Thirty Quilters and a Red Barn Door

It took us the whole day to get the star drawn right. Every time a line came out wrong, Melvina had us wipe it and do it again, and nobody complained once.

By four in the afternoon there were eight points laid out from the center of that square, and every one of them was true.

Melvina stood up out of her chair with help and looked down at it a long time.

“That’s close,” she said. “That’s very close to hers.”

The third Saturday was the blue. We had matched it from an old photograph of the barn that Ardith had dug out of the guild scrapbook, a picture somebody took for a newsletter in 2007.

The paint store mixed it from the photo, a deep cornflower blue, three quarts of it.

Women painted on their knees in my grass with little foam brushes, staying inside Melvina’s pencil lines.

Ernestine, who is 86, painted lying on her side on a folded quilt because her knees were done for, and she painted the best edges of anybody.

Somebody hummed while she worked. I don’t know who started it. It was “Blessed Assurance,” and after a while three or four of them were humming it together, low, and nobody sang the words. They just kept painting.

The fourth Saturday was the gold. And at the end of that day, after the gold was on and dry to the touch, Ardith came and found me in my kitchen where I was washing out brushes.

She handed me the smallest brush in the guild’s whole kit, a little thing with about six hairs on it.

“The corner’s yours,” she said.

I didn’t understand her at first. Then I did.

I went out to the plywood with the little brush and a jar lid of gold paint.

I knelt in the grass in the bottom right corner, where Mom had painted hers twenty years before. I painted A.K. and E.K., and under them, 1961, about the size of a postage stamp.

My hand shook so bad that I had to stop twice. Nobody said anything.

When I finished and looked up, the women still in my yard were standing in a loose ring around me, not talking, and some of them were wiping their eyes with the backs of their hands.

Nobody Told Mom

Not one of those thirty women told my mother. I still don’t know how they managed it.

The only other person who knew besides the guild was Percival.

Percival lives two farms down from the home place. He was a lineman for the electric co-op for thirty-one years before he retired, and when he retired he bought an old bucket truck at a utility auction and started trimming trees for people around the township. He’s 72 and still goes up in it most weeks.

He saw the plywood lying in my yard on the second Saturday when he came to town for feed and slowed down to look.

He pulled over and walked into the backyard and stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking at the star Melvina had drawn.

“That’s Arlys’s,” he said. “That’s the one off the hayloft door.”

“It’s a new one,” I said. “Tammy had the old one painted over.”

He nodded slowly. He didn’t say anything about Tammy. He just looked up at the sky like he was figuring something.

“Nine feet up that wall is no place to hang a four by four alone off a ladder,” he said. “You’ll want a man on the ground holding the bottom.”

I tried to tell him he didn’t have to. He waved me off.

“I hung lines in ice storms for thirty-one years,” he said. “I think I can hang a quilt.”