Thirty Quilters and a Red Barn Door

Asking Neal

Before I bought one board, I drove out to the farm on a Sunday afternoon and found Neal in the shop greasing the baler.

I told him straight out. I said the guild wanted to paint Mom a new barn quilt, a Lone Star in blue and gold, four feet square, and I wanted to hang it on the barn wall that faces her house for her birthday. A sheet that size was what the guild could paint, carry and lift without a crane, and I wasn’t going to cut into the red door.

I said it was his barn and I wouldn’t do it unless he said yes.

He wiped his hands on a rag and looked at the floor of the shop for a long time. Neal is like Dad. He does his thinking with his mouth shut.

“Tammy’s not going to like it,” he said.

“I know.”

“The magazine people already came,” he said. “They took their pictures. It’ll be in the October issue.” He folded the rag and set it on the workbench. “So it isn’t about the pictures anymore.”

“No,” I said. “It’s about Mom.”

He nodded slowly. Then he said, “It’s Mom’s door. It was always Mom’s door. I should have said that in June.” He looked up at me. “Hang it where she’ll see it from her step. I’ll tell Tammy myself. I don’t want her hearing it from anybody else.”

“Do you want me to talk to her?”

“No,” he said. “She’s my wife. I’ll do it.”

I never asked him what he said to her. That was between them. I only know that the next time I saw Tammy, at a graduation party in July, she said hello and nothing else.

Four Saturdays

They came to my yard on the second Saturday in July at eight in the morning. I had told Ardith maybe ten women would come. I counted thirty-one before nine o’clock.

We set up two sawhorse tables in my backyard and laid the plywood across them, one sheet of the smooth sign board cut down to a four foot square.

Vesta, whose late husband had been a carpenter, brought his old circular saw and a box of deck screws in a coffee can.

Her grandson built the frame out of treated two by fours, with a cross brace in the middle so it wouldn’t rack, and screwed it to the back of the panel.

We primed it that first Saturday. Two coats of exterior primer, rolled on by women in their 70s and 80s wearing old blouses and gardening hats, laughing about whose husband had ever let them paint anything.

At noon Ardith said grace over the potluck on my picnic table. It was a plain grace, the same one my grandmother used to say, and thirty women said amen together in my backyard while the primer dried in the sun.

I stood at the edge of it and had to look at the garage for a while.

Somebody set a coffee can on the picnic table that first morning. I had already spent about $380 at the lumberyard and the paint store, and by noon the can held more than that.

The second Saturday was the drawing. That was Melvina’s day.

Melvina had taught Mom to quilt in 1966, when Mom was a young farm wife with a baby on her hip. She came that morning with her own yardstick and her own chalk line in a little cloth bag.

She couldn’t get down on her knees anymore. So she sat in a lawn chair at the edge of the plywood and told us where to set the yardstick, and two of the younger women held the chalk line tight while a third snapped it.

“No, no,” Melvina would say. “Pull it tighter. You’re letting it sag. Arlys never let it sag.”