The Quilt on Our Pickup Tailgate

The corner

Here is what was on the back of the quilt, in the bottom right corner, in blue thread no bigger than a pencil eraser.

Two sets of initials, side by side. R.M. and A.M.

Underneath the R.M. was a tiny stitched number. 1943. Underneath the A.M., 2026.

Ruth Moeller made her first quilt in 1943, when she was eight years old and her mother was laid up with a broken hip and somebody had to finish the binding on a quilt for the church auction. She had told Abby that story at the kitchen table a hundred times.

Abby had stitched it in at night, in her room, after Ruth went home. She told me later it took her four tries to get the 3 to look right.

Ruth had not seen it. Ruth’s eyes were not good for small work anymore unless she had the big magnifier lamp over her frame.

Mrs. Lindquist looked over at the lawn chair.

“Mrs. Moeller,” she said. “I think you’d better see this.”

Abby went to Ruth and helped her up out of the chair. Ruth was slow getting up. It took a minute. Nobody in that crowd moved or said a word. Abby walked her the four steps to the tailgate with one arm around her waist.

Ruth could not see the stitches. So Abby took her great-grandmother’s hand, the old hand with the thimble callus from eighty years of quilting, and she guided Ruth’s fingertip slowly across the letters.

R. M. One nine four three.

A. M. Two zero two six.

Ruth’s finger stopped on the second set of letters, and stayed there.

She did not cry. She was ninety-one years old and she had been through too much to cry in a parking lot. She just stood very still with her finger on that corner and her other hand on Abby’s arm, and her lips moved a little, like she was saying something to somebody who was not there.

Then she said, “Well. Now it’s finished.”

I heard the Lutheran quilting ladies behind me start crying. I heard the big rancher in the pearl-snap shirt clear his throat about three times. I did not hear myself, but Kim told me later I was making a noise like a teakettle.

The ribbon

Mrs. Lindquist let the corner fall. She unzipped the canvas tote bag on her shoulder.

“Every judge at this fair,” she said, loud enough for the crowd, “gets one Judge’s Choice ribbon in her packet. It is mine to give to any exhibit on these grounds that I believe deserves to be seen. The fair book says on these grounds. It does not say inside a building.”

She took out a purple rosette with a long satin tail. Printed on the center, in gold, were the words “Judge’s Choice.”

“I have been carrying this since nine o’clock this morning,” she said. “I couldn’t find anything inside to give it to. Now I know why.”

She handed it to Abby.

“You pin it, young lady,” she said. “My hands are not as steady as Mrs. Moeller’s.”

Abby pinned the purple rosette to the quilt, right in the middle of the center ring, with three hundred people watching her do it. Her hands were shaking. She got it on the second try.

The crowd clapped. It was not a big whooping clap. It was the warm, steady, Iowa kind, the kind you hear at a Sunday afternoon wedding when the couple comes back down the aisle.

Mrs. Lindquist leaned in so only Abby and I could hear.

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to stand beside it in there,” she said. “It’s a rule I’ve enforced myself for forty years. Missing signatures are missing signatures.” She glanced at me, not unkindly. “Next year, Mother, sign the tag.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“And I’ll tell you this,” she said to Abby. “The judge doesn’t make the quilt. You did. Nobody can disqualify the four hundred hours.”

Then she patted Ruth’s hand, took a molasses cookie off the bumper, and walked back toward the exhibit hall in her cardigan.