Died in the Wool

by Rett MacPherson

  * * *

  When I was finished helping Matthew write his numbers and letters and fumbling through Mary’s math homework, I headed back upstairs to my office and the quilt journal. The pages of the diary were yellowed, the ink a sepia brown, faded from their original colors. I flipped through the diary just to see what was inside. It wasn’t all words. There were fabric swatches with notes telling the origin of the fabrics and which quilts she had used them in. There were a few photographs tucked inside the journal, too. One photograph was of a young man sitting on the front porch of the Kendall house. There was no morning glory vine in the photograph, but there was a quilt. The quilt was wrapped around the young man, who looked pale and shellshocked. I flipped the photograph over. Written on the back was Rupert, 1919.

  So that was brother number two. I was going to go way out on a limb here, but I’d say that he was the one who had fought in the First World War. I could find the answer to that quickly enough, since the St. Louis County public library had all of the Missouri draft papers from World War I on file. Getting his military records from the National Archives wouldn’t be that difficult, either, even without his regiment information. The problem was that it could take up to eight weeks. At least that was how long it took the last time I’d sent off to the National Archives for something.

  There were a few other photographs. One showed two of Glory’s quilts hanging out on the laundry line. She stood demurely between them, hands folded and eyes half hidden underneath a big old flowery hat.

  The journal itself began around 1913, when she was sixteen years old. She boldly stated right off the bat that she had made her very first quilt when she was just eight years old. Before that, she had helped her mother out by cutting fabric and even stitching on quilts; her mother turned her loose in the fall of 1905 to make one for her own bed. In the journal she bemoaned the fact that she had no “color swatches” from those first quilts to include.

  At sixteen she was cheery, frank, and opinionated. Not unlike Rachel, only I think Glory might have been a bit more cheery. The first quilt that she journaled was a Lone Star made of red and yellow calicos. It took me only a matter of minutes to realize that Geena and I had uncovered merely a fraction of Glory’s quilts. From the ages of eight to sixteen, before the start of the journal, she claimed to have made fifteen quilts. That was nearly two quilts a year. As the journal wore on, she became more prolific with patchwork quilts. By the time she was twenty, she was making about three patchwork quilts a year, plus one appliqué quilt that would take as long as the three patchwork quilts put together. Well, I could certainly relate to that. Appliqué is hard. At least I think so. Turning those edges under is as tedious as coloring my hair, strand by strand.

  I was delighted to see that when she made quilts as gifts, she noted who the recipient was. Geena and I might be able to track these quilts down—if they still existed—and purchase them for the textile museum. Or possibly, if an owner was unwilling to part with a quilt, we could get it on loan, at least for the initial opening of the display. If nothing else, we could get photographs of them. It could take years to track them all down, I told myself, but it was doable.

  Around 1917 Glory began to quilt even faster. It was her entire world. In that year alone, she made six quilts. Considering some quilts could have as many as a thousand pieces, all traced, cut out, and then sewn together, that was a lot—not to mention the time that went into quilting the three layers together. The reason for her speed-quilting was simple: Her brother went off to war in France. Whether she was aware of it or not, quilting became therapy. It was the only thing that got her through her brother’s absence. In her words, My beloved Rupert is deep in the trenches of France. I am so fraught with worry I can barely sleep. The only solace I find is in the stitches of my quilts.

  From 1917 to 1920, she made twenty quilts.

  At some point in 1920 her quilting came to an abrupt end for nearly two years. The last quilt she made before this hiatus was a utilitarian brown one composed of big square blocks from her brother’s army uniform. The entry read, I shall make no beauty in a world so ugly. Until my brother regains his love of life, I shall sleep beneath his uniforms. Until then, I am afraid that I, too, am stricken with his sickness. The sickness of being alive in a world that cares not for life, but only for death.

  Well, that, rather melodramatically, answered the question of the plain brown quilt on her bed.

  For the next year or two she chronicled the quilts she had in her possession that had been made by her mother. It seemed that only three of her mother’s quilts survived. Then she documented a quilt made by her Grandmother Kendall, and there was even a quilt made by her mother’s grandmother. I made notes of all of these in a notebook to give to Geena. Tomorrow she could take these descriptions and see if any of the quilts were among the ones that we had retrieved from the Kendall house.

  Somewhere around Christmas of 1921, for an unknown reason, Glory picked up her needle and started to quilt again. The first quilt she made was a rose appliqué that she made for her best friend, Elspeth Bauer. I wrote this name down as well, because I was almost certain this was Maddie Fulton’s grandmother. I would ask her tomorrow.

  Glory finished the rose appliqué and then started on a morning glory, which was clearly the quilt that Geena and I found still in the frame in her room. Glory gave no reason for why she began quilting again. Maybe her brother got better. Maybe she got better and he didn’t. At any rate, her journal entries were not chipper and bright like they had been when she was sixteen. Rather, they were fairly sedate and purposeful. There were several references to things like not having the energy to write my name, much less sit up and quilt. One entry in particular really bothered me. When I am gone, I realize that there will be nothing to show I was ever here, except my quilts. I shall never be Missus Anybody. I shall never be a mother. I shall never change the world with great acts of humanitarianism. All there will be is what my fingers have produced.

  This entry was from around May of 1922. She was dead a month later.

  So maybe the reason she began quilting again was to leave a record of her life. But then, why end it when she was in the middle of creating one of her most gorgeous pieces?

  Her death made absolutely no sense.

  Eight

  “Well, of course her death makes no sense,” Father Bingham said from behind his desk at the rectory.

  Rudy is what they call a “cradle Catholic,” but I am not. Somehow I had taken to divulging my problems to Father Bingham anyway, like some sort of regular therapy session. Maybe it was because, in this town, I felt as though I couldn’t say just anything to people. My best friend, Collette, had moved to Arizona, and although I had friends like Helen and others, I couldn’t just dump on them about people and problems within their own town. My mother was a good listener, but being married to the mayor, who at one point had been sheriff, sort of gave her a conflict of interest. I could still go to my mother with all sorts of things, but now there were some categories of problems that I no longer felt I could discuss with her.

  Enter Father Bingham.

  “So, you agree?” I asked.

  “Suicide never makes sense,” he said.

  “It must make sense to some people, or they wouldn’t do it.”

  “At the time they are committing the act, they’ve convinced themselves that there is no way out,” he said. “They’ve convinced themselves that their problems are so huge, their pain so great, that there is no other answer. Almost always, a year later or five years later, whatever their problem was works itself out. Of course, they’ll never know that.”

  “Yes, but…”

  “You can’t make sense of something that you’ve never experienced,” he said. “It’s sort of how we, as Westerners, can’t understand how Muslim women can tolerate their position in their society. We say things like, ‘Can’t they see they’re being manipulated and bullied?’ But they don’t see it that way. They look at you in your
jeans and T-shirt and think that you’re out walking around half-naked and shameful. Neither one of you can fully understand the other’s feelings because you’ve never been in the other’s place. It’s foreign to you. Suicide is foreign to you, unless you’ve attempted it or contemplated it yourself.”

  “But why?”

  Father Bingham took a long draw on his pipe and then tapped it on his ashtray. It was an action that I had watched my Grandpa Keith do a thousand times. Maybe that’s why I connect to Father Bingham. He reminds me of my grandpa.

  “Some people commit suicide because they are truly depressed. They have a chemical imbalance in the brain. According to your research, Glory speaks of not having the energy to get out of bed. Depression does that to some people. Saps them of all their energy. They stop doing the things they love, like, in Glory’s case, quilting.”

  “Ah, but she gave a reason for that,” I said.

  “Nevertheless. Some people end their lives because they can’t face their loved ones with something they’ve done. Quite often, it’s nothing more than ego. They can’t face people. Sometimes they can’t live with an unspeakable act. Some people just see no hope for the future. Sometimes they are so mentally ill that they are in pain every single day of their lives. Sometimes they commit suicide out of anger. I actually knew a young man who took his own life as revenge against his father. He knew the thing that would bother his father most was for him to die. The ridiculous thing is, then he wasn’t around to enjoy his success in hurting his father.”

  I shook my head. “So what do you think happened to the Kendall family?”

  “I told you yesterday that I don’t have a clue, but I think there was a lot of pain in that house. Just from things that townspeople have said.”

  I thought of the drawings in Rupert’s room—and the restraints.

  “What about posttraumatic stress disorder?” I asked. “I think Rupert Kendall was suffering from it. Could his illness somehow have infected the rest of the family?”

  “What, you mean his attitude somehow rubbed off on them?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, I’m no expert, but I do think if you had to live with somebody who was suffering from PTSD, especially at a time when it really wasn’t understood, it would be very difficult to accommodate. I imagine Glory probably had to take care of her brother, since her mother had already died. What must that have been like for her? She must have witnessed some pretty scary and ugly things coming from him, if he was truly suffering from PTSD. I could see how that would depress her.”

  I said nothing.

  “Are you certain he had PTSD?”

  “Oh…,” I said, remembering those stricken faces sketched on Rupert’s walls, “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Without the proper medical attention … Well, imagine a young girl having to deal with that on a daily basis? It probably did wear at her. Probably ground her down to just a shell,” he said.

  “So you think that Rupert’s disorder affected Glory so much that she became depressed enough to kill herself?”

  “I am no expert,” he said. “I’m just saying that I could see how that situation would be difficult. Especially back then. With no medical or outside help. It would have all fallen to Glory, most likely. I think it would have made her doubt everything. Especially if she loved her brother. What must that have been like, for a sheltered girl to suddenly see a brother she loves in such mental anguish?”

  “Right,” I said. “In a world that didn’t respect life, but only death.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Something she wrote in her quilt journal,” I said.

  “You have a journal of hers?” he asked. “Doesn’t that give you some clues?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly a diary. It’s something she journaled her quilts in, so she only gives hints of what was going on. She was clearly devoted to him, and she was greatly affected by his disorder. I can tell that much from the diary.”

  He made a gesture with his hands as if that explained it all.

  “But she was equally devoted to her craft. I just can’t make it right. Not that she wouldn’t end her own life, but that she would do it before she finished her last quilt. That seems completely out of character for her.”

  “Maybe it all became too much,” Father Bingham said.

  “Or,” I said, suddenly sitting up straight, “maybe Rupert had killed himself first, and she couldn’t bear to go on. Unfinished quilt or not.”

  Father Bingham nodded in my direction, agreeing to what I said.

  “I’ve got to get to a library and find some newspapers,” I said. “I’ll bet you anything, Rupert killed himself first, and Glory couldn’t take it. That would make sense.”

  Father Bingham smiled at me. “Sometimes there are no pat answers,” he said. “There are some things that you’ll never make right.”

  “Yeah, but not for lack of trying,” I said, and stood. “Thanks, Father.”

  I called the Gaheimer House on the way out of the rectory. My sister, Stephanie, answered the phone on the second ring. “Steph, it’s me, Torie.”

  Stephanie is my younger half sister, and I only just discovered she existed a few years back. When I met her she was a history teacher, but she had since quit her job and come to work for me part-time. It gave her more time to be with her new baby and her daughter. We are a lot alike, which lends credence to that whole biology-over-environment thing. We don’t look too much alike, but we do have the same eyes. In fact, it had been her eyes that convinced me she was telling me the truth when she showed up in my office, claiming to be my sister. I had, of course, been in denial—especially when I’d discovered that my father had known about her for years, had even gone to see her, and had never told me—but when I got over the hurt, I gained a fantastic addition to my family. In fact, I liked having a sister so much that I had jokingly asked my father if there were any more half siblings wandering around that I could rein in. He had muttered something about me being a brat, and no, there were no others.

  “Hey, Torie, when are you coming in?” she asked.

  “Not for another couple of hours. I’m headed over to Wisteria to look up something in the Granite County newspapers,” I said. “I just wanted to give you a heads-up that a woman named Geena Campbell would be coming by.”

  “What for?” she asked. “And what are all these quilts in the front room?”

  “That’s why she’s coming,” I said. “She’s an appraiser and a quilt historian. Just give her whatever she needs. Call my cell phone if she’s got any questions.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll talk to you when you get here.”

  As I drove out to Wisteria, I dialed my real estate agent and told her I wanted to make an offer on the Kendall house. She said she would get back to me with specifications of the asking price and so forth. I couldn’t let that house go to anybody else, particularly Eleanore. For one thing, I wanted a World War I historian to photograph and document Rupert’s room.

  Wisteria is the largest town in Granite County, which isn’t saying much. The population has grown considerably over the past few years, and it’s now around twenty thousand people. Main Street through town should be renamed Fast Food Alley, as every fast-food chain in the Midwest seems to be represented here.

  There’s no point in going all the way up to the St. Louis County library when the Wisteria library holds the Granite County newspapers. The librarians know me here. In fact, I’d say every librarian within a sixty-mile radius knows who I am. Today’s librarian, a small blonde named Hilary, waved at me as I came in and nodded when I signed in to use the microfilm reader.

  Once I was set up on a microfilm reader, I flipped through the pages until I came to the article about Glory. I had looked her up first, because I knew the exact date of her death, whereas I only knew the year that Rupert had died. It would save time.

  Not only did Glory Anne Kendall’s suicide make the front page—it was a small commu
nity, after all—but the paper had a photograph of her as well. I put money in the reader and made copies of the article, but I read it sitting there anyway. According to the paper, Glory had taken a large dose of laudanum to kill herself. Her father gave a statement claiming that since her brother’s suicide she had been melancholy and took no joy in life. The paper said that Rupert Kendall had hanged himself from the tree in the backyard in November 1921. They described Rupert as being a “tormented soldier.”

  Sandy Kendall had even shown the police a vial of laudanum that he had found among his daughter’s things. There was a photograph of him holding the vial up for the paper. Sandy was described as the son of a “northern banker” who had followed in his father’s footsteps. He was of statuesque build and great height, towering over everybody at the crime scene, including his distraught son Whalen.

  I then put in a new microfilm for 1921 and found the article about Rupert Kendall. The headline read, “The Great War Claims Yet Another Life.” Straight up, the article portrayed Rupert as disturbed and unable to live within society since returning from France. He’d participated in the second Battle of the Somme, where American casualties were enormous. The article also said that Rupert had not returned to Missouri directly after the war, and for months nobody knew where he was. Finally, he returned home and literally never left the sanctuary of the grounds on Haggeman Road.

  Neighbors talked of seeing him sitting on the front porch; occasionally he would sit in the backyard and stare at the giant oak tree—the tree where they had found his body. Other neighbors claimed to have heard screaming from the house. They said that upon visiting, they would find Rupert “unruly,” “angry,” and “wild.”

  One woman told a story of how her dog had become ill and, rather than let the dog suffer, her husband had put it out of its misery by shooting it in the backyard. According to the woman, when Rupert heard the gunshot, he jumped off of the porch and ran around the yard screaming. It had taken his sister, Glory, two hours to coax him out of his hiding place behind the shed.