Elm Creek Quilts [10] The Quilter's Homecoming (21 page)

“Is she right?” the shorter man asked the other in an undertone, his smirk vanishing.

The taller man shrugged. “Beats me.”

Elizabeth hid her relief with a smile. “Well, gentlemen?”

“All right,” the taller man said grudgingly. “You find us horses, and we’ll pay you ten cents for each one we buy.”

“Twenty-five.”

“Ten,” the shorter man shot back. “And we ain’t payin’ an arm and a leg for the horses, neither, so talk the price down before dragging us out somewhere to buy a horse we haven’t seen.”

“You won’t have to go anywhere,” Elizabeth assured them. “I know a place that will send the horses to you—Bergstrom Thoroughbreds.”

The taller man looked perplexed. “Didn’t you just say they were in Pennsylvania?”

“We can’t wait for horses to come all that way,” the shorter man said irritably. “What do you think this is? We need them now.”

“All right,” said Elizabeth, taken aback. “I’ll find some horses a little closer to home, but I can tell you right now they won’t be as good as Bergstrom Thoroughbreds.”

“They’ll be good enough,” the taller man said.

Elizabeth promised to bring them a list of horses and prices within the week. They responded by frowning and shaking their heads as they returned to their work, as if they did not expect to see her again and would forget their arrangement as soon as she left their sight.

She hurried off to meet Mary Katherine and the girls, her thoughts racing. When she had asked for the job, she assumed she would simply be the middleman between her uncle and Safari World. Now she would have to scout throughout the Arboles Valley and perhaps beyond, finding suitable horses where those two had already failed. She would need a car, and time to search. From the looks the men gave her, they expected her to fail—but that just made her more determined to succeed. All she had to do was find a horse or two that met their expectations, and perhaps then they would trust her judgment enough to consider Bergstrom Thoroughbreds for future purchases. The movie producers would surely recognize quality when they saw it, and perhaps one day, movie studios throughout Hollywood would insist upon Bergstrom Thoroughbreds for their pictures. It would benefit them, it would benefit Uncle Fred—and it would put some money in Elizabeth’s pocket. If she happened to catch the eye of a movie producer at the same time, so much the better.

She must put the wages she earned from the Jorgensens toward Henry’s lost savings and their train fare back to Pennsylvania. Anything she earned from additional work accomplished on her days off—time she would much rather spend enjoying Henry’s company—was hers to do with as she pleased. It would please her very much to buy back her quilts from Mrs. Diegel.

She found Mary Katherine and her daughters by the monkey cages. The girls had saved some peanuts for Elizabeth, and Mary Katherine insisted upon treating her to a glass of lemonade as they strolled through the park. Trailing after the girls as they bounded from one spectacle to another, Elizabeth asked Mary Katherine if it was true that movie producers occasionally came to Safari World.

“Not only to Safari World, but all over the Arboles Valley,” Mary Katherine replied. “Think of any Western you’ve ever seen, and chances are it was filmed beneath the bluffs west of our farm.”

“Is that so?”

“When Annalise was a baby, our pasture and sheep appeared ina movie about Nebraskan pioneers.” Mary Katherine frowned comically. “You’d think that we could have asked for more for their wool after that, but you’d be wrong.”

Elizabeth laughed, spirits rising. “It must have been exciting to watch a Western being filmed.”

“It was a lot of standing around, mostly, or so it seemed to me. I couldn’t see much of the action from the garden and the house. A movie called
Trouble at Rocky Ranch
was filmed out here more recently, but I saw even less of that.”

“I saw that movie,” said Elizabeth, as the familiarity of the bluffs east of the Jorgensen farm suddenly made perfect sense. “At the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, the night before we came to the Arboles Valley.”

“I bet you’ve seen the Arboles Valley in more movies than that. It’s been the setting for more than just Westerns. How do you think Lake Sherwood got its name?”

Elizabeth had not known of any Lake Sherwood in the Arboles Valley, but she guessed. “Not
Robin Hood,
with Douglas Fairbanks?”

“The one and only. Once I saw him and Mary Pickford having lunch at the Grand Union Hotel. She was even more beautiful in person, and he was so handsome.” Mary Katherine looked wistful. “Can you imagine such a glamorous life? Fame and fortune, the prettiest clothes, people to do all the cooking and cleaning and laundry for you, the chance to travel and see the world—and all because you know how to pose and recite some lines. It must be heavenly.”

Privately, Elizabeth agreed, but she knew that for every Mary Pickford there were probably hundreds of chorus girls and thousands of aspirants whose faces never made it to the silver screen. But one producer had already told her she had star quality, so perhaps her chances were not so remote. If the Jorgensen sheep could land movie roles, surely she could.

When the girls grew tired, they drove home, Mary Katherine at the wheel so that Lars would not become incensed when he saw Elizabeth in the driver’s seat. “Not that I’ve ever seen him terribly angry,” said Mary Katherine with a grin. “He’s as mild as an afternoon in May. He wasn’t always like that, or so I’ve heard. He had a temper back in the day when he was drinking.”

She spared a quick glance for the backseat, and was visibly relieved to find that the girls had fallen asleep. Since Mary Katherine was apparently the only Jorgensen who willingly divulged information about the family, Elizabeth decided to risk pressing her for more details. “I understand why Lars couldn’t buy back the old farm,” she said as they drove past Meadowbrook Hills, where construction continued at the same industrious pace, although the real estate agents and flocks of prospective residents had departed. “But why did he sell it in the first place?”

“Why does anyone sell a family farm?” Mary Katherine replied. “Maybe he was tired of the hardships and uncertainties of farming. We all know we could be only one drought away from going belly-up. Maybe he wanted to leave the Arboles Valley, strike out on his own, go into business in a larger city. Or put his earnings into the stock market and get rich without having to drag himself out of bed before dawn every day. Maybe the money sounded too good to pass up. How was he to know how much more the land would be worth in just a few short years?”

Elizabeth knew there had to be more. “But to do nothing with the money once he had it in hand, to just drink it all away, and then to return to farming anyway—”

“Once the money was gone, he probably had no other choice. And of course my Oscar would never turn his brother away. Lars was the true Prodigal Son.”

Silently Elizabeth disagreed. The biblical father had welcomed back his wayward son with great joy and celebration and restored him fully to his birthright. He had not, as far as Elizabeth could recall, allowed him to come home only to serve his more dutiful brother.

When Henry returned to Two Bears Farm, his family would celebrate his homecoming even more than the Prodigal’s so long ago, for Henry had never sold his birthright, nor squandered his inheritance. He had been deceived through no fault of his own, but he would earn back what he had lost. Although they might not return to Two Bears Farm for years, it was a great comfort to know that someday they would.

“It seems like such a waste,” said Elizabeth. She was not sure if she meant Lars’s rash behavior as a young man, or all the years since then he had spent atoning for his youthful mistakes.

Mary Katherine sighed. “I’m not sure what sorrows Lars was trying to drown back then, but in all the time I’ve known him, he’s never shirked his duties and he’s never fallen off the wagon—and we all know liquor isn’t that hard to come by, Prohibition or no Prohibition. I think everyone would just as soon forget that he was ever anyone but the man he is today.”

Elizabeth understood this as a gentle admonition to stop probing into Lars’s past, and she reluctantly complied.

Back home in the cabin, she made supper and had it waiting on the table when Henry came in, smelling of sheep. She tried to amuse him by revealing that the sheep he tended were no ordinary barnyard animals but a flock of woolly movie stars. Henry seemed not to hear her as he hungrily cleaned his plate of fried potatoes, dried apples, and onions seasoned with the black pepper and caraway seed Mary Katherine had generously offered from her own pantry. Elizabeth kept up her cheerful patter even though inside she was seething with annoyance. If he were determined to avoid her on their one day off and then not even listen to how she had spent her afternoon away from him, she would not bother sharing her good news about her prospective business deal with the wranglers of Safari World. She would wait until she could fan a handful of greenbacks in Henry’s face. That would make him pay attention.

After supper, he built a fire on the hearth to ward off the chill brought on by the ocean mists that cooled the late spring nights. She cleared the table and heated bathwater for him. While he bathed—alone, with the door closed—she searched her pocketbook and retrieved the business card that Grover Higgins of Golden Reel Productions had given her at the dance marathon in Venice Beach. If a movie producer didn’t come to the Arboles Valley, she did have other options.

If only the cabin had a telephone. She could imagine Mrs. Jorgensen’s response if Elizabeth asked to borrow hers to make a long-distance call to a movie producer.

She sat down on the bed, working out a plan. Mrs. Diegel had a phone. Lars seemed protective of the car, but twice already she had seen him reach out a hand to someone in need. If she explained why she needed the car, he might let her borrow it. As she drove around the valley in search of horses, she could stop by the Grand Union Hotel and call Grover Higgins. What Mrs. Diegel would expect in trade, Elizabeth could only guess. Perhaps a lien on any future quilts Elizabeth pieced on the treadle sewing machine.

Her gaze fell upon the worn scrap quilt she had found in the cabin. It had held up well to washing, but she had paid little attention to it since then except to feel grateful each night for the warmth it provided. It was wrinkled and faded, especially compared with the quilts she had given up, but now that she studied it more carefully, she could not help admiring the ingenious design. She had never seen a star pattern quite like it before, despite the hundreds of quilts she had witnessed the Bergstrom women make through the years. At first glance she had mistaken it for a traditional Blazing Star quilt, the blocks arranged in seven rows of five blocks each, but on closer inspection, she saw that smaller diamonds fanned out in a half star in the four corner squares of each block, giving the quilt the illusion of brilliance and fire. Such care must have gone into the making of each block for each divided star to fit the corner exactly so.

Elizabeth wondered who had made it. Mrs. Jorgensen’s grandmother, perhaps, or could the quilt be even older than that? It seemed to be pieced of scraps of clothing, which always made it more difficult to date. Had the fading and wear to the fabric occurred before or after the pieces were sewn into a quilt? Perhaps the quilt had been made far away and brought to the Arboles Valley by a young bride trusting in her husband’s decision to bring her out West, far from home and family, trusting that he would always cherish her and never give her reason to regret her decision.

Elizabeth rose and reached for the second quilt, neatly folded at the foot of the bed. She spread it out on top of the star quilt, marveling at how much her first dismissive glances had missed. Pieced of homespuns and wools, it was sturdy and warm, obviously intended for daily use rather than a best quilt brought out only on special occasions or for visitors, but for all that, it was as complex and well fashioned as any quilt to grace a bed at Elm Creek Manor. It was composed not of square blocks but of hexagons, each formed from twelve triangular wedges with a smaller hexagon appliquéd in the center where the points met. Elizabeth smiled, recognizing the familiar quilter’s trick of covering a bulky seam or hiding a place where points did not match up as precisely as they should. Sewing the pieced hexagons together was much more challenging than simply stitching together rows of square blocks, but this unknown quilter had managed admirably. Even now, with some of the binding hanging from the edge and the cotton batting thin in patches, the quilt lay perfectly flat, with no puckering or bulging seams except for an overall patina of wrinkles created by the slight shrinkage of the wool in the wash.

Had the same unknown woman made both quilts? Though both were the work of accomplished quilters, the fabrics used and patterns chosen suggested they were not of the same era. And yet Elizabeth had found them folded together. Surely they had both belonged to the Jorgensen family. But why had they been left in the cabin? Why had such painstaking needlework not earned these quilts a place in the yellow farmhouse? They certainly would have endured better had they been sheltered behind sturdy walls rather than left to the drafts and damp of the cabin and the nibbles of inquisitive mice.

Her thoughts flew to the scraps she had brought from home and the pieces of fabric Mrs. Diegel had included in the sewing machine trade. While none of the fabrics was identical to those in the two quilts, some were a fairly close match. She ought to have enough to repair them.