Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters Read online

  “Hester, you won’t change her mind,” said Mrs. Stonebridge. “Maggie’s holding out for true love.”

  “As you should,” said another quilter, wistful. She was famous among the residents for her five marriages and four divorces. “I didn’t, and look where it got me.”

  “I did,” said Mrs. Blum. “I was blessed that I met my true love when I was only seventeen. He’s out there, Maggie dear. You’ll know him when you meet him.”

  “In the meantime, you’ll always have us,” said Mrs. Stonebridge. And since Mrs. Stonebridge seemed to think Maggie had made the right decision, everyone else thought so, too, and she never heard another word of dismay or disapproval on the subject.

  Two days later, Maggie walked home from the bus stop after work, dreading the thought of spending the rest of the evening alone packing up Brian’s scattered belongings. He had already returned a carton of her own things—books and CDs, an old toothbrush anyone else would have thrown out. She would have to return the faded green sweater she had borrowed from him so long ago that he had probably forgotten it had ever been his. It had been her favorite, but she could not bear to put it on anymore.

  Maggie reached her own street and passed a middle-aged couple cleaning up after a garage sale. More to procrastinate than to hunt for bargains, she browsed through some books and old vinyl albums stacked in boxes on a card table. She found a copy of Brian’s favorite Moody Blues album and had to turn away. At the next table were several folded baby blankets in pink and yellow gingham. She moved on down the aisle and had nearly summoned up enough fortitude to go home when a glimpse of faded patchwork brought her to a stop.

  It was an old quilt draped indifferently over a table. Intrigued, Maggie studied the patterns as best as she could without moving the tagged glassware displayed upon it. The two quilts she had made in her lifetime—one a Girl Scout badge requirement, the other a gift for her sister’s firstborn—by no means made her an expert on quilts, but she knew at once that this quilt was unique, a sampler of many rows of different, unfamiliar blocks. The Courtyard Quilters would probably be able to identify each pattern easily—if they could see the pieces clearly enough through the layers of dirt.

  “How much is this?” she called to the woman running the garage sale.

  “That?” The woman dusted off her hands and drew closer. “You mean the quilt?”

  “Yes, please. Is it for sale?”

  The woman looked dubious. “We were just using it to hide an ugly table. I guess I’ll take five bucks for it.”

  Maggie reached into her purse. “Are you sure?”

  “Are you?” the woman countered. “Don’t you want to take a better look at it first? It’s not in very good shape.”

  Maggie agreed, though she had already decided to take the quilt home. They carefully moved the glassware and lifted the quilt from the table. The woman held it up so that Maggie could examine it. It was filthy; a good shake flung up a cloud of dust but left the surface as grimy as before. The woman apologized for its condition and explained that it had been kept in the garage since they moved to the neighborhood twenty-six years earlier. Her mother-in-law had bought it at an estate auction, and when she tired of it, she gave it to her son to keep dog hair off the car seats when he took his German shepherds to the park. Still, it was free of holes, tears, and stains, and the geometric patterns of the blocks were striking.

  Maggie paid the woman, folded the quilt gently, and carried it home. There she moved the coffee table aside, spread the quilt on the living room carpet, and studied it. All one hundred of the two-color blocks were unique, and each had been pieced or appliquéd from a different print fabric and a plain background fabric that might have been white once, but had discolored with age and neglect. Along one edge, embroidered in thread that had faded to pale brown barely distinguishable from the background cloth, were the words “Harriet Findley Birch. Lowell, Mass. to Salem, Ore. 1854.”

  The discovery astounded her. How had a beautiful 133-year-old quilt ended up as a tablecloth at a garage sale?

  The next morning she took the quilt to Ocean View Hills, and on her first break, she hurried to the recreation room to show it to the Courtyard Quilters. They were as excited and amazed as she had anticipated. “This is a remarkable find,” said Mrs. Stonebridge, bending over to examine a block composed of sixteen tiny triangles. “What an impressive assortment of fabrics, and what care she must have given to every stitch for the quilt to have held up so well through the years.”

  “This is a genuine treasure,” exclaimed Mrs. Blum. “Here’s a LeMoyne Star block, here’s a Chimney Sweep…. Hmm. Here’s one I’ve never seen.”

  The other Courtyard Quilters drew closer for a better look, but no one recognized the pattern.

  “I wonder who Harriet Findley Birch was,” said Mrs. Stonebridge. “She had an excellent sense of proportion and contrast.”

  The other quilters agreed, and one added, “Maybe if you found out more about the quilt, you could find out more about her. Or vice versa.”

  “And of course you must find out how to care for such a precious antique,” said Mrs. Stonebridge. “Well, my dear, it seems you have yourself a research project, just in time for the weekend.”

  On Saturday Maggie went to the Cal State Sacramento library to search for books on preserving antique quilts. She found a few books of patterns and others with old black-and-white photos of traditional quilts, but none with the information she sought. A librarian suggested she contact a professor in the art department, so she made an appointment the next day during her lunch hour. After viewing the quilt, the professor put her in touch with a friend, a museum curator in San Francisco named Grace Daniels. Maggie had to take a day off work to meet with her, but the ninety-mile drive from Sacramento was well worth it. The curator confirmed that the quilt was indeed a rare and unusual find. Grace offered to clean it properly for Maggie in exchange for permission to allow the museum’s photographer to take a photo for their archives and for information about the quilt’s provenance.

  Maggie agreed, and the next day she returned to the home where the garage sale had taken place. The woman was surprised to see her again, but invited her inside to talk about the quilt. She called her mother-in-law, but all she remembered was that she had bought it at an estate sale run by an auction house in Bend, Oregon, about 130 miles southeast of Salem.

  Maggie returned to the library and searched microfiche versions of all the phone books for the state of Oregon. She listed every Findley and Birch she could find, beginning with the Salem area, then Bend, and then working outward. It was slow, painstaking work that consumed several weekends while she waited for Grace Daniels to finish tending to the quilt.

  Starting at the top of her list, she phoned the Findleys and Birches and asked if they knew of a Harriet Findley Birch, a quilter originally from Lowell, Massachusetts. Most said they had never heard of her; a few mentioned other Harriets much too young to be the one Maggie sought. One man said he did not know any Harriets, but he knew several Harrys she could call.

  “Why would anyone think information about a Harry Birch would be useful?” Maggie asked the Courtyard Quilters one day when she found time to run down to the recreation room to update them on her progress—or lack thereof. “This is impossible. I should have known I wouldn’t turn up anything.”

  “You can’t give up now,” protested Mrs. Blum. “Not after piquing our curiosity. Our old hearts can’t take it.”

  “Don’t play the ‘We’re so fragile, have pity on us’ card on me,” Maggie teased. “I saw you doing the polka in the library with Mr. Maniceaux not two weeks ago.”

  “Oh.” A faint pink flush rose in Mrs. Blum’s cheeks. “You saw that, did you?”

  “Don’t abandon your project so soon,” urged Mrs. Stonebridge. “Someone on that list might be a descendant of Harriet Findley Birch. You’ll never know if you don’t call.”

  Maggie feared that it would be a waste of time, but she promis
ed the Courtyard Quilters she would consider it.

  A week later, curiosity and a sense of obligation to the Courtyard Quilters as well as the museum curator compelled her to resume her calls. Two-thirds of the way through the names and numbers she had collected, she reached a man who said that his great-grandmother’s name was Harriet Findley Birch. “When I was a kid,” he said, “my grandmother took me to see Harriet Findley Birch’s grave, not far from our original family homestead in Salem. It’s a tradition in our family, a pilgrimage we make when we’re old enough to appreciate her.”

  Thrilled, Maggie told the man about the quilt she had found and asked him to send whatever information she could about his great-grandmother. He agreed, but the information Maggie received in the mail a week later was disappointingly scanty. Harriet Findley was born in 1830 or 1831 in rural Massachusetts. She married Franklin Birch in 1850 and traveled west along the Oregon Trail sometime after that. She had six children, only two of whom survived to adulthood.

  The next week Maggie returned to the museum. The quilt had been so beautifully restored she almost did not recognize it. Her information about the quilt’s provenance seemed hopelessly inadequate compensation for Grace Daniels’s work, but the curator brushed off Maggie’s apologies. She had made a few discoveries of her own after contacting a colleague at the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts.

  The Lowell curator had not heard of the Harriet Findley Birch quilt, but she had posed an interesting theory. The more than one hundred unique fabrics in the quilt suggested that Harriet had ready access to a wide variety of cottons. Though she could have saved scraps for years or traded with friends, it was also possible that she had worked in one of Lowell’s cotton mills before her marriage. A mill girl could have collected scraps off the floor that otherwise would have been swept up and discarded, and before long acquired more than enough for a quilt. Grace’s colleague was not convinced that Harriet had been a mill girl, however, because existing diaries of mill girls from Harriet’s era rarely mentioned quilting as a pleasurable pastime. Instead these young women new to the excitement of the city spent their precious off hours enjoying lectures, exhibitions, and other cultural events outside of the boardinghouses where they lived.

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for certain,” said Grace.

  Maggie reluctantly agreed they were unlikely to learn more.

  She took the precious quilt home and draped it over her bed. She sat in a chair nearby and gazed at it lovingly, but with an ache of regret. The more she learned how rare and precious the quilt was, the more she realized she had no right to keep it.

  But the extra print the museum’s photographer had made for her was not enough.

  She bought colored pencils, graph paper, and a ruler and began drafting the beloved little blocks, imagining Harriet Findley Birch sketching the originals so long ago. Had she worked on her quilt on the front porch of her boardinghouse, enjoying the fresh air after a fourteen-hour shift in the stifling mill? Had she sewn in her parents’ front parlor, envying the confident, independent mill girls who passed by her window on their way to work?

  One Saturday morning after she had drawn ten blocks, Maggie visited a quilt store the Courtyard Quilters had recommended, the Goose Tracks Quilt Shop, to purchase fabric and sewing tools. She felt too shy to ask any of the busy customers or saleswomen for help, so she wandered through the aisles scanning the bolts for fabrics that looked like Harriet’s. She chose ten, carried them awkwardly to the cutting table, and asked the shop owner to cut her enough of each one to make a six-inch quilt block.

  “Okay,” the woman said carefully, clearly recognizing her as a novice but not wishing to discourage her. “Do you think a quarter of a yard will do? An eighth?”

  Maggie had no idea, but just in case, she asked for quarter-yard cuts.

  “We have fat quarters over there if you’re interested,” the woman said, gesturing with her scissors toward stacked rows of baskets full of rolled bundles of fabric. “What are you making?”

  “A sampler.”

  “Bring some of your finished blocks along next time. I’d love to see them.”

  Flattered, Maggie agreed, but her quilting skills were so rusty she wasn’t sure she wanted to show her handiwork to anyone. Fortunately, when she told the Courtyard Quilters about her project, they eagerly offered her a refresher course in the art of quilting by hand. With their assistance, she relearned how to make a precise running stitch, how to appliqué, how to sew perfectly smooth curves, and how to set pieces into an angle. Breaks and lunch hours she usually passed on her own she now spent in the company of the Courtyard Quilters. By the time she finished making her eighth block, she had earned a chair of her own among the circle of quilters.

  A few weeks after her first visit to the Goose Tracks Quilt Shop, when Maggie had completed ten blocks and had sketched the second row of ten, she returned for more fabric. This time she knew exactly what she needed and chose from the baskets of fat quarters with confidence. The shop owner recognized her and asked how her sampler was progressing. Maggie placed the ten little blocks on the counter, her pride in her work abruptly vanishing as other customers gathered around to look. “I’m just a beginner,” she apologized, fighting the urge to sweep the blocks back into her purse. To her surprise, the other quilters admired her work and insisted they never would have guessed she was a beginner.

  “What do you call this pattern?” asked one of the women, indicating a five-pointed star.

  “I don’t know,” said Maggie. “I’m copying blocks I found in an antique quilt.”

  With prompting from the quilters, the whole story of Harriet Findley Birch’s quilt came out. The women marveled at Maggie’s lucky find and begged to be allowed to see Harriet’s quilt for themselves, so Maggie agreed to meet them at the shop the following Saturday.

  In the interim, she completed five more blocks and sketched a dozen more in anticipation of her return to the quilt shop. The women she had spoken to the previous week must have told their friends, because more than twice the number of people she had expected were there, eager to admire Harriet Findley Birch’s masterpiece. After seeing the original version, several of the quilters told Maggie that they respected her courage for taking on such a daunting project, which would surely take years to complete. Until that moment, Maggie had not thought of how much time she would need to invest in her replica. She simply wanted one she could keep.

  Harriet’s quilt began to consume more and more of Maggie’s life. She sketched blocks in the morning before leaving for Ocean View Hills. She sewed by hand with the Courtyard Quilters on her lunch hour. After work she made templates, or read books about the mill girls of Lowell, or tracked down leads at the library, longing to know more of Harriet Findley Birch’s story. Her work friends complained that they never saw her anymore, so she made time for them when she could. They did not understand her new fascination and tentatively suggested she start dating again. “I don’t have time,” she told them.

  And then came a day she had long dreaded: the day she finished sketching the one hundredth sampler block.

  She called the woman from the garage sale and arranged to meet her. She carefully typed up everything she had learned about the quilt, including her unconfirmed theories about the life of Harriet Findley Birch. The woman’s eyes lit up when she saw the folded bundle in Maggie’s arms. “I was hoping you would bring it by to show me after you restored it,” she exclaimed, holding her front door open and ushering Maggie inside.

  “I didn’t bring it just to show you,” said Maggie. “It’s worth much more than I paid for it and I think in all fairness I should return it to you. Or, if you’re willing, I would be very grateful if you would allow me to keep the quilt and pay you the difference.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said the woman. “It sat in my garage for all those years and I did nothing with it. Thank goodness you rescued it before it was nothing more than a rag.”

  “But …�
�� Maggie hesitated. “You could probably sell it for much more than what I paid you.”

  “Well, certainly, now. Thanks to you. You’re a sweet girl, but you don’t owe me anything for this quilt. You bought it fair and square, and if you decide to sell it for a profit, then more power to you.”

  Grateful, Maggie told the woman everything she had learned about the quilt and felt herself at ease for the first time in months. But the feeling did not last. The next day she phoned Jason Birch and offered the quilt to him, the only descendant of Harriet Findley Birch she had been able to locate.

  “That would be awesome,” Jason Birch replied. “I’d love to have that quilt.”

  “Okay,” said Maggie, heart sinking. “Should I send it to you, or would you prefer to pick it up? I would hate to risk losing it in the mail—my heart nearly stops just thinking about it. But if the drive is too inconvenient, I could insure the package for a lot of money to encourage them to keep track of it.”

  “When you put it like that …” Jason hesitated. “I should at least reimburse you for your expenses.”

  “I bought it for five dollars at a garage sale.”

  “What? Five bucks? In that case, keep it.”

  Maggie was tempted to thank him and hang up, but she couldn’t. She could not let him turn down her offer because he believed the quilt was an old rag. “I had the quilt cleaned by an expert and I know it’s worth much more than what I paid for it. I could have it appraised if you like.”

  “No. You know what? It’s not like my family lost Harriet’s quilt. One of us chose to sell it, and that choice has consequences. You should keep it. It’s obviously important to you. I’ll make you a deal: You keep the quilt, but let me know anything you learn about my great-grandmother.”

  “I’ll do that,” Maggie promised, grateful.

  Now that Harriet Findley Birch’s quilt was truly hers, the original impetus for sewing her replica was gone, but Maggie enjoyed her project too much to abandon it. Every week she stitched a few more blocks; every Saturday she met with the regulars at the quilt shop to show off her progress. A few of them asked whether she’d mind if they tried their hand at a few of the patterns. Flattered, Maggie agreed to share her drawings with them. She had completed eighty-four of the blocks and had already begun sewing them into rows.