So the next week, in addition to attempting to earn an honest living, I spent my evenings viewing people's comforters and old bedspreads. Spotsburg's floodgates had opened, and out spilled a torrent of abused, mangled, and filthy quilts. I must have examined at least thirty quilts in five nights.
Sometimes they made me sad: a quilt represents a considerable investment of human effort and time, and the treatment some of those quilts had received was atrocious. Several smelled of birdcage, others of wet dog. Sometimes the quilts were educational: interesting colors or arrangements of blocks I hadn't seen before. Sometimes I became quite vexed: people brought me quilts with no evidence of the stains mentioned in the letters, explaining that they thought I should look at them "just in case. . . ."
In addition to alternately feeling sad and angry about the quilts, I also became grouchy that week for another quite different reason. My pal Jay Allen (that heart-throbbingly handsome redheaded forensic chemist I've mentioned before) had told me about a new associate he wanted to introduce me to, some guy named Mike in the Physics Department. For several days I'm ashamed to say I questioned Jay's motives, wondering if he could be tired of doing crime-solving scientific experiments for me—for free. Then I rejected that notion as ridiculous. As long as Jay wasn't trying to foist me off on some other—less qualified—scientist, I was happy to meet an interesting new man. Spotsburg's quilt hysteria, however, was making arranging a rendezvous with the Mike person impossible.
One of those evenings I thought we'd found it—the Deathbed Quilt, I mean. Doris Nelson brought in a lovely and very old-looking Cowboy Star, also known as Arkansas Traveler or Travel Star.
What Doris showed me was beautiful: blue, purple and a funny pinkish-colored putty, which sounds unattractive, but went very well with the other colors. In the center it had the requisite dark stains. I must say I was immediately suspicious of the quilt, even though it was lovely, and even though the Cowboy Star pattern first appeared in 1860, (and so the date would have worked out right), because Doris said she'd also found a little collection of scraps that matched the quilt. And I asked myself: if this was really the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt, how would Uncle WhatsHisName who sent his niece this quilt have also acquired the scraps?
The scraps helped me solve the problem—without Jay Allen's help, ha-HA! I took pieces of the three different colors and put them on my ironing board. Then I turned on the iron to its hottest setting, and then I ironed them and—nice as you please—the putty-colored scrap stuck to the bottom of the iron! Doris watched me while I was doing this and was totally baffled.
"It's simple," I said. "This piece that's sticking to the bottom of the iron is made with a man-made fiber: either rayon, nylon, or Dacron. I know that because it can't be ironed at the high temperature I use on cotton. See, it's sticking because it's melting. Now," I said, warming to my subject, "Rayon was first manufactured commercially in 1905, Nylon wasn't patented until 1937, and Dacron appeared in 1941." (Sometimes the stuff I know even amazes me.) "So whichever man-made fiber was used—and a scientist with a high-powered microscope could tell us—" (I kept my mouth strictly shut about which scientist I was thinking of) "—this quilt was made long after Lincoln died."
We both sighed sadly.
"But it looks so old," she said.
"Yes," I said, "I was fooled, too. But it's faded. That's all."
I was proud of my detective work, but Doris looked crestfallen.
"It IS beautiful," I said. "Say," I added, having just had one of my brilliant afterthoughts, "why don't you suggest to the Historical Society that they host a quilt exhibition and show off all these wonderful Spotsburg quilts, now that everyone's so excited about them."
Doris seemed delighted with this idea. We folded up her prize, and she went off looking pleased.
Eventually I came as close as anyone to finding the much sought-after quilt. It happened this way. Spotsburg's most prestigious men's club is the Sons of Sasquatch. Many a citizen has been rendered nearly speechless by the imposing sight of the Sons of Sasquatch costumed in their Sasquatch furs, marching in the Fourth of July parade to the stirring cadences of their anthem, "Bigfeet on the March."
As is so often the case, the Sons of Sasquatch were completely oblivious to what the rest of the community was doing, and in late September they were holding their annual rummage sale and chicken fry. Among the rummage, on the old clothes and blankets table, was a very old quilt.
As luck would have it, I was the one who found it. Moving aside the old jeans, t-shirts and broken tennis rackets, I gently removed the quilt and laid it on top of the pile. It was a very handsome black and white Light and Shadow, a pattern I remembered from 1858 Godey's Lady's Book, and which was probably in existence a lot earlier. So it could be the right age. . . .
It was stained, too, with two large rust-colored stains shaped like giant irregular flowers. I recognized that kind of stain: blood.
With shaking fingers I examined the front of the quilt, then turned it over. On the backside, in one corner, embroidered in red, white, and blue thread, were the words "From Thaddeus, 1865." Oh my goodness. The right year, and perhaps the right uncle? I carried the quilt over to Jim Brewster, who was supervising the cash box and chatting with other Bigfeet. "How much?" I asked him, able to contain my excitement, but just barely.
"For that old rag?" he said, eyeing it indifferently. "How about a dime?"
"Sure," I said, thinking I was going to faint.
I dashed home with my prize, endured several painful seconds of indecision, and then called Jay Allen at home. No answer. I tried his lab in the Chemistry Department at State College.
"What?" a gruff voice answered.
"Jay!" I yelled.
He actually sounded disappointed that it was me. "What do you want?" he grumbled.
"I think I've found the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt!" I shouted.
"Come again?" he said.
Incredibly, Jay, too, had missed Spotsburg quilt-mania, having been COMPLETELY absorbed, he told me pointedly, with a murder case in Grand Rapids that involved SEVERAL MILLION DOLLARS AND A STATE SENATOR.
So, in spite of the fact that he kept muttering something about GETTING BACK TO PAYING WORK, I sketched out the whole saga to him in several well-worded and compact paragraphs.
"What's the bottom line?" he said.
"Can you tell if it's Lincoln's blood?" I asked.
There was a long pause. "Maybe, maybe not," he said.
I was scandalized. "Jay Allen," I said, "you can figure out anything! Just take a little snip of this quilt and see if it's blood, and then we'll know."
"Sorry, Barb," he said, "but it's not that simple. Yeah, we could analyze the stain in your quilt, find out if it was human or animal blood—" (I hadn't thought of that before. Maybe some of the bloody quilts I'd inspected over the past few weeks had non-human blood on them!) "—but we'd have to compare it with a sample of blood known to be Abraham Lincoln's, and that could be difficult." And then he said, and he seemed genuinely interested, "I'll see what I can find out."
It turned out that the second half of the problem was the problem. There are actually samples of Abraham Lincoln's blood and tissue in existence today, and they're stored at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC. HOWEVER, the high muckety-mucks there in Washington, DC, were not prepared to release enough of those cells so Jay could run any sort of tests. When he told me this two weeks later, he sounded regretful
"They sent me a rather stiff note," Jay said. "It seems the world is full of quilts, shawls and blankets which, as they so generously phrase it, ‘unscrupulous persons fraudulently assert were on President Abraham Lincoln's bed at the time of his death.'"
So we were never able to prove that the quilt I bought at the Sons of Sasquatch rummage sale was definitely the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt. But its design, stains, and inscription made me believe with all my heart that it was, and the note from the Armed Forces Institute gave me an idea.
/> And when the Historical Society held its Old Quilt Exposition (which so many people attended at twenty-five cents per person that the Society was able to install both indoor plumbing and two two-seater outhouses behind the Standard School #2), the quilt I entered (and gave to the Historical Society afterward) was carefully identified thusly:
THE LINCOLN DEATHBED QUILT
Believed to have been on President Abraham Lincoln's bed at the time of his death.
6/ Think Hockey Takes Guts? Try Fabric-Hunting!
Once the Lincoln Deathbed Quilt furor subsided, we were able to get back to our more-or-less normal routines, and Arden had a great idea. We would launch a co-educational expedition to Northern Indiana, and do some serious fabric shopping and lunching at the all-you-can-eat Amish buffet there. So Arden and her husband Tom, Karen and her husband Peter, and Jay and his wife Betsy, and I signed up. And Jay invited the interesting-sounding (to me, at any rate. He was single. I checked it out) Mike Mackenzie of the State College Physics Department to go along.
You can imagine my amazement when Mike turned us down because our plan conflicted with a State College hockey game! I'm well known in Spotsburg for my willingness to share my opinions with everybody—whether they're interested or not—and so I sent Mike the following letter, in a plain brown asbestos envelope.
Dear Mike:
Perhaps we did not sufficiently explain. Fabric-hunting in northern Indiana is very much like hockey, which we know you love. In fact, many days it is indistinguishable from hockey.
Like hockey, in fabric-hunting there are two teams: Us and Them. The object of fabric-hunting is for Us to score more goals in a given time span than Them. Experienced fabric-hunters, like hockey players, know that however much time is allotted is never enough.
At the starting signal of a fabric hunt, Us and Them face off in a large area called Yoder's Department Store. Not for the seasoned fabric-hunter to put on a pair of wimpy skates and a whole bunch of protective gear and slide insouciantly across some ice—heck no! The fabric-hunter, equipped only with her purse, and assisted only by her flying squadron of sister fabric-hunters (who cannot be relied upon if there's a special over in the corner on zippers or bias tape) fearlessly elbows her way past rapacious bargain seekers to the goal: the last remaining yard of fabric on the bolt that perfectly matches the project she's been laboring on without ceasing since seventh grade. A few noses may bleed as she makes her way across Yoder's, but as long as it's not on that last remaining yard of matching fabric, who cares.
As in hockey, in fabric-hunting just about anything goes. Tripping your opponent with a quilt rack you are pretending to consider purchasing is entirely legal. Pulling out the keystone fabric bolt from a teetering display, creating a fabric avalanche and a subsequent impenetrable barrier in your opponent's path, is splendid strategy. Entwining your opponent in twelve yards of Battenburg lace and consequently immobilizing her from further play, will delight onlookers. Clobbering her in the mouth with your purse is good clean fun. Clobbering her in the mouth without your purse is even better. In other words, in fabric-hunting, as in hockey, violence in the service of a higher purpose (more violence) is the name of the game.
Fabric-hunting is not for everyone. It takes guts, stamina and absolute ruthlessness. In some parts of the globe, descendants of Genghis Khan give useful seminars on the finer points. But here in the Midwest we are privileged to have some of the world's ablest practitioners of the sport of fabric-hunting. You are fortunate, Mike—and should be grateful!—to have been invited to see them in action.
Any questions?
Sincerely,
Barb Hoxsie
In retrospect, I suppose this letter might be considered a bit, well, strong.
Two days later I got a call from him. His voice was very pleasant: warm and deep, with the merest trace of a Southern accent. He said, "I enjoyed your letter. It was funny."
That surprised me. We chatted a bit and then he asked me if I'd like to go with him to the Robert Burns Festival in Ann Arbor. Men in kilts and haggis would be the order of the day, he said.
I didn't know what haggis was (I do now!), but I said "Sure!" Before we could do that, however, we all had to live through:
Spotsburg's Annual Treasure Hunt.
PS. Mike still went to the hockey game.
7/ The Game of the Quilt Disaster
I see I really haven't told you much about Spotsburg. It's a pretty place, set amongst the rolling hills and deciduous forests of southern Michigan. We've got a population of 4,000 (not counting 900 college students on the Spotsburg campus of State College) and the necessities: police, a volunteer fire department, a bank, a bar, a tea shop (The Spotté of Tea), three churches, pretty good schools, a train station (with frequent trains to Lansing, Jackson, and Detroit), some shops, including Dean's great dime store that sells everything from children's toys to pencils to athletic supporters, a drug store, and (most important!) Janine Runyon's fabric shop, Sew and Go.
Most of our businesses are built around a pleasant central town square that has some fine old maples, a few flower beds (well-maintained by the members of the Garden Club), a statue (of Harold Thripp, founder of Spotsburg and its first mayor, state representative, and circuit court judge), a memorial to Spotsburg's men and boys lost in the various wars and, in the southeast corner of the square, a bandstand big enough to accommodate ten or twelve well-fed musicians playing large instruments. The campus, a branch of State College where Jay Allen, forensic chemist and redhead extraordinaire (as well as Mike Mackenzie, heartthrob-in-waiting) both work, is on the western side of town, just past the grain elevator and Agriculture Experiment Station.
Things are usually quiet in Spotsburg; it's something our young people complain about constantly. Occasionally the college boys stage a panty raid in one of the girls' dorms, which stirs things up a bit at that end of town. Spotsburg High's Fighting Dalmatians won the state's high school basketball Class D championship one year (1937, to be exact). That was exciting. And, of course, there are all the events—births, deaths and marriages—that are important to the people involved, but can't be considered remarkable.
For entertainment we do highly conventional things: the county fair in August, the Methodist Church ice cream social, The Ham Sandwich Festival, and our very stirring Civil War battle re-enactment, where (as the name suggests) we all dress up in Civil War clothes and re-enact a Civil War battle. Stirringly.
And in May there's the Treasure Hunt. Nobody seems to know how the Treasure Hunt started, but it's gotten to be a Big Thing. It consumes a great deal of energy that might otherwise be spent on useful activities, and here's how it works. Usually works, that is.
One May evening, the participants—who by light of day are sober, high-minded city fathers and mothers—dress up in funny clothes and assemble in the Spotsburg High School parking lot. They arrange themselves into teams. Each team is given a manila envelope containing the treasure hunt clues, and off they go. As you might expect, the first team to find the treasure wins.
What makes our treasure hunt different from other towns' treasure hunts in which their city council members, church leaders, teachers, farmers, and insurance salesmen dress up like idiots and chase maniacally around the countryside, is the clues. They're not sequential. You know how traditional treasure hunts work. The first clue directs you to the location of the second clue, hidden, for example, in Roberta Findley's mailbox. In Roberta Findley's mailbox you get instructions for the third clue, which happens to be tucked in one of the nests in Elmer Swope's chicken coop. And so on.
No, Spotsburg's treasure hunt is written so that you can solve the clues in any order. Each clue reveals one letter of the final answer, which is an anagram. By anagram I mean that when you've found all the letters, you still have to unscramble them.
Here's a typical clue, which actually appeared in the 1952 treasure hunt. "Here we go to kneel and pray, counting out the night and day, the FIFTH WORD (just the SECOND LETT
ER) hopefully will make life better."
Dreadful, isn't it? Anyway, when your team receives a clue like this, you and your teammates ponder it for a bit and conclude after much hard thought that "kneel and pray" means you should dash to the METHODIST CHURCH! "Counting out the night and day," you deduce, refers to the CLOCK on the Methodist Church's marble façade. (There are some fine minds in Spotsburg.) Once you've arrived at the Methodist Church, you envision finding the fifth word of the inscription under the clock, and then taking the second letter of that word, and that will be one of the letters in the name of the treasure's location. Eureka!
All the teams receive all the clues at once. Once the starting signal is given (on the treasure hunt master's battered and out-of-tune trombone), Spotsburg's surrounding woods, hills, and dales resound with the glad cries of weirdly-dressed people leaping out of cars and jumping back in. Chaos frequently ensues. For example, teams tear off to the Methodist Church and discover, once they've gotten there, that it's the Baptist Church that has the clock on the front! That sort of thing.
In recent years I've grown too stodgy to be one of the treasure hunters (as have Arden, Karen, Ramona, Jay, and their hangers-on, who spend that evening doing something more intellectual, like playing Go to the Head of the Class). No, I prefer to associate myself with the treasure: a lavish buffet supper held in the secret location concealed in the anagram answer, and the splendid grand prize, frequently a new AM radio or a set of spiffy new highball glasses.
May's treasure hunt was no different from previous hunts. At least, it started out like the others, although it ended in disaster. (So I don't worry you, let me clarify: I'm talking about a Spotsburg-style disaster, such as the day the water main burst directly under the bleachers during the high school's graduation ceremony. Not a DISASTER disaster, like the sinking of the Titanic.) The treasure hunt's costume theme was "Literary Classics," and participants were supposed to arrive dressed as characters in great books.
The Name of the Quilt: Tales of Patchwork, Mayhem, and Murder Page 5
