Rita told about the Harveyville Masons putting up a ten-dollar reward for the capture and conviction of Ben’s murderer. When I read that, I asked Grover if Ben Crook was a Mason in good standing. Grover said he wasn’t because he’d never paid his dues, which was the second reason the reward was only ten dollars. The first reason was that nobody cared enough about Ben to pay more than a sawbuck to find his killer. Ben’s murder had caught the Masons between the mud and the wagon wheel, Grover said. Some of them thought they ought to give twenty-five dollars to whoever had killed Ben. They never paid out a reward one way or the other, because Skillet never was caught.
Rita didn’t get the job on the Topeka Enterprise, but she and Tom moved away just the same. Not more than two weeks after the quilting at Mrs. Judd’s, Tom was offered the engineering job he’d applied for at the Mountain Con copper mine in Butte, Montana. A day later, they were packed and gone. I think Tom was even more anxious to get away than Rita. A couple of weeks after that, Rita wrote to say she hadn’t had any luck with the newspapers in Butte, but she’d gotten the next best thing, a typist’s job at the Anaconda Copper Company. She was learning shorthand so she could get a promotion to steno, and one day, she might even be a secretary. “It’s a humdinger of a chance, and it sure beats feeding chickens,” she wrote.
After Rita left, the Persian Pickle made her an old-fashioned Remembrance quilt. We embroidered our names along with favorite sentiments on diamond-shaped pieces of fabric. I assembled the diamonds into a star and added a nice background. The club members stitched the quilt one day at Net-tie’s house, and we sent it off.
Rita wrote us a note by return mail, saying she’d never seen anything as gorgeous as that quilt, which she’d put on the bed as soon as she unfolded it, as a surprise for Tom. Rita turned into an even better friend after she moved away. She was my best pen pal, sending me a letter every couple of weeks, telling me about the funny people she met in Butte and the fancy restaurants where she and Tom ate.
When I wrote to tell Rita the baby had arrived, she and Tom sent Grover junior a telegram congratulating him on choosing us to be his parents. I framed it.
After the club members finished cooing at the baby, they sat down in the chairs I’d arranged around my quilt frame and admired my Christian Cross, which was made entirely of plaids and polka dots, each square a different material. I’d asked all the club members to search their ragbags for scraps so I’d have enough. I thought it was the prettiest quilt I’d ever made, and they did, too.
I assigned chairs around the quilt frame and waited until everyone began sewing before I announced, “I have a surprise for you.” I tried to sound important.
“You see another rain cloud, did you?” Mrs. Judd asked, looking up from the stitches she was taking around the blue-and-yellow-plaid cross.
“It’s something just as good and maybe better. Look at this!” I took a postcard out of my pocket and held it up. “It’s from Ruby!”
“Oh, Ruby. Goody!” Ella said. Now that the Judds had arranged for a telephone and electricity to be installed at her place, Ella had moved back to her farm. Duty and Hiawatha kept an eye on her, and Prosper picked her up at noon every day so she could take her dinner with the Judds. I’d never seen her so happy.
“Are you going to pass it around, or are you just going to wave it in the air like that?’“ Mrs. Judd asked.
“Read it out loud,” Ada June said.
I cleared my throat. “It’s from Bakersfield, California, and in case you can’t see it from where you’re sitting, there’s a picture of two little boys sitting on a giant peach.”
“They’ll squish it,” Opalina said.
Mrs. Judd shot her a look. “Read the postal,” she ordered.
“It says, ‘I bet you never thought you’d hear from me again. I hope you haven’t forgotten your old friend Ruby. Floyd is working for a farmer here, and we are living in a tourist cabin.’ And it’s signed, ‘Love to the Persian Pickle. Ruby Miller.’“
“Well, that’s just fine,” Forest Ann said, and everyone nodded.
I handed the card to Ada June to be passed around. She studied the picture while the others went back to their sewing, but not me. I cleared my throat, and they looked up.
“What now, Queenie?” Mrs. Ritter asked.
“That’s not the only thing that came in the mail. I got something from Rita, too.” I went into the dining room and came back with a cardboard box. I set it on the edge of the quilt frame and folded back the tissue, then lifted out a baby’s quilt and held it up. “It’s from Rita. She made it out of the scraps we gave her at our quiltings. She took them with her.”
“Why, we taught her to quilt, after all,” Mrs. Judd said, taking the quilt and holding it up close to her spectacles. She passed it on.
“Did you ever see anything so cunning?” Ceres asked when the quilt reached her. “It’s threads of all our lives, Rita’s and ours, pieced together.” Ceres handed the quilt to Mrs. Ritter.
“Lookit here. She’s used the little sea horses in ‘that green,’ you gave her,” Mrs. Ritter told Forest Ann. “And here’s a dear little piece of Persian pickle from you, Ceres. I’d have thought it was all used up by now.”
“Her stitches are getting better,” Ada June said, although that wasn’t true. Rita’s stitches were as big and crooked as they’d always been. “I bet she’s been practicing out in Montana.”
Nettie traced her finger around the edge of one of the pieces. “This is real nice. What’s the design?”
“It’s Double Ax Head,” Forest Ann replied when the quilt reached her.
Forest Ann passed Rita’s quilt to Agnes T. Ritter, who looked it over and said, “No it’s not. It’s not Double Ax Head at all. Well, I mean, some might call it Double Ax Head, but that’s not its real name, not the name on my templates, anyway.”
I’d sat down and begun stitching around a dark blue square with orange dots, but something in Agnes T. Ritter’s voice made me glance at her.
She was holding up the quilt and looking my way, waiting to get my attention before continuing. “When Rita wrote me to send her a pattern for a quilt for Queenie’s baby, I went through my templates and picked the one I thought had the best name. Of course, I chose an easy one, Rita not being such a good quilter and all. But it was the name that decided me. This quilt is a Friendship Forever.”
“Oh, Agnes T. … Agnes,” I said. She blushed, something I had never seen her do, and it was not a pretty sight, but I didn’t mind, because I wasn’t as critical of Agnes as I used to be.
“Fancy that. Of course it is. Could you think of a better name!” Ceres said.
“Was there a card?” Mrs. Judd asked. I told her there was and took it out of the box and handed it to her.
“It says, ‘If you wonder who’s responsible, I did it.’“ Mrs. Judd frowned at me. “Does Rita think you wouldn’t know she’d made it?” Grover had asked me the same thing.
“I guess not,” I said, going back to my stitching. I knew that wasn’t what Rita meant at all, and I smiled to myself.
The note was a kind of joke between Rita and me that I couldn’t explain to the members of the Persian Pickle, even though it went back to Rita’s last quilting, the one at Mrs. Judd’s.
When the time had come to go home, Rita had left the house with me and walked all the way to my car, where we were out of earshot of the other club members.
“Queenie, there are two things I have to clear up, just in my own mind. I promise I won’t put them into the article.”
“Well—”
Rita broke in before I could object. “How did Skillet know Ben Crook was out in that field? It’s awfully mysterious unless he helped you bury the body.”
Of course, I’d wondered that myself. “No, Skillet didn’t help. I can’t be sure how he found out, but my guess is he passed by the grave and was curious about why the earth was turned. He might have dug down to see for himself. He wouldn’t have told anyone about findi
ng the body. There being bad blood between the two of them, he might have been arrested for Ben’s murder. I suppose by the time he met the Massies, he figured Ben had been dug up.”
Rita thought that over and said it made sense.
I turned to go, but Rita stopped me. “There’s one other question.”
I’d been afraid of that.
Rita lowered her voice. “Was it Mrs. Judd? Was she the one who killed Mr. Crook?”
I thought over that question for a long time. The members of the Persian Pickle Club never talked about which one of us had been responsible for Ben’s murder, because we didn’t care. Anybody arriving first at the Crook place that day would have picked up the oak ax handle lying on the woodpile and smashed in Ben’s skull to keep him from beating Ella. As we saw it, we shared equally in the guilt—and in the credit for saving Ella’s life, too. It was important to remember not that a bad man was dead but that a good woman still lived. It wouldn’t surprise me if one or two of the members couldn’t even recall which Pickle had wielded the ax handle, and among those who did, not a single one would have told, even in a court of law. We were all in it together. The one who actually struck the blow knew that, and it kept her from dwelling on the fact that a man died because of her.
Thinking of that loyalty made a lump come to my throat, and I looked out over the Judds’ rusty old steam thresher to the field of winter wheat that Prosper had planted. I wanted to ask Rita if she thought he would get enough moisture to make a crop of it, but how would she know? She wasn’t a farmer. Besides, I knew Rita wouldn’t let me change the subject.
“We’re not supposed to talk about it, even to one another. We agreed,” I said at last, not meeting her eyes. I turned a little to stare at the sawhorse where Mrs. Judd killed her chickens. The wood was bloodstained, and feathers were stuck in the ax marks. A puff of wind sent one of them up into the air, where it hung for a minute before floating away. A little yellow head lay on the ground. Mrs. Judd must have killed a chicken that morning, and the dogs hadn’t come around yet. “I guess you’d have to say we’re all responsible.”
“I know that, Queenie, but I’m not going to tell anybody, not even Tom,” Rita said. “I’ll keep the secret, too. You’re the only one I can ask. I wouldn’t believe what the others told me.”
That was true enough. Still, I shook my head. “I don’t want to say.”
“Please, Queenie, I promise I’ll never talk about it again. Ever. Even with you. After all, I am a Persian Pickle now. I share the responsibility for the secret. I think I have a right to know.”
Rita put her hand on my arm to keep me from getting into the car, but I opened the door anyway and put one foot up on the running board. We’d stayed too late at quilting. Grover would be wanting his supper.
Still, I didn’t climb in, because Rita’s question hung in the air between us like one of those chicken feathers, and I admitted she was right. She was a Pickle, and now she shared not just the secret of Ben Crook’s murder but the guilt. She deserved an answer. I put my other foot on the running board and glanced away at the members of the club, who were getting into their cars. Agnes T. Ritter fluttered her fingers at me, and I waved back.
“Queenie?” Rita said, and I turned toward her again. “Who?”
Mrs. Judd’s screen door slammed, and someone called my name, but I didn’t look up. Instead, I took a deep breath and looked Rita straight in the eye. Then I leaned over the top of the Studebaker door and said in a clear voice, “I did it.”
The Persían
Píckle club
The Persian Pickle Club Page 21
