The Quilts They Threw Away

Number Fifty

By Friday at nine in the evening we were at forty-nine, and the last one, number fifty, was the one I had been avoiding.

It had come out of the dumpster in a bag by itself, as if someone had put it away on purpose, with a strip of masking tape across the neck that said only Z. I had set it aside on Thursday and told myself there was no time. That was not the reason.

I took it home and sat at the kitchen table after Roy had gone up to bed, and I untied the bag.

It was a top only, a nine-patch in yellow and white. In the center square, in the place of honor, was a piece of faded blue flannel printed with tiny ducks. Around it were four squares of yellow I had not seen in thirty-nine years, and I knew them the way you know a voice in the dark.

I should tell you about Danny.

In 1986 I was twenty-four years old and I had a son. We called him Danny. He was born nine weeks early at the old county hospital, the one that closed in 1991, a building with no special unit, only a nursery, a kind doctor, and a nurse who could not stop crying. He lived five days. Roy and I held him for the last of them.

I do not talk about Danny. It is not that I do not think of him. I think of him more than I can say.

The day he died, Perl, who was forty-five then and barely knew me beyond the church potluck, came to that hospital room carrying a little quilt. She had sewn it overnight, yellow, with a blue duck flannel in the middle. She did not tell me it would be all right, because she knew it would not. She laid it over him, tucked it at his feet, and stood with her hand on it, and said, almost too quietly to hear, “Lord, keep this one warm until his mama can.”

Danny was buried in that quilt. I have never been able to say what it meant to me.

I had never once asked Perl why, eight years later, she began making quilts for the Little Ones Unit. I had thought it was because of the hospital.

Pinned to the nine-patch was a note, on the back of a church bulletin, in the careful hand of a woman who knew she was running out of time.

Zona. I did not get to this one. I ran out of time and you never run out of patience, so it is yours. The ducks and the yellow are scraps from the quilt I made for Danny the night he died. I cut them from the same bolt and kept them in a cookie tin for thirty-nine years because I could not throw them out and could not figure how to give them to you. I was afraid it would only hurt.

Every quilt I ever made for that unit was for him, and for you, and for every mother who stood where you stood. I never told you. I thought you might think me foolish.

Let this one go to a mama who has nobody. When they wrap the baby, you say the words. You have never said them, and I know why. Say them this once for me. Keep it warm until his mama can. Perl.

I read it three times. Then I put my head down on the kitchen table, on the bulletin, on the yellow, and I cried the way I had not let myself cry since 1986.

When I was done, I took out the batting and the backing and my own needle, and I tied that quilt with yellow embroidery floss, knot after knot in a ring of small stars, until a quarter to two in the morning. Roy came down once in his robe and, without a word, held the lamp.

I stitched on the muslin label last. Made with prayer for a little one. Cedar Point Draw.

Then I said Perl’s prayer over it, for the first time in my life, with the last knot in my fingers. I got as far as “Lord” before I could not go on. I understood why she had written that I would need to do it in front of somebody, with a baby in the quilt.