The Quilt Read Online Free PDF Page A

inside and a girl who was perhaps ten or eleven sat holding the reins. She called after one of the women:
    “I should stay and help.”
    One of the women turned. She was plump and wearing an old-time dress that came almost to the ground, and she had red cheeks and dark hair up in a bun. “Not this time,” she said. “You're too young yet. You go home and tend to chores.”
    “How am I ever going to learn?” the girl asked.
    “You're too young,” the woman repeated, and then one of the other women pulled at her arm and said:
    “Come on, Martha, let's get inside.”
    With that the three women disappeared into the house and the girl turned the horses and wagon, as expertly as the previous boy had done, and the team walked down and out the driveway. The boy watched and thought of numbers. He liked to work numbers in his head and he thought, All right, there's Kristina and my grandmother, that's two, and then two women in the first wagon, that makes three, and four, and then three women in the last wagon, that makes five and six and seven.
    He looked at the house and he thought of sevenwomen in there and how small the house was and where would he sleep? Then he heard a familiar slamming and wheezing and banging, and he looked up to see Elmer's truck coming down the drive and next to Elmer was another woman.
    Whereas the rest of the women had been younger, she was old, like his grandmother, and she stepped out of Elmer's truck stiffly, holding a large bag, made from sheet material, that contained some kind of folded colored patches, and a smaller burlap sack that seemed to be filled with jars.
    Elmer waved to the boy and smiled a toothless grin but like the wagons he did not stay, instead turning the truck and hammering back down the driveway.
    There was a moment of silence and the woman looked at the boy. “You must be Eunice's boy, visiting with Alida?”
    He nodded. “She's my grandma.”
    “Well I'm her cousin Gerta, so that makes us … I don't exactly know. Third or fourth cousins. But we're related. We're
all
related, I guess. Here, carry this sack of jars for me. This quilt is so bulky.”
    He took the heavy sack gladly. It proved to be full of jars of canned food. He was dying to get into the house and see what was happening, but once he did he was disappointed. It was just all noise.
    Women filled the kitchen. The stove was fired up and in the heat everybody was sweating and all of them seemed to be talking at once, and not a word of it was English but was all Norwegian, and it meant nothing to him, just sounds mixed with banging and rattling from pans on the stove and the creaking of the pump handles.
    He moved to a corner, out of the way, and they all ignored him except one woman, who had blond hair and blue eyes like Kristina but was not as young or quite as pretty. She smiled at him and gave him a slab of bread covered with butter and honey. He ate it wolfishly, realizing that it was well past lunchtime. Then he went to the pump, where a dipper hung on a hook, and held the dipper up to another woman, who pumped it full and handed it to him without really looking at him, speaking in Norwegian to a woman by the stove all the while.
    He did not see either his grandmother or Kristina— or the woman called Martha—and stood back in the corner sipping, and guessed that his grandmother and Kristina and Martha were in the upstairs bedroom, which he had not seen. Then he heard the sound.
    It was not, quite, a scream. He would grow to be something of a man and be in the army and later work on an ambulance and, somehow, live to become an older man, and he would see and hear and do many cutting and bad things but he would never, ever, hear anything like that sound.
    It came from upstairs but seemed to fill the whole house, a deep, grunting, ripping sound that turned into a piercing shriek and ended in panting murmurs.
    For a second the talking in the kitchen stopped and the boy was truly horrified, wondering how