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

by Carolyn McPherson

  "It's doorknobs!" he said. "Faucets and doorknobs!"

  "All right, everybody," I said loudly, indignant that Ralph Duffendack had now trained his gun on ME, the old fool. But first things first. "Pay attention! Ted and I will go with Hilda to the hospital. While we're doing that," I said to the four college boys, "I want you nice young men—" (I'm an excellent judge of character) "—to go to the Masonic temple two blocks down the street, to the basement, and eat some of the most delicious barbecued chicken and chocolate eclairs you've ever tasted in your life. Ask for Ruth and tell Ruth Barb sent you.

  "Jim! You and your henchmen go wake up EDNA and ALVIN and tell them something's gone wrong with their precious treasure hunt, and they should drive around Spotsburg and find our lost treasure hunters.

  "And you, Ralph Duffendack," I yelled, looking straight at Ralph, who scowls and grumbles and refuses to wear his hearing aid, "you GO INSIDE AND PUT THAT GUN AWAY!"

  And that is how the treasure hunt, which came to be called the Game of the Quilt Disaster, ended. The college students enjoyed the buffet, which suffered only slightly when the Mile-High Tower of Ruby Jell-O toppled off its pedestal and slopped all over its end of the table, inundating the cloverleaf rolls in a tidal wave of red ooze. Afterwards those nice young men wrote us thank you notes, with many kind words about the food. (The only strange thing—which they didn't comment on—was that there didn't seem to be enough desserts to go around. . . .)

  Edna and Alvin located most of the treasure hunters (except the two teams who'd driven to the Jackson airport), and sent them to the buffet. Edna and Alvin also graciously declined the chairmanship of the next year's hunt, to everyone's enormous relief.

  Jim Brewster and his Biblical followers went home and got dressed!

  And poor Hilda Cooper spent the remainder of the school year and most of the summer recuperating from her broken ankle, which turned out to be severe, and required several surgeries. She asked me to special nurse her for a few days when she got out of the hospital, which I did.

  I hadn't been friends with Hilda before—she was too bossy for my tastes—but I felt sorry for her, with nothing to do but sit at home: nurses and teachers make bad patients. And so I had one of my typical brainstorms, and I got Hilda started quilting, something she told me she'd never done before.

  It was her idea to make a four-block wall hanging about the disastrous treasure hunt. She wanted to use a block of Boy's Nonsense, to represent the college boys and their prank. I suggested a block of Breeches, for Jim Brewster and their outrageous costumes. (Hilda approved. Of course, driving around the city with them, she'd had a closer look than I, and now we both know that Jim had his appendix removed not so long ago!)

  Hilda studied my quilting Bible, 1001 Quilt Blocks, and decided the third block could be Tirzah's Treasure, because of the treasure reference, or Broken Path, because of her ankle. She finally settled on Tirzah's Treasure.

  And then I remembered a patchwork block I thought would be perfect for the fourth corner of Hilda's wall hanging. It was a not-very-veiled allusion to the quality of Edna and Alvin's treasure hunt clues, and I wasn't too sure how Hilda would take it. Sometimes sickness dulls people's sense of humor, and I didn't know what kind of sense of humor Hilda started out with, if any.

  What, I said, did she think about a block of Fool's Puzzle?

  She guffawed.

  8/ Patchwork on the Job

  [More excerpts from Aunt Maggie's]

  It's especially fun to tailor-make a gift that's relevant to a person's passion, hobby or work. For example, a pillow constructed of one large quilt block makes a great gift. Four or six blocks make a wonderful wall hanging for an office. The question is: are there many quilt blocks that represent people's occupations?

  The answer is yes and no. A hastily-conducted census (it took me about a minute and a half) of my quilting books reveals that patchwork leans heavily in the direction of the stars. We Americans love stars: Ohio Stars, Texas Stars, Iowa Stars, and so on. So if your special gift recipient is a star—either an astral body or a star of stage or screen—you're in good shape.

  On the other hand, there's a dearth of quilt patches that represent marriage counselors, auto mechanics and dishonest politicians.

  But don't give up hope. With a little imagination—and willingness to joke and even insult your gift recipient—you can find patterns suitable for many walks of life. Consider these jobs and hobbies, and their possible piecework representations:

  ACTOR (just starting out): Butterfly at the Crossroads, Bright Hopes

  AUTO MECHANIC: Wheels

  AVIATOR: Lindy's Plane, Wings (and, under certain unfortunate circumstances) Chuck-a-Luck

  BABYSITTER: Baby Blocks, Seesaw, Children's Delight

  BRIDGE OR POKER PLAYER: Card Tricks, Fair Play

  BROTHER-IN-LAW (annoying): Clown's Choice

  CARPENTER: Carpenter's Square, Sawblades, Barn Raising, Building Blocks

  CLERGYMAN: Star of Bethlehem, Crown of Thorns, Garden of Eden, Walls ofJericho, Jacob's Ladder, Joseph's Coat, Job's Troubles, Children of Israel, King David's Crown, David and Goliath

  DOCTOR OR NURSE: Red Cross

  ELECTRICIAN: Tangled Lines, Lightning

  ENTREPRENEUR: Small Business

  FARMER: Country Farm, Farmer's Fields, Buckwheat, Corn and Beans, Squash Blossom, Clover Blossom, Turkey Tracks, Hen and Chickens

  FISHERMAN: Flying Fish

  FLORIST (There are many flower-related patterns. Among them are): Fancy Flowers, Flower Basket, Flower Pot, Rosebud, Lily, Aster, Chrysanthemum, Nosegay, Basket of Tulips

  GRANDMOTHER: Grandmother's Flower Garden, Grandmother's Own, Grandmother's Puzzle, Grandmother's Fan

  HOUSEWIFE: Homemaker, Home Treasure, Mother's Delight

  LAWYER: Courthouse Steps, Lawyer's Puzzle, Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

  LIBRARIAN: Borrow and Return

  LOGGER: Falling Timbers

  MARRIAGE COUNSELOR: Single Wedding Ring, Broken Path, Battlefields, Thorny Thicket

  MORTICIAN: Coffin Star

  POLICEMAN: City Streets, Stop Sign, Blue Blazes, Catch As Catch Can

  POLITICIAN: Road to the White House, Tippecanoe & Tyler, Too, and Washington Puzzle

  POLITICIAN, DISHONEST: Spider Web, Twist and Turn, Secret Drawer, Leavenworth Nine-Patch

  RECKLESS DRIVER: Right and Left, Hit or Miss

  REPAIRMAN: Handy Andy, Hole in the Barn Door

  SAILOR: Sailboat, Flags and Ships, Mariner's Compass, Storm at Sea, Wild Waves

  SAILOR, INEPT: Crossed Canoes, Lost Ships

  SEAMSTRESS: Spools, Pincushion, Buttons and Bows

  TEACHER: Little Red Schoolhouse

  VETERINARIAN: Goldfish, Kitty Corner, Bull's Eye, Turtle, Mare's Nest

  WEATHERMAN: Weathervane, Four Winds, Whirlwind

  The greatest patchwork nomenclature challenge I ever faced was when I was asked to create a wall hanging for a famous chest surgeon. I looked over my patchwork choices and rejected Sawtooth as lacking dignity. Wheel of Fortune lacked sufficient awe for a doctor's carefully acquired skills. Finally I settled on Hearts and Gizzards.

  I know. When I told my friends my choice, they groaned, too.

  9/ The "Good Parts"

  If you're like me, when you get your hands on a new book, you flip through the pages frantically, trying to find the "good parts" as quickly as possible. The "good parts" (as I define them) are the first murder or the first kiss. The good parts are even better if there's a first murder followed by a first kiss!

  Here's one of the good parts of this book. In this chapter you will learn how things went the first time I went out with Mike Mackenzie, and will be given some tantalizing hints about what might happen between us in the future. I promise to spare you no details; I trust you'll wildly applaud my absolute frankness vis-à-vis my love life.

  As you remember, Jay Allen the Gorgeous had suggested he introduce me to this guy Mike Mackenzie in the Physics Department. (Of
course, I had NO idea what kind of matchmaker Jay would be: men's interests are so different from women's. For all I knew, maybe this fellow was a good fly fisherman, and that was Jay's standard!)

  Then Arden suggested Mike join us on a Quilt Country expedition, and Mike passed it up, and I showed you the letter I wrote Mike about his unfortunate (and quite incomprehensible) preference for a hockey game over a Quilt Country expedition. Then, much to my surprise, Mike called me, told me he enjoyed my letter, and invited me to the Robert Burns Festival in Ann Arbor. He sounded nice over the phone, and I accepted.

  I'll admit: I was a tad nervous about this. It's a bit disconcerting to be forty-ish and going on blind date. I spent early Saturday morning pulling clothes out of my closet and throwing them back in. I mean, what do you wear to an event where the men will be wearing skirts? My usual strokes of brilliance were deserting me in droves!

  Fortunately, Ruth Wallace called me Saturday noon to ask about playing bridge that night, and I told her my dilemma. I'd forgotten (or maybe I never knew) that Wallace is a good Scottish name, and so I threw myself at her mercy. Should I wear plaid? I asked. Pants? Sequins and feathered boas? What?!!?

  Ruth is very calming and logical. "No," she told me, "don't wear plaid to a Robert Burns night, because you're not Scottish and in that crowd you don't want to show up wearing the wrong tartan. They'd notice."

  Good point.

  "And," she continued, "don't wear slacks because a Robert Burns night is a very formal occasion. Do you have something fancy to wear?"

  I thought about it for a minute. I do have a rather strange costume—by the standards of our day—a very slim patchwork skirt I made a while ago of randomly arranged blocks of black, ruby and sapphire velvet, and a matching black satin blouse. Because of the fabric it's quite elegant, although it's so out-of-the-ordinary (remember, this IS the Eisenhower Administration) that my sons say it makes me look like a beatnik.

  "Sounds perfect," Ruth said. Ruth has a fine appreciation for individuality—in clothes, opinions, whatever.

  So five o'clock rolled around, I'd tried on my skirt with and without a girdle (I finally said, "To hell with the girdle. After all, I've had babies!"), and I'd pulled myself into some semblance of order. I looked pretty good. I hoped I wouldn't sweat all over the satin blouse. It was exactly five o'clock. There was a knock on the door. I opened it.

  There on my doorstep stood a bonny Scots laddie if ever I saw one. Not fat, not thin, just sturdy. Tall—over six feet—with dark hair and a neatly trimmed dark beard that made me think immediately of Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales, but before he became fat. In other words, HANDSOME!!! And wearing a most amazing costume.

  Taking it from the top, a white wing-collared shirt such as men wear with formal wedding clothes, a black bow tie, and then a black jacket thing, that looked like the upper half of a cutaway, but without the tails. The jacket had black satin lapels and square silver buttons. (An expert seamstress notices these details.)

  And the kilt. I guessed I was looking at the Mackenzie tartan, which is dark and quite beautiful: blue and black and green. And that funny thing Scottish men wear in front (now, now—no naughty jokes, please) which I've since learned is called a sporran (rhymes with "Lauren") and actually serves as a wallet. His sporran (which hung from a silver chain at, roughly, his hips) was made of spotless white fur with white tassels, and the top edges of the tassels and sporran were silver, engraved with some sort of intricate Celtic design.

  As for the rest of this Gaelic apparition: dark blue knee-high Argyll socks (who says you can't mix plaids?), and a chunk of v-shaped green ribbon at the top of each stocking (they're called "flashes," he told me later), and gleaming black shoes.

  Some part of my anatomy did back flips.

  "Hi," he said, smiling broadly and sticking out his hand. "I'm Mike."

  I shook his hand, acutely aware I was going to sweat all over my satin blouse after all.

  It took me a moment to remember my usually impeccable manners. "Uh, come in, won't you?"

  He did.

  "Would you like something to drink?" I said.

  "I was thinking," he said, "we might like to take the back roads to Ann Arbor. There's an inn on the way where we could have a drink."

  "That sounds very nice," I said, thinking it sounded very nice indeed.

  "It may get cold," he said. "Do you have a coat?"

  I was making a mental list: it was considerate of him to think of taking a coat. And he was prompt, too, if his timely arrival was any clue. (I can't stand men who are late.)

  I looked in my closet and found an emerald green cape with a hood, something my aunt brought me as a souvenir of her trip to Austria. I love it, but I never wear it because it‘s way too exotic for Spotsburg. Tonight it looked just right. He helped me on with it. (Nice manners, I added to my rapidly growing list of his virtues.)

  And so we got into his car, a modest green Chevy, and were off.

  Dear reader, I've promised you complete and utter candor—none of those infuriating phrases silly Victorian novelists adored, like "And now, gentle readers, we draw a curtain across this blissful scene, blah, blah, blah." But the appalling fact is that I'm trying to write down exactly what we talked about on our way to the festival, and I CAN'T REMEMBER! You know, usually when there's a crisis, I'm the most clear-headed person in the room. But it's like I had an acute attack of senility—most of which fortunately cleared up in a few days—but it left me with some memory loss. You have every right to be irritated about this.

  But maybe you understand, too. Have you ever been in a situation where you were so frightened or amazed or excited that you couldn't sort out the details afterward? Where you were so distracted by what you were hearing that you couldn’t remember what you were seeing? Or so distracted by what you were feeling that you can't remember what—or if—you were thinking?

  The first part of that evening was like that for me. I do know I asked Mike what the Robert Burns Festival would be like, in case it was a sacred ritual, where I might easily make a mistake and do something stupid or ill-mannered.

  And he explained this celebration of Scotland's greatest poet to me, and I could see that being Scottish wasn't a RELIGION for him, because he could tell jokes about being Scottish, too. Like this one: "Question: How was copper wire invented? Answer: Two Scotsmen quarreling over a penny."

  And I do remember that he told me my skirt was pretty, and he asked if I'd made it myself, and how had I gotten involved in sewing?

  And I told him. And for those of you who are relentlessly curious and must know EVERY blessed detail, let me say this. At no time on our drive TO Ann Arbor was there any kissing or even any handholding—not that I didn't think of it, I admit! We just drove and talked and laughed, and my cheeks got pinker and pinker, and during the quiet spells I noticed his eyes twinkled in a most charming sort of way. And we laughed a lot more, and it got rather warm in the car (very odd—I'm too young to be having hot flashes), and even though I only had a ginger ale at the tavern we stopped at on the way, an ancient (by Michigan standards) converted fieldstone inn, and he only had a root beer, I felt quite giddy by the time we arrived at the Chesterfield Hotel on Main Street in Ann Arbor.

  Picture the scene in the Chesterfield Hotel. Even without such a pleasing companion, any quilter's blood pressure would have rocketed sky-high. The Chesterfield's main ballroom is elegant: brass chandeliers and red wallpaper and red plush carpeting. My escort's garb was multiplied a hundredfold, with variations in the plaids and in the accessories, creating a dazzling vista of gorgeous reds and greens and peacock blues and even bright yellows. Many of the women were kilted also, although several wore plain white dresses, with a length of plaid fabric drawn over the shoulder and pinned.

  And it occurred to me then that today's usual gatherings are so drab. Go to church or a city council meeting or a high school graduation, and we're all wearing such dull Republican clothing: beiges and grays and browns. But the
Chesterfield Hotel's ballroom that night gleamed like two handfuls of jewels.

  We'd been assigned a table at the front of the room near the speaker's podium. The tables had centerpieces of cut flowers and thistles, of all things ("a Scottish motif," Mike explained), and name cards decorated with little pen-and-ink sketches of thistles and our names, carefully written in fancy calligraphy. Each of us had a tossed salad at our place and a small glass containing an amber-colored liquid. Mike must have guessed I was puzzled. "Whiskey," he said, "for toasting the haggis."

  "Ah, yes!" I said, noting from the name card (which bore the inscription "Alexander Greystoke McFarland IV") that I was sitting in the wrong place, in the place to Mike's left. I quickly moved around him to the place—and place card—on his right. "Yes, the haggis!" Not, of course, that I knew what a haggis was.

  Other guests soon appeared at our table, many of them with drinks in their hands. Mike seemed to know most of them, and he introduced me and we all nodded and smiled and I promptly forgot their names, except for Alexander Greystoke McFarland IV, which had a lilting ring to it, like a nursery rhyme by A. A. Milne. And all of a sudden I was saying to myself (not to others, you'll be relieved to hear): "Alexander Greystoke McFarland the Fourth went out for a cup of tea, and said to the Queen, as he buttered his scones, Alexander the Fourth, that's me!" No, I wasn't drunk. But there was something in the air. . . .

  This poetic reverie was interrupted by a terrible low growling in the back of the room. Something drastically wrong had just happened to the hotel's ventilation system. This growling was followed by the screeching of two large tomcats in a duel to the death, and then it dawned on me: bagpipes. The wailing was almost unbearable to my sensitively-tuned ears, and I started to grimace, and then I realized that the others at the table had stood up and were exhibiting various degrees of rapture and reverence, so I reined myself in sharply.