A quilt, woven of love, dreams, and threaded with grief, joys and laughter sewn into its patches, tells of life beyond the shadows of hidden love, secret messages.
Carrie A. Hall
Against all predictions, the war edged into a second year. No one had dreamed it would last this long. Both armies had been camped through the winter months, with little action on either part. However, with the coming of spring, everyone on both sides braced for the battles that inevitably would happen.
JoBeth wasn’t sure just when or how the idea of the quilt came to her. Of course! she thought. It would be so simple, so subtle, so innocuous, that no one would guess, no one would suspect. Every young woman made quilts for her hope chest. No one would think anything of one she would design for herself. The secret would be her own. The hidden truth. She would keep working on the quilt all the time Wes was gone, as a kind of talisman to their promise, their pledge to each other.
She took out a sheet of paper and, with a pencil, began sketching her idea. Each square would have a dove in the corner, an olive branch in its mouth, and in the center would be clasped hands holding a heart!
Her mother seemed mildly surprised at JoBeth’s sudden interest in quilting and readily told her to rummage in her scrap bag or among her many various lengths of cloth to select material for her design. Her choice for the center of the square was a blue-gray calico with a tiny pattern. The dove shapes were white, the clasped hands she cut from pale-pink cotton, and the heart was red, as was the binding of each square. The olive branches she would embroider in brown and green thread after the patch was completed. Satisfied with her selection, she began work with high hopes. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too large a quilt—perhaps the war would be over soon.
JoBeth’s optimism, however, was short-lived. There was too much evidence to the contrary. Harvel’s letters were full of the hardships the Confederate forces were suffering, camped as they were in winter weather that most of the Southern men were unused to. There were difficulties in reaching the troops with supplies and food as well as medical necessities. All this was discussed and worried over at length in the Cady household. JoBeth, who knew that Wes was suffering the same kind of discomfort, distress, and deprivation, had no one with whom to vent her own anxieties. When Aunt Josie enlisted Johanna’s help in packing boxes with warm quilts, homemade jellies, knitted scarves, and gloves to send to her sons, JoBeth’s desire to do the same for Wes had to be suppressed.
It was so unfair, yet she could do nothing about it.
The days were long and the work on the quilt went slowly. JoBeth started diligently enough, but then her thoughts would wander, bringing Wes dreamily to mind. Was he cold, hungry, weary? The long marches, the battles he might be fighting, the danger, all played on her vivid imagination. If only she would hear from him! Mail was slow and irregular, especially that coming through the lines from the North. All such mail was probably considered suspicious, she thought, and was more than likely opened and read to see if it contained any information that could be used or could be damaging to the enemy.
JoBeth had also started keeping a journal into which she poured her thoughts, her feelings, her fears, her hopes, her dreams. It was a place where all their secrets could be safe. JoBeth hid both the growing stack of letters from Wes and her journal under a loose floorboard under the rug in her bedroom.
She often echoed the plaintive question that Wes had written in one of his letters that spring.
Why are we killing each other? We are all the same, descended from the same band of brave men who founded this country in the first place. If we have such differences, why can’t we settle them peacefully? What if men on both sides simply refused to fight, demanded that the politicians settle this some other way?
Forgive me, my darling, for burdening you with all this. But I have no one else to talk to who would understand, who knows my heart, mind, and soul as you do. I miss you more than I can say. Pray that this wretched war comes to a speedy end with victory for the Union, saving our wonderful country. I long for the day I can come back to you, kiss your sweet mouth. I love you, JoBeth. Pray for me.
Ever your devoted,
Wesley
If only Uncle Madison could read what Wes was feeling, maybe he would understand and forgive him. That was impossible, of course. JoBeth could not show this letter to anyone. As she read his letters, she realized that Wes was thinking deeper, becoming more mature, more spiritual. She had never heard any of the men in her family—for that matter, any of the men she knew—express such feelings. Her one comfort was the pledge quilt she was making. Hiding all in her heart, she stitched on her quilt, counting the finished squares as milestones until she could be with Wes again. Strengthening herself, she would think over and over, No matter what anyone says or thinks, I love him and he will come back! We will be together.
One day Aunt Josie asked, “Aren’t you ever going to finish that quilt, JoBeth? Seems to me you’ve been working on it quite a spell.”
“Yes, ma’am, I know,” JoBeth answered noncommittally. No one knew her secret pledge not to complete it until the war was over and Wesley returned safely.
Spring arrived and the war picked up momentum—battles fought, battles won. First the Confederates seemed to be winning, then the Union forces. Elation or depression came and went like the tide. Letters from Wes were rare. Sometimes JoBeth would get two or three at once, and other times weeks would pass before she heard from him. The letters she received did nothing to lift her spirits.
She herself was surrounded on every side by those who are all “hurrah for the South.” Of course, she understood. Their dear ones were in danger, fighting for what they believed was right. Sometimes it was hard to take so much talk edged with mean-spirited comments about “Yankees” as though they were an alien people. Did not people on both sides of the conflict bear a similar appearance, pray to the same God?
November 1862
With the bleak November weather, JoBeth experienced an eerie sense of doom. The war was never going to end. It would go on and on, just as her pile of patches grew. How many would she have to make before the war was over, before Wes was home? She began to feel like some kind of prisoner condemned to piecework, turning out a required number of units day after day. Each new one she cut out and started sewing added to her sentence. A self-imposed sentence. She would go on making them—she didn’t care how long or how big the final quilt became. Sometimes she almost lost heart, but something—fear as much as anything else—doggedly compelled her on. It isn’t superstition, she told herself. Wasn’t she praying constantly all the time she worked on it—for Wes’s safety, for the war to end? As the patches accumulated, so did the days and months drag by. She continued writing to Wes. Even if she wasn’t always sure he got the letters, it helped her to write them. It relieved some of her tension to express the feelings she had to suppress in her daily life. The fall dragged into winter, and JoBeth dreaded facing another Christmas without Wes.