Elm Creek Quilts [04] The Runaway Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Anneke, who was interested in finding me a more lasting partner, offered to make me a dress, in which, she said, I would dazzle the eye of all who saw me.

  Scoffed I, “And after the dance, I’ll wear it to dazzle the eye of the cow and the chickens?”

  “You’ll set it aside for special occasions.” Her gaze went to the crate of fabrics, tucked away in a corner of the cabin until Hans could determine how to best sell them. “There’s a lovely blue silk that will be very becoming to your eyes.”

  I laughed at the thought of scattering chicken feed clad in silk, but when she insisted, I said that if she must make me a dress, let it be a sturdy calico I could wear new to the Harvest Dance, and later as I did my chores. She grew impatient and pointed out that she knew much more about sewing than I did, and if I didn’t want her lecturing me on politics or on the proper pronunciation of English words, I should not attempt to instruct her in dressmaking. Then her eyes took on a steely glint I had never before seen there, and have seen only rarely since. “Let me show you how to best dispose of your parents’ gifts,” said she. “Let me show you what I can do when permitted to follow my own judgment.”

  I knew it was not I she intended to impress. “What will Hans think of you cutting up a bolt of fabric? Won’t he see it as the loss of at least the mane of a horse, or a wall of the new house?”

  “Didn’t your mother’s letter say the fabric was a gift to me?”

  So dumbfounded was I by her unexpected determination that I had no choice but to submit, especially as I suspected she had an underlying purpose. I will also admit that although I knew what obstacles my plainness presented to even the finest seamstress, I found Anneke’s promises that she would make me look handsome dubious but perhaps not entirely outside the realm of possibility, because she was, after all, exceptionally talented with a needle.

  One morning, a week before the dance, we rose early and raced through our morning chores so we could get to work on the dress as soon as Hans left to care for the horses. Thus I was standing in my corset as Anneke fit the bodice when a knock sounded on the cabin door.

  “L.?” a gruff voice called from outside. “You there?”

  Wide-eyed, Anneke scurried off to the other room, leaving me in my corset to welcome our visitor. I snatched up my calico work dress and threw it on over the pinned silk bodice, wincing as a pin found flesh. “Good morning,” said I, pulling open the door, breathless.

  Two men with rifles stood before me, one regarding me with his mouth in a grim line, the other taking in the exterior of our altered cabin with bemusement. Two weary horses nibbled at the thin shoots of grass behind them.

  “I’m looking for L.,” said the first man.

  “He no longer lives here,” said I. “I’m afraid I don’t know where he is.”

  The second man gave me a hard look. “We hear tell you ’uns stole his farm.”

  I drew myself up, hoping he would not detect my nervousness. “You heard incorrectly.”

  At the sound of my accent, the second man nudged the first. “Dutch,” spat he, in a most disparaging tone.

  “We don’t mind you Dutch,” said the first man, addressing me, but speaking as if to remind his companion. “Not as much as some. Your man around?”

  “My brother is in the barn.” Without his rifle, I thought, feeling a pang of fear.

  “We’ll go talk to him there.” The first man tugged at the brim of his slouch hat. His companion merely scratched his dark beard and glowered. As they turned to go, I saw over their shoulders that Hans was hurrying toward us from the barn. To my relief, Jonathan was at his side. He must have arrived only moments before the two men, as he had not yet come to the cabin to greet me.

  “What brings you gentlemen to Elm Creek Farm?” Hans called out, with an easy smile.

  The two men exchanged a look, then the first one said, “We’re looking for a n——.”

  Someone else would have said “Negro” or “colored man.” I have seen the injury caused by the word he did use, and I will not repeat it here.

  “A runaway n——,” added the second man.

  Jonathan winced slightly at the word, but Hans’s expression did not change. He merely shrugged and said, “Everyone at Elm Creek Farm stands before you, except my wife.”

  “He might be hiding in your barn.” The second man took one step toward it before Hans put out an arm to stop him.

  “I just came from there,” said he, with that same easy smile. “There’s no one hiding in my barn.”

  The first man said, “We might do well to check for ourselves.”

  “You might, if I were not a man of my word.” Hans looked up at them steadily. “Is that your meaning?”

  The second man swore impatiently, but the first man held Hans’s gaze. “You’re new to this country, and maybe you don’t know the law. This may be a Free State, but anyone helping a n—escape is breaking the law.”

  “We know the law,” said Jonathan.

  I prayed he would not choose this moment to distinguish for our visitors, as he had many a time at Dorothea’s sewing circle, the difference between a just law, which ought to be obeyed, and an unjust law, which by a just man must be broken.

  The second man squinted at Jonathan. “Ain’t I seen you at the Nelson place?”

  “Very likely you have, as Mrs. Nelson is my sister.”

  The second man spat on the ground and muttered to his companion, “G——Abolitionists.”

  Jonathan stiffened, but restrained himself without need of the hand Hans placed on his shoulder. “That’s no way to talk about a man’s family,” Hans said, and he held the second man in a gaze so firm that the man eventually looked away and muttered something resembling an apology.

  The first man turned around in a slow circle, scanning the clearing surrounding our cabin. Suddenly he asked, “What happened to L.?”

  “L. sold me Elm Creek Farm more than a year ago.”

  “We haven’t been through these parts in some time,” said the first man. He broke off scanning the horizon and, after an inscrutable glance at Jonathan, smiled at Hans in a friendly manner. “L. might have been a Yankee, but he was not unsympathetic to our employers. We could always count on him for a hot meal and a bed on the floor near the fire.”

  I felt myself balling my dress in my fists, and I forced myself to remain calm. Perhaps Elm Creek Farm had once extended its hospitality to slave catchers, but no more!

  I was just about to declare the same when Hans said, “I’ll have my wife fix you some eggs.”

  “Hans,” I exclaimed, and Jonathan shot him a look of stunned amazement.

  “Sister,” said Hans in a level voice, “tell Anneke to fix these gentlemen some breakfast while they feed and water their horses.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but when Jonathan gave his head the barest of shakes, I swallowed back my words and went inside. My thoughts were in turmoil as I delivered Hans’s instructions. Anneke nodded wordlessly and obeyed, while I went to the window and watched as the slave catchers headed to the creek while Hans and Jonathan returned to the barn. I could not bear to witness the hay and oats we had harvested for our own horses going to feed those of slave catchers, so, fuming, I took off my dress and unpinned the blue silk bodice of my dancing gown, and flung the pieces onto Anneke’s sewing machine.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” Anneke said from the fireplace as I dressed. “Be thankful he didn’t ask you to cook for them.”

  That was the first I realized he had not, which was unusual, since I did almost all the cooking for the family. But if Hans thought it would be enough for me that my own hands were unsullied, he was mistaken.

  None too soon the men finished their meal and left, shaking Hans’s hand and tugging their hats at me and Anneke. As soon as they were gone, I burst out, “Hans, how could you?”

  “I could hardly feed their horses but not them, now could I?”

  “Yes, you surely could have. Slave catchers are
the lowest of men, and you have given them sustenance necessary to continue their pursuit. Better to send them away hungry, too weak and distracted to find this unfortunate slave.”

  “If they did not eat here, they would eat at another farm. Best not to make enemies of them.”

  Jonathan made a noise of disagreement, and I, disbelieving Hans could mean what he said, asked, “Do you want them to believe you’re a friend to their cause?”

  “I couldn’t send those horses away before giving them a rest.” Hans dropped onto a bench beside the fireplace. “They’ve been running them too hard. If they keep up that pace, I don’t see how they’ll survive the return journey. That’s a long way to travel on horseback.”

  “That’s a long way to travel on foot,” said Jonathan, referring to their quarry. “Especially in this season. The nights are cold, colder still for a man hunted in a strange land.”

  “Likely he’s found shelter along the way.”

  “More likely than not, he hasn’t.”

  “If he’s made it this far, he must be made of sterner stuff than you and I,” said Hans, mustering up a grin. “I must say, his owner must sorely miss him to pursue him so far.”

  “Never underestimate the extent or the strength of a man’s greed, especially when his pride is insulted.”

  Now Hans laughed. “You sound more like the minister every day.”

  “But Hans—”

  Hans’s smile vanished. “I will not be drawn into an argument.”

  “Into this argument,” said Jonathan, “willing or not, we will all eventually be drawn.”

  As the entire nation would soon discover, he was correct.

  Whenever she could spare time from Elm Creek Quilts and Grandma’s Attic, Summer returned to the Waterford Historical Society’s archives to pore over the maps and page through bound volumes of city resolutions and legal affairs.

  One particularly fruitful visit had turned up two intriguing maps of the county. The first, dated 1858, identified the town as Creek’s Crossing, but unlike the Creek’s Crossing map from 1847 that Summer had found during her first library search, labels identified Elm Creek Farm as well as the farms of other families. A map from 1864, however, called the town Water’s Ford, but it was clearly the same region as the one depicted on the first map, with the additional development not unexpected after a six-year interval. Although a dashed line still indicated the town boundaries, Elm Creek Farm was shaded to suggest that it lay outside the border proper. Furthermore, while other farms were labeled by name as before, Elm Creek Farm was not.

  It looked to Summer as if someone wanted to pretend Elm Creek Farm did not exist.

  On a later visit, with the date of the name change more narrowly defined, Summer had turned to the town government records. In the volume from 1860, she finally found an official proclamation renaming the town, but although the document cited the need to “restore dignity to the village and its people,” it provided no specific reasons.

  The town’s name appeared as Water’s Ford in every source from the decade that followed, but gradually Waterford came into greater use. Since Summer found no official proclamation noting the change, she surmised that Waterford was a corruption of Water’s Ford. The archives became somewhat muddled after Waterford was used exclusively, since another town in Pennsylvania shared the name and some of the documents from it had been filed among those of the former Creek’s Crossing.

  After Sylvia told her friends about the Bergstrom’s encounter with the slave catchers, Summer decided to extend her search to local newspapers published in Gerda’s time. Even though the town proclamation had not provided any details, surely a scandal shameful enough to make them change the name of the town would have appeared in the Creek’s Crossing newspaper.

  After hours of studying microfiche, Summer remained convinced that some long-ago reporter would have broken the scandal in the paper, but to her dismay, she could not say for certain.

  The archives of the Creek’s Crossing Informer ended in mid-1859. When they resumed in 1861, the paper was called the Water’s Ford Register.

  Summer was no cynic, but she found it difficult to believe the paper wasn’t published during the exact period something significant had occurred in the city.

  She would have bet her entire fabric stash that either the Waterford Historical Society wasn’t interested in preserving the newspapers from those years or someone had made sure no copies would remain to be preserved.

  “How delightful,” said Sylvia dryly when Summer told her what she had learned. As if it weren’t bad enough that Hans had obtained the farm through less than honorable means, now it appeared that the Bergstroms had done something so scandalous that the town had had to change its name to divert the shame of it. “My family certainly made their mark on this town, didn’t they?”

  “We don’t know for a fact that your ancestors were involved,” said Summer. “It might just be coincidence.”

  Sylvia took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Nonsense. On the map of Creek’s Crossing, Elm Creek Farm appears, but on the map of Water’s Ford, it’s been all but expunged. Gerda herself writes of a scandal, and you call it coincidence?”

  “Well ...” Summer hesitated. “Until we have more proof ...”

  The poor girl looked as if she wished she had not told Sylvia what she had uncovered. “Now, dear.” Sylvia patted her hand. “You mustn’t worry about sparing my feelings. I have already come to terms with the fact that my ancestors were not the sterling characters I thought them to be.”

  “Maybe, but aren’t they much more interesting this way?”

  “Yes, I suppose they are.” They were much more real, too, more like people Sylvia would enjoy chatting with than the remote figures from the family stories.

  Still, the more she pondered Gerda’s cryptic asides, the more she suspected there might be parts of her family history she would not wish to divulge, not even to her closest friends.

  5

  November 1857—the Harvest Dance

  I never learned whether the two slave catchers found the man they pursued, but they did not return to Elm Creek Farm. I prayed often for this unknown, unfortunate man, and was encouraged by Jonathan’s assurances that the longer he remained free, the greater his chances of escaping to Canada.

  When I first came to Pennsylvania, I assumed that it and all Free States were havens for the escaped bondsman, and that once a runaway crossed the border into the North, he could not be compelled to return to his former masters. That was, sadly, not true. In 1850, as part of a compromise meant to placate Southern states angered by measures to check the spread of slavery elsewhere in the growing nation, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law. It proclaimed that runaways, even those who managed to reach Free States, must be returned to their owners, and that federal and state officials and even private citizens must assist in their recapture. Moreover, anyone—freeman or fugitive—suspected of being a runaway slave could be arrested without a warrant and, once apprehended, could neither request a jury trial nor testify on his own behalf.

  This Jonathan told me, indignantly adding, “I cannot and will not submit to any law that compels me to act against the dictates of my conscience and my God.”

  I admired him for his convictions, for his sentiments were the same as my own. In comparison, Hans’s reluctance to risk offending the two slave catchers troubled me. If the fugitive had been hiding in our barn that day, would Hans have delivered him into the hands of his pursuers? I did not wish to believe this of my brother, and I disliked that my admiration and faith in him had been so shaken.

  Anneke, of course, believed that Hans had acted appropriately. They were a good match, I suppose, as neither would believe any evil of the other. She refused to discuss the matter with me, both out of loyalty to her husband and from her exasperation that I did not understand that citizens, especially immigrants, must obey the laws of the land—all laws, not merely those that suited one’s own tastes. I, in turn
, could not abide her blindness to one’s moral obligation to disobey unjust laws. Anneke responded, “You would not say such a thing except to please Jonathan.”

  This flustered me a great deal, so much that I refused to speak to Anneke for the rest of the day, which suited her fine as she was not interested in conversing with someone who would criticize her husband. But by the next morning we were speaking again, more from necessity than choice, as it was impossible to avoid each other in our two-room house. It was Anneke who broke our silence, by offering to finish the task the two slave catchers had interrupted. I accepted her offer gratefully, and by noontime, she had finished the bodice of my new dress. The entire gown was complete the morning of the dance.

  “You look enchanting,” declared Anneke, and I heartily wished I could believe her.

  Saturday dawned cool and crisp, and we completed our chores with glad hearts, looking forward to the evening’s festivities. I baked two pies, one of apples Dorothea had shared with us from their trees, one of wild blueberries I had discovered growing near the creek, and I also made potato pancakes with soured cream. I did not know what our neighbors would think of the latter, but since numerous other families of German descent inhabited the town, I suspected few would remain on the platter, if only accounting for Hans’s appetite.

  We rode into town on the wagon pulled by two of Hans’s horses—“Bergstrom Thoroughbreds,” he liked to call them—to find the streets of Creek’s Crossing full of other families, laughing and calling greetings to one another. We met Dorothea and Thomas at the grassy square in front of the City Hall, where already the picnic had begun. Four tables had been arranged in a long row to one side of the square, and the women of the town had covered them with all manner of mouthwatering dishes, to which I added my contributions. We filled our plates and set out quilts to sit upon. I was careful not to muss my blue silk dress, in which, I admit, I felt rather fair for a plain girl, and as we ate, I searched the crowd for Jonathan, disappointed that he did not join us. After Anneke’s remark about how I sought to please him, however, I could not bring myself to ask Dorothea where he was, not within Anneke’s hearing.