• Chapter 13 •

Roseanna sits on her walker parked by the owl cage. When her daughter told her about making friends with the Chorniak grandson, she thought it might not be a bad idea, just like getting to know Jen Holt is not a bad idea. But Roseanna doesn’t know about the sister. This Esther Rawling woman talked Angela into being a judge for their fair, and she wants them over for tea this afternoon to see her quilts. Angela says she is a real busybody, like her puppy. It yaps at blackbirds roosting in the maple trees, and it yapped at Roseanna when she went with her walker up the lane. Angela says a pet gets to be like its owner, and she teases Roseanna that she’s spending too much time with the owl.

“Sly bird,” Roseanna says to it. “What all do you know?” They stare at each other. Roseanna rattles the chicken wire with a stick, then makes sounds by clicking her tongue. After a moment, the owl clicks its beak.

“I have a plan,” Roseanna says. “Angela, what are you doing this morning?”

“Some drawings of the town. Mrs. Rawling asked me if I’d show some pieces at the fair.”

“Draw the camp,” Roseanna says. “Where I found my broken doll.”

She returns her gaze back to concentrate on the owl.

“An owl flew over us that night at the camp. Draw a picture. Let the spirits guide you.”

This morning Angela wants to draw the grain elevator before it gets knocked down, and if she finishes in time, she’ll go to the campsite.

Angela imagines the empty elevator as near death. Later she will draw another picture during the elevator’s scheduled collapse, and later still another of an empty lot with a few half-buried boards showing on the surface.

The grain-boss elevator stands astride the plain, its business gone. Grass grows on its ramps like fuzz on carpet slippers. Workers swarm like ants on its thick ankles, emptying the building of what valuables can be removed. She draws the elevator’s resigned apprehension in the eyes of its broken windows, and in its slouched sag of submission.

She moves up the street to get a line on empty lots, the surviving post office, the vacant pool hall and the café. If she can locate old photographs, she’d like to draw a picture of the street in busier times, and another before there was a street.

From there she goes to the fairgrounds. Her mother told her that the campsite is to the northeast of the racetrack that no longer exists: no track, no judge’s stand, no white rail fence. But she sees the aspen bluff, and that is just what she is looking for.

She finds the clearing, but no evidence of anything left over from a camp, just the few rusted cans. How could there be anything after fifty-seven years? She will sketch regardless: the trees, the grassy area, the slough filled with cattails.

She draws two tents and a wagon stacked with willow pickets, and another picture of moving camp in a time before wheels – a picture of horses pulling travois. But she’d better hurry; she told Mrs. Rawling they’d come for tea at one.

Esther’s quilt is stretched out on a frame in the living room. Finished quilts are draped on sofas and chairs, and on the dining room table. Angela stands beside her, and Roseanna sits on a chair with the dog on her lap.

Esther scurries about the room from one quilt to the next, holding each one upright to show its pattern and name it:

“Log Cabin, The Cross and Crown,

Stacked Bricks, Trip Around the World,

Shoo Fly, Star, Rail Fence,

Court House Steps, Mohawk Trail,

Dresden Plate, Grandmother’s Flower Garden….

She lifts a quilt hanging from the back of her rocking chair. Each square has four different-coloured triangles sewn together, each square bordered with four-inch strips of floral Fortrel, polka-dot Fortrel and any and all of the patterns of the age of Fortrel.

My old blouses,” she says, “and my late husband’s pants and shirts.”

“What is the pattern called?” Angela asks.

Esther’s lips twitch for a moment. “I shouldn’t say. It’s really quite silly when you think of it.” She holds it by the corner, gingerly in one hand, and gingerly with her other hand strokes it with her fingers, then folds the quilt to place it back on her chair.

“Indian Hatchet,” she says. “Isn’t that silly?”

Angela picks it up and laughs. “I don’t see any hatchets.”

“Neither do I,” Esther says. “I don’t know why it’s called that.”

“Angela has a star-blanket quilt from her graduation,” Roseanna says.

“Bring it with you, Angela. When you come to the hall on Friday. We can set it up for display.”

She pours tea from a Saskatchewan lily fine-china teapot into Saskatchewan Lily fine-china cups. When she takes the lid off a cookie jar, the dog yips and leaps from Roseanna’s lap, only to get tangled in her oxygen lines.

“Oh, Bridget,” Esther says as she untangles the dog. “You naughty girl.” She cradles the dog in her arms, then sets her down on her mat by her dish and gives her a cookie.

“You’ll bring some drawings to the fair?” Esther asks Angela.

“I think, a couple.”

“We start judging at eight o’clock.”

They finish with the tea, and then Esther calls on Angela to help with her quilt.

“And you can just sit and watch us, Mrs. Wilkie. That we don’t do anything wrong.”

“Babysit the dog,” Roseanna says, as by this time Bridget has jumped back on her lap.

“This design is different,” Esther says, “and how it’s made.” She tells how normally she would have sewn patches into squares, and then sewn the squares together to make a cover. For this quilt, she has sewn forty-eight patches into a large ring, and she has many rings. She then stitched all the rings, like Olympic rings, onto a cream-coloured cotton cover. Angela rubs the fabric with her fingers to feel its warm, satin touch.

“Sea Island cotton,” Esther says. “I’ve had it awhile. From Mikado Silk in Saskatoon. Mostly nowadays people use a cotton/polyester. But nothing compares to Sea Island cotton.”

Esther has two pieces of cardboard for stencils: a circle the size of a dollar, and a concave square that’s a little larger. She has already stitched on the rings, and she has stitched all the patterns inside the circles, except for the last one where she has to trace both stencils in its centre.

“The frame’s old,” Angela says. “Old wood.”

“My grandparents,” Esther says. “They had it when they came from Ontario. They even brought a piano.”

“Your quilts are beautiful. What’s this one called?”

“Wedding Ring,” Esther says.

“Not Indian Hatchet,” Roseanna says.