The Quilt Read Online Free PDF Page B

work to do.”
    He followed her then and decided he would just stay inside to eat, and if they started joking about the sound again, he would look for a hat and go back to the barn to sleep.
    But the women were not joking now. He sat on a chair in the corner of the kitchen and they worked, cooking and filling pans with hot water and making bread, and he thought he had never seen so much food. Meat and potatoes and loaf upon loaf of bread, each wrapped in waxed paper and put in a metal bread box, and even after they ate and he was so full he could hardly walk, there was still more food left.
    After the meal they made coffee in a big pot on the hottest center part of the woodstove by just dumping a handful of coffee grounds into boiling water and then adding some broken eggshells.
    He did not understand the eggshells and thought it might have something to do with the baby, and because his grandmother was still gone with Martha and Kristina and because the woman in the barn hadtalked to him he asked her, “Are the eggshells to help the baby?”
    She laughed, but not in a bad way, and ruffled his hair. “The eggshells take the bitterness out of the coffee. Here, try a sip.”
    He took a mouthful from her cup, which seemed so hot it must be on fire and so bitter he almost threw up. “How can you drink that?”
    She laughed again. “After a while you can't live without it, eh, girls?” And she turned to the other women, holding her cup up to nods and smiles, then back to the boy. “You'll come to like it when you grow to like grown-up things.”
    Then there was a quiet time. The dishes were done and he had helped to wipe them. He felt that he should do something more but there wasn't anything he really knew how to do. They set him to filling the wood box next to the stove and he brought the wood in four pieces at a time until it was heaping and then went back to his chair in the corner to be out of the way.
    His grandmother came down then and said somethingin Norwegian to the group, and one of the women said in English:
    “So how long since the last pain?”
    His grandmother came over to him and kissed him on top of the head and held him, which felt very right. She said, “Over an hour. Perhaps it was just false labor.”
    “What's labor?” he asked, and they went back to speaking in Norwegian and he realized they did that when they were talking about things they didn't think he should hear.
    But the one from the barn said, “It's not so good when they've had hard labor and then stop this way, is it?”
    And his grandmother shook her head and looked down at the boy and answered in Norwegian again, with a little snap in the words so the woman from the barn said:
    “I'm sorry but my Norski isn't so good. It gets rusty.”
    His grandmother sat at the table then and ate a plateful of food and drank hot coffee steaming from the cup. She smiled at the boy and said, “Little pitchers have big ears.”
    “So it will be a long night, do you think?” one of the other women asked.
    “That's what Martha said.”
    “So if the night is long maybe it is we should do quilt stories?”
    Which was the way the boy started to learn about the quilt.

There was a new, strange energy in the house that he had not felt or seen before. They ate again; he had never seen so much food so often. They ate all the time they weren't working. And they drank hot, scalding hot, coffee with eggshells in it and ate rolls and jelly and bread with honey and pie and cake and meat and potatoes. Breakfast lasted to what they called forenoon lunch and then to the middle meal of the day, called dinner, and then afternoon lunch and then the evening meal called supper and then what they called a snack before going to bed.
    He had not seen the dark yet in this summer becausehis grandmother put him to bed when it was still light—nine or ten o'clock and still light—and the sun came up before he awakened.
    But this time it was different. After the evening snack