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

by Carolyn McPherson

  "Brilliant!" they said together, clapping their hands. And then: "What kinds of borders?"

  To this day, I can't understand why two souls so apparently well synchronized in their thoughts and speech could not solve their differences more harmoniously. Even as I answered, I experienced one of my usually reliable premonitions which, unfortunately, I did not heed.

  "I don't know," I said. "Some borders. Three or four strips along the top, bottom and sides. Varying widths and fabrics. You know: calicos to coordinate with the browns and the greens that are already there."

  "You're so clever!" they exclaimed in unison, and after a brief doh-si-doh to see who would go out my front door first, they left.

  The next evening I heard from Janine, owner of Sew and Go, the fabric store on our central town square. Janine is an old buddy of mine. (As you might expect, the ties that bind the town's quilting teacher and the town's fabric store owner are powerful indeed.) It seems that Mildred and Judy had arrived at the crack of dawn, quilt top in hand, and spent the next three hours quarreling over what borders they would add to their quilt top.

  From Janine's shelves they removed every bolt of fabric that had even a trace of green in it, and piled those bolts up at one end of Janine's cutting table, and then all the bolts with even a speck of brown in them, and made a stack of those at the other end of Janine's cutting table, and then unrolled the bolts, and laid them on top of and underneath each other, and tried to visualize what a light green border with a floral motif would look like next to a dark green border with large ivy and brown berries next to a fabric with medium brown chicken tracks next to the quilt top itself. And this task could not be accomplished without knocking a number of these bolts on the floor, and without engaging in rapidly escalating characterizations of the other person's suggestions and tastes, so that the two women went from "Hmmm, I can't really say I like that," to "You seem bound and determined to put those two pieces of fabric together, don't you?" to (at the end of the three hours) "I've seen some ugly color combinations in my life, but that takes the cake!"

  And whether it was by accident or by design, Daughter Judy struck Mother Mildred in the forehead with a card of heavy brass coat buttons, and Mother Mildred just happened to lay her hands on a sleeve board, and then Daughter Judy grabbed a handful of thread and some bias tape, and Janine, who's a most peaceable person, was forced for the first time in her long career as a fabric store owner to throw two customers out of her store, which by now looked like photographs of downtown Flint, after the tornado. And in the mêlée, Mildred and Judy left the quilt top behind.

  I told Janine I'd meet her at her store and help her clean up the mess, and while we were picking up (and dusting off) bolts of fabric, spools of thread, cards of buttons, and bias tape, I had one of my brilliant ideas. Why not put the quilt top in the window and have a contest? Enlist the aid of Spotsburg's clever citizens, and ask them for suggestions regarding the quilt borders!

  "And," said Janine, "have Judy and Mildred be the judges!"

  "NO!" I shouted. "NOT be the judges! They can't agree on anything! Not Mildred and Judy!" I pulled myself together, and continued more calmly. "You and I can be the judges. Or," I said, having a positive brainstorm, "Ramona! She's a lawyer. Ramona could be a QUILT JUDGE!"

  And so, with a quick phone call to Mildred and Judy for their permission, and one to Ramona (who gave me neatly argued reasons—which I ignored—as to why she wasn't qualified to judge a quilt design), it was arranged. The quilt top was hung in Janine's front window, and the citizens of Spotsburg were invited to enter their suggestions vis-à-vis the borders. Janine put little numbered tags on each of her fabric bolts, and she and I mimeographed some official-looking entry blanks, and people were invited to sketch their suggestions, or write ideas like "Put a foot-wide border of fabric #12 on the danged thing and be done with it!" And over the quilt, Janine hung a neatly lettered sign that read, "Help Solve a Border Dispute!" (I quipped that Ramona, since she was going to sort this out at the end, was the border patrol.)

  To my surprise, this project became the talk of the town. People were in and out of Janine's store, including a remarkable number of men. (It was very good for her business. Also Jeff Sesno, who is recently divorced, good-looking, and very nice, asked her out to dinner. She accepted.)

  At first I assumed the crowds at Janine's were the result of the recent Spotsburg whoop-de-doo over quilts in general. I dreamed a lovely dream in which our town was being magically transformed into some kind of midwestern quilting Shangri-La, where every man, woman, and child within the city limits was eager to learn to quilt a feathered circle and piece a nine-patch.

  And then I discovered the truth: that Mildred and Judy had carried their dispute into their bridge clubs, into their church circles, and into their homes—making Jim Brewster's life an absolute nightmare—and that most of the quilt-viewers were, in fact, just curiosity-seekers, wanting to know what the brouhaha was all about.

  And then a strange thing happened. Mildred's mother's (and Judy's grandmother's) will was read, and the situation, already confused, became totally baffling.

  I once heard my divorce lawyer expound (offensively, I thought) on "Old Ladies' Wills." "The problem," he said, "with wills written by old ladies is that they delight in making a plethora of specific bequests." (Why do lawyers talk like that? It's so irritating.)

  As it turned out, Lucinda Pike's will contained just such a long and detailed list of specific bequests. Among those bequests: her ruby ring with diamond side stones was to go to "my daughter Mildred Hawn, because the ruby is her birthstone. Also the matching earrings." Her copy of My Life Among the Indians (by General George Custer) went to "my son Alfred Pike, who has proudly and fearlessly served as a Captain in the US Army." Her set of pink and green Havilland dishes went to "my son Alfred's daughter Rachel, who studied French in high school and will appreciate French fine bone china." Her black jet beads went to "my granddaughter Judy Brewster, who looks so very nice in black." ("I HATE black," Judy told me.) Lucinda's cobalt blue glass plate went to "Boopsie, my cat, who has always been true BLUE to me."

  And "my quilt, which I hope to have finished by the time of my death, and is named Trip Around the World, I hereby bequeath to my Canadian offspring."

  Mildred, Judy and Mildred's brother Alfred were completely slack-jawed when they heard this. Who was Canadian? WHAT Canadian offspring? Who got the quilt? And WHAT ABOUT THE QUILT CONTEST?

  Mildred and Judy appeared on my doorstep later that week. I was surprised to see them together, but there they were, side-by-side and very subdued, too, in matching gray checked blouses and turquoise skirts. They wanted the quilt border contest suspended, they told me, until the mystery surrounding the bequest of the quilt was solved.

  I agreed. After all, the quilt top might not actually be theirs. And (and this will come as no surprise to those of you who know me), I found myself getting interested in their story, and they were happy to fill me in on the details, which grew curiouser and curiouser by the day. And here's how the mystery unraveled.

  Unlike most of Spotsburg's old-timers, the late Lucinda Pike and her two children, Mildred and Alfred, weren't actually born in Michigan. They were born in Vermont, and migrated here forty or so years ago. That was after Lucinda's husband died, when Mildred and Alfred were still quite young.

  "Spotsburg looks very much like Vermont," Mildred explained. "So many lovely maple trees. Although it's flatter here. . . ."

  "It certainly does," said her daughter, who added, "Spotsburg looks VERY much like Vermont, with the trees and all, though they've got mountains. I've visited there many times. I was born here in Michigan, of course."

  "Of course she was," Mildred said, "since I married a Spotsburg man."

  "Of course she was," I said, "since you married a Spotsburg man."

  To be exact, Lucinda and her children were born in Derby Line, Vermont. I found Derby Line at the tippy-top of the Vermont map—you can see it's rig
ht at the US-Canadian border. On the other side of the border is Rock Island, Quebec. But, as Mildred and Judy explained to me, Derby Line and Rock Island are really one community, one community that happens to have an international border running through it.

  "The place is unique!" they both cried at once.

  "The line runs right through some people's houses!" said Mildred. "Including my parents'! Where I was born!"

  "And this is amazing!" said Judy. "The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is firmly planted on the line! So the front doors are in the United States, and the books are in Canada!"

  Mildred took up her daughter's cry. "Mother actually had to go THROUGH CUSTOMS just to take her aunt a jar of jelly!"

  "And if that's not bad enough—" began Judy.

  "Wait a moment!" I said: I was beginning to have the glimmer of a very bright idea. Where was Lucinda's house located exactly, I asked.

  Judy asked for a piece of paper and pencil. As I searched for them (in the considerable mess on my desk), she told me that another one of the funny things about Derby Line, Vermont, and Rock Island, Quebec, was that there'd been no way to fight the War of 1812, which pitted the British and their Canadians allies against their American neighbors. So a town council met and voted to ignore the whole war!

  "And so," echoed her mother, "they ignored the war!"

  "They ignored the war!" I cried, handing Judy the pencil and paper.

  With her mother's continual assistance, Judy quickly sketched out a rough map of the two towns, their grand total of about six streets, and a box with an X in it, indicating Grandmother Lucinda's house. ("Dear, I think you've made the house look SMALLER than it is," remarked Mildred. "And I believe Caswell Street doesn't turn northeast quite so sharply.")

  Whatever the deficiencies of Judy's map, I could see clearly: Lucinda Pike's house on the west side of Main Street—where Mildred and her brother Alfred were born—was neatly bisected by the international border. Half of it was in Derby Line, Vermont; half of it was in Rock Island, Quebec.

  "And you were born where?" I asked Mildred.

  "In the house."

  "Yes," I said, trying to be patient, "but where in the house?"

  "As you face the house, it's the upper left-hand bedroom," she said.

  "And that part of the house is in what country?" I asked.

  "That part of the house is in the United States," Mildred said.

  "Is it possible," I said, "that your brother Alfred was born in a different room, and would, therefore, be a Canadian? The ‘Canadian offspring' referred to in the will?" (Or, I wanted to add, that your mother might have had another child you don't know about? But I didn't say it. Some days even I know when to keep my mouth shut!)

  Both women looked thunderstruck. "NO!" they exclaimed in unison. "Alfred was a captain in the US Army! AS EVERYBODY KNOWS!"

  This was true. Everybody in Spotsburg knows that Alfred Pike was in the US Army, because he flies an American flag from his front porch, and always wears a little flag pin in his lapel, and reminisces incessantly and tediously about his days in the army ("when we had REAL men who REALLY knew how to fight a war"), and in addition to being a Sasquatch, he's also one of Spotsburg's most ardent American Legion members, and he's frequently heard to mutter about the United States being the best country in the world, and how proud he is HE's a US CITIZEN!

  But my eagle eye noted that neither Mildred nor Judy was absolutely positive where Alfred was born, and why would Lucinda have put that line in her will about her Canadian offspring, unless she knew something about her children that they didn't?

  "I think," I said, "there's a very simple explanation. I expect you'll soon find something that clears the matter up."

  And, of course, they did. The attorney who drew up Lucinda's will had been keeping a letter for Alfred, to be delivered to him after his mother's death. By that time the public curiosity about the quilt top (and the thought-provoking line in the will about "Canadian offspring") had become so great that the entire affair was written up in the Spotsburg Sentinel, including Lucinda's letter to her son.

  If you live in a large city, you may have a hard time understanding why anything so personal as a private letter from one's deceased mother might be printed in the local paper. Indeed, I myself was astonished that Alfred would allow such a letter to be printed, because it was certainly not very complimentary to him. But in a small town like Spotsburg, everybody knows your business and you might just as well publish the story, so everyone has the same set of facts. Especially once rumors reached their peak, as they did in this case, insisting that Mildred and Alfred had a heretofore-unknown brother or sister living in the Yukon, born of their mother's youthful and illicit passion for a French-Canadian stable boy!

  Here's the letter.

  Dearest Alfred:

  By now I have passed over, and dear Mr. Frome, my attorney, has given you this letter. I hope and pray you will not be too deeply troubled, my dear, by what I have to tell you.

  I believe you and your sister Mildred assumed your father and I were always happy together. But such was not the case. Without causing you further pain, I must tell you that there was a time when his behavior could no longer be borne, and while I could not, of course, leave our home, I refused to any longer share the marital bed.

  In these modern days, there is no great shame attached to such a separation, if it is tastefully conducted. But at the time of your birth, such a rupture would have been a terrible scandal indeed. When I left your father's bed, I did not know I was in the family way. And so, when my time came (and very precipitously, too, as there was not even a moment to send for the doctor, and it was poor frightened Molly who had to assist me), I did not give birth in what all the world must have thought was “our” bed, your father’s and mine (which happened to be in the American half of our house), but in the bed across the hallway on the north face of the house, where I had, in fact, been sleeping of late.

  And thus, poor, dear Alfred, you were not born in the United States at all, but in Canada. And this fact I have concealed from you all these years, lest you also inquire about the shameful state of my marriage. And I compounded my sin (as lying, I believe, is most certainly a sin) by swearing Molly to secrecy, and never correcting your birth records (which falsely stated your birthplace to be Derby Line, Vermont), and by allowing you to enroll in the United States Army, and by never challenging you when you spoke so heartily and with such deep feeling of how proud you were to be a citizen of the United States of America, and how glad you were that you were not one of THEM, the people of other lands.

  My time on this earth could not last forever, and God will judge me for what I have done, and I can only ask His forgiveness—and yours. I pray that you will learn greater tolerance, my dear, for the splendid people fortunate enough to have been born in Canada, a number of whom (should you choose to visit them) are your relatives, and are buried in the Canadian cemetery in Stanstead nearby.

  With prayers for your continued safety, my dear son, and for your understanding love, I remain

  Your loving

  Mother

  (Lucinda Butterick Pike)

  The letter (which everyone else in Spotsburg thought was TERRIBLY touching—after it was published I saw women wiping their eyes and snuffling about it in their conversations)—perhaps the letter, as I say, was actually a first step in Alfred's personal reform movement.

  And since he was the "Canadian offspring" alluded to in the will, the unfinished quilt top was his. He decided he wanted nothing done to it—no borders, no batt, no backing. As he told Janine and me the day he came by her store to retrieve it, "Mum left it to me looking like this, and I don't want anybody messing with it."

  And since his sister Mildred and her daughter Judy were once again on such amicable terms—now that the quilt top was out of their hands—leaving the quilt top alone seemed like a splendid idea.

  11/ Measure for Measure

  [I wrote this for Aunt Maggie's
Needlework Magazine after a particularly trying night in one of my quilting classes. Mildred Hawn's curiosity about quilts had been piqued by the quilt top escapade, and she and Judy enrolled in a class together. Judy had taken the class before, so she was proficient in drafting patterns. But Mildred became mightily upset when she couldn't get her triangles to be triangular. "I must be terribly stupid," she kept saying, which is something I don't like to hear, because it signals deep frustration—and isn't very good for the old self esteem, either.

  So I sat down beside her, and discovered that 1) she was close to tears, and 2) she was working with a pattern that was very difficult to draft to her project's dimensions, and 3) her ruler was defective! (This was something I pointed out to Jim Dean, since she'd bought the ruler at his Five-and-Dime.)

  And her experience inspired this article.]

  NOTE: This column is NOT about the metric system. I will NOT attempt to convert you to the metric system in this column. Whenever I talk to my students about interesting alternative ways to measure quilt blocks, their eyes narrow suspiciously and they accuse me of trying to sneak the metric system over on them. But NOT in this column! I've read the most recent Gallup polls, and they indicate that people in the United States are still exceedingly grumpy about the metric system, and so I will NOT make you use the metric system to measure your quilt pieces. A shoelace, maybe, or a can of tuna fish, but NOT the metric system.

  Trust me.

  Every once in a while, a quilter faces a measurements problem. Yes, we all have days when our measurements are a problem, but I'm talking about a problem with a quilting measurement.

  For example: You need to make a quilt block that's exactly 15 inches wide. Maybe it has to fit a particular pillow form or a tray top or the cover of a picture album.