Goose in the Pond - Earlene Fowler [61]
I studied each of her squares, admiring the details, and paused for a long time to study the Cajun dance-scene block that reminded me so much of the one in my childhood memories. I remember Dove’s friend Doris telling me to ferme ta bouche—shut your mouth—about going to the dance when we returned to Aunt Garnet’s. Aunt Garnet was an old-fashioned Hardshell Baptist and thought any kind of dancing the pure work of the devil.
I strained on my tiptoes to see the top three squares—a bayou scene that showed a pelican in which, if you looked closely in his white chiffon beak, you could see tiny handmade fabric fish. The middle square held a row of babies lying on a quilt-covered bed while the grown-ups danced at the fais do do. I’ d heard Evangline talk about this square when she was making it. If you undid their tiny diapers, you could tell whether they were boy babies or girl babies. That was the kind of playful detail that made Evangeline’s work so special. In the upper right square a woman held a baby in a blue flannel blanket as her husband napped in a brass bed covered with a finely stitched miniature crazy quilt. Staring at it, the overhead track lighting caused my eye to catch a glint of something. Too far away for me to see closely, I grabbed the rickety wooden stool from behind the gift-shop counter and carried it over to the quilt. The glint, I could see at closer inspection, came from a small glass bead Evangeline had sewn right underneath the woman’s dark brown eyes. That puzzled me. Did it represent a tear? What was she crying about? Was something wrong with her baby? I opened the tiny flannel blanket held closed by a strip of Velcro and found . . . nothing. Nothing? Where was the baby? That wasn’t a detail Evangeline would leave out. Before I could inspect the square any closer, a gruff voice startled me.
“Benni, what you doing?”
Grabbing the adobe wall for support, I turned and faced D-Daddy. The severe expression on his weathered face reminded me that he once captained a fishing boat full of rough, sea-hardened deckhands.
“Nothing,” I said, climbing down from the teetering stool. “There . . . I thought I saw a loose thread in one of Evangeline’s squares. I took care of it.” I startled myself with the quickness of my lie. What instinct kept me from revealing the real reason I was inspecting the quilt?
He gave me an odd look and took the stool from my hands. “Better be careful, ange,” he said. His black eyes held tiny pinpoints of light.
“What?”
He held the stool up and jiggled the loose legs. “These chairs, they aren’t too steady, no. You could fall and hurt yourself. I’d better take this out the back and glue it.”
“Okay, thanks.” Following him to the studios, I wondered if this twinge of foreboding I felt was real or just a figment of my sometimes overactive imagination. D-Daddy didn’t seem happy I was inspecting his daughter’s quilt so closely, and that made me wonder why. I’d learned one thing about story quilts as I’d talked to the quilters and fabric artists as they made and discussed them these last few months. They were often like personal journals and used to either celebrate some wonderful memory or sometimes purge a bad one. I wanted to take another look at Evangline’s quilt, only now I would have to be more discreet about it.
At eleven-thirty, Elvia called.
“Mama’s serving lunch at noon,” she said “Pick me up, okay?”
“Sure. What’s she making?”
“White enchiladas.”
“I’m on my way.”
On the drive over, my thoughts compulsively turned back to all the tiny connections and ambiguities