughing, I would have to stop being his neighbor, and I was not ready to do that on a Monday morning with tomatoes on the stove.
So I said, “All right, Lyle.”
“All right,” he said, pleased, as if we had settled it.
I walked back up the yard.
The wind was out of the south, the way it is here from May until the corn comes out, and it walked right along with me, carrying his trash.
I took the quilt down the way you would lift a sleeping child out of a car seat.
You do not pin a quilt that old. Pins pull, and the weight of the thing hanging from two little points will tear seventy-two years of hand stitching in an afternoon. You drape it over two lines at once, so it lies in a kind of hammock, and you put it on the shady side of the sheets, and you give it two hours of moving air. Mother taught me that. Her mother taught her.
It is a Double Wedding Ring: rings the size of dinner plates, linked like a chain, each pieced from wedges of print no bigger than a stick of gum. Pinks and blues, mostly, with a green here and there where Grandma ran short. Some of the wedges are feed sack. I can still pick out the one with the tiny bluebirds, because when I was little I used to find it with my finger before I went to sleep.
Grandma pieced it over the winter of 1953 and the church ladies quilted it on a frame in her front room that spring. In the corner, in pink floss, it says Irene and Walter, June 12, 1954.
It weighs five pounds. I know because Mother weighed it once on the bathroom scale, holding it and then not holding it, to settle an argument with my aunt.
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