Authors: Earlene Fowler
“Not the kind we’re trying to achieve.” Laughter rippled through the small group. I answered with a perfunctory smile. I didn’t want to discourage anyone who wanted to get involved, but to them the murders here were just another piece of gossip, a sort of urban ghost story, but to me they were a very real and sometimes still frightening memory.
“What are you teaching them today?” I asked, changing the subject.
She perused her note cards. “We’ve gone through the history of the adobe and of the Sinclair family. I was just going to start the tour of the storytelling quilts. I read all the histories last night.”
“Mind if I follow along?”
“Not at all. You can tell me if I get anything wrong.”
The first quilt was made by a woman in Morro Bay who had been married for fifty-three years to a captain of a commercial fishing boat.
Waiting for Henry
was its name. Incorporating the traditional quilt pattern Ocean Waves and using a mixture of hand-dyed multicolored fabric with touches of nautical fun prints, she created a Grandma Moses-style scene of a man out on a wildly tossing ocean hauling in nets, while on a high bluff in a blue-and-white saltbox house his wife stands leaning against a silver widow’s walk looking out to sea. Around her shoulders was a bright patchwork quilt embroidered with tiny little fish.
The typed card next to the quilt read, “I spent many hours ‘waiting for Henry’ and worrying every day about whether the sea would give him back to me. Quilting was a real blessing and comfort to me during those stormy days and nights. And fish, which have supported Henry and me all our married life and sent our two kids through college, always seem to sneak their way into my quilts, whether I intend them to be there or not. The fisherman’s nets are actually strings from the nets my husband used before retiring—thank the Lord—three years ago.”
I followed Mildred through the tour of thirty quilts in the display and was still delighted by each quilt even though I’d studied them closely myself before interviewing the quilter and recording her story. Most of the quilts followed a common style in story quilts—capturing a moment in the artist’s life and freezing it much like a photograph. There were quilts that told of summer days at the beach or mountains, a favorite pair of shiny black tap shoes, a great-grandfather’s smelly pipe, a devastating flood that killed a family’s three hundred chickens. Tiny moments of people’s lives recreated, using myriad pieces of fabric, leather, buttons, and beads.
One especially delightful entry was by a black woman about her grandmother, a native of Tennessee. The title of the quilt was
My Grandmama’s Flags.
Bordered by a Peace and Plenty pattern, the center was an array of colorful flags from all the states where her grandmother had family. In the center was a tiny woman with skin the color of milk chocolate sitting in a porch swing underneath a flagpole displaying the American flag. Behind her head, like a huge halo, was an array of smiling faces ranging in color from creamy coffee to rich mahogany.
“My grandmama collects flags from wherever she has family. We were taught from the time we were young children that the first thing we had to do if we moved out of Tennessee was to send her a flag of the state or country we lived in. She has a flagpole in front of her small cabin in Tennessee and whenever one of her children or grandchildren came to visit her or on their birthdays, they can always know that their flag will be waving over her log cabin. She taught all of her kids and grandkids how to quilt. Out of fifty-seven of us, thirty-five are still quilters, including my father. This quilt is my salute to a very special lady, who at eighty-eight still cooks all day every Saturday to make meals to take to the ‘old people’ at the retirement home.”
When we reached Evangeline’s quilt, though, even after seeing so many intricate and touching quilts, it elicited an amazed murmuring from the docents-in-training. Evangline’s details of Cajun life and the intricate needlework in each of the twelve squares gave her quilt a quality not unlike a painting by one of the masters. It could be rediscovered again and again, as each time you viewed it, another detail revealed itself.
After the group moved on to a bold surrealistic quilt incorporating and celebrating the stylistic features and Native American themes of the Canadian artist M. Emily Carr, I lingered in front of Evangeline’s quilt. The Cajun culture had always fascinated me. It brought back wonderful memories of a summer trip with Dove when I was ten and visited an old school friend of hers in Houma, Louisiana. We went to a Cajun dance called a
fais do do
in a concrete-block VFW building, where I learned to eat crawfish and danced with an old Cajun man whose face was as wrinkled as used tinfoil. Because of his perfect timing and ability to dance with two partners, he had the ladies lined up waiting for their turn, toes anxiously tapping.
I studied each of her squares, admiring the details, and paused for a long time to study the Cajun dance-scene block that reminded me so much of the one in my childhood memories. I remember Dove’s friend Doris telling me to
ferme ta bouche
—shut your mouth—about going to the dance when we returned to Aunt Garnet’s. Aunt Garnet was an old-fashioned Hardshell Baptist and thought any kind of dancing the pure work of the devil.
I strained on my tiptoes to see the top three squares—a bayou scene that showed a pelican in which, if you looked closely in his white chiffon beak, you could see tiny handmade fabric fish. The middle square held a row of babies lying on a quilt-covered bed while the grown-ups danced at the
fais do do
. I’ d heard Evangline talk about this square when she was making it. If you undid their tiny diapers, you could tell whether they were boy babies or girl babies. That was the kind of playful detail that made Evangeline’s work so special. In the upper right square a woman held a baby in a blue flannel blanket as her husband napped in a brass bed covered with a finely stitched miniature crazy quilt. Staring at it, the overhead track lighting caused my eye to catch a glint of something. Too far away for me to see closely, I grabbed the rickety wooden stool from behind the gift-shop counter and carried it over to the quilt. The glint, I could see at closer inspection, came from a small glass bead Evangeline had sewn right underneath the woman’s dark brown eyes. That puzzled me. Did it represent a tear? What was she crying about? Was something wrong with her baby? I opened the tiny flannel blanket held closed by a strip of Velcro and found . . . nothing. Nothing? Where was the baby? That wasn’t a detail Evangeline would leave out. Before I could inspect the square any closer, a gruff voice startled me.
“Benni, what you doing?”
Grabbing the adobe wall for support, I turned and faced D-Daddy. The severe expression on his weathered face reminded me that he once captained a fishing boat full of rough, sea-hardened deckhands.
“Nothing,” I said, climbing down from the teetering stool. “There . . . I thought I saw a loose thread in one of Evangeline’s squares. I took care of it.” I startled myself with the quickness of my lie. What instinct kept me from revealing the real reason I was inspecting the quilt?
He gave me an odd look and took the stool from my hands. “Better be careful,
ange,
” he said. His black eyes held tiny pinpoints of light.
“What?”
He held the stool up and jiggled the loose legs. “These chairs, they aren’t too steady, no. You could fall and hurt yourself. I’d better take this out the back and glue it.”
“Okay, thanks.” Following him to the studios, I wondered if this twinge of foreboding I felt was real or just a figment of my sometimes overactive imagination. D-Daddy didn’t seem happy I was inspecting his daughter’s quilt so closely, and that made me wonder why. I’d learned one thing about story quilts as I’d talked to the quilters and fabric artists as they made and discussed them these last few months. They were often like personal journals and used to either celebrate some wonderful memory or sometimes purge a bad one. I wanted to take another look at Evangline’s quilt, only now I would have to be more discreet about it.
At eleven-thirty, Elvia called.
“Mama’s serving lunch at noon,” she said “Pick me up, okay?”
“Sure. What’s she making?”
“White enchiladas.”
“I’m on my way.”
On the drive over, my thoughts compulsively turned back to all the tiny connections and ambiguities that surrounded Nora and her murder. What did we know so far? That Nora owned Bonita Peak and was going to sell it to developers. That made Peter a more than likely suspect, and he had plenty of access to ropes through the mountain climbing store where he worked. Both Roy and Grace had grudges against her and also had access to ropes.
Oh, for cryin’ out loud, Benni,
I said to myself.
Everyone in San Celina County has access to ropes.
Then there was the new development of her being the Tattler. If someone besides Will Henry knew her identity, it was possible other people knew it, too. Would they kill her over a nasty piece of gossip? I thought back over the last few months of the Tattler’s column. Was there anything there bad enough to kill someone over? Not that I could remember. It would have to be something so terrible it would ruin someone’s life. It all felt like a game of Scrabble when you get your letter tiles and, no matter which way you arrange them, can’t make any words. If you just had a few vowels—
Elvia was waiting for me in front of Blind Harry’s. “Mama’s really looking forward to seeing you,” she said, climbing into the truck.
“I’m looking forward to seeing her, too. Not to mention her
atole
. Gabe asked me to sneak him some.”
“We’d better get some while we can. The brothers and their
familias
are coming over tonight. That’s the equivalent of a swarm of locusts.”
The house where Elvia grew up was in an older section of San Celina where the houses were as individual as the people who lived there, many of them, like the Aragons, for more than forty years. Her parents’ neat yellow-and-white woodframe house sat on a huge corner lot that was the envy of the neighborhood. Flowering beds of red and pink impatiens and dozens of blooming rosebushes surrounded the house. They received almost as much loving care from Elvia’s mom as her fourteen grandchildren. Two huge walnut trees thick with leaves shaded the green lawn, trunk sections slick as glass from the decades of children who’d shimmied up and down them like little spider monkeys. I’d spent many cool and comfortable hours perched on one of the tree’s massive branches, reading or giggling with Elvia as we threw green walnuts on her protesting brothers below us. The house itself always reminded me of a patchwork quilt, with rooms tacked on like bright happy squares, making it bigger as each new baby came into the family.
Inside Señora Aragon’s red and yellow kitchen, the smoky smells of hand-burned chilies and simmering pinto beans flooded me with warm memories of rainy afternoons after school sitting at the round maple dining table doing math homework with Elvia, waiting for Dove to pick me up. Elvia hugged her mom and set a basket of fresh strawberries on the table.
“Chiquita,”
Señora Aragon said, taking my face in her plump, brown hands and kissing my cheek. “You look
bueno
. The
señor,
he is treating you right?” She searched my face with inquisitive eyes.
“Yes,” I said, smiling. “He’s a pain sometimes, but he’s treating me fine. He’d have to answer to you and Dove otherwise.”
She clicked her tongue. “
Sí,
he is a pain. He is a man, no?” She pointed at the strawberries and said to Elvia, “
M’hija,
put these over on the counter and help Benni set the table. The enchiladas are ready.”
We spread the red-and-white plastic tablecloth over the table and helped Señora Aragon set out the creamy white enchiladas, Spanish rice, pinto beans, and hot flour tortillas. After answering Señora Aragon’s questions about the health of my family and how my job was going, I fell into silence and listened to her and Elvia discuss the latest family gossip, which was, by sheer virtue of its size, quite detailed and extensive. As their conversation gradually fell into the half-Spanish, half-English they felt comfortable speaking around me, I let my mind wander, remembering the happy hours I’d spent in this kitchen and anticipating the sweet-tasting
atole
I was going to eat in the next few minutes. A familiar name caused me to mentally rejoin the conversation.
“Juanita Ayala,” Señora Aragon was saying.
“Ayala?” I repeated. “Is she related to Dolores Ayala? The Ayalas who own the Celina Cantina Restaurant on Marsh Street?”
Elvia nodded. “Her mother. Mama was just telling me about talking to Señora Ayala after mass on Sunday. Apparently they almost lost the restaurant a while back. They were damaged heavily during that horrible rain last winter because their roof was bad, and they never completely recouped their losses.” Elvia shook her head, her thick-lashed eyes narrowing in disapproval. “They only carried the minimum insurance and didn’t keep it current. Really stupid move, business-wise. Insurance is the
one
thing I never scrimp on.”
“Don’t be so hard on them,
m’hija,
” her mother said. “They lose so much money when Roberto was in hospital with his kidneys.” She stood up and picked up my empty plate. “Sometimes the times are harder than the money you save for them.” Her voice held a gentle reproof.
“I know, Mama,” she said. “I’m not saying anything against them, but it wasn’t a smart business move.”
Señora Aragon stacked my plate on Elvia’s and said to me, her eyes dancing with amusement, “Not everyone is as smart as
mi hija la patrona,
eh,
chiquita
?”
“I’ d venture to say no one,” I answered, laughing as I dodged Elvia’s swatting hand.
As Señora Aragon dished up the vanilla-scented puddinglike
atole,
making sure I got plenty of pineapple chunks just like when I was a girl, I asked, “You said almost, Mama Aragon. Did they get a loan or something?”