True Colors

by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock

  Hannah and I covered the tomato and cucumber plants. As we worked, I saw Cat watching us.

  “She’ll be cold tonight,” I said. “Maybe I could make her some sort of bed.”

  “She’ll be warm enough in the barn,” Hannah said, but when she saw me biting my lip the way I always do when I’m worried, she smiled.

  “I’m sure you can find some old thing in my closet that she can sleep on,” she said.

  Before I left for Nadine’s, I rummaged around until I found just what I wanted, a small patchwork quilt, blue with little white daisies printed on it. It was torn, and frayed at the edges, but I didn’t think Cat would mind.

  Hannah’s mouth formed a little O when I showed it to her.

  “I won’t use it if you don’t want me to,” I said.

  “No, it’s not that,” Hannah said. “It’s just, well, that’s the quilt you were wrapped in when I found you.”

  chapter 12

  I forgot all about going to Nadine’s.

  “Who made the quilt?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Hannah said.

  I stared at the quilt as if it could tell me who my mother was. My own mama, my real mama, had touched it—had maybe even made it herself, before wrapping me in it and putting me in that copper kettle.

  “There wasn’t a note on the quilt?” I said.

  “No,” said Hannah.

  “You looked all around in the kettle?” I said.

  “There wasn’t a note,” Hannah said. Her voice had a sharp edge, so I didn’t ask her any more of the questions swirling inside my head.

  I wondered what thoughts must have been going through my mama’s head when she left me. Did she walk away without looking back, or did she stop and wonder if she was doing the right thing? Since then, had she ever thought and wondered about me, the way I so often wondered about her?

  I tucked the quilt under my sweatshirt while I fed the animals, gathered eggs, and milked the cows. I sat on it while I ate supper and slept with it on my pillow, hoping it would whisper its secret to me, tell me why my mother had abandoned me.

  The next day, I showed the quilt to Cat.

  “This was my mama’s,” I told her. Finding the quilt was auspicious. Someone in the quilting club might know who had made it.

  After supper, Hannah put on a sweater and picked up her basket of quilting.

  “We’re meeting at Ida’s tonight,” Hannah said. “I’ll be home about ten.”

  “I’m going with you,” I said.

  Hannah eyed me suspiciously. I couldn’t tell her I wanted to learn how to quilt; Hannah knew I liked sewing about as much as pounding my thumb with a hammer.

  “It gets kind of lonesome here when you’re gone,” I said. I felt bad lying to Hannah, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by telling her I was looking for my real mama.

  “What do you do in the quilting club?” I asked Hannah on the way.

  “Some weeks we work on our own quilts,” Hannah said. “Other times we work together on quilts for orphans or the elderly. Right now we’re working on a display quilt for the celebration.”

  I wondered what I was getting myself into, and there were butterflies in my stomach when Mrs. Barclay met us at her door.

  “Why, Blue!” she said. “I’m delighted you’re joining us this evening. Finally going to learn how to quilt, are you?”

  I nodded guiltily, not wanting to tell her the real reason I was there.

  There were six other women besides Hannah. Except for Esther, they were all old, and they could have been sisters, all of them with gray hair and glasses and wearing aprons. They called each other by their first names—Ida, Bertha, Hortense, Mabel, Gertrude—but I called them Mrs. Barclay, Mrs. Thompson, Mrs. Potter, Mrs. Fitch, and Mrs. Appleby, except for Esther, who was the youngest in the group (besides me, of course).

  Mrs. Barclay sat me next to Esther, who smiled and showed me how to make stitches so small they wouldn’t show. Her fingers flew, while mine seemed big and clumsy.

  I remembered all the things I hated about sewing. My thread knotted and broke, and I pricked my fingers so many times that my piece of cloth looked like it had the measles.

  All around me, the women laughed and visited, chattering like a flock of starlings, and I saw it was going to be a lot harder than I thought to come right out and ask them about my mama.

  The club was called Needles in a Haystack.

  “Of course we were all younger, and thinner, when we picked that name,” Mrs. Fitch laughed.

  I thought it was a dumb name until Mrs. Appleby told me the names of some quilting clubs in nearby towns: the Nimble Thimbles, On Pins and Needles (sounded painful), Patchworks (I wasn’t sure what that meant), and Sew Far, Sew Good (that one I really didn’t get).

  The display quilt they were working on was for the sesquicentennial and showed the story of the town’s history. Some of the buildings they’d sewn into the quilt were still around, like the Congregational church, Pierce’s Pharmacy, the Monitor office, and the town hall.

  Scattered across all the tables were hundreds—no, thousands, it seemed like—of tiny pieces of cloth in every shape and color. I wondered how the women knew where all the pieces were supposed to go.

  “It’s like a puzzle, isn’t it?” Esther said. “You have all these pieces, and each piece, by itself, is nothing, but put them together and voilà! You’ve made something beautiful.”

  The only person I’d ever heard say voilà before was Mrs. Tilton.

  I leaned closer to see what Esther was sewing onto the quilt.

  “You recognize that?” Esther asked.

  I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I hesitated.

  “It looks like the Statue of Liberty,” I told her.

  “It is,” she said. “Most people don’t know that our town almost got the Statue of Liberty.”

  I looked at her close to see if she was kidding.

  “No, it’s true,” she said. “Several cities and towns bid for it.”

  “But we didn’t get it,” Mrs. Thompson said. “So I don’t think we should put it into the quilt.”

  “We were one of the towns in the running for it,” said Mrs. Potter, “so I think we should include it. This quilt is about the town’s history, and almost getting the Statue of Liberty is part of our history.”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem quite right, putting it in,” Mrs. Thompson said.

  I didn’t think it seemed quite right, either, but I didn’t say so.

  I recognized some of the people they were sewing onto the quilt, too: George Washington Henderson, Alexander Twilight, and Spencer Chamberlain. We’d learned about them in fourth grade when we were studying Vermont history. They were all people Mr. Gilpin was putting into his pageants, too.

  George Washington Henderson had once been a slave, but had come to Vermont after the war, gone to college, and become a professor, minister, and school principal, teaching six subjects, including Latin, Greek, French, and German.

  The thought of all those languages made my head spin; I had enough trouble just with English!

  Alexander Twilight, the first black man to graduate from Middlebury College, had come here and built a huge stone school, all by himself with only the help of an ox. It was called the Old Stone House, and we’d taken a field trip there.

  But my favorite story was about Spencer Chamberlain.

  Spencer was famous for outrunning Runaway Pond back in 1810. It had all started when Aaron Willson needed more water to run his mill.

  Just five miles away sat Long Pond, a mile long and one mile wide. If only he could get water from Long Pond, Mr. Willson thought, he’d have enough water to run a hundred mills! So he came up with a plan: he would dig a ditch from Long Pond, and the water would fill the stream and get the mill running again. But he needed help to dig that ditch. So, on Wednesday, June 6, about sixty men walked to Long Pond and started digging. What they didn’t know was that right below their feet was a layer
of quicksand.

  That quicksand gave way under them, and all of Long Pond roared through the hole they’d dug. Mr. Willson thought of his wife, still in the mill.

  “My wife!” he cried. And someone else cried, “Run, Spencer, run!”

  Spencer took off running.

  A wall of water forty feet high chased him down through the valley. He burst into the mill, grabbed Mrs. Willson, and dragged her far up the hillside just as the water swept the mill away.

  Imagine running five miles at top speed, through thick woods, with a flood licking at your heels. Miss Paisley had said Spencer suffered from aches and pains the rest of his life. I should think so! Hannah and I lived five miles from town, and I couldn’t imagine running that far with a flood chasing me. The Wright brothers hadn’t interrupted Miss Paisley once when she’d told us that story, but then they loved hearing about any disaster: the Titanic, the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago fire, the Johnstown flood. It made sense. The Wright brothers and disasters just seemed to go together, like macaroni and cheese.

  Esther pointed out Jacob Bayley, Moses Hazen, and Timothy Hinman. They’d built the first roads here. I didn’t think building roads was nearly as exciting as outrunning a runaway pond, but I didn’t say so.

  As I looked at the quilt, it came to me for the first time that all the famous Vermonters we’d studied were men. Not once had Miss Paisley mentioned any women. Come to think of it, we’d hardly studied any famous women, period.

  “Is there something wrong?” Esther asked.

  “It’s just …,” I said. “I was just wondering … weren’t there any famous women back then?”

  Esther laughed.

  “Of course there were,” she said, “but they never get into the history books.”

  “Yes, it’s a shame how those old stories get forgotten,” said Mrs. Fitch. “Timothy Hinman’s daughter was my great-great-great-grandmother, and when she was just five years old, her father left her and her brother here all winter with Indians while he went back to get the rest of the family in Connecticut. Can you imagine?”

  “They were tough women back then,” Mrs. Barclay agreed. “My great-great-great-grandmother walked one hundred and fifty miles through deep snow, pulling her children in a handsled, after the team of oxen starved to death.” And Mrs. Appleby chimed in with, “My great-great-grandmother had to support thirteen children by herself after her husband was killed by a falling tree.”

  “When my great-grandfather went off to the Civil War,” Mrs. Thompson said, “my great-grandmother disguised herself as a man so she’d be able to fight alongside him. My great-grandfather always said she was a better shot than he was, anyway. They only discovered she was a woman when she gave birth to my grandfather! Imagine the shock of the other soldiers when they heard that baby crying!”

  Mrs. Potter told of her ancestor who’d been a doctor back when women weren’t even allowed to go to college. Esther’s grandmother and great-grandmother had worked all their lives for the right of women to vote, and Hannah’s Scottish great-grandmother had crossed the ocean all by herself, at fifteen, to start a new life here, and her grandmother had been a nurse in the Civil War.

  They all sounded like women not to be trifled with, either. Not one of them would have been scared of the Wright brothers. They would have stood up to them, not hidden in the bushes and thrown a stone.

  Listening to all the stories about family, and ancestors, and recipes handed down got me to wishing again that I knew something about my ancestors. In third grade, when we’d studied geography, Miss Paisley had asked all of us to find out where our ancestors had come from. When she’d asked me, I’d just stared down at my feet, and Miss Paisley said, “Oh, Blue, I’m so sorry, I just wasn’t thinking,” which had only made it all worse. Trying to make up for it, she’d let me stick the little flag pins onto the globe, but I would have traded that for knowing who my ancestors were, and where they’d come from.

  The best part of the quilting club meeting was the refreshments afterward. Mrs. Barclay served lemonade and molasses cookies, Mrs. Potter had brought brownies, and Hannah had made scones and shortbread.

  Mrs. Appleby passed around pictures from a trip she’d taken to England.

  “Of course, London is still terribly devastated from the war,” she said, “but the surrounding countryside was glorious. We even took the train up into Scotland. You would have loved that, Hannah.”

  The way Hannah was studying those photos told me that she would have loved it. Hannah had grown up listening to stories of Scotland, and she must have dreamed about seeing it for herself someday. She probably would have, if she hadn’t had me to raise. I wondered if Hannah had ever wished she hadn’t taken in that squalling baby. How would her life have been different if she hadn’t found me?

  Hannah and I were all the way home before I realized I’d completely forgotten to ask about the quilt. Which meant I’d have to go to next week’s meeting.

  chapter 13

  The week seemed unusually long, probably because I didn’t have Nadine to play with. I saw her riding her bike one afternoon, and once I rode past on Dolly, but Nadine didn’t even wave.

  I fed the cat morning and night. She still waited until I backed away before creeping toward the bowl, but at least she wasn’t running from me anymore.

  “You know, when Nadine goes to the coronation, she’ll probably make the queen curtsy to her,” I told her.

  The cat coughed. It could have been because she always gobbled her food too fast, but it sounded almost like a laugh to me.

  The next quilting club meeting was at Mrs. Thompson’s house.

  “We’re going to have our hands full finishing this quilt in time,” Mrs. Appleby said. “I think we’d better meet twice a week until it’s finished.”

  The other women agreed, and everyone found a place around the quilt. I wasn’t sure where to sit until Esther smiled at me and patted the seat next to her. I slid in beside her, and she handed me a needle. More pinpricked fingers, more knotted thread, but I was getting a little bit better at it.

  Not that I wanted to get better at it. I was only there to try to get information. I sat thinking how I should bring up a conversation about the quilt—should I just show it, or ask first who’d been in the quilting group in 1941?—and was startled when I heard my name.

  “I’ve been thinking about what Blue said last meeting,” Esther said. “We should have put some women in the quilt.”

  “Well, it’s too late now,” said Mrs. Barclay. “There isn’t time. We have to have this quilt done by August thirteenth.”

  “Still, we should have,” Esther said. “And someone should write down all these stories of our women ancestors before they’re lost.”

  “Why don’t you do it, Ida?” Mrs. Fitch said. “You write your columns.”

  “Well, I would,” Mrs. Barclay said, “but I’m going to be spending the next few weeks with my daughter and my new grandbaby.”

  “What about you, Hannah?” Esther asked. “You know the history better than anyone.”

  “Me?” Hannah said. “I’m no writer! Besides, I don’t have time for that.”

  “Well, someone should,” Esther said.

  “I don’t think the young people are even interested in hearing those stories,” Mrs. Thompson said. “I know my granddaughter isn’t. She’d rather listen to the radio or play records.”

  Mrs. Potter nodded.

  “My son just got one of those newfangled televisions, and my grandchildren are already glued to it,” she said.

  “With all this new technology, they’re more interested in the future, not the past,” said Mrs. Appleby.

  That got them to talking about how many people had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, including Hannah’s father and brother (I hadn’t known that), and then Mrs. Thompson told how her mother had been the first woman in town to drive a car and she’d driven it right through the front window of Whitcher’s store, and then I got so cau
ght up in Esther’s story about her cousin Marion who’d been only the third woman to hike the whole length of the Long Trail, back in 1932 (she’d even carried a pistol!), that I completely forgot about my quilt.

  The third week was no better.

  They started on recipes (again), then got off onto the 1927 flood (that was more interesting, hearing how high the water had gotten in town, and how many buildings and bridges had been washed away, and how a cow had been found three days later—perfectly safe—on the roof of the Municipal Building and no one could figure out how she’d gotten there). I almost forgot to ask about my quilt, but just as I was trying to get a word in edgeways, Mrs. Fitch jumped up and said she was sure she had a picture somewhere of that cow on the roof, and another photo of Amelia Earhart when she’d visited Vermont.

  While Mrs. Fitch was rummaging through her pictures, Mrs. Potter said, “We have had some famous people visit here,” and Hannah chimed in, “That’s right. I saw Teddy Roosevelt when he came to the fairgrounds in 1912. He was campaigning, and I shook his hand, but of course, that was before women had the right to vote.”

  “Not only that,” Mrs. Thompson said. “Tell them about the time you met Tom Thumb.”

  I took a good long look at Hannah. How many other things about her didn’t I know, and how come I hadn’t heard any of these stories before?

  “It happened when I was just a little girl,” Hannah began. “There was a bad storm, the wind howling, driving sleety snow against the windows. We were asleep, but Father heard someone shout. He dressed as quick as he could, took the lantern, and went to the door. There, in our yard, was a tiny coach, pulled by two little black ponies, and a man and his wife, both less than three feet tall. He introduced himself as Tom Thumb. They were on a winter tour and had come over the mountain when the storm hit. They were soaked and shivering. Mother hurried to feed them some hot tea and soup while Father took care of the horses. They slept in the very bed that Blue sleeps in now. The next morning, I thought they were playmates that Mother and Father had gotten for me, and I cried buckets when they left.”