At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [17]
Then he returned the treasure box to Pearl with a tender look, but she did not linger to thank him. She ran away as fast as she could to Mama Madie’s cabin, and she thought that God must be in bad trouble indeed if He needed the likes of the bearded man to fight His battles for Him.
That night, Pearl and Mother moved into Mama Madie’s cabin, which was small but warm, and smelled like the dried plants and flowers that hung from the ceiling. Mother was real pleased to have her treasure box safe, and she hugged Pearl hard when she learned of it. Then Mother said she thought it wouldn’t be so bad, having the soldiers camped here, because there wasn’t anything left to steal and at least they would keep the gray-coated soldiers away. But Mama Madie said she didn’t trust nobody in a uniform, and good thing they’d buried the silver in the stream bed and turned the hogs and cows loose months ago.
They sat piecing together a quilt top and talking like that in tight, nervous voices, and Pearl, whose stitches were fine and even, helped a good bit. Mother said she felt bad for all the sick soldiers and maybe she’d take some willow bark and blackberry tea up to the house in the morning, and Mama Madie said angrily that it wasn’t her place to go ministering to white trash that drove her out of her own house like that, and then Mother’s eyes began to flash as she said that the captain seemed a decent Christian man and it was her boundin’ duty to help the sick. Then Mama Madie said that no Christian man would wear the coat of a soldier and, because Pearl didn’t like to hear them arguing, she said, “Tell me the story of this quilt, Mama Madie.”
All of Mama Madie’s quilts had stories hidden in their patterns. Some were stories of the Far Country, where the sun shone on dry rivers and the hunters carried spears and eyes hid in the tall grass, that her grandmother’s mother had told to her. Others were stories of nearer times, and slaves that hid beneath the bridge at Four Corners on a night when the moon was full, awaiting rescue by something called the Underground Railroad, which did not run underground and which was not a railroad at all. Mama Madie said the only way her people had to tell their stories was through songs and women’s work, because the white Master didn’t pay attention to either one of them.
Mama Madie had been a slave once, and the man she loved who fathered her twin baby girls had been sold to Georgia, then the twin babies died and Mama Madie had come to raise Pearl’s mother, whose papa had made her a free woman. Pearl knew all the stories of all the quilts. But when Pearl asked her the story of the newest quilt, Mama Madie got a strange, kind of sad look on her face and said, “Why, child, I don’t rightly know just yet.”
Pearl looked at her mama. “Maybe this quilt could be our story, Mother.”
Mother smiled, but in a way that said she was thinking of something else, and agreed that maybe it could.
Pearl dragged Mother’s treasure box out from under Mama Madie’s low rope bed, and put it in Mother’s lap. A soft look came over Mother’s face as she opened up the lid. It smelled of cedar and dust and old, dear things. Inside were scraps and pieces of lives that had gone before—a snippet of lace from a wedding dress, a knitted baby sock, brass buttons off one of Papa’s coats, a spool of delicately spun thread too fine to use for everyday work, a cluster of pressed dried violets pinned to a square of lavender silk, and, finally, the greatest treasure of them all: a square of strong dark wool, tattered now and a little frayed at the edges, embroidered with brightly