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  OTHER YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY

  ALIDA'S SONG, Gary Paulsen

  INSIDE GRANDAD, Peter Dickinson

  THE TEARS OF THE SALAMANDER, Peter Dickinson

  THE FIRE-EATERS, David Almond

  SWEAR TO HOWDY, Wendelin Van Draanen

  VOYAGE OF ICE, Michele Torrey

  BLACKWATER BEN, William Durbin

  SONG OF SAMPO LAKE, William Durbin

  VARJAK PAW, SF Said

  YEAR OF NO RAIN, Alice Mead

  With all love to Hannah

  Foreword

  This is the third book about my relationship with my grandmother Alida. For various reasons, and to my great good fortune, my grandmother essentially became my mother. The first book, The Cookcamp, covered a summer I spent with her when I was just five years old and she was working as a cook for a crew of older men making a road up into Canada from Minnesota during the Second World War. The second, Alida's Song, is about the summer I spent with her when I was fourteen.

  Initially, because of the pain of remembering the emotional disaster that was my mother, I had decided not to write anything else about my early years with my mother and grandmother; and so in the end of The Cookcamp there's a note of finality about seeing my grandmother again when I was a child. But my grandmother shines so in my life, made things so wonderful for me when I was a small boy and, later, when I became a man, that I simply had to write more about her. And so The Quilt. All that I am, I am because of her, and in that way this final story, all true, is more hers than mine. By her life, through me, she has made it happen.

  In this third book I have just turned six. At six I still did not understand what the war was or how it would affect me. Just two years later I would move to the Philippines and see war personally. I became a street child in Manila, living in the aftermath of the barbaric cruelty the Japanese had committed there. But the summer I was six I learned what women, and more specifically, my grandmother, had to do to keep life, and families, together during the war.

  For America, World War II lasted for nearly five years. During those years there was a time when the boy could not live with his mother.

  His father had gone off to fight one week after the boy was born and his mother went to work in a munitions factory in Chicago. At first the boy lived with her in the tiny apartment by the elevated railway. Soon, though, other people—men—came to visit her and she started to do very grown-up things. He did not fit in, and when life with his mother became too difficult, he went to live with his grandmother.

  The first time this happened his grandmother was working as a cook for a group of men building a war road from northern Minnesota up into Canada. They spent a wonderful summer together; later he would remember only good things about those months and indeed all the times he was with his grandmother.

  He called her Grandma. Her name was Alida but he called her Grandma and he loved her very much, as he would love her the rest of her life and his life, and she adored him as well and cooked him apple pies and knitted stockings and mittens for him even though it was summer and read him letters from his mother, which made him love his mother, even though sometimes he would look at the paper his grandmother held and see that there was no writing on it. And she spoke to him in Norwegian as if he were a little man and not a boy.

  The second time he went to live with his grandmother he was just six and he stayed with her at first in her small house in a little town near the Canadian border, in Minnesota.

  There were only a hundred and forty people living in this town and he lived with her in a two-room house that was set on the outskirts of the village near a small stream. The water made a wonderful burbling noise that helped him sleep when he thought of his mother in Chicago and missed her.

  Once, while his grandmother was sitting at the small table in the one room that served as parlor, living room and kitchen, he asked her, “If I miss Mother so much”—and he called her Mother then, although when he spoke to his mother he always called her Mom—“why is it that I can't be with her?”

  And his grandmother, who was crocheting what would become a bedspread, put her crocheting down on her lap. She took him in her arms, which he always liked but did not see a reason for now, and said, “She is living in a very fast time, your mother, and working very hard, and she would not have time to spend with you and that would make her sad. It's bad to be sad.”

  “Sometimes in the night when I think of her and miss her I'm sad.”

  “I know, I know. And that is why you're with me. That's just the way things are now.”

  “Is it because of the war?”

  “Yes. It's the war.”

  “I thought it was because of the men who came home with her from the plant where they make bullets for the soldiers.”

  “No. Those men are nothing and you mustn't think about them.”

  “Do they come home with her because of the war?”

  “Yes. They are nothing to think about.” And she went back to her crocheting except that he could see that her fingers went very fast and hard with the crochet hook, and she missed a stitch and had to go back. He could tell that she was upset but could not understand why and thought it was something he'd said, and hugged her and stood next to her that way for several moments. Then he said, because he thought it would help, “I don't miss my father at all.”

  Her fingers stopped for a moment, then continued, more slowly, and she sighed. “You never saw him. He was in the deserts in California training in tanks when you were born and they sent him right overseas.”

  “But I will see him someday.”

  “Yes.”

  “After the war.”

  “Yes, after the war.”

  He thought for another moment. “When will the war be over?”

  Her fingers stopped again and her voice grew tight and with the clipped sound of her Norwegian accent had almost knife edges. “When men are sick and tired of being men …” She trailed off. “Never mind. The war will be over when it's over. Go play outside.”

  It was summer and he played on the edge of the water and in the stream, which was only ankle-deep, making boats with leaves and sticks and lying down on his side to make them look bigger so they were like ships as they bounced and careened down the rapids. Enemy ships, which he had seen in newsreels on the rare occasions when his mother had taken him to Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies in Chicago, which he liked very much—the movies—even though he did not know exactly what an enemy was except that one was German and one was Japanese and he did not know exactly what they were except that they were bad and soldiers were fighting them.

  He played war with the stick boats and leaf ships and dropped rocks on them and pretended they were bombs, and each time he sank one of them he pretended he was helping his father in some way, by killing the Germans and Japanese, and he would be able to come home and send away the men who visited the boy's mother in Chicago.

  He would sometimes play in the stream all day until his grandmother called him in to eat. He would find that it was very late and still light and his eyes could barely stay open.

  They ate potatoes and small pieces of venison that his grandmother got from neighbors who hunted deer. And she made him apple pies, as she had in the cookcamp in the woods the year before. Sometimes they had lefsa, a kind of big tortilla made of potato flour, which she cooked on a piece of iron on top of the stove.

  The lefsa was delicious, especially when she smeared it with butter and rolled it into a long tube with chokecherry jelly she had made from berries picked in the summer.

  Sometimes he would find himself in her lap, falling asleep with lefsa in his mouth and the sun still bright outside.

  “Why is the sun still out at night here? It's not in Chicago,” he asked one day, sitting at the table. “Is it because of the war?”

  She shook her head and smiled. “No. God makes the days long in summer in the north so Norwegians have more time to get all their work done.”

  “What's a Norwegian?”

  She laughed. “Why you are, little one. You're my brave little Norwegian.” And she sang a song about a thousand Swedes who ran through the weeds with one Norwegian chasing them, and he didn't understand really what it meant but tried to hum along with her.

  She sang a lot in that time when the two of them lived in the little house and most of his memories of then would have her singing. She sang short songs with a foreign sound, which he would find was Norwegian. She sang while she cooked, leaning over the stove with flour on her cheeks and in her hair, her eyes crinkled with smiles.

  One day she decided to hang new wallpaper in the little bedroom and she made paste with flour and water and took out the wallpaper with the pretty flowers that she had ordered from Sears and Roebuck. A neighbor lady came to help. Her name was Clair and she was old like his grandmother and had the same lines by her eyes from smiling all the time. She brought a quart jar full of red liquid that she said was her special berry wine.

  He had often seen his mother drinking beer in the Cozy Corne
r Bar in Chicago when she met with men. She'd have him stand on the bar and sing the “Mares eat oats and goats eat oats and little lambs eat ivy” song, which he always got wrong and sang, “Marzeedotes and goazeedotes and liddlamseetdivey.”

  Everybody laughed when he sang and gave him drumsticks of Southern fried chicken and nickel bottles of Coca-Cola. He liked all that, but he didn't like what the drinking did to his mother.

  But his grandmother and Clair were different. They took little sips from jelly glasses and even gave him a little sip, which tasted sweet and a bit sticky, and soon they were giggling and flopping the wallpaper over their heads when they tried to hang it, and his grandmother began singing songs that made Clair blush, even though when they weren't laughing she sang along.

  The wallpaper never did get pasted to the walls, and instead his grandmother and Clair sat in the kitchen and talked about when they were young. The boy sat listening because they laughed the whole time they talked, and he thought how much fun they must have had when they were young.

  “I should have married Clarence,” Clair said once.

  “He didn't ask you,” his grandmother said, laughing, “he asked me. And I married him. You married Sven, remember?”

  “Yes, Alida,” Clair said, “but Sven was weak and Clarence was strong.”

  “You had three sons with Sven before he died.”

  “But you had four, Alida, and four daughters, before Clarence passed on….”

  “That's true. But even so, you loved Sven, didn't you?”

  “Sven was a poet,” Clair said, nodding, but then she smiled and added, “But poets don't always get the wood cut, if you know what I mean.”

  And his grandmother laughed and blushed and said, “Oh, you, Clair, you're terrible!”

  And they laughed and laughed, sipping the sticky wine, and the boy didn't understand most of what they said. As the evening came on he kept closing his eyes and opening them more slowly, and he finally felt himself being carried to bed and thought if his mother was this way when she drank he would not mind it so much.

  The next morning the sound of his grandmother slamming pans in the kitchen woke him up and he went out in his pajamas to see her making pancakes.

  “This morning,” she said, all smiles, “we are having buttermilk pancakes fried in bear grease with honey on top.”

  “What's bear grease?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “It's grease made from bears. Clair brought two quarts of it over when she came to help with the papering and I thought you might like to taste pancakes made with it. It's the very best for pancakes and doughnuts and rubbing on your boots.”

  And while he tried to think of how you could get grease from a bear or why you would use it for pancakes or doughnuts or why you would rub it on your boots, his grandmother's ring came from the phone hanging on the wall.

  He loved the party line. In the city everybody had their own private phone but here all the phones were on the same line and each had their own special ring. His grandmother's ring was a short, a long and then another short, but they heard all the rings and often his grandmother would put her hand over the mouthpiece and hold the earpiece to her ear and listen in on other people's conversations.

  It was called rubbernecking, and he loved it even though his grandmother said it was wrong.

  “But you do it,” he said.

  “Yes, but it's still wrong, and it's very wrong for you, my little Norwegian.”

  But this time the ring was for her and she wiped the flour from her hands and took the earpiece from the hook on the side and rose on her toes to reach the mouthpiece.

  “Hello, yes, this is Alida!” She always yelled in the telephone and she started every sentence with “Hello, yes,” as if she needed to constantly reestablish that she was still there listening. “Hello, yes, Kristina, go ahead!”

  The boy heard only the one side, though he listened hard.

  “Hello, yes, I see.”

  And: “Hello, yes, that will be fine. How soon?”

  And: “Hello, yes, I'll have to get Elmer to give us a ride out. It depends on his truck. With the gas rationing he has to run it on tractor fuel and sometimes he can't keep it running. We'll see you when we see you.”

  She listened again, then: “Hello, yes, there's no problem. He's a good boy and no trouble. Yes, then, we'll see you.”

  And she hung up and turned to the boy and smiled and said, “We're going to go spend some time with Kristina. Her man is off in the war and she needs some help on her farm.”

  Which is how it happened that the boy learned of the quilt.

  The boy had not been raised on a farm. Most of his life he had been in Minneapolis, living in a small apartment with his mother while she worked at a laundry and then in another small apartment in Chicago when she went to work at the munitions factory. He knew a little about city living, about how to say “hello” and “please” and “thank you” to the super, how not to make noise in the hallways, how to play in one place so his mother could find him easily, how not to make noise when his mother napped because she worked the night shift, how not to go outside the building because there were bad men, how to turn the radio on and listen to the Lone Ranger and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy and Red Skelton, how to be careful of Mr. McAllister, who lived next door and did not like children.

  But he knew almost nothing of farms. He had seen farms when he visited his cousins at Christmas for a day or two but had no real concept of what happened on one and so he was very excited all through the evening while his grandmother packed.

  “Is it a big farm?”

  “Not so large. I think they have a hundred and sixty acres with about eighty acres cleared.”

  “Does she have animals?”

  “Of course, silly. All farms have animals.”

  “What kind of animals?”

  She looked at him. “Farm animals.”

  “Are there cows?”

  She held up a denim jacket that had seen better days, then shrugged and put it in the box she was packing. “Yes, cows.”

  “And horses?”

  “Of course. You can't farm without workhorses. Who would do the work?”

  “Chickens?”

  “Yes. Chickens and ducks and horses and cows and pigs. All the farm animals.” She sighed as she put a worn dress in the box. “Now, get ready for bed. Elmer is coming to get us early in the morning to take us out to Kristina's farm and we have to be rested and ready.”

  He put on his pajamas and she washed his face and tucked him into the small cot next to her bed, but at first he was too excited to sleep. He listened to her moving around, packing, and just as he started to doze off he remembered something.

  “Will she have a dog?” he called.

  “A dog, yes. And cats, too, I suspect. She might even have fish or a kangaroo. Now go to sleep.”

  But still sleep wouldn't come and he turned and tossed, until at last his eyes closed for just a second. Then he heard his grandmother say, “Come on, sleepy bones, Elmer will be here soon and we have to have breakfast ready for him.”

  It was hard to decide on who was older or in worse shape, Elmer or his truck. In the layers of family in the north part of Minnesota, where it seemed that almost everybody was related in some way, Elmer was some distant relation to the boy's grandmother but older, much older, than her and broken by his years.

  He was short and bent, with an old wool jacket that seemed almost to reach the ground, and a beard that was gray and roughly cut with a scissors, and tufts of hair that grew thickly out of both ears and both nostrils.

  The top of his head was completely bald and around the sides there was a white ring of silver-gray hair that he apparently also kept trimmed with the same hacking scissors he used on his beard.

  There was not a tooth in his head and he had long ago broken what served as his dentures so that he had callused gums that were so hard he could actually chew, and the boy watched with outright fascination as he ate pancakes. His manners were fastidious and he carefully dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief after each bite, and when he had finished eating he sipped coffee into which he dipped two sugar lumps, which he put inside his lower lip while drinking the coffee.