Elm Creek Quilts [10] The Quilter's Homecoming (23 page)

Rosa stared at her. “Invite…John?”

“Yes, and without delay. We must have this out in the open. I don’t approve of how he has handled things so far, but your father and I are willing to give him a chance to redeem himself. This will help you, too. Concealing the truth from us has distracted you from deciding how you really feel about him.”

When Rosa did not reply, Isabel said, “Either invite him to meet the family or promise never to see him again. Your father and I are willing to overlook how this matter began so we can see that it has a proper resolution. We will allow him to court you in a respectable manner, but this sneaking around and staying out all night must end.”

Still Rosa stared at her. Finally she said, “I’ll speak to John today.”

“Good.” Isabel embraced her daughter, but Rosa seemed dazed and shaken in her arms. “It will be all right in the end, whether you accept John’s proposal or marry someone else. Take all the time you need. Don’t let him rush you. If he truly loves you, he’ll wait until you’re ready to answer.” She thought of the three years she had made Miguel wait, three years that seemed like only moments now. Their marriage had been blessed, and well worth the wait. She wished someday for her children to know such a rich blessing.

Wordlessly Rosa clung to her, tears in her eyes.

1925

A
fter Henry went off to bed, Elizabeth tore up her unfinished letters home and started over, writing cheerful, breezy accounts of their arrival at Triumph Ranch, the Jorgensen family, and the work of the farm. “Although the ranch is not precisely as it was described to us,” she wrote to Aunt Eleanor, “it is a lovely, thriving place, and I hope we will do well here.” She described their discovery of sheep where they had expected cattle as a comical misunderstanding, and wrote in lavish detail of the beauty of the landscape. To Sylvia she wrote of befriending Mary Katherine and her daughters, and of their visit to Safari World, where she met Charlie the lion and discovered a Bergstrom Thoroughbred among the performing horses.

Then she sat awake in the front room with the homespuns-and-wool hexagon quilt spread upon her lap, unable to silence her nagging conscience long enough to drift off to sleep. Sylvia admired her, and Elizabeth had always tried to be worthy of her young cousin’s trust. Nothing in her letter was, strictly speaking, a lie; she had written that she liked to walk among
the
apricot trees, not
her
apricot trees, and it was fair to call the sheep Henry’s flock because he tended them. While Elizabeth’s mother might chide her for lies of omission, no one could say that she had betrayed Sylvia’s trust by lying outright—except when she referred to Triumph Ranch. No such place existed anymore, and to pretend she lived there crossed the line from evasiveness into outright dishonesty.

Elizabeth worked her needle in tiny stitches through a wool patch she was appliquéing over a small hole in the quilt top. The quilt’s hexagonal pattern made her think of wagon wheels rambling over the Norwegian Grade into the Arboles Valley, or the sun rising over the bluffs east of the ranch. When she looked upon the quilt, she wondered about the woman who had made it, whether she pieced these unusual hexagons here or in a city back east, and whether she found happiness in the Arboles Valley or disappointment. What had she written to loved ones far away?

Exasperated with herself, Elizabeth set the quilt aside. She could not tell the truth for Henry’s sake, and yet she could not bear to lie. She had to write something, or the folks back in Pennsylvania would fear the worst.

Her gaze fell upon the smoldering embers in the fireplace. Suddenly a way out of her predicament occurred to her, and although it did not completely silence her nagging conscience, it would have to do until she thought of something better or Henry changed his mind about divulging the truth. She drew her dressing gown tightly around herself and hurried outside into the starlit night, trying not to think about coyotes and rattlesnakes and the other nocturnal creatures Annalise had enthusiastically assured her lurked in the valley. She dug into a stack of discarded wood behind the cabin until she found a flat board about two feet long and a foot wide. She brushed off the dirt and took it inside.

Kneeling beside the fireplace, she searched the embers until she found a thick splinter of wood that was charred on one end but unburned and cool on the other. Using the blackened tip as a pencil, she wrote upon the board in clear, bold letters:
TRIUMPH RANCH
. She took her hand-lettered sign outside and propped it against the cabin wall on the porch near the front door.

“I hereby christen thee Triumph Ranch,” she said softly, a lonely soloist backed by a choir of chirping insects. If she had a bottle of champagne, she would smash it against the porch steps. Better yet, she would trade it to Mrs. Diegel for eggs, coffee, and bacon for Henry’s Sunday breakfast.

They were no better off, but at least a place named Triumph Ranch existed now. It was not only a dream, and when she wrote to her family of her new home, she would not be a liar.

She returned to bed and was at last able to sleep.

In the morning, when Henry returned from the outhouse, his face was grim. “Is that your idea of a joke?”

For a moment Elizabeth had no idea what he was talking about, and then she remembered the sign. “It’s not a joke. When I write home, my family will expect me to talk about Triumph Ranch, my new home. I don’t want to lie to them, and now I won’t have to.”

“You don’t consider this a lie?”

The bitterness in his voice shook her. “It’s the best I can do under the circumstances. Would you prefer that I tell them the whole story? Should I borrow a camera and send some snapshots?”

Henry muttered something she couldn’t make out, but his meaning was perfectly clear. He strode off to the farmhouse so quickly that she could barely keep up with him. He did not kiss her good-bye at the back door or tell her he would see her at breakfast, as he had done every other morning since they had come to work for the Jorgensens.

She was upset and worried and angry, and she regretted ever trying to ease her conscience with a silly sign that she should have known would insult him. Mrs. Jorgensen looked at her sharply when she came into the kitchen, red-faced and breathless, but Elizabeth composed herself as best she could and got to work. She knew Mrs. Jorgensen wasn’t fooled, but she was not the sort of woman to pry into someone else’s business. When Henry came in for breakfast with the other men, he no longer seemed angry, but the kiss he gave her every morning on his way to the table, the kiss the others would have noted for its absence, was so swift she barely felt his lips brush her cheek.

After breakfast, Lars reminded Elizabeth of his intention to stop by the post office that afternoon and asked if she had any letters for him to send. As she took them from her pocket, Mrs. Jorgensen said, “Why don’t you go with him? Mary Katherine tells me you can drive, so if you learn the way, on days when Lars is too busy you can run the errands for him.”

Mary Katherine gave Elizabeth a meaningful look over her mother-in-law’s shoulder while Elizabeth arranged to meet Lars in the garage after cleaning up the kitchen after lunch. She had not expected Mary Katherine’s prediction that Mrs. Jorgensen would not allow Lars to go to the Barclay farm alone to come true. Did Lars really need a watchful eye more than Mary Katherine needed Elizabeth’s help in the garden? If Lars’s old temper really could resurface after years of dormancy, Elizabeth doubted her presence would do anything to prevent it.

She spent the morning doing the laundry, load after load of men’s work shirts and denim overalls so filthy that she expected to look out at the barley field and discover that an entire layer of top-soil was missing. She much preferred to wash the ladies’ cotton dresses and the girls’ sweet pinafores, admiring them as she hung them on the line to dry in the fresh air that blew down from the Santa Monica Mountains from the west, but she would have gladly given up that pleasure if it meant never again having to wash a stranger’s undergarments. She knew her distaste was prim and patrician, but she could not help it. As much as she liked the other hired hands, as much as she was learning to respect Oscar and his mother, handling their undergarments was too intimate, and in the case of some of the hired hands, too overpowering. On laundry day, she could always tell who had spent most of the week in the orchard and who had been herding sheep.

For hours, she and Mary Katherine and the girls went from washhouse to clothesline hauling water and heavy baskets of damp clothes. After several weeks of working for the Jorgensens, Elizabeth had grown accustomed to the labor, but even so, the muscles in her neck and shoulders ached long before Mrs. Jorgensen called her to the kitchen to help prepare lunch. Still, it could be worse and she counted her blessings, especially the Aerobell washing machine Oscar had purchased for Mary Katherine on their eighth anniversary. (“Mother Jorgensen called it a waste of money,” marveled Mary Katherine as they filled the round copper tub with soiled clothes. “She wouldn’t think so if
she
had to do the laundry for the family and eight farmhands.”) Since the washhouse was not wired for electricity, Oscar had hooked up the machine to a kerosene generator, which gave off a deafening roar and made conversation in the washhouse difficult.

On that day, Elizabeth preferred not to chat, because for all her aspirations of stardom, she doubted she could act well enough to conceal her dismal mood. Also, Mary Katherine was still smarting from some disagreement with Mrs. Jorgensen the previous evening and was determined to draw Elizabeth into finding fault with her. While Elizabeth liked Mary Katherine and preferred her company to that of her demanding mother-in-law, she was far too clever to be caught saying anything against Mrs. Jorgensen that might be used against her later. Back in Harrisburg, her taste for gossip had been nearly unrivaled among her friends and she had never shied away from speaking her mind, but now she was a different person in a different world. Her position on the farm was far too uncertain to risk, no matter how good it might make her feel at that moment to top Mary Katherine’s complaints with the mental list she had been keeping since her first day with the Jorgensens. How Mrs. Jorgensen swore there was only one proper way to slice a potato, for example, or how she made Elizabeth clean every last speck of dirt from the corners of a room by digging the sharpened end of a clothespin into the crevices where the baseboards met.

After washing the lunch dishes, Elizabeth hurried to the garage to meet Lars, grateful for the reprieve and worried that he might leave without her if she was late. Instead, she was the first to the car, and it was Lars who arrived a few moments after, coming not from the fields but from the house, his face and hands washed, his thinning blond hair neatly parted and combed. He crossed in front of the car and opened the driver’s side door for her. “I best see how you can drive before I let you take her out on your own,” he said.

She gladly climbed into the driver’s seat, and before long they were on their way. As they rode along, Lars provided directions, which were helpful, and driving advice, which was not. When they reached the Barclay farm, Elizabeth set the parking brake and gave Lars a bright, inquisitive smile. “Well, what do you know?” she said. “We made it in one piece.”

“I guess you can handle an automobile all right,” he said reluctantly. “But maybe you should get more practice.”

“I’m glad I’ve earned your trust,” she said, smothering a laugh. He was not the first man to contrive some excuse to be in her company, and although Lars was at least fifteen years her senior, his interest was flattering. Henry had scarcely touched her since they had made the cabin their home. She had begun to believe that she was no longer pretty, that worry and hard work had robbed her of her beauty. She did not know whether to be relieved or upset by this sign that men still found her attractive. If Henry did not, it mattered very little what other men thought.

She decided to press her advantage. “Do we have time to swing by the Grand Union Hotel on our way home?”

“It’s not on our way,” he pointed out, “but we have time.”

She smiled at him, but he looked away as Marta and Lupita came running up. “Hello, Mr. Jorgensen,” Marta said shyly.

“Hello, Marta,” Lars said gently, although he looked pained.

“Where are your parents?”

“Papi’s working and Mami’s inside with Miguel and Ana.”

“How are they?” asked Elizabeth.

Marta bit her lip and glanced at the house. “Miguel cried and cried and cried, but now he doesn’t cry anymore. Ana didn’t get out of bed today. Mami stays inside all the time.”

“All the time?” echoed Lars.

Marta nodded. Grim, Lars drew in a deep breath, and Elizabeth followed his gaze as it traveled around the yard. The neatly planted flowers had turned dry and brown; a layer of windblown dirt covered the stone walkway that had been so carefully swept on Elizabeth’s last visit.

Lars pulled a brown paper sack from his pocket and handed it to Lupita. “Share the candy with your big sister,” he instructed. The girls beamed, thanked him, and ran off to enjoy the treat in the shade of the orange tree.

“Should we fetch the doctor?” asked Elizabeth as she trailed after Lars to the small, silent adobe house.

“No doctor around here can help them,” Lars said, with a trace of anger, as if he was certain that other, more capable doctors elsewhere could, if only the children could get to them. He knocked on the door, and after a long moment, Rosa opened the door a crack and gazed out at him without speaking.

“How long has it been since you’ve been outside?” he asked gruffly.

“I don’t know,” she replied softly. “Days, perhaps.”

“You’re killing yourself, you know.”

She blinked, surprised, as if that had not occurred to her. “Do you think I care?”

“Marta and Lupita will still need you after—after—”

“After my other two children die?”

“Come out into the sunshine,” said Lars. “It’s a beautiful day. Fresh air will do you good.”

Rosa glanced over her shoulder into the darkened room. “And leave my babies alone in this house?”

“I’ll stay with them,” said Elizabeth quickly. “I love children. I’ve cared for my nieces and nephews from the time they were born. They’ll be fine.”

“They will not be fine,” said Rosa without emotion.

Lars gently pushed the door open wider, and Rosa did not prevent it. “Come on outside. You don’t have to go far. If anything happens, Elizabeth can yell for us and we’ll come running.”

Lars held out his hand. Rosa looked at it, then took a deep breath and nodded. She did not take his hand, but she did step through the doorway and tell Elizabeth where she could find the children.