A Quilter's Holiday: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (18 page)

“Their parents throw them out?” echoed Gretchen, bewildered. “So young, and—and in their condition?”

“A pregnant, unmarried daughter is a huge disappointment to some families,” said Louis. “Their anger gets the better of them and they think throwing the girl out is a suitable punishment. Teach her a lesson.”

“What lesson is that?” said Joe, horrified.

Louis shrugged. “If they break the rules and shame the family, it won’t be under their roof. Sometimes homeless girls get pregnant. Sometimes pregnant girls get homeless.”

“The lucky girls end up here,” said Monsignor Joe. “The
very
lucky girls marry the fathers of their babies and go on to live good lives.”

“He has to say that,” said Louis, tossing the priest a wry glance. “Marriage works for some of these young mothers, but it’s not always the best solution for our residents.”

The monsignor spread his hands as if to suggest that they
had long ago agreed to disagree. “The lucky girls end up here,” he repeated, “where Louis sees that they have a safe place to stay, enough to eat, medical care, and parenting classes.”

Gretchen, who longed for a child of her own, could not imagine throwing a precious daughter out into the world in so vulnerable a state. “Do the girls—your residents—do they give up their babies for adoption?”

“Some of them do,” Louis acknowledged, “but we try to teach them to be good mothers so they can care for their children right themselves, keep them. If they don’t want to or can’t, well, there aren’t a lot of places for these babies to go, you understand.”

Gretchen nodded wordlessly, thinking of the young mothers little more than children themselves, taking parenting classes to learn what they had probably been unable to observe in their own childhood homes. She wondered about the tables set up in the driveway, the garden plot in the front yard, and she suspected that Louis Walker ministered to a wider community than the young expectant mothers who had found shelter beneath his roof.

In the weeks to come, the stories Joe brought home from Abiding Savior Christian Outreach confirmed her hunch. To Joe’s surprise, Louis assisted him in his work rather than leaving him to it, and Joe quickly realized that Louis wanted to learn all he could so that the next time repairs were necessary,
he would not need to rely on anyone else for assistance. “The Lord provides,” he told Joe, “but He’s also mighty keen on self-reliance.”

His Southern accent came from the state of his birth, Mississippi, where he had lived for his first eighteen years. He told Joe harrowing stories of growing up in the segregated South—the humiliating forced deference to whites, the segregated drinking fountains and entrances to buildings, the inadequate schools, the threats of violence that were too often actualized, the ramshackle houses in impoverished neighborhoods that lacked running water, streetlights, and paved roads. What chafed an outspoken youth like Louis most in those days was the lack of voice, the inability to improve his people’s situation, despite their ostensible right to vote, a right they were too often prevented from exercising.

His passion for justice caught fire the first time he heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., preach at his church. With inspiring eloquence, Dr. King asked them to practice nonviolent civil disobedience in order to win the civil rights that had been too long denied them. Louis marched with Dr. King, participated in Freedom Rides to challenge segregation in public transportation, and organized peaceful student protests in pursuit of equal access to education. His parents feared for his safety after he was attacked by a gang of white thugs outside a post office, and they begged him to withdraw from the movement after a cross was set aflame in their front yard, but Louis
could not, would not, abandon the cause that he believed God had called him to serve.

Then one afternoon as he, his girlfriend, Alice, and his best friend, Thomas, were leading a student march through the streets of Jackson, singing protest songs to drown out the angry jeers of white folks lining the sidewalks, a gunshot went off. As the students scattered, the police swept in and arrested as many as they could apprehend on the grounds that they were marching without a permit. Louis, Thomas, and twenty other young men were taken to a maximum security prison, where they spent five nights in cells with the furnace blasting despite the sweltering summer heat, were prodded awake with billy clubs every time they drifted off to sleep on the hard concrete floor, and were force-fed laxatives. Louis emerged from the ordeal shaken but more committed than ever to the cause of justice for all.

He knew he had made enemies, but he had not counted on their bloodthirstiness, nor could he have imagined on that Saturday morning when he let Alice borrow his car to take her mother to the dentist that someone had planted a bomb beneath it, or that in an instant he would replay again and again in his nightmares for years to come, that it would kill his first love, the woman he had intended to marry, and to love and cherish and honor all the days of his life.

Anguished, he swore to find the murderers, but his younger brother begged him for their parents’ sake to flee before
the culprits realized they had missed their intended target. Louis packed a single bag and took the next train out of town, spending all but ten dollars to go as far from Mississippi as he could afford to go. The money in his pocket could take him as far as Pittsburgh, so that was where he went.

His ten dollars soon was spent. With no prospects and no family to take him in, Louis ended up on the streets, sleeping in doorways, taking meals at a soup kitchen, finding odd jobs where and when he could. He dared not write home to his parents out of fear that the men who had tried to kill him would track him north, or that they would take their rage out on the loved ones he had left behind.

As the hard days stretched into months, as he grew thin and bone-weary and began to wonder if maybe it would have been better to risk his life in Mississippi than to endure the harsh, friendless existence in a northern city, he prayed to God to deliver him from his misery, and he vowed that if he could get on his feet again, he would devote himself to serving others in need.

Little by little, he made his way. A minister at a Methodist church helped him find a job as a dishwasher in a restaurant and a cheap room to rent. As he regained his strength, he took classes and earned his GED. His dreams of college not forgotten, he enlisted in the Marines, served in Vietnam, and attended Duquesne University on the GI Bill, earning a degree in Social Work.

Louis never forgot how his prayers had been answered or the vow he had made. Shortly after graduation, he worked for a nonprofit organization serving the homeless in Pittsburgh, but he grew frustrated with bureaucratic obstacles that prevented immediate help for the people who needed it most and a short-sighted focus on short-term solutions instead of the more arduous task of addressing the root causes of poverty and homelessness. Conferences where well-meaning activists discussed how to fund and operate more homeless shelters irritated him. “These people don’t need shelters, they need homes,” he griped to a like-minded woman, Andrea, who had served with him on several committees. “Otherwise we’d call them the ‘shelterless.’ ”

Frustrated, he severed ties with official government agencies and went off on his own, determined to spend every cent he earned buying abandoned properties in the inner city, restoring them to habitable shape with the help of volunteers, and giving them to the people who needed them most. The restoration of a three-story Victorian house near a Croatian immigrant neighborhood was well underway when Andrea, an obstetrics nurse who volunteered at a local free clinic, alerted him to the plight of homeless expectant mothers. As soon as the bedrooms and the kitchen were finished, Louis scrounged up donated beds, mattresses, and sheets and took in the first residents. The Abiding Savior Christian Outreach ran entirely on donations, and although Louis occasionally
butted heads with representatives from government agencies who preferred people to work within the system, he knew his mission made a difference in his community. Now, five years later, he and Andrea were married with two children, and he had raised enough money to purchase a four-story apartment building a few blocks away, which they intended to remodel and rent out apartments at a dollar a year to people who would otherwise have nowhere to turn. Louis had already renamed the building “Thankful Abode” in remembrance of his gratitude for prayers answered years before.

Gretchen listened, fascinated, each time Joe came home with a new tale about Louis Walker’s mission, his marriage to Andrea and their children, and their plans for the future. “I told him you were a teacher,” Joe said one day, “and I could almost see his ears prick up.”

“Did you tell him I’m only a substitute home economics teacher?”

“There’s no ‘only’ about it,” said Joe, indignant. “You have a lot to teach those girls, and to Louis, your flexible schedule is a bonus.”

A few days later, Gretchen began volunteering at the mission, teaching the young mothers and mothers-to-be how to prepare simple, nutritious meals, how to sew, how to do laundry, how to keep a house clean and safe for a toddler, how to keep a household budget and balance a bank account— something a few of the girls claimed they would never need to
know, since they would never have enough cash to open a bank account, never enough left over at the end of the month to save. “You should and you shall save something for a rainy day,” Gretchen told them firmly.

“Maybe that works for you,” a resident told her once. “But it’s always the rainy season for us.”

“Except when it’s snowing,” another chimed in.

So Gretchen told the girls how no one had imagined a life for her other than to become a housemaid as her mother and grandmother had, but that she had worked hard in school and earned a scholarship, and now she was a teacher. “But I’m not finished,” Gretchen told them. “I have other dreams, too, plans that I’m saving for, and someday I’m going to fulfill them. You can, too. Your first duty is to your child, of course, but if you work hard, live frugally, and save, you can make a better life for yourself. I can’t do it for you, but I can give you the tools you’ll need—and that means learning to balance a checkbook, even if you don’t have a bank account yet, because someday you will.”

Some of the girls still looked dubious, but they settled down to their studies, and in some of their eyes, Gretchen thought she glimpsed the light of possibility dawning.

Gretchen also taught the girls to sew, certain that every mother needed to know how to sew on buttons, patch worn trouser knees, and mend torn seams. Most of them had never held a needle before, so to practice and perfect their stitches,
their first projects were small, scrap Four-Patch quilts for their babies. Even the most ambivalent about motherhood warmed to the project, and as they sewed squares of cotton and poly blends together, they spoke about their hopes and fears for the future. Andrea, passing through the cramped front room on her way to the kitchen or the office, overheard bits of their conversations, occasionally lingering in the kitchen doorway to hear a shy girl express her most private fears about what might happen to her and her baby once they left Abiding Savior. Later Andrea told Gretchen that she marveled at her ability to get the girls to share so openly. “It’s not any of my doing,” Gretchen said, embarrassed by the undeserved praise. “It’s the craft. Quilters talk when they’re gathered together, even beginning quilters. They always have.”

In due course, Joe finished the kitchen project and resumed the work that had been accumulating in their garage, but Gretchen continued to volunteer at Abiding Savior at least two days a week, unless she was occupied with an extended substitute teaching assignment within the public schools. The girls Gretchen observed in the classrooms and passed in the halls were, for the most part, happy and well-adjusted, with plenty to eat, decent clothes to wear, and a caring adult at home to love and guide them. And yet she knew that some of the residents of Abiding Savior had possessed all the outward trappings of comfortable, secure, middle-class lives before they had ended up on the streets, and she wondered which of
the girls who attended her classes and always turned in their homework felt unloved at home and contemplated escape through running away or through fleeting affection in the back seat of a boyfriend’s car.

A world away at Abiding Savior, she taught the young mothers domestic skills and held their newborn babies when they were desperate for a few uninterrupted hours of sleep. Often, frightened and alone when the first labor pains began, they begged Gretchen to come with them to the hospital and stay with them until it was over, their babies in their arms. In the evenings at home with Joe, Gretchen would stitch quilts for new residents, gifts of love and comfort they would use during their stay at the mission and take with them when they departed, requiring the continuous replenishment of her supply. As the years passed, she saw many young women come and go, taking the quilts she had made them and their few belongings, their babies swaddled in bright quilts they had made with her guidance. But always they left, the difficult young women who balked when she tried to teach them to cook, the acquiescent ones whom she feared might need the outreach center’s services again within a year, the babies who squalled all night and left all the residents weary, the sweet ones whose adorable smiles belied their circumstances.

“Doesn’t it ever make you too sad to go back?” Joe asked one evening when she told him about a young woman who had been working the streets but had sought sanctuary at
Abiding Savior when her pimp beat her for getting pregnant. Two days after delivering a stillborn baby boy, she had fled into the night, taking nothing with her but a few dollars’ worth of change kept in a jar in the kitchen.

“Most of their stories don’t end so tragically,” Gretchen said, thinking of how she and Andrea had held each other in the kitchen and cried when they realized the girl was gone, most likely reunited with her pimp and back working the streets.