The Quilt on Our Pickup Tailgate

The tailgate

The fair parking lot is a big gravel field on the east side of the grounds, between the grandstand and the county road. By six-thirty in the morning in the last week of July it is already warm, and the dew is burning off the grass along the fence line, and the first pickups with stock trailers are rolling in toward the cattle barns.

We took a spot near the main walk-through gate, where everybody coming from the lot had to pass. I backed in, so the tailgate faced the gate.

Then we did it the way Ruth said to do it.

Brian had come by before dawn on his way home from the plant and left a length of two-by-two lumber in the bed, cut to the width of the truck, with two C-clamps. He had not said a word about it. He had just left it there with a note on a feed store receipt that said “For the top. Love, B.”

We clamped the board across the top of the bed. I stood up in the bed of the truck in my sneakers, and Abby handed the quilt up to me, and I unfolded it over the board and let it fall.

It hung down over the open tailgate almost to the gravel. The morning sun came across the lot low and gold and lit up the rings so they looked like they were moving.

I clipped the top corners to the board with Ruth’s wooden clothespins, one every eight inches, because Ruth was supervising from below and that is how she wanted it.

“Straighten that left side,” she said. “There. Now come down here and look at it.”

I climbed down and stood beside her. Abby stood on the other side of the tailgate in her T-shirt and jeans, with her braid down her back, and looked at her quilt hanging in the open air for the first time in its life.

“Oh,” she said.

That was all. Just “oh.”

Ruth unfolded her lawn chair right beside it, sat down, poured herself a cup of coffee from the thermos, and set the molasses cookies on the bumper.

The only sign we put up was a piece of cardboard from a case of canning jars, propped against the back tire, that Abby lettered in marker. Ruth would not allow anything else on it.

It said: “Double wedding ring. Abby Moeller, age 14. Hand quilted, about 400 hours. Taught by her great-grandma Ruth, age 91.”

Nothing about the tag. Nothing about the judging. Nothing about Carla.

“Let the work talk,” Ruth said. “It’s better at it than we are.”

People

The first person to stop was a farm wife in a sleeveless blouse with two little boys hanging off her arms. She stopped dead in the middle of the gravel and said, “Oh, my word, look at the points on that.”

Then she came closer and ran her finger along a seam without touching the top, the way quilters do, and she looked at Abby and said, “You did this? By hand?”

“Most of it,” Abby said. “The arcs are machine pieced. The quilting is all by hand.”

“How many to the inch?”

“Ten. Grandma Ruth made me get to ten.”

The woman looked at Ruth in the lawn chair. Ruth raised her coffee cup.

“She ripped out more than she kept, the first year,” Ruth said. “That’s how you get there.”

By seven-thirty there were a dozen people. By nine there were forty. I know because a retired fellow in a seed corn cap who was working the gate as a fair volunteer had a little silver hand clicker he used to count cars, and he started clicking people instead, just for fun.

“That’s sixty-two,” he called over around nine-thirty. “You’re outdrawing the rabbit barn.”

That is how it works at a county fair. If twelve people are standing in a clump, the thirteenth has to go see why.

They were farm wives and church ladies and grandfathers in suspenders. A van of women from a Lutheran quilting circle in Postville walked through the lot. Two of them asked Abby if they could turn the bottom corner up to see the back, and she said yes, and they looked, and one of them put her hand on her heart.

I didn’t know why yet. I was busy handing out molasses cookies.

There were men, too. A big rancher in a pearl-snap shirt stood in front of it for a good two minutes with his arms crossed, then said to nobody in particular, “My mother made one of those. Took her the whole winter of ’79.” He took a cookie and walked away and then came back ten minutes later with his wife.

A girl about eight asked Abby if the circles were hard. Abby crouched down to her level and showed her where two of the arcs met and said, “Every one of these points I had to do over at least once. Some of them five times. It’s okay to do stuff over.”

I had to walk around to the cab for a minute after that.