A Quilt for Christmas: A Novel - Softcover

SANDRA DALLAS is the author of thirteen novels, including Fallen Women, True Sisters, The Bride's House, Whiter Than Snow, Prayers for Sale, Tallgrass and New Mercies. She is a former Denver bureau chief for Business Week magazine and lives in Denver, Colorado.

CHAPTER ONE

Christmas Eve, 1864

The postmaster handed Eliza the letter the day before Christmas. It had sat in the box for a week, waiting for her, he said. “I’d have sent it along, but nobody was going out your way. I figured you’d be in for the oranges. I set two aside for you, the best two.” The man operated the post office out of his general store.

The oranges were the reason Eliza had hitched old Sabra to the wagon and driven into town. She had a sack of corn in the back to trade, a steep price for two oranges, but it couldn’t be helped. There were no coins to be spent. Will had promised to send her his thirteen dollars a month pay, but so far, she’d received nothing.

“It’s from Will, is it not?” the postmaster asked, fingering the letter as if it were his own.

“It is.” Eliza snatched the missive, as if she feared the man would open and read it himself. Perhaps he had already, for the letter was not sealed with wax but merely folded into itself, forming its own envelope.

But the postmaster didn’t comment on the contents. “A nice Christmas present for you, then. I’ll fetch them oranges.”

Eliza nodded. The oranges were likely not the best ones at all but the culls, dull orange in color, shriveled, the juice half gone. But they were oranges, and it wouldn’t be Christmas without them. She had told the children there might not be oranges this year, what with the war. After all, oranges came from somewhere in the South, so maybe the storekeeper wouldn’t be able to get them. Davy and Luzena had said they understood, but she knew they would be disappointed. They had always had oranges at Christmas. When they were younger, Davy and Luzena would consume the fruit all at once, letting the juice run down their fingers, but now that they were older, they carefully savored each section so that the orange lasted the entire Christmas day. And they saved the peels for their mother to dry, then chop up for her cooking. Once Davy had cut his orange in half and scraped out the pulp with his teeth. Then he had fastened each half of the cleaned orange to the bottom of a bottle, where it dried hard into a cup. He’d hidden the cups a whole year, until the following Christmas, giving one to Luzena, the other to Eliza, who used it for her pins.

This year they would have the Christmas oranges after all, along with the divinity candy that Eliza had set aside when she made the batch for Will, had secreted it in a tin for a surprise. She would stew the rooster she had killed that morning and add potatoes and onions, mix in a few herbs she had collected and dried in the summer. And then she would surprise the children with the presents—a knife for Davy that Will had found on the road just before he left. Eliza had rubbed the rust from the knife, then polished it until it looked almost new. And there was a wooden doll for Luzena, although she was nearly too old for such a plaything. Will had carved the doll before he left for a soldier, and had given it to Eliza to hide. She’d made an indigo dress for the doll and wrapped it in a tiny quilt made from scraps left over from the Stars and Stripes quilt. Now, best of all, there would be Will’s letter to read. She wouldn’t open the letter until Christmas morning. They would read it before church.

As she left the store, the letter and the oranges safe in her basket, Eliza scanned the sky, thinking the three of them might not make it to church at all. The snow had threatened even before she set out for town, and she had worried that it might come quickly and make the driving difficult. But a snowstorm would not have kept her from the Christmas oranges.

The snow was coming fast, in flakes as big and as soft as the down in Will’s Christmas quilt. As she hurried to the wagon, Eliza wondered if he had received it. She smiled to think that Will would spend the night before Christmas wrapped in the down-filled quilt she had made for him. She wondered if he would rub his hand against his name and hers and know how much she had loved stitching them, how much she loved him. She climbed into the wagon and flicked the reins against Sabra’s back, and the horse started up, taking a quick step or two before settling into a walk. The horse was old, and Eliza was grateful the mare could pull the wagon at all.

As she slapped the reins against Sabra’s back a second time, she heard someone shout, “Eliza!” and reined in the horse. She turned to the voice, unsure in the snow who was speaking to her.

“It’s me, Missouri Ann Stark,” a young woman said, emerging from the store and coming up to the wagon. “I saw you in the post office. I guess you didn’t see me.” Missouri Ann was small and pretty, with green eyes and hair so pale it was almost the white of the snow. But her face was gray and gaunt.

“I ask you to forgive me. There was a letter from Will, and for just about a minute, I forgot where I was.” Eliza saw that her friend was clutching her own envelope. “Did you hear from Hugh, too? That would make Christmas all the better if we both got letters.”

Missouri Ann shook her head. “Hugh can’t write. Couldn’t.”

Eliza stared at the woman. “What do you mean, couldn’t?”

“Oh, Eliza, Hugh’s dead. I’m a widow woman.” She stopped, as if studying the words, and repeated them. “I’m a widow woman. I don’t have a husband no more.” She rubbed her shawl across her face, then steadied herself. “It says right here in this letter that Hugh’s killed hisself in the battle. They’s wrote he died. Here, I’ll read it to you. ‘Missus Stark, your husband was perfectly resigned to dying. His final words were, “I die for a worthy cause.” He died a-praising the Union and said for you not to worry because he was going to a better place.’”

“Do you believe it?” Eliza blurted out. She shouldn’t have asked such a thing, but those were not words Hugh Stark would have spoken. More likely in his final moments, he would have profaned the Lord as well as the Union Army for playing such a rotten trick on him as to let him pass over.

“No, but it’s nice they wrote it.” She looked up, her face damp, but whether the wetness came from tears or snow Eliza didn’t know. “Oh, Eliza, what’s to become of us?”

“I’m sorry, Missouri Ann. It isn’t fair the war’s taken our men. I suppose you and Nance will stay on with the Starks.” Eliza didn’t like the Starks. They were loud and foulmouthed and lived like hogs. Hugh’s brothers were too unpatriotic or too cowardly to join the army. After they married, Hugh and Missouri Ann had gone to housekeeping on their own place, but when Hugh joined up, he moved his wife and daughter in with his family. Eliza had called on her friend only once at the Stark farm, because she could sense Missouri Ann’s embarrassment at the way her husband’s family lived. They were lazy and stupid, without sense enough to put butter on bread. Eliza couldn’t think how they kept themselves, because nothing ever hatched on their farm.

“I can’t. I’m between a hawk and a buzzard. They won’t let me go, but I can’t stay. They treat me like chicken scratch, and with Hugh dead, his brothers likely … Only thing protected me was they knew Hugh’d womp them if they didn’t treat me right.”

“But they’re family. And surely they dote on Nance.” Missouri Ann’s daughter was not quite two. She was a pretty thing, with fine golden hair and hazel eyes.

“Not so’s you’d notice. Only Mother Stark does. The men blame me she’s not a boy.”

“So you’ll go back to your own people, then?”

“I can’t. When I married Hugh, my folks said I couldn’t never come home again.”

“But they didn’t mean it.”

“They did, all right. They wouldn’t take me in if it was snowing ice cakes and I was dressed naked.”

Eliza understood. Missouri Ann’s family was as judgmental as the Starks were mean.

“Oh, Eliza, I thought about it, ’course, thought what I’d do if Hugh got killed in the war, but never did I come up with a plan.”

Eliza got out of the wagon and put her arms around Missouri Ann. “Do you have to tell the Starks that Hugh’s dead? You could wait until you’ve found a place for you and Nance.”

“I wish I’d thought of that. But I told the postmaster what was in the letter, and you know how you can’t never trust him to keep a secret. Besides, Dad Stark gets the paper from Topeka every week where it lists the dead. He has me read it to him, for he can’t read, neither. And how am I going to just skip over Hugh’s name if it’s there?”

Missouri Ann tucked the letter into the bosom of her dress and wiped her face with her hands. “I guess I should be mourning Hugh instead of worrying about me and Nance, but I can’t help it. I got to think of us first. Mourning’s for rich folks.”

“Have you prayed?” Eliza said, and immediately regretted the words. When would Missouri Ann have prayed? She’d just received the letter. Besides, Missouri Ann hadn’t been in church for a long time. She wasn’t a praying woman.

“Me and the Lord ain’t too acquainted of late.”

“Maybe not, but surely someone at the church would find a place for you.”

“Maybe you forgot Nance came awful early, and there’s some that holds it against me, believes me to be a prodigal woman.”

Eliza did remember now, but the gossiping had been more about Missouri Ann fornicating with a Stark than about the early arrival of the baby. The baby had been the only explanation Eliza could think of for why Missouri Ann, that sweet girl, had married Hugh. She hadn’t wanted to have a briar-patch child, a bastard.

Missouri Ann looked Eliza square in the face and said, “I could come live with you.”

“Me?”

The new widow had been holding her breath, and now she said in a rush, “You got that hired man’s soddy out back of your house. I could work around the place to pay for lodging. And Nance won’t be no trouble. We wouldn’t be a burden to you.”

“But it’s a ramshackle house with a hole in the wall where the snow drifts in. That’s no fit place for a woman and child.”

“I’m a good fixer. You should have seen me at the Stark place, nailing up boards. I wanted it warm for Nance. I asked the boys, but they’re lazy as summer rain. They don’t do nothing and don’t start that till after dinner. The roof on that cabin is awful bad, and Mother Stark complained the rain was coming in on her bed and asked them to do something about it. So they went upstairs and moved the bed. That’s all the good they are, and her their mother, birthing and raising them. She was the only decent one in the lot.”

Eliza laughed despite herself. She wondered again why Missouri Ann had married into such a family, why she’d fallen in love with Hugh Stark. Maybe it had been his good looks and the slow way he smiled. He’d seemed truly taken with Missouri Ann, however, and might have been a better man than she’d given him credit for, although she wasn’t sure. And then she remembered that Hugh Stark’s widow was standing in front of her. “He was a good husband. I’m sorry about Hugh, Missouri Ann. Truly I am.”

Missouri Ann looked away. “Like I say, I can’t think about that now. I got to ponder what I’m going to do. I best have plans before the Starks find out about Hugh. They might expect me to marry Edison.”

The woman had said that last in such a low voice that Eliza had strained to hear her, and even then, she wasn’t sure she had heard right. “Marry Edison? Edison Stark? Hugh’s brother?”

“The same.”

“One-legged Edison?”

Missouri Ann nodded.

“But why would you do that?”

“It might be I won’t have a choice. You don’t know the Starks, Eliza. Mother Stark said if anything happened to Hugh, I’d best get away fast, or it might be I’d never get another chance. She said it was too late for her, too late by thirty years, but I still had time. The Starks don’t want me, but they won’t let me go, neither.”

Had Hugh been like the rest of them? Eliza wondered. Had the sins of his father passed on to him? But Missouri Ann cared for him, so maybe he was different.

“Hugh was the best of them,” Missouri Ann said, as if she knew what Eliza was thinking. “He was a good man. I’ll raise Nance to think well of her father.” Then she added, “Maybe I could stay with old Aunt Grace. She needs someone to have a care for her.”

Old Aunt Grace was a slattern who lived in a shack in the woods and trapped wild animals, eating their flesh and selling their skins.

“No,” Eliza said, horrified. “You’ll move in with us.” She said it quickly, without much thought, but now she realized she had no choice but to take in Missouri Ann and Nance. What if Will had been killed and she and the children had had to leave the farm? Where would they have gone? “We would welcome you and Nance, Missouri Ann.”

Missouri Ann stared at Eliza. “You sure?”

Eliza said they would go and get Missouri Ann’s things right then, before the storm got worse.

“Cain’t. I’ll have to sneak away. I’ll walk to your place.”

“In this snow?” Eliza thought a moment, then said they could meet at church the following day.

Missouri Ann frowned. “Starks don’t go to church, even at Christmas.”

“Then you must tell them you are going to church for Nance’s sake,” Eliza said. “What about your belongings?”

“Ain’t got any,” Missouri Ann said.

*   *   *

As she rode behind the slow horse back to the farm, Eliza wondered what had happened to her friend in the past few years. She’d been shocked, of course, when Missouri Ann married Hugh Stark. He was a comely man with a smile that would have melted ice in midwinter, but there had been something about him that Eliza feared. Missouri Ann had been raised by a family of holy willies whose only joy was pointing out the sins of others. Eliza’s friend knew from an early age she was going to hell, so what did it matter if she broke a few of God’s laws, especially the one about fornication? But with a Stark! Missouri Ann was guileless and good. She could have done better. And then to be dumped at the Stark shanty when Hugh went off to war! Missouri Ann was a tough girl, but she had grown depressed, beaten down in the last months. Well, who wouldn’t be, living with a family like that? Eliza chided herself for not having been a better friend. Then she wondered if Missouri Ann had any friends at all or whether, like Eliza, they’d been discouraged from visiting.

Of course Eliza would let Missouri Ann and Nance live at the Spooner farm. She wondered that she had hesitated at all. Things would be tight. They would all have to be careful to make the food last through the winter. The harvest had been all right, although even with the help of men working on shares, they had had to leave some of the crops to rot. Eliza had tried to persuade Will to wait to join up until after the harvest was over, but he was anxious to kill the Rebels. He’d said she could manage, and she had, although not as well as if he’d been there.

Even if Hugh’s pay came through, there would be little money for necessities and none for extravagances such as more oranges. It was doubtful Missouri Ann would bring so much as a penny with her. But they would make it. Having another woman living on the place might help the loneliness she had felt since Will enlisted. And Eliza and the children would be safer with another adult there. She’d worried about safety ever since Davy found that tramp in the barn.

The cold had begun to seep into Eliza’s bones, and she tried to hurry the horse, but Sabra couldn’t be persuaded to pick up speed. Eliza hoped the Stark horse was faster, because she didn’t like to think about baby Nance out in the cold. She had glimpsed the child peering out of the window ...