An Elm Creek Quilts Sampler

by Jennier Chiaverini

  I remember one story in particular. Out of all the stories this house holds, it’s my very favorite.

  My great-grandfather was the youngest son of a rather well-to-do family in Germany from a small city near Baden-Baden. I say the family was from Baden-Baden, but that’s not entirely true. Hans’s grandfather moved there from Stockholm when he married a German girl. And you’d think that would be enough moving about for one family, but you’d be wrong.

  I suppose Hans Bergstrom was a lot like his grandfather—never one to stay in one place. His parents wanted him to go into the clergy, but he would have none of that. He wanted to seek adventure and fortune in America. When he was a young man, perhaps only a few years younger than you, he boarded a ship and emigrated without his parents’ permission, without even informing them of his journey. Only his eldest sister knew, and she told no one until his ship was a week at sea.

  Before long he made his way to Pennsylvania and began to use his knowledge of horse breeding and raising in other men’s employ, saving every spare cent he could. He had a plan, you see, to establish his own stables someday and to breed the finest horses anywhere, new world and old alike.

  When he was ready, he found this land and built a small house on the western edge of the property, where the orchard grows today. Such a confident man he was, brash even, so certain he was of his future success. He wrote to his family back in Germany to urge them to join him here, but only his eldest sister, Gerda, agreed to make the journey. She was unmarried, and very sensible, but not afraid to take a few risks.

  When Gerda’s ship was scheduled to arrive, Hans traveled to New York City to meet her. And this is the part of the story I like best. When he arrived at Immigration, he found a small knot of men talking excitedly and waving their arms about and carrying on as men always do when they argue. Never one to keep his nose in his own business, Hans nudged one man and asked him what was going on.

  “They’ve got a girl there,” the man told him. “Folks say she’s been loitering here for three days now.”

  “I heard a week,” another man interjected.

  The first man shrugged. “Either way, they want her gone. They’re trying to figure out what to do with her.”

  Intrigued, Hans pushed his way to the center of the crowd, and there he discovered the prettiest girl he had ever seen. Oh, she looked exhausted, to be sure, but with her green eyes and brown hair—well, I’ve seen her portrait, and I tell you she must have been a vision. She sat on top of a shining new treadle sewing machine cabinet, ankles crossed, hands folded primly in her lap, brave chin up, for all the world as if she were sitting on a throne. A couple of steamer trunks rested on the floor beneath her feet, and beside her three men in uniforms debated her future as if she had no say in the matter—which, I suppose, she probably didn’t. She ignored them with all the dignity she could muster.

  After questioning some others in the crowd, Hans learned that this young woman was from Berlin and that she was supposed to have been met there three days before by the man who had promised to marry her. She had spent her life savings on her passage to America and on the sewing machine with which she hoped to earn her keep, had gambled everything on that scoundrel’s promise. The officials did not know what to do with her. She had no other family in the country, spoke no English, and had no one to sponsor her now that her good-for-nothing fiancé had betrayed her. Most of the men were all for bundling her back on board the next ship for Germany, but she refused to budge. She wouldn’t disobey them, but she wouldn’t allow herself to be meekly driven away, either.

  Now, if I had been that young woman, I would have planted my feet, looked those men straight in the eye, and dared them to try to put me on board a ship when I didn’t want to go, but times were different then. I suppose my day was as different from hers as yours is from mine.

  Then one of the officials threw up his hands in exasperation. “Well, unless one of you lot wants to marry her, I’m all for tossing her on the next ship east, sewing machine and all!”

  “I’ll marry her,” my great-grandfather said, stepping forth from the crowd. He turned to the beautiful girl sitting on top of her sewing machine and greeted her in German.

  She blinked in astonishment at the sound of her own language coming from an American. She became even more surprised when he translated what he had told the men.

  “I’d marry you today and consider myself a lucky man,” Hans said in German. “But it would be wrong for me to expect you to decide under these circumstances. Besides, I’d like to think that my bride chose me for myself and not because her only other option was deportation.”

  The beautiful girl smiled at that.

  “We’ll tell these men that you’re my bride,” Hans continued. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them. You can live with my sister and me as long as you want. Maybe in a year or two, you’ll tell me that you truly will be my bride. Or maybe you’ll find another fellow. I hope you’ll choose me, but I want you to know what you’re getting before you say yes.”

  She smiled and gave him her hand. “Perhaps you’ll give me your name first, and we can discuss marriage later. In a year or two.”

  It turned out that she needed only six months to make up her mind. They fell in love, and that speeded her decision. Sometimes I wonder if she fell in love first with Hans’s dream, with its hopes and challenges, and then with the man himself. Or perhaps her love for the man grew into love for his dream. I suppose I’ll never know.

  Well, I suppose you’ve figured out by now that the beautiful girl was my great-grandmother, Anneke. She and my great-grandfather were married eight months after they met, and Gerda was the maid of honor. As the years passed they established Elm Creek Manor and spent their lives working tirelessly until Bergstrom Thoroughbreds were recognized everywhere as the pinnacle of excellence. Even today the world’s finest horses can be traced back to this land.

  My great-grandparents raised their children here, and when the children married, their spouses lived here as well with their children. Some moved away, but when my father married he brought my mother here. I remember having fourteen young playmates close at hand when I was a child. It was a wonderful, happy time.

  “Then what happened?” Sarah prompted. Why had Mrs. Compson sounded so sad at the end? And what had happen to change everything? The manor was all but abandoned now, unrecognizable as the happy place Mrs. Compson had described.

  “The manor thrived. My father continued the tradition my great-grandfather had begun, as did my husband and I, for a time.” Mrs. Compson sighed and went to an east-facing window. She gazed outside. “But that was all a very long time ago, and things are much different now. Much of the land we once held has been sold off, and all that is left of Great-Grandfather Bergstrom’s dream is this house, a handful of acres, beautiful horses scattered around the world—” Mrs. Compson’s voice caught in her throat. “And memories. But I suppose that will have to be enough. Sometimes it’s too much.”

  Sarah wanted to say something but could only watch as Mrs. Compson stared outside at the rain. In the tightness of the older woman’s shoulders and in the bowing of her head, Sarah thought she could see the surface of a grief she could not understand.

  Mrs. Compson turned and crossed the room. “Bring the tray down with you at three, will you?”

  “Aren’t you going to finish your lunch?”

  “No, thank you, dear. I’m not hungry after all. I’ll see you downstairs this afternoon.” She left the room, shutting the library door behind her.

  Frowning, Sarah started to finish her lunch. Then she set down her sandwich and pushed the plate away. What could have happened to the Bergstrom family to make Mrs. Compson so unhappy?

  Sarah went to the window where Mrs. Compson had been looking out at the storm. If there were answers in the rain-drenched lawn, the distant trees tossing their green boughs in the wind, and the pool of the rearing horse fountain rapidly filling with rainwater, Sarah couldn’t see them.


  Seven

  At three o’clock Sarah carried the tray downstairs to the kitchen and joined Mrs. Compson in the sitting room. The well-lit room was snug and cheerful in spite of the storm outside. Mrs. Compson had draped Sarah’s fabric over the sofa and was studying it when Sarah greeted her.

  “You have a good eye for color, Sarah.”

  “One of Bonnie’s employees helped me match things up.” Sarah picked up one of the quilting books and flipped through the pages. “Are we going to start quilting today?”

  “If you mean quilting as in the whole process of making a quilt, yes. If you mean quilting as in sewing through the three layers of the quilt, no.” Mrs. Compson pushed her sewing machine against the wall and beckoned Sarah to join her at the table. “We’ll begin by making templates for your first block, the Sawtooth Star.”

  “Templates?”

  Mrs. Compson found the block’s diagram in a quilt book. “We transfer the pieces of the block from the drawing to this clear plastic. Then we cut out the template, place it on the wrong side of our fabric, and draw around it. Cut a quarter of an inch around the drawn line, and you have your first quilt piece.”

  “Why don’t we cut on the line?”

  “The drawn line is your sewing line. The extra quarter inch is the seam allowance.”

  “Oh.” Sarah wasn’t sure she understood, but she sat down and took the sheet of plastic Mrs. Compson handed her. A grid of fine red lines covered it. “Should I just trace it out of the book? It looks too small.”

  “That’s quite correct,” Mrs. Compson said. “If you simply traced the pieces, your finished block would be six inches square, only half the size we need. Many books and magazines provide actual-size drawings, but we will need to enlarge this one.”

  She showed Sarah how to use the author’s half-scale diagram and the grid on the plastic sheet to create a template of the correct size. With Mrs. Compson’s help, Sarah soon created four templates: a small square, a larger square, a small isosceles right triangle, and a larger isosceles right triangle.

  As Sarah worked, a memory tickled in the back of her mind. Whenever she looked at the Sawtooth Star diagram, she felt as if she were missing something obvious, something important, something she ought to see but didn’t. She tried to shake the feeling, but it lingered.

  “Now for the tracing.” Mrs. Compson selected Sarah’s medium blue print and her cream background fabric from the pile on the sofa. She instructed Sarah to cut one larger square and eight smaller triangles from the blue, and to cut four small squares and four larger triangles from the cream. When Sarah had finished, Mrs. Compson arranged the pieces on the table so that the different shapes formed a star.

  The persistent sense of familiarity tugged at Sarah as she studied the pieces. “I’ve seen this before.”

  “Of course you have. You chose this block yourself.”

  “No, that’s not it.” Sarah thought hard, and then it was as if a blurry image suddenly shifted into focus. “I had a quilt like this once.” As she said the words, she could almost see the pink-and-white quilt her grandmother had made for her eighth birthday.

  She could still remember the way her mother’s mouth had tightened when Sarah unwrapped the present. “Good Lord, Mother,” her mother had said. “You didn’t need to do that. I just bought her a new bedspread two months ago.”

  “A granddaughter deserves a handmade quilt. It was a joy to make.”

  “She’ll just spill something on it and ruin it.”

  “No, I won’t. I promise,” Sarah had said, running her small hand over the quilt.

  “Don’t you like the bedspread we picked out together?”

  Sarah had looked up then, startled by the warning tone in her mother’s voice. “Y-yes.” She hesitated. “But I like the quilt, too.”

  “Which one do you like better?”

  “Don’t ask her that,” Grandmother had murmured.

  “No, no. Don’t worry about offending me, Mother. I want to know. Come on, Sarah. The truth.”

  “I like—” Sarah remembered looking from her mother’s hard eyes to her grandmother’s sad ones. “I like the quilt best.”

  “Figures.” Her mother stood up. “I guess that’s what you hoped to hear, right, Mother?”

  “It isn’t a contest.”

  “Easy for you to say. You won.” Her mother took the quilt and stuffed it back into the box. “Sarah will take good care of it, won’t you, Sarah?” She carried the box away without another word.

  Grandmother held out her arms then, and Sarah climbed into her lap. She squeezed her eyes shut against the tears, but they fell anyway.

  Even now, so many years later, resentment washed over her. She pushed the memory away. “My grandmother made me a Sawtooth Star quilt when I turned eight.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Uh huh.” Sarah stared at the quilt block. “I wasn’t allowed to use it, though. My mother said it was too fancy for every day, so she kept it in a box in her closet. I was only allowed to use it when Grandmother came to visit.”

  “I see.” Mrs. Compson gave her a knowing look. “So your mother was the fussy type, with plastic on the furniture and all that, hmm?”

  “No.” Sarah moved two of the block pieces closer together and studied them. “She wasn’t like that about anything except this quilt.” She wondered where it was now. Still on the floor of her mother’s closet, probably. “I had forgotten all about it. Funny, isn’t it, that out of all of those blocks you showed me, I would pick this one?”

  “Not necessarily. Perhaps you chose this block because some part of you never forgot your grandmother’s quilt and never stopped missing it.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Or perhaps the gift wasn’t a Sawtooth Star quilt but a Dove in the Window or a Sunbonnet Sue. Or maybe it wasn’t a quilt at all, but a doll or a pretty dress. Memory can be a tricky thing sometimes.”

  The thought made Sarah uneasy. “So you think I’m remembering something that never happened?” That didn’t make sense. She could picture herself holding that quilt, running her hand over its softness and delighting in the bright colors.

  “Certainly not. Something happened, some conflict with your mother, some tension between her and her own mother. But whether it was over a Sawtooth Star quilt or something else entirely, I couldn’t say.”

  Sarah frowned. Mrs. Compson’s explanation was no comfort. She rearranged some of the block pieces and glowered at them. “These corners—they don’t match up right.”

  Mrs. Compson tapped her wrist. “Stop fiddling with the pieces. You’re forgetting about the seam allowances again. Once the pieces are sewn together, everything will match up just fine and you’ll see how pretty the block will be.” She opened a small tin container full of pins. “Now you’ll learn how to hand piece.”

  Sarah knew how to sew on a button but nothing more complicated than that, so she listened carefully as Mrs. Compson explained what to do. Following Mrs. Compson’s directions, she picked up a cream triangle and a blue triangle, placed the right sides facing each other, and pinned them together along the sewing line. Then she took the threaded needle Mrs. Compson handed her, tied a small knot at the end of the thread, and sewed a running stitch from the beginning to the end of the line, removing the pins as she came to them. After tying a second knot and trimming the extra thread, she creased the seam flat with a fingernail.

  “Now, if you do that several thousand times, you’ll have a quilt top,” Mrs. Compson remarked.

  Sarah continued to work, with Mrs. Compson looking over her shoulder and giving advice. When Sarah had finished all the straight seams and had joined several units into rows, Mrs. Compson explained how to sew through seams when joining rows together. Although Sarah’s piecing became faster and more accurate with every seam, Matt arrived before she was able to finish the block. She put the pieces and her sewing tools into her backpack so that she could continue sewing at home.

  The
rain had stopped, and the usual heat and humidity had returned. On the drive home, Sarah told Matt the little Mrs. Compson had revealed about her family and the history of Elm Creek Manor.

  “I wonder what went on here to ruin everything,” Matt said when she finished.

  “Me, too. For a moment I thought she was about to tell me, but just when she opened up, she got all upset and left. I can’t figure it out. From what she said, they had everything. Literally. A family, a home, enough money to take care of everything. Why would someone want to leave all that?”

  “You’re asking the wrong guy.”

  Sarah barely heard him. “I wonder,” she mused. “Claudia or someone must have done something terribly wrong to Mrs. Compson for her to break off all ties with her family.”

  “Sometimes people break off all ties even when the family does everything right.”

  Sarah started in realization. “Matt, honey, I didn’t mean—”

  “Can we drop it, please?”

  “But I didn’t mean that your mother left because you—”

  “I said, can we drop it?”

  Sarah watched him as he stared grimly out at the road in front of them. A long moment passed in silence.

  “Matt?”

  “What.”

  “Mrs. Compson came back to Elm Creek Manor. You never know, maybe—”

  “No, I do know. If my mother was coming back, she would have done it a long time ago. Don’t treat me like I’m five, okay?”

  Stung, Sarah sat back in her seat and stared out the window. When they reached their duplex she jumped out of the truck and ran inside. She hurried upstairs and took a long shower, rinsing her stinging eyes again and again. She finished reluctantly and lingered in the steam, not knowing how to avoid her husband in such a small home.

  When she finally pulled on her robe and went to the bedroom, Matt was sitting cross-legged on the bed, looking miserable.