The Name of the Quilt: Tales of Patchwork, Mayhem, and Murder

by Carolyn McPherson

  Auction day arrived, and we turned out in force to look over a century's accumulation. It was a warm August day, and the grounds surrounding the house looked like a party, with tables and small items of furniture and even a refreshment booth provided by the auctioneer.

  "Gotta get rid of this junk," Gilbert said to nobody in particular, bringing more heaps of old linens and books and cut glass mementoes and china and souvenirs of world's fairs out of the house, and dropping them on tables. We were allowed to go though the house, too, and look at the furniture and rugs—heavy, dark Victorian pieces: tables and sideboards and beds and dressers and wardrobes and her old grand piano, still covered with the paisley piano scarf that was there the day I closed Florence's eyes. All of it was excessive, as the Victorians loved to be, but it also had a charm that would never be reproduced in one of Gilbert's proposed bomb shelter dwellings.

  What interested me—surprise, surprise—was Florence's quilts. I've always thought I'd love to have a collection of old quilts, but it's just impossible. They take up room. They need to be kept cool and dry. And so Arden, Ramona and I studied the quilts more for their designs and fabrics than with the thought of buying one.

  Until I saw the velvet crazy quilt.

  You know about crazy quilts. Unlike earlier (and later) quilts, crazy quilts did not feature symmetrical, repeated blocks of calico patchwork. Instead, they were made of oddly-cut chunks of velvet or silk. This particular crazy quilt was made of silk velvet in jewel tones—ruby, emerald, topaz, sapphire, aquamarine—and as silk does, even old silk, it glowed. The blocks were joined with exotic embroidery stitches executed in golden silk buttonhole twist. And (and this is what really intrigued me) occasionally instead of a velvet patch there was a silk ribbon or a fabric card.

  For example, between two pieces of ruby and sapphire velvet was a white ribbon printed with words inviting one and all to a cotillion being given in Spotsburg's Opera House in June 1884. (The Opera House has since been torn down to make way for the bank's parking lot.) Between two other chunks of velvet was a strip of pink satin printed with one of those goopy Valentine messages the Victorians loved so well. (The Victorians never seemed to know when to quit.) The quilt featured a half dozen fabric cigar bands, too. And in one corner of the quilt a fat embroidered bullfrog and, in large red letters, "To Charlotte Conway, Spotsburg, 1886."

  I can't say the quilt was beautiful. It was lumpy and musty and it certainly wasn't in very good shape, either: that old silk was rotten in many places. There were other, nicer, quilts on the table, including a Sunbonnet Sue and a really handsome Amish Roman Stripe, in bold, plain colors and black. But the crazy quilt was an excellent example of that genre (as we say) and, conveniently identified as it was, I thought it might be possible to find out more about its owner. And that intrigued me. I thought my quilting students would like it, too.

  I was just deciding to buy the crazy quilt when old Gilbert (Florence's aforementioned worthless son) sauntered over to me. Gilbert is the first person in Spotsburg to have adopted the hairstyle worn by that new music idol, Elvis Presley. It's not the only thing about Gilbert that's unattractive. He also chews gum, wears some sort of nauseating perfume, and leers.

  He kind of leaned into me and dropped his heavy eyelids. "Hi, doll," he said, chomping his gum noisily. "You busy tonight?"

  Off to the side, Arden made a little disgusted noise.

  "Sure am," I said, looking away.

  "With anybody I know?"

  I wanted to say "One of your old high school buddies, Joseph Stalin," but, fortunately, Ramona began asking me something about the crazy quilt, and better manners won the day.

  Somehow Gilbert sensed that his presence wasn't wanted (perhaps he intuited this from the fact that we weren't speaking to him), and he trudged off, anxious, no doubt, to cash in on more of his mother's priceless belongings.

  "Not one of Spotsburg's leading citizens," I muttered to Ramona. Arden shook her head grimly in agreement.

  Now, I'm a nurse and in a position of some responsibility and confidentiality, and I do NOT spread gossip. So I did not tell Ramona the rumors: that the eminently resistible Gilbert was involved with big-time hoods in Detroit, in prostitution rings, and some sort of pornography racket. Instead I told her what was well-known actual fact, as reported in the Spotsburg Sentinel: that Gilbert Montgomery had served time in Jackson State Prison for the robbery of a jewelry store several years ago. His accomplice had never been caught, and the jewels (eight diamonds and a very valuable star sapphire—I remember that because there's actually a patchwork design by a similar name) had never been found. So Gilbert had cooled his heels for a few years behind the walls of the world's largest walled prison. No doubt Jackson Prison had improved him, giving him his present polish and savoir faire.

  The auction lasted all day, but the crazy quilt was auctioned off early, and I took it home for seventy-five cents.

  And then a funny thing happened. Gilbert appeared on my doorstep a week later and wanted to buy back the quilt. I was definitely displeased to see him. He stood in my doorway, leered even more offensively than before, and said, "Say, darlin', I'm feeling mighty sorry I sold that quilt, which was such a dear remembrance of Ma, and I wondered if you'd be a real pal and sell it back to me. How much did you pay for it? Whatever it was, I'll double it. Just so I can have—"

  "'—That dear remembrance of Ma,'" I finished with him.

  Friends, every little red warning flag in my psyche was flying. You know how it is: a woman comes into the emergency room all banged up and her husband tells you he had no idea how it happened, and you know he's not just a creep, but a lying creep. Well, I only had to look at the way Gilbert's unappetizing torso (in a shirt open three buttons down) was leaning itself against my door jamb, his lips smacking as he chewed his gum, his eyes half-open under puffy, red lids, to know that this was a genuine skunk I had on my premises.

  "Gilbert," I said, deciding to lay a trap for him, in the wildly remote event I was misjudging him, "I'm glad to hear you like that old quilt. What do you like most about it?"

  Of course, he had no idea what I was talking about. "It's real, real pretty," he said, shifting his weight slightly in the doorway.

  "Oh," I said sweetly, "I agree. But it's always interesting to know what appeals to people. So tell me what you like best about that quilt." Someday I'm going to regret my big mouth. In fact, Gilbert gave me a look that said he was probably the one who would make me regret it.

  "Pretty colors," he said, struggling (I have no doubt) to assemble a coherent thought. "Um. Cute little girls in hats. Old-time bonnets. It was one of Ma's favorites."

  I hope all life's baloney is as easy to spot as this was—what pure, unadulterated balderdash! I did NOT say what I was itching to say: how would he know what his mother's favorites were, since he couldn't take the time to visit her?

  There had been a Sunbonnet Sue on that table at the auction, but I hadn't bought it. Did he really think I'd bought the Sunbonnet Sue? Was it really the Sunbonnet Sue that he wanted? No matter. With complete honesty I could say to him, as I slowly began to close the front door, "Gilbert, I'm so sorry, but I didn't buy the quilt with the little girls on it." And then, to excuse myself, a small dose of fiction. "And—oh my!—I hear my apple pies burning."

  I shut my door and—unusual in Spotsburg—locked it. He stumped down my front steps and drove off in his Chevy clunker. I watched to make sure he was gone. Of course I had no pies in the oven. Instead I went upstairs—two at a time—to my second bedroom and opened the trunk in the back of the closet. The crazy quilt was still there. I had this definite notion that somehow I'd better store it somewhere else.

  The next chapter of this adventure won't surprise you. The following Monday night, while I was at Spotsburg High School (home of our renowned Spotsburg Dalmatians) teaching my class of novice quilters how to draft diamond-shaped templates, my house was broken into. The first floor wasn't so bad, but the second floor was a rea
l disaster, with bookcases tipped over, drawers pulled out of their dressers and the contents strewn everywhere. I was furious. I was even more furious when I saw that the thug or thugs who had messed up my house had mutilated the beautiful Maple Leaf quilt my grandmother (who came from Winnipeg, Canada) made for me when I graduated from nursing school. It had been on my bed and was now literally slashed to ribbons.

  I stormed around my bedroom for a goodly while (I loved my grandmother, and would have happily strangled—slowly and painfully—the person who ruined the quilt she gave me), had a very thorough cry, and then called the police. Ted Dancer (who is good-looking and nice, but also very married—and several years my junior) arrived in five minutes.

  It was Ted who made the interesting observation that, in spite of the mess, and the heartbreaking vandalism of my Maple Leaf quilt, nothing had actually been taken, not even my jewelry, which looks like it came out of Cracker Jack boxes. I told him about Gilbert Montgomery's unnatural interest in my quilt and his attempt to buy it back, and I explained where I had hidden the crazy quilt: carefully wrapped in a clean, white sheet and locked in the trunk of my old gray Studebaker.

  We both had the same idea at the same time: that Gilbert (or more likely, his partner, assumed by Spotsburgers to be the so-called brains of the operation) might have used the crazy quilt as a place to store the jewels from the long-ago robbery. Certainly, that would explain why dear old Gilbert had suddenly taken a fancy to a quilt he couldn't even identify. I had already told Ted that the quilt was tattered and lumpy. Mightn't those lumps be eight diamonds and a sapphire? Why not?

  I raced out to my Studebaker, unlocked the trunk, lifted out the quilt, and lovingly brought it inside. We quickly unwrapped the white sheet I'd wound around it and tossed it in the corner, then gently unrolled the quilt and spread it out on my living room rug. Slowly and carefully we began feeling every inch of it with our fingers. It took a very long time—the quilt was in worse shape than I'd realized, with out-and-out holes every once in a while—and when we were done, we felt discouraged and dissatisfied. It didn't seem like there was anything in the quilt, but we didn't feel 100% certain. And I definitely wasn’t going to cut up the quilt to make sure!

  Then I had one of my typical brainstorms. We could x-ray it! Of course, this would cost some money, but Ted thought maybe the county sheriff's department would foot the bill if there was hope of recovering those stolen jewels. So Ted wrote me out a receipt, and took the quilt away with him in his squad car.

  This was a dumb mistake. We should have realized my vandal hadn't found what he was looking for, and would come back. For a while I straightened up my house, then I cried a little more over my poor Maple Leaf quilt, and eventually I went to bed and fell into a restless sleep. All Spotsburg's noisiest cars seemed to be in my neighborhood that night.

  At about two o'clock in the morning, I heard what sounded like a family of woodchucks cavorting in my heating ducts. (I know what that sounds like, since I had once had a family of woodchucks who cavorted in my heating ducts.)

  My house has what we call a Michigan basement. It means a dirt-floored area under the house. My Michigan basement, like so many of them, is only accessible via the storm cellar doors on the outside—just like Auntie Em's house in The Wizard of Oz.

  I put on my slippers and my pink terrycloth bathrobe (beautifully embroidered with an immense maroon B, a gift from a former admirer), and once I got to the kitchen, I took the broom (for shepherding those rascally woodchucks), and went out to the side of the house. With some effort (because they're metal and quite heavy), I lifted the storm cellar doors.

  It wasn't woodchucks. It was Gilbert and a lowlife I'd never seen before, who by the light of two Coleman lanterns were tearing my basement apart. Boxes, cordwood and several old chairs I was storing there were flying every which way, and they had actually been shoveling the coal out of my coal room!

  I put on my ferocious nurse voice, the one I use with cranky old men patients who tell me I can't give them a shot in their rear ends. Unfortunately, my ferocious nurse voice didn't have its usual blood-curdling effect. Gilbert and Associate flew up the stairs, jumped me, hauled me by my arms into the basement (very uncomfortable), and punched me hard a couple of times, demanding all the while to know "where the stuff" was. Then they grabbed their lanterns, ran up the stairs and, before I could say "You'll be sorry!" slammed the basement doors and locked me in with my broom, which they ran through the outside door handles. And there I was. Imprisoned in my own basement.

  The basement was absolutely pitch black, as well as dank and musty. I could hear the scritch-scratch sound mice make when they're chewing on your beams and load-bearing members. I could also hear two huge rats (Gilbert and Friend) thumping around upstairs, finishing their fiendish work. I sat down on the stairs, poked my sorest spots for broken bones (couldn't find any), and pondered the situation.

  Thinking about quilting always seems to release my considerable creative talents. I began to mentally flip through the pages of my Bible, 1001 Quilt Blocks. I could picture the pages clearly. If I ever got out of my basement alive—not a certainty at that moment—I would commemorate the month's activities with a quilt. I would start with a tribute to Florence Montgomery. I didn't think there were any blocks named Florence, but Florence means "flower," and there are plenty of flower-associated patterns. Then another block to indicate that she'd died—although I didn't want to be macabre. How about something poetic—even metaphorical—like a block of End of Day?

  Then the quilt I'd bought, represented by a block of Crazy Quilt, and the missing jewels (a block of Jewel Box), and then I would introduce the appalling Gilbert (whose elephantine tread I could still hear over my head). There's no patch named The Big Jerk, but Turkey Tracks might do quite nicely. Or Snake's Trail. There is a block called Toad in the Puddle. Too bad there wasn't one named just for Gilbert, like Pig in a Poke—

  And then it hit me. I knew where the jewels might be. At least, where they might have been before Gilbert and Co. arrived on my premises. I just had to get out of the basement, that was all.

  After what must have been over an hour, the thumping and thudding overhead stopped, and I assumed the Reign of Terror had ended. I could easily make out the sound of a car being driven away—Gilbert's pleasure craft, judging from the reports of the muffler.

  How to get out? Or how to signal someone? I waited a couple more hours, until the first rays of dawn's early light crept through the cracks in my foundation, and when I could finally see a bit, I carefully negotiated my way through the mess to my furnace.

  It took me a while, but I gathered up everything burnable I could find—cardboard boxes, cordwood, coal—and I stacked them in my furnace and lit them. They instantly leapt into a gratifying blaze and then, when I was sure the fire was well established, I threw handfuls of the earth from my damp Michigan basement floor onto the fire, closed the furnace door, and waited to see what would happen. Hopefully, a smoky mess was emanating from my chimney and would arouse suspicion on a summer's day.

  But why leave anything to chance? Another bright idea occurred to me. I pulled off my beautiful terrycloth bathrobe (I had nothing on underneath) and opened the furnace door. Would this work? Possibly. I was certainly producing the smoke I had hoped for. Rather awkwardly, I threw the upper half of my robe on the fire, and (using the sleeves) yanked it off as fast as I could, and then repeated this, again and again, until I had about one quarter of my bathrobe left—and it wasn't a very useful quarter at that—plus two slightly singed arms.

  Yes, my neighbors (and half of Spotsburg) saw my smoke signals. Soon I was out of my basement and into a nice warm blanket. Ted the Policeman was back, looking a mite sheepish, but whether he was embarrassed by my lack of appropriate attire or his having abandoned me when foul fiends were still on the loose, I couldn't tell.

  I led him and the entire neighborhood to my living room (which now looked like a replay of World War II), and found the sheet
that had been wrapped around the quilt, still lying where we tossed it. Thankfully, Gilbert and his evil twin had ignored it. And there, in one of the folds of the sheet, was a twist of white paper, and in that twist of paper were—you guessed it—eight gorgeous diamonds the size of my pinky fingernail, and a large, deep blue and utterly entrancing star sapphire.

  My fellow Spotsburgers were impressed by the jewels, and eventually someone had the presence of mind to ask how on earth I'd figured it all out.

  "Simple," I said, preening myself a bit, "once I began to think about patchwork patterns. For reasons I won't explain now, I was going through names relating to animals, and turkeys, snakes and pigs came to mind. And when I thought of pigs, I thought of the expression pig in a poke, and then I thought of carrying a pig wrapped in a blanket, and then I thought of how I'd been toting the quilt around, wrapped in its sheet, and then it seemed logical that the jewels—if they'd been hidden in the quilt in the first place—might have fallen through one of the holes and into the sheet!"

  The Citizens of Spotsburg were speechless at my brilliant deduction, and Officer Dancer shook his head. I was now beginning to feel a bit conspicuous and was hoping that no one would make a crack about ME wrapped in a blanket! People began filtering out the front door. As they left, several of my neighbor ladies called out that, when I was ready, they'd be happy to help me straighten up my house. Spotsburgers make good neighbors.

  Gilbert and his pal were arrested, of course, and tried and convicted and jailed—although the prosecutor refused to charge them with Maple Leaf Quilticide, which was the worst of their crimes as far as I was concerned. And to commemorate this event, I put a patch in Florence's memory quilt named Leavenworth Nine-Patch, in honor of the maximum-security prison where Gilbert and his pal so richly deserved to be incarcerated.

  4/ Diamonds Are STILL a Girl's Best Friend