The Quilt in the Dog Crate

When Jeff and Courtney told us at Christmas that a baby was coming in July, I went home and got Grandma’s paper templates out of the cookie tin. I bought yellows and blues, because they did not know yet if it was a boy or a girl, and a good white for the path. I started that night.

I worked on it after supper, mostly, two hours an evening with the lamp pulled close. My husband Mark watched ball games beside me and learned not to set his coffee near my basket. I kept a tally in pencil on the back of a feed store calendar, because Grandma always said you should know what a thing cost you even if you never told a soul. Four marks and a slash. Four marks and a slash.

Hattie did not wait for July. She came the second week of June, five weeks ahead of herself, five pounds and one ounce. She had trouble keeping warm and trouble eating, and they kept her nine days in the NICU at the hospital there in Hutchinson.

I sewed the last of the binding in the waiting room down the hall. I was not allowed back where she was, only the parents were, so I sat under the television with Grandma’s thimble on my finger and stitched. Every evening about half past seven my little brother would come down that hall in his work boots with salt dried white on the toes, wash to the elbows at the sink, and go in to sit beside the isolette until they made him go home.

I finished the quilt on the eighth day. I counted the calendar that night. Four hundred and twelve hours. I have always just said four hundred.

There was one red center, third flower from the left on the bottom row.

I gave it to Courtney the day they brought Hattie home. She said, “Oh, wow, that’s a lot of colors,” and laid it over the back of the rocker, and I thought she was tired. She was tired. I do not take that back.

Now it was in my bathtub.

You do not put a quilt like that in a washing machine. I filled the tub with cold water and a spoonful of Orvus paste, which is what quilters use, and which you buy at the farm store in the horse aisle because it is sold as horse shampoo. I laid the quilt in flat and pressed it down with my palms and let it sit.

The first water came out gray, with gold hair floating in it.

I drained it and ran it again. The second water came out nearly clear, but when I leaned down it still smelled like dog.

The third time there was nothing wrong with the water at all. I ran it anyway. I knelt on the bath mat and pressed that quilt down under clean water with both hands, over and over, and I cried into my own bathtub like a fool, and that was what the third washing was for.

Mark came and stood in the door. He is a propane driver and not a man of many words.

“That the baby’s?” he said.

“It was in the dog’s crate.”

He was quiet a while. “You want me to go over there?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

He nodded, and went and got an old sheet, and helped me carry the quilt out dripping in a towel sling so the weight would not pop the stitches. We spread it flat on the sheet on the spare bed with the fan going. It took two days to dry.