The Quilt With My Name

Carla, on the porch

Carla came back after dark. I was on the front porch in the cold with my jacket on. She sat down in the other chair, the metal one that has been out there since before me, and for a while neither of us said anything.

“I looked you up a quilt,” she said finally. “Online. There’s a woman in Lawrenceburg does them, she could make you one looks just like it. I’d pay for it. I mean that.”

“It wouldn’t have her hands in it,” I said. “That’s the whole thing. It’s not the pattern. It’s that she sat in that chair by the window and sewed my name in the corner of it before I was even born. You can’t buy that from a woman in Lawrenceburg.”

Carla was quiet.

“I never had anybody sew my name in anything,” she said.

I turned and looked at her.

“My mother wasn’t a maker,” she said, looking out at the dark yard. “She wasn’t a keeper either. We moved eleven times before I was grown and we threw away more than we ever carried. I don’t have one thing in this world that somebody made with my name in it. Not one.” She pulled her sweater tight. “So when I married your daddy and came in this house, it was full. Full to the attic with her things. Ruth’s. Every drawer, every shelf, her quilts, her jars, her everything, still running this house three years after she moved up to the little place in town and ten minutes after she died. I know that’s small of me. But I looked at those quilts stacked on the bed in the room I was supposed to clear and I did not feel a thing but tired.”

It was the most she had ever said to me at once.

“That doesn’t give it back,” I said.

“I know it doesn’t.”

“But I’d like the name,” I said. “The Savannah lady. In your notebook.”

She looked at me a second. Then she got up and went in the house and came back with the spiral notebook and a kitchen light behind her, and she turned to the page and she ran her finger down it.

“Pruett,” she said. “That was her. An older woman, by herself, drove a tan Buick. She bought the nine-patch and a set of pillowcases and she was real particular, she went through the whole stack. I remember because she held that quilt a long time before she paid. I thought she was going to talk me down off the eight dollars.” Carla wrote on a scrap and handed it to me. “She wrote me a check for the pillowcases, so her name’s in my deposit book. Edna Pruett. Savannah. I don’t have the road, but it’s a little enough place.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’d of never sold it,” she said, “if it’d had a tag I could see.”

“It did,” I said. But I said it gentle, because I was starting to understand it was true that she never turned the corner over, and it was also true that she would not have known what she was looking at if she had.