A Story

from Quilters

by Barbara Damashek and Molly Newman

My husband and I married back in Virginia and he wanted to go west as soon as he could. He got a job laying track for the first railroad into New Mexico. When that job was done he got put to work inspecting twenty miles of track. He walked it... Could do it in a day easy if there wasn't any repair work.

I was home caring for the stock and the kids and I wanted to make something nice for him so I started on a quilt that took me two years to finish. I was always hidin' it before he came in, sometimes runnin' when he hit the door... or stashin' it in the craziest place, like one time the stove! When it was done, I called in Elizabeth, my oldest to give it to him. Her took it and studied it and studied it. I was just thinkin' maybe there was something wrong with it, when he rushed over to me and wrapped the quilt around me, swung me off my feet and sashayed me all around the kitchen. Both of us laughin' to beat the band. He was some man all right.

Next spring, I had wrapped up my work for the day and was piecin' up some scraps to cover the baby that was due in the summer. I had just lit the lamp when we heard a lot of horses comin' up the road and ridin' hard. My heart stopped and I reached way down to get my breath and ran out to the porch. There was five men from the railroad. They were sweatin' and talkin' over one another's words. There was a big bushel basket on the ground in front of them...

Jim Rice thought maybe he fell and hit his head on the tracks. Slim Henson thought maybe the heat had got to him... None of 'em could figure out why he didn't hear the train. We never did get a clear reason, but they had to bring him home to us in that bushel basket.

They tell me I didn't cry or say a word. I just sat down on the porch, kinda' in a little ball and started rockin' back and forth... rockin' and starin', rockin' and starin'.... 'Course I don't remember much now... hardly anything in fact.  Just what they tell me. I stayed in the back room; never came out. I guess it musta' been my momma come in and set a piecin' bag in front of me with a needle, a spool of thread, a pair of scissors.  I didn't know what those things were for. But one morning, my hands reached out... my hands remembered. They grabbed the top piece and sewed it to the next piece, and the next... Didn't matter what it looked like.  I never laid a cuttin' edge to any of 'em.

Four months later I had a whole quilt and the baby was born... and my eyes came clear again.