The Quilts They Threw Away

Forty-Four

We were in that dumpster until a quarter past four.

I will not tell you it was pleasant. The rain had gotten into the top layers of bags, and those quilts were heavy as drowned dogs. Under them were Perl’s kitchen scraps, coffee grounds and eggshells, and one bag had split on a jar of bacon grease. The feed store men climbed in and handed bags up, and the women laid them on Linda’s tarps on Perl’s lawn.

The football coach showed up at noon with eleven big sophomores who had no practice that day, and by one o’clock they had a line going from the dumpster to the garage.

Ron set his hat on the hood of the squad car, climbed in in his uniform trousers, and worked beside the boys until the last bag was out. Brent stood at the edge of the lawn for the first hour. Then I noticed he was gone.

And as each quilt came out, something happened that nobody planned.

Dorothy pulled out a Log Cabin in reds and creams, a little damp at one corner but sound, and she held it up in the light, and without anyone asking her to, she bowed her head and said, very softly, “Lord, keep this one warm until its mama can.”

Nancy said it over the next one. Then Linda. Then Carol. Then every one of us, each woman holding up a quilt as it came out of its bag and saying Perl’s prayer over it, one after another, like a church bell at the top of the hour. The sophomores stopped passing bags and stood with their caps off.

We counted by the ledger, which had been in the dumpster too, wedged in a coffee can in the last bag. Perl’s handwriting had not run.

Forty-four.

Forty-four bags, one for every number on the ledger we had found: thirty-one finished quilts and thirteen pieced tops. Five of the finished ones were so stained with grease and coffee that no washing in the world would make them fit for a baby. The other six numbers, the cut-square piles from the sewing room, were simply gone, lost in a load that had already gone to the landfill on Monday.

Forty-four recovered and six lost made fifty, every number on Perl’s page accounted for. Thirty-nine we could save.

I sat down on the back step with the ledger in my lap and turned to the last page. Next to number fifty there was nothing written but a date, a week before Perl died.

Marge sat down beside me. She is a small woman, and it took her a long time to get down.

“Zona, how many days to All Saints’?”

“Nine,” I said.

“Nine days,” said Marge. “That’s about enough.”