Sarah's Quilt Read online

  Halloweens, Sparky keeps guard duty at the outhouse for us, which saves it being turned over like most of the other privies around. Other times, he appears now and then, just for the fun of it. Once, I got up on a Christmas morning to find what looked like a saddle tramp snoozing under a sombrero in a rocking chair on the front porch, his boots sticking from under an old blanket. About the time I guessed the old cuss was dead and started to use a stick to lift the sombrero, one of Sparky’s glass eyeballs fell out and rolled across the porch. Gilbert and Charlie were laughing so hard at the corner of the house, they fell clear into the dirt. That was three years ago. Now he just collects spiders in the barn.

  I said, “Grampa Chess put that hat on his head. I got tired of seeing those eyeballs glaring at me in the dark.”

  Charlie said, “Mama, Sparky’s a-sitting on a headstone with your name on it. What does it mean?”

  I stood in the doorway and folded my arms. “Not a blessed thing,” I said. “I just had a hankering one day and bought it. Had my name carved, says just what I want.”

  Gil slapped his gloves against his leg. “What in blazes do you want it to say?”

  I said, “Don’t swear; the little boys are here. Come take a look, and I’ll show you.” I headed for the barn.

  Gilbert took my arm, hurrying beside me. “Mama, if there’s something we ought to know, if there’s something wrong, you’ve got to tell us.” Ezra and Zack followed us, and Charlie held the door aside, frowning. I do see his father’s face when he does that.

  In the barn, I moved Sparky, then went to pulling down some bales of fence wire where he’d been resting his feet. I passed them to each of the boys until I got down to the tarpaulin on the stone. “There’s nothing wrong except my hardheadedness,” I said. Although I’ll be forty-three on my next birthday, I feel eighteen and spry, and I work sun to sun without a stop. “Don’t know how you managed to find it. I hid it back here so you two won’t have to mind it when the time comes.”

  “Mama,” Charlie said, shaking his head, “that’s the blamed awfulest thing I ever have heard of.” That boy loses all track of his grammar when he’s excited.

  Gil said, “It’s bad luck or something. If you’re not old or sick, could bring on some kind of early passing.”

  I smiled at the earnestness of his expression. “Not likely, boys. The only thing I’ve come down with was a scalded hand last Christmas. I pondered a long time about what I wanted it to say.” I was holding the tarp so they couldn’t see the whole thing. The stone matched the color and shape of their papa’s on the hill. It will look fine next to his. My stone says “Here lies Sarah Agnes Prine Elliot, mother, rancher, and a pretty good shot.” Suits me.

  Charlie made a face at Gilbert. “You sure you’re not sick?”

  Gilbert was starting to grin. He said, “Dang, Mama. You’ll probably be dead three days before you quit working long enough to notice. Let’s see ’er.”

  Charlie smiled. He said, “I know just what it needs: ‘Shake the dust off your boots and look busy, Lord, there she comes.’”

  “Rascals,” I said, and pulled back the tarp. “See there? All you have to do is put on the date and prop it next to your pa’s.”

  Gilbert poked Charlie in the arm. Charlie said, “This is vexation, Mama. Why, that had to cost a pretty penny, all those letters, and should have gone against the grain of a woman who’s got a five-dollar gold piece with marks from her milk teeth bit into it.”

  I could tell him a thing or two, since every gold eagle he’s ever seen has been one I’ve earned with my two hands. I said, “I’ve got lessons to teach. You boys stack those spools of wire back up before you wash and come in the house.”

  “We’ll set your sentry back on duty, too,” Charlie said.

  I left my sons and started for the house, with Ezra and Zachary following behind me like ducklings, heading for the only schooling they’re going to get, living this far from town. My father-in-law, their grandpa Chess, came to the house for lunch, and when Gil and Charlie got in from brushing down their horses, we had a fine reunion around the kitchen table. It always has done my heart good to watch folks eat, especially my kin.

  I set our noon meal in front of the boys and their cousins, enjoying the familiar sounds that filled my kitchen. They made a ring of men, plus me. Chess, Charlie, being nearly a head taller than Gilbert, who sat next to him, and Ezra, who’s just starting to get stringy, followed by little old Zack, just eight years old. Chess was as happy to see the boys as if they’d only been on some long errand. He kept pushing food at them, telling them to stock up and get the town dust out of their veins so they could breathe better and work harder.

  Gilbert said to Chess, although I figured it was for me to hear, “Well, Grampa, that’s the whole idea. Charlie and me need to be—”

  I said, “Charlie and I.” And while I’m hearing them argue the reasons for letting out of school, I keep remembering their father went through military college when he was their age, all on his own. That was gumption.

  Gilbert kept talking without missing a word: “—and I need to be here to help out with the ranch when Mama gets too old. It isn’t going to run itself.”

  Charlie grins and says, “We only have until Mama’s next birthday. She’ll be middle-aged and put out to pasture. She knows it herself, spending cash on that stone there, like it was just around the corner of being needed. Must be getting older by the minute.”

  “Middle-aged, my hind foot,” I said. “Wasn’t I flanking every fourth calf last year? By the time I’m too old to run this place, you two will be doddering around on canes, and riding nothing but a rocking chair. Why, I haven’t even got a gray hair! I’m not old. Not by a long shot. I’ll see you two graduated from that university yet.”

  Charlie smiled. Ornery cuss. I can hire hands to do their work, but I’m not paying hands to take their grades for them. Even before they went, they’d look down at me and we’d square off until one or the other of them cuts a grin, and pretty soon we’d all be laughing at the three of us. It never let up the mad I felt at them, but it put it on a back shelf, as if it was out of my reach for a while.

  Gilbert had the gall to say if I was so set on more learning in this family, I should go myself and see what they were up against. I told him to go cut a switch and I’d wear out his britches, and then he’d see what they were up against, but he just grinned. Charlie and Gil and their grandpa took off to get a better look at Pillbox’s new foal, which I’d saddled with the name Elliot’s Hunter.

  While my boys were in the barn, I corralled Ezra and Zack, and summertime school commenced. Savannah and I don’t let up on the children the way town schools do. We have school every day of the year except Sunday, unless it’s roundup or harvest or Christmas. Of course, like today, sometimes our school lasts only two hours.

  We went around the side where shade hits in the afternoon, and I sat on the rope swing while they used firewood blocks for a perch. I heard their recitations and Ezra did some long division. Zack said his times tables. I listened, but I wished a breath of wind would stir. We were sweating, just sitting in the shade. Both of them had some Latin verbs, which I think no boy is too young to do, and then I read to them another page from Modern Celestial Theories: A Study of the Planetary System. It took a while to decipher it, but we got it boiled down to a few ideas they could understand. I do fancy a well-rounded education.

  Then I sent them to play, after explaining that the planets don’t swirl around each other, that one of them had to be the sun, and the other one had to do all the circling. Zachary always makes me think of a child born old, for I saw him cogitating just a moment before he said, straight-faced as a judge, “I’ll be the sun, Ezra. That’s the boringest part.” So he’d fixed Ezra after all, and his older brother would have to run rings around him for the game of rotating planets to continue.

  I shooed them like critters and headed for the house. “Scoot,” I said. “School’s out, and I’ve got work
to do.” I pulled my flour crock from its corner on the kitchen worktable and then tried to figure how many pies I should make for supper. I could see the four boys in the yard. Gilbert had a lariat and tossed it, lassoing Zachary, cutting short Zack’s game of being the sun. Ezra leaned over, hands on his knees, catching his breath.

  Watching them through the window glass, Chess said to me, “Sarah, you know I don’t like to interfere with your raising the boys.”

  I nodded slowly. Don’t know how a man can be part of a family and not interfere somehow. At least he was usually spare with his advice unless asked. I said, “What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s time you cut ’em loose. That’s all.”

  “You saying my apron strings are too tight?”

  “That. I’m saying you could talk to them until you was choked. They’re men. They got to make up their own minds, or it’ll go bad on you. I recommend you to let ’em have their own reins. Make less work for yourself in the bargain.”

  “They aren’t done growing yet.”

  Chess picked at a thread on his shirt. He does that when he’s thinking. His head has a slight tremor, though his eyes are clear and keen. “B’lieve I disagree.”

  “I want them to get educated.” I scooped a lump of dough onto the table and went to rolling it out.

  “They will. In time. No sense wearing yourself out on it.”

  “How did you get Jack to go to school?”

  “Didn’t. He just up and went.”

  “So you’re telling me to let them be?”

  He smiled. “I’m telling you that you work like two men. I suggest you get two men to lighten your load a mite. It’s soon enough they’ll be ‘up and went,’ on their own. Some girl’ll come along and wink her eye, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “April and Morris are living in Tucson. Maybe I’ll move to town, too, and go to tea parties and concerts and let you men run this ranch.”

  Chess said, “We’d take the job for you.”

  I said, “What in the world will make them appreciate what I’m trying to do for them?”

  “Time.”

  “I don’t have time,” I said. “I’m too old.”

  After they were satisfied with seeing the colt, Zack and Ezra were sent home with the invitation for supper in their minds, cookies in one hand, McGuffey’s Readers in the other. My boys unpacked their duds and the books they brought home while I made up beds for them on the sleeping porch. Then they went with their grandpa to ride south and see how the land had fared with the drought.

  We’ve been three years of the sparsest rainfall in anyone’s recollection. Last year was better, but still dry. We used to run over five hundred head on sixty sections of open range, and now the land’s so beat-up, it won’t keep four hundred on the same acreage. When Chess decided to live here permanently, he bought up some leases on another forty sections and I opened my stock to the grasslands, but then you’ve got rustlers and loss from natural devices, and it still doesn’t pay. Only one around still making good is Rudolfo Maldonado. His land is lower and has more natural water tanks. He can keep fifteen to twenty head on a section down there. Sometimes I envy him his land. It’s some of the best around, and while my place is drying out, his is just beginning to show the drought’s effect.

  When I went to the bedrooms to open windows to get a breeze blowing through the house, I saw the stack of newly unpacked books on Charlie’s shelf, next to others with dust on the tops. I picked up the closest one to me and held it for a minute, feeling the narrow pressed lines on the front edge, the ponderous weight of it, staring at the ominous title, Geophysical Nomenclature of the Earth’s Surface. I opened the book. A little stub of paper made the pages fall open at the place where Charlie had been reading.

  Faint pencil lines underscored some words in the first paragraph—Mount Etna, Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kilauea. In the side margin was a note in Charlie’s hand, “Xm tomorrow, remember Boltzmann Con., PV = Nk(B)T,” some note beyond my knowing. In the bottom margin he had written in pencil a note I understood at a glance—a single word with a whole story in it. “Esperanza.” After the girl’s name was a little question mark.

  I slapped the book shut. It felt like I’d been prying in his private letters or something. I never meant to do that. It was just a schoolbook. With a really good notion there, in writing, of why he was having a hard time studying. Well, I suppose all that remains now is to wait until he decides to tell us about this girl. Thinking about who she might be gave way to wondering who Boltzmann is, and what those other little letters were about. Real schooling. How anybody could walk away from finding out what all that means is just beyond me. I could eat it like sweet pudding.

  I put the book amongst the others stacked there on the shelf, and went to the kitchen to get started with supper. While I cooked, I drifted to town in my mind, picturing myself sitting in class with other girls. Picturing someone named Esperanza across the room, now and then glancing up to see if Charlie was looking her way. Then I pictured the teacher talking about rocks and soils and streams and such, and how to know what was under the earth, whether it was coal or quicksilver you were standing over. I forgot all about my boy and just smiled, thinking I was listening to some mighty fine talk about things I’ll likely never get to learn.

  My sons and their grandpa came back in a couple of hours. They talked about how scorched the land seemed. If it doesn’t come rain soon, there won’t be any need of hired hands at all, including the ones I’ve already got.

  I said, “You boys get any work done?” and set a plate of fried pies on the seat of an empty chair and motioned to them. They were made from scraps left from the baked ones I’d made for supper. I put out cups for drinking water.

  Charlie took one and said, “Sent Flores with five bales of hay up to the fence lines near each tank.”

  “Spotted a herd of antelope up at Majo Vistoso. They were drinking the springwater,” Gilbert said.

  Chess said, “Didn’t think anything could live on that water.”

  We all stayed quiet for a bit, thinking about how desperate a wild animal would be to drink hot water so loaded with minerals it wouldn’t boil. The pie plate was empty. A fly buzzed over the crumbs, and I waved my hand over it.

  Chess said to me, “Sarah, you’ve said nary a word. What’s on your mind?”

  “Where’s Kilimanjaro?” is all I said. Charlie turned about six shades of red, but he didn’t say a word. “I come across that word recently,” I said. “Is that Japón?”

  “Africa,” Charlie said. “And it’s not Mexican. You say the J in Japan.”

  I said, “I see you learned at least a thing or two.”

  “Mama, don’t start in on me.”

  Gilbert was looking first at one of us, then the other. He said, “Want us to ride up and get mail today? We can be back by suppertime.”

  “Albert and Savannah will be here for supper,” I said.

  Chess said, “Pass me that water jug there, Charlie, and one of those cups. Sarah has a right to lay into you if she wants to. You two have disappointed her mightily.” Well, at that, we all three stared at Chess like he’d grown a horseshoe out his forehead. Never once in all the years since Jack died has he stood up for my wanting the boys to go to college. Usually, he won’t speak a word on the subject. Charlie and Gilbert both winced. It appears their grandpa’s disapproval hit a lot closer to the bone than their mother’s.

  I took up the empty plate and said, “Bring the mail, and don’t dawdle. Your aunt and uncle are wanting to see you boys again. They reckoned you’d need cheering up, being so sad about missing out on college and all. Buck up. I’m not fussing at you anymore. I’d been thinking of hiring. I figure I’ve paid your tuition, and you owe me each a good six months, working that money off.”

  Gilbert made a face and popped the last half of the fried pie in his mouth. Those boys know I don’t really ever stay mad at them. He gulped and said, “Charlie, old man, we are now indent
ured servants. Maybe when the six months are up, la doña de estancia will hire us on regular.” He went for his hat, hanging by the door, and thumped his brother on the shoulder as he passed.

  Well, before too long, I had a houseful of folks: my mother, who goes by Granny, my oldest brother, Albert, Savannah, his wife, and their children living at home. There’s Clover, done with his school and come to mind the farm, Esther, Mary Pearl, Ezra, and Zachary.

  Almost all my folks that I know of are here. The only ones not close by being my younger brother, Harland, and Melissa and their children and, of course, my brother Ernest, who hasn’t been heard from since the war in Cuba. We all talk about him like he’s just been misplaced like a hat or something, but inside I know he’s gone to his reward. After that slatternly gal Felicity left him, he wrote me regular, at least once a month, even during the campaign in Cuba. He sent me a picture of himself putting shoes on the horse ridden by General Theodore Roosevelt. Don’t know if we’ll ever know what happened to him. I know if Ernest was still living, he’d write. For Mama’s sake, I say he’s going to write any day now. She has me read his old letters to her now and then.

  Mama has her own little house, the first one we homesteaded in, just two rooms, but it suits her, she says. She’s never quite been the same since my papa died years ago, and sometimes her mind slips a little and she seems to be someplace else in her head. It comes and goes, though, and just when I think she is clear crazy, she up and surprises me with something fine she sews or some clever thing she says.