Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey Read Online Free PDF Page B

subsequent years, a transport allowing us for a time to snatch a small something from the maw of impending mortality and to have a sound answer to a disturbing question: Was I really present that day if, a few weeks later, it left me with nothing other than a little more sag here, more droop there, and one less day to be alive?

4
    The Wandering Foot
    M OTHERS, FATHERS, GIVE FORETHOUGHT to what you allow your children to sleep under. I don’t mean roofs and rafters; I mean something closer to their skin, their heartbeats, their souls, if you will. My parents, early, put me under a quilt hand-stitched by a paternal great-grandmother, a woman who saw Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg and a few years later packed her things into a covered wagon near Reading, Pennsylvania, and walked beside it all the way to the western Ozarks of Missouri. She knew something of hard travel, and that could be why she especially liked a quilt pattern commonly known as “wandering foot” or “turkey tracks.” It has at least two other names: “flying swallows” and “flying corners.” You can readily see all those images in the pattern.
    For each of her first three grandchildren, she made quilts of wandering feet until the death of the youngest, a World War II airman whose plane was brought down over Holland by Third Reich flak — what one could call flying corners of steel. Thereafter, she changed to “snail” or “basket” patterns for the last three grandchildren, her designs becoming ever more ones of security and stasis.

    Some years ago I came upon a batch of my father’s photographs in an old two-drawer, wooden cigar box that still smelled of tobacco. The pictures were curling up as they used to do before synthetic backings. One of them showed a child in a white dress making a wobbly pursuit after a flock of semidomesticated turkeys, a breed feathered in their fine natural colors. On the back was penciled, “Bill’s First Steps.” My father had snapped the picture in 1940 on his grandmother’s farm in the Missouri Ozarks. She was the maker of the quilts, the woman who, thirteen years later at age ninety-four, picked my fourteenth birthday to die on. If you will imagine a kind of spiritual mitochondrial DNA, she is my key link with the nineteenth century for reasons that go beyond the story here, but relevant now are her quilts which to me serve as further evidence of ways the peculiar and the seemingly random — the quoz of a human life — can shape it. We can’t choose our ancestors, but they, often in ways never to be guessed, can select pieces of
our
future.
    I asked my parents what was going on in that photo and why I was wearing a dress. My mother quickly said, before my father could concoct a tale about boys dressed like girls, “All little children at that age wore dresses then. It was easier.” She was talking of diaper changes. He said, “You saw those turkeys, and you got up off your hands and knees for the first time, and you went staggering after them. I didn’t see you until I heard the women hollering. Your mother was saying, ‘Look! He’s walking!’ and your aunt was shouting at me, ‘Get holt of that boy before those turkeys flog him!’ They’d flogged your little cousin Marlene the year before, and Uncle Charley took a stick and killed one of them.”
    I got snatched up short of any avian confrontation, but once I was set down again, my days of hands-and-knees locomotion were finished (except for an evening in Penzance, England, in 1969 when I took too literally the phrase
pub crawl
). Today I believe bedding me down under a cotton quilt covered by 120 turkey tracks created in trapunto is the likely reason my mind chose a pursuit of fowl as the moment to put feet under itself for better exploration. That the maker of the quilt was the very woman who daily fed those dozen bipedal-gobblers confirms it all in my mind.

    But it doesn’t stop there. I continued to use the quilt; in fact, I napped