The Knitting Circle Set Me Up

For eleven years I was the woman who found everybody else somebody. I paired off half of Dunmore County from a card table at the back of the Lutheran fellowship hall, with a skein of worsted weight wool in my lap and a clipboard I was not supposed to admit I kept. I matched the widower who ran the seed store with the lady who taught piano. I matched the man who repaired tractors with the nurse from the clinic in Ashby. I matched two people at a single funeral once, which I will not defend and will not apologize for either, because they have been married nine years now and they send me a card every Easter.

What I never did, not once in those eleven years, was think about myself. I had buried my husband Orrin in the spring of 1999, and I had decided somewhere in the long flat months after that the matchmaking would be my company. Other people’s happiness would be the warm thing I kept in the house. I was sixty-eight years old and I was good at it and I did not need a thing for myself, thank you very much.

So I want you to understand the size of what happened the autumn the circle mixed up the cards. Because they did not set out to find me anybody. They set out to find a widower named Pell Hargrove a wife, the way I had taught them to. And through a clerical disaster involving two index cards, a church coffee urn, and my own bossy handwriting, they set me up instead. And it worked. It worked better than anything I ever arranged for anybody.

Let me start at the table.

The card table at the back of the hall

The circle met Thursdays at the Bethel Lutheran fellowship hall in Dunmore, Nebraska, a town of about nine hundred people set down in the corn like a button sewn onto a quilt. We had been the Thursday Stitchers since before I joined, but everybody in three counties knew us by the other thing we did, which was marry people off. We never advertised it. You did not need to advertise a thing like that in a town where the grain elevator and the Casey’s were the only two buildings taller than a barn.

There were six of us that fall. There was Imogene Lott, who was eighty-one and could not knit a straight row anymore but came for the coffee and the gossip and to render verdicts, which she did the way a judge renders them, slow and final. There was Verbena Stoll, who farmed sixty acres of soybeans by herself after her husband passed and had hands like a man’s and a heart like a wet dishrag, soft all the way through. There was Lurleen Apgar, the young one, fifty-four, who ran the post office annex and therefore knew everything about everybody before they knew it themselves. There was Sigrid Aamodt, the Norwegian woman from out by the river, who said almost nothing and missed almost nothing. There was Odessa Pruett, the pastor’s widowed sister, who kept the urn going and the cookies coming. And there was me. Vesta. Vesta Quall. The one with the clipboard.

Here is how the matchmaking worked, because the mechanics matter for the disaster that is coming. When somebody in the county lost a spouse, and enough time had passed that it was decent to think about it, somebody on the circle would put a card in. Just an index card. On the front went the person’s name and a few plain facts. Widower. Sixty-six. Runs the seed store on Route 9. Good to his late wife, you could see it in how he kept the planters. Keeps a clean truck. Lonely as a fencepost in January. On the back went the matches we were considering, in pencil, so we could erase and argue.

We kept the cards in a recipe box. A green tin recipe box that had once held Odessa’s mother’s bars and cobblers, with little tabbed dividers, except instead of Desserts and Casseroles the tabs said Available, Considering, Spoken For, and one tab in the very back, faded, that said Long Shots. We did most of our best work out of Long Shots.

I had a rule about the cards. The rule was that I wrote them. My handwriting, my pencil, so the box stayed legible and so nobody put down something cruel that the person would hate to see. Verbena once tried to write tighter than a tick on a card and I made her erase it. We were not in the business of being unkind. We were in the business of company. There is a difference and I held the line on it.

That fall, the card that started everything was Pell Hargrove’s.

Pell Hargrove’s card

Pell Hargrove had lost his wife Maribel in February. He farmed corn and a little cattle out on the Loup road, eight miles from town, and he had come to church exactly twice since the funeral and left both times before the last hymn so he would not have to stand in the narthex and be condoled at. Verbena knew him because their fields touched along a county line. She said he was not doing well. She said he had let the yard go, which from a man like Pell was the same as a distress flare.

So in September I wrote his card. I can quote it because I wrote it in my own hand and I have it still. Pell Hargrove. 70. Farms corn and cattle, Loup road. Lost Maribel in February, 41 years married. Quiet. Hard worker. Builds furniture in the winter, beautiful work, made the pews refinished in the side chapel. Will not ask for help and will not take it offered loud. Needs somebody who can sit in a quiet room and not need it filled. On the back, in pencil, I had started a list of women to consider for him. Three names. We argued about all three for two Thursdays running.

And here is the thing that mattered and that nobody noticed at the time. While we were arguing about Pell, I had also been quietly, privately, writing a different card. A card I had not put in the box. A card I had been carrying in my cardigan pocket for about a week, half ashamed of it, taking it out at night and putting it back.

Because that September, for the first time in eleven years, I had felt the smallest crack open up in the wall I had built. I do not know exactly what did it. I think it was a Tuesday when I came home from the clinic in Ashby, where I volunteer Tuesdays, and the house was so quiet that I stood in the kitchen with my coat still on for a full ten minutes, not doing anything, just standing, and I heard myself think a thought I had not let myself think in over a decade. The thought was, I would like somebody to be home when I get home.

That was all. I would like somebody to be home.

So I wrote a card. My own card. I felt foolish doing it, a sixty-eight year old woman writing herself up like a heifer at the county fair, but I wrote it. Vesta Quall. 68. Widow, 27 years. Runs the circle, which everybody knows. Volunteers Tuesdays at the Ashby clinic. Reads too much. Talks too much, knows it. Would like, after all this time, for somebody to be home when she gets home. I did not write any matches on the back. I could not. I could match anybody in the county to anybody else, and I could not write a single name on the back of my own card. I just carried it in my pocket like a stone you keep because it is smooth.

And then came the Thursday of the coffee urn.

The Thursday of the coffee urn

It was the third Thursday of September and we were going to settle Pell Hargrove’s match. We had narrowed his list to one. The match we had settled on, after two weeks of argument, was a widow named Cordelia Fenn from over in Ashby, a retired home-economics teacher, calm, capable, a quiet-room sort of woman, and we were all agreed. I was going to write Cordelia’s name on the back of Pell’s card in pen, which was the circle’s way of saying final, and then Lurleen, who saw Cordelia at the post office annex, was going to find a natural way to mention to Pell that the circle thought highly of her. That was the whole gentle machine of it. We never pushed. We just opened a door and let people walk through it themselves.

But that Thursday two things happened at the same time and that is always how a disaster gets built, two ordinary things at the same time.

The first thing was that the big silver coffee urn, which was thirty years old and had a temper, finally died, and it died loud, with a pop and a hiss, and Odessa cried out and we all jumped up from the table because there was hot water and steam going everywhere across the counter and toward the wall outlet, and for about four minutes the whole circle was a fire brigade, mopping with the cookie napkins and unplugging things and Verbena hauling the urn off the counter with her farm hands wrapped in her own cardigan so she would not burn.

The second thing was that in the scramble, the cards went everywhere.

The green recipe box had been open on the table. I had taken Pell’s card out to write Cordelia’s name on the back, the final pen, and I had set it down when the urn blew. And my own card, my secret heifer card, had been in my cardigan pocket, and when I yanked my cardigan off to help Verbena throw it over the hot urn, my card came out of the pocket and fluttered down onto the table, and in the wet and the mopping and the napkins, it landed face down right next to Pell’s card, two index cards in my own handwriting, both face down, both with names I had written, and we mopped around them and over them and through them, and when the smoke cleared and we sat back down breathing hard and laughing the way you laugh when a thing was almost bad and was not, somebody, and to this day none of us will own it, somebody slid both cards back into the box.

Into the same tab.

Into Considering.

What Lurleen did with the wrong card

Now here is where you have to understand Lurleen Apgar, because Lurleen is the engine of this whole thing and she is the most well-meaning woman God ever made and that is exactly the trouble.

The plan, after we settled Pell, was that Lurleen would carry the news gently outward. Her job was to take the settled card, see whose name was matched on it, and find a soft natural way to bring the two people into the same room. She had done it a dozen times. She was wonderful at it. She could make a fated meeting look like a coincidence at the seed store.

So the next morning Lurleen came into the fellowship hall early, before her shift at the annex, to get the settled card and start her gentle work. And she opened the box, and she went to Considering, and she pulled out the top card, expecting Pell Hargrove with Cordelia Fenn penned on the back.

What she pulled out was my card.

Vesta Quall. 68. Widow. Would like somebody to be home when she gets home. No match penned on the back, because I had never been able to write one.

And here is the part that I did not learn until much later, and that breaks my heart a little every time I think of it. Lurleen looked at that card, my card, in my handwriting, with no match on the back, and she did not think, this is a mistake. Lurleen thought, oh. Lurleen thought, oh, the circle decided to do Vesta. Finally. And they left the back blank because they want me to find her somebody. Because in eleven years I had never once put myself in the box, and Lurleen had quietly thought for years that somebody ought to, and now here, she believed, was the circle finally doing it, leaving the match to her because she was the one who saw the whole county come through the annex.

She did not tell me. She did not tell anybody. She thought she was honoring a quiet decision the circle had made. She slipped the card into her purse, and she went to work, and she started, with the full force of her enormous well-meaning heart, to find Vesta Quall a husband.

And she had a card right there in her purse, in my own handwriting, with the facts of a good man on it. The card she thought was her shortlist. Pell Hargrove. 70. Loup road. Quiet. Builds furniture. Needs somebody who can sit in a quiet room and not need it filled.

She did not match me to Pell on purpose. She did not even fully decide it. She just had two cards in her purse, mine and his, the way you sometimes carry two halves of one thing without knowing they fit, and the simplest, nearest, ready-made match for the woman on the blank-backed card was the good quiet man on the other card. So that is the man she went to work on.

She set out to set up Vesta Quall with Pell Hargrove. And she thought the entire knitting circle had asked her to.

The Saturday at the lumber counter

Lurleen’s method, when she wanted two people in a room, was never a setup. She hated the word. Her method was the manufactured errand.

She knew Pell came into Dunmore on Saturday mornings for lumber, because he built his furniture in the winter and laid in his boards in the fall. And she knew, because she was a genius of this, that the hardware and lumber yard on Route 9 had a bulletin board where the church posted things, and that if she pinned a notice there about the circle needing somebody to refinish the fellowship hall benches before the Advent suppers, a man who had refinished the side-chapel pews for free and never told a soul would see it, and would not be able to help himself.

Then she told me, casually, on the phone, that the benches in the fellowship hall were a disgrace and somebody ought to look at them, and that she had heard a fellow might come by the hall Saturday around ten to give an estimate, and would I, since I had a key and was the sensible one, just be there to let him in and point at the benches.

I said of course. I am the sensible one. I had no idea I was the heifer.

So Saturday at ten I was at the fellowship hall in my good cardigan, the green one, with my hair done, which I want to be honest about, because Lurleen on the phone had said do try to look nice, Vesta, it reflects on the church, and I had thought that was a strange thing to say about a bench estimate but I am vain enough that I did my hair.

And in came Pell Hargrove.

I knew him to see him. Eight miles of country was between his church and his weekday life and mine, but in a county that size you know a face. He came in with his cap in his hand, which I noticed, a man who takes his cap off indoors, and he stood in the door of that fellowship hall and looked at me and looked at the benches and looked back at me, and there was the most particular confusion on his face, the confusion of a man who has been told one thing and is finding another.

Because, and I did not know this either, Lurleen had worked the other end too. Lurleen had not pinned a notice about benches. Lurleen had called Pell’s nephew, who farmed with him, and had let it be known, gently, the way she let everything be known, that the woman who ran the church circle, the widow Quall, had heard about Maribel and wanted to talk to him about, she had said, some quiet help. And Pell, who would not take help offered loud, had heard quiet help and had come, braced, expecting a casserole and a Bible verse and the worst hour of his month.

So there we stood. Me, told I was meeting a bench man. Him, told he was meeting a church lady with a casserole and pity. Both of us set up by a woman who thought she was carrying out the will of the entire knitting circle, working off two index cards in my own handwriting that had landed face down next to each other in a flood of coffee.

“You’re not here about the benches,” I said. It just came out.

“No, ma’am,” Pell said. “I was told you wanted to talk to me about some quiet help. After Maribel.” He turned his cap around in his hands one full time. “I’ll be honest, I almost didn’t come.”

And I do not know what made me do it. I think it was the cap turning in his hands. I think it was that I had spent eleven years reading exactly that gesture across a card table and pairing it off to somebody, and I had never once stood inside of it. I reached into my cardigan pocket, the green one, out of an old habit, and my fingers found nothing, because of course my card was in Lurleen’s purse eight miles and one disaster away, and the empty pocket somehow undid me completely.

“Mr. Hargrove,” I said, “I am going to tell you the truth, because I think we have both been managed by people who love us. I did not arrange to meet you. And I do not believe you came for benches. I think a friend of mine got two pieces of paper mixed up. But since we are both standing here with our hair done.”

He almost smiled. Just the corner of it.

“Would you sit down,” I said, “and have a cup of coffee that I will make in a saucepan, because our urn died. And we will figure out which one of us is the bench and which one is the church lady.”

The coffee in the saucepan

He sat. I made coffee in a saucepan on the little stove in the church kitchen, and it was terrible coffee, and we both drank it.

We talked for three hours. I had not talked to a man for three hours since before Orrin died. He told me about Maribel, forty-one years, and how the quiet in the house after was not the absence of noise, it was the absence of somebody to be quiet with, which is a different thing entirely, and which I had been trying to put into words for twenty-seven years and never had. I told him about Orrin, and about the matchmaking, and about how I had paired off half the county and never once thought of myself, and about the Tuesday I stood in my kitchen with my coat on for ten minutes.

And then, because I am who I am, I told him about the card. The whole foolish thing. The heifer card I had carried in my pocket for a week, the one that said would like somebody to be home when she gets home, the one that had fluttered out next to his in the flood. I told him I thought that card was probably, right that minute, in Lurleen Apgar’s purse, being used as a shortlist to find me a husband by a woman who believed the whole circle had voted on it.

Pell Hargrove set down his terrible saucepan coffee and he laughed. A real one, from down low, the laugh of a man who had not laughed since February. “So,” he said, “the church circle that marries off the whole county finally married off its own matchmaker. And nobody meant to.”

“Nobody meant to,” I said.

“And they did it,” he said, “with a card you wrote on yourself and were too shy to finish.”

“I could not write a name on the back,” I said.

He was quiet a moment. Then he said, “What if I write it.”

I did not say anything. I could not.

“I build things in the winter,” Pell said. “I am better with my hands than my mouth. But I could, if you let me, write one name on the back of that card. When Mrs. Apgar gives it back.” He looked at me very steady. “Mine.”

What we did about Lurleen

Now I want to tell you the part that I think makes this a heartland story and not just a love story, because the difference is the town, and the town is the point.

Pell and I had a choice to make about Lurleen Apgar. She had, after all, done a thing she should not have done. She had taken a private card I never put in the box. She had set me up without asking me. She had managed two grown people with manufactured errands and a tale about quiet help. By the strict letter of the circle’s own rules, the rules I myself wrote and enforced, Lurleen had committed about four violations before lunch.

And here is what we did. We did nothing. We let her think it had worked exactly as she planned.

Because when I sat with it that night, in the quiet of my own kitchen, with my coat finally off, I understood what Lurleen had actually done. For eleven years, six women had watched me give the whole county the one thing I would not give myself. And not one of them had ever said a word, because you do not embarrass a proud woman, and I am a proud woman. And then a flood of coffee had handed Lurleen a card with my name on it and no match on the back, and instead of bringing it to me and embarrassing me, instead of saying Vesta, this is yours, finish it, she had simply, quietly, lovingly, taken it on herself to do for me the thing I could not do for myself. She honored a decision the circle never actually made, because she wished with her whole heart that we had made it.

That is not a violation. That is the most decent thing anybody had done for me in twenty-seven years. It only looked like a mistake.

So the next Thursday, the whole circle assembled, and the urn was replaced with a new one Verbena had bought, and I came in and sat down at the card table, and I said, “I have an announcement, and Lurleen, I want you to give me the card from your purse.”

Lurleen went white. She thought she was caught. She thought I had found out she had taken a card without the circle’s say, and she started to stammer out that she had been so sure we had decided to do me, that the card had been blank on the back, that she had only wanted.

“Lurleen,” I said. “Give me the card.”

She gave me Pell’s card, the one she had been using as a shortlist, the good quiet man on the Loup road. And then, because she could not help herself, she gave me the other one too. My card. My heifer card. Would like somebody to be home when she gets home. Still blank on the back.

And I took my pencil, the circle pencil, the one I had written eleven years of other people’s chances with, and I turned my own card over, and in front of all of them I wrote one name on the back.

Pell Hargrove.

And then I told them everything. The flood, the two face-down cards, the bench man who was not a bench man, the church lady who was not bringing a casserole, the three hours and the saucepan coffee and the man who took his cap off indoors and offered to write one name. Imogene Lott, eighty-one, rendered her verdict, which was, “Well, it’s about time, and it took a broken coffee pot to do what six women couldn’t,” and Verbena cried into her soybean hands, and Sigrid Aamodt said nothing and smiled the largest smile any of us had ever seen on her, and Odessa Pruett went and got the cookies, and Lurleen Apgar put her face down on the card table and wept with relief that she was not in trouble, and I put my hand on the back of her head the way you do a child, and I said, “You did the one match in eleven years I never could have done myself. You’re the best of us. You always were.”

The benches did get refinished

Pell and I were married the following June, at Bethel Lutheran, in the same fellowship hall, and I will tell you that the benches in that hall got refinished after all, because Pell did it that winter, beautiful work, the grain brought up gold, and there is a little brass plate on the end of the first one that nobody but the circle understands. It says In gratitude for the urn.

We have been married four years now. He is home when I get home. I am home when he gets home. That was the whole of what I wanted, written on a card I was too shy to finish, and it turns out it is a very great deal to be given.

The circle still meets Thursdays. We still keep the green recipe box, and we still work mostly out of the Long Shots tab in the back, because that is where the best work is. But I made one change to the system, and I made it the first Thursday after my wedding, and the circle voted it in unanimously.

There is a new rule now. The rule is that everybody in the circle has to put her own card in the box. Name on the front, facts on the front, and the back left blank, because you are not allowed to match yourself. Somebody else has to do it. We pass them around at Christmas. Most years nothing comes of most of them, because most of us are old and settled and content. But the cards go in. Because the lesson of the flood, the lesson I learned at sixty-eight with my coat on in my kitchen and again at the lumber counter that was not about lumber, is that the people who spend their lives finding everybody else somebody are exactly the people who will never, ever do it for themselves.

They need a flood. They need a broken coffee urn and two face-down cards and a friend with a heart so big she will set you up without asking and believe the whole town told her to.

I matched half of Dunmore County for eleven years. And the best match of my life, the only one I could not arrange, got arranged for me, by accident, by the kindest mistake anyone ever made. Lurleen Apgar still says she meant to do it. We let her. She earned it.

And the urn, the old one that blew, the one that started everything? Verbena had it bronzed. It sits on the windowsill in the fellowship hall, dented and dead and beautiful, and every new bride that circle has had a hand in since, and there have been a few, gets her picture taken next to it before she walks down the aisle.

Best thing that ever broke in that building. Mine included.

This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.