The Caps My Wife Knit for the Ward
The Bottom of the Basket
I have to tell you about the basket now, because I have been carrying you toward it this whole time, the same slow way I carried it up in that elevator.
That first Thursday, after I sat down and wound the yarn, Donna did something with Margie’s oak basket.
She did not just pull the yarn out of it to use. She turned the whole thing out, careful, onto the card table, to sort through what was in there, because Margie always kept her project yarn and her notions all jumbled in together.
Out came the balls of blue, and the stitch markers, and a cloth tape measure worn soft as an old dollar bill, and a little pair of scissors shaped like a stork, a thing I had bought her at a fair forty years back.
And out came Margie’s pattern book, a spiral notebook gone fat and soft with nineteen years of use, every cap pattern written out in her own hand, with notes in the margins about which yarn was too scratchy and which colors the children always picked first.
And at the very bottom of the basket, underneath all of it, wrapped up in a square of tissue paper, there was a cap I had never once seen.
It was not a small soft chemo cap. It was a man’s cap, a watch cap, in a dark gray wool, made big enough for a head like mine.
Donna unwrapped it on the table and went still, and the whole circle around me went quiet all at once.
Pinned to it was a scrap of paper in Margie’s hand, her tired last year handwriting, and it said, For Walt, for when the barn gets cold, finish the ribbing.
She had been making me a cap. In her last weeks, in between the blue one for a stranger she would never meet, she had started one for her own husband, and she had not been able to finish the ribbing, and she had tucked it down at the bottom of the basket where I would not find it until I was good and ready to.
I sat there with that gray wool in my two big hands, the same hands that had held the steering wheel steady all those years while she carried her sacks up the stairs, and I could not get out one single word.
Donna reached across the card table and laid her hand flat on the back of mine.
And she said, we will finish the ribbing, Walt. That is a thing we know how to do up here.
Four Hundred and Counting
They finished my cap the very next Thursday. Donna did the ribbing herself, and she made me try it on in front of the whole circle, and it fit, and I have worn it out to the barn every cold morning since.
And I finished Margie’s blue one. That one took me a good deal longer.
Donna taught me the last inch of it, stitch by stitch, over the better part of a month, and my tension was all wrong and it came out a little crooked, but it is soft, and it has no seam in it to rub a sore head.
We counted it up, the two of us, back through the hospital’s own records and Margie’s notebook.
The blue cap, the one that had been sitting on her needles since October, the one I finished with my clumsy truck driver hands in the spring, was the four hundredth cap.