Stephanie Grace Whitson - [Quilt Chronicles 03] Read online

  Emilie took a deep breath. She turned away from Mother so that Father could see the tears brimming in her eyes. “I learned to think for myself. That’s a benefit, isn’t it? You haven’t forgotten what you said the day I left, have you? ‘Don’t be led along like a bleating sheep,’ you said. ‘Make up your own mind. Examine the facts. Form your own opinions.’”

  The tears didn’t do any good. Father was clearly more concerned with Mother’s feelings and opinions tonight. “When I said those words, I did not mean to encourage rebellion. I was envisioning my daughter taking her place among the leading women in our community. Well-equipped to tread in her mother’s footsteps—with newly acquired grace.” He sighed. “I have perhaps encouraged you too much when it comes to the subject of independence.” He glanced over at Mother. “And I most certainly did not encourage thoughts of a career in journalism.”

  Words tumbled out. “Since when is it ‘too much’ to want to learn? To want to be engaged with what’s going on in the world?”

  “The world,” Mother said, “as you seem to define the term, is not something with which a lady concerns herself, Emilie Jane. And it’s time that you accepted the simple facts of your birth.” She sighed and shook her head. “Sometimes I think you resent being born a woman. I don’t understand why you must always challenge everything. The boundaries protect us, Emilie. Why can’t you see that?”

  Resentment and simmering anger bubbled up. Emilie wanted to scream. What did Mother know of the world? She lived beneath a glass dome where everything was sunny and rosy and ladies made afternoon calls and conducted fund-raising bazaars to support causes. They threw money at problems. They never got their own hands dirty doing real work. Angry tears threatened. She blinked them away. And then, quite deliberately, she removed her gloves, laid them in her lap, and crossed her hands in a way that exposed the honest results of the afternoon’s experience setting type.

  Two spots of color appeared on either side of Mother’s aristocratic nose as she looked at Emilie’s hands. She rose from her chair and went to the doorway leading into the back hall. “Come to the kitchen when you and Father are finished discussing the Ladies’ News,” she said. “I’ll prepare what you need to take care of that.”

  “I don’t need your help,” Emilie said. “Dinah told me what to do.”

  Mother sighed again. “All right, then. I’ll excuse myself and leave the two of you to discuss the rest of this business.” She crossed to where Emilie sat and bent down for a good-night kiss, murmuring, “I’ll ask Dinah to make cinnamon biscuits for breakfast.”

  The faint aroma of Mother’s perfume softened Emilie’s anger. As did the mention of cinnamon biscuits. Mother always apologized through Dinah’s cooking. Perhaps there was still hope, especially if she was going to leave and give Emilie a chance to talk to Father alone.

  But Father called for Mother to wait for him. As he rose from his chair, he said, “If you have any notes that would help with the next column, you can bring them with you in the morning. I’ll see that Mrs. Penner gets them.”

  Mrs. Penner? With a sharp intake of breath, Emilie said, “Mrs. Penner? As in—Fern and Flora’s mother?”

  “Do we know any other Mrs. Penners?”

  “She was quite pleased to be asked,” Mother added with a gentle smile.

  “Of course she was.” Emilie snorted. “You’ve just handed one of the worst gossips in town a captive audience.” She glowered at Mother. “This is all your doing, isn’t it?”

  Father broke in. “Mind your tongue, Emilie Jane. Whatever her faults, Mrs. Penner is a tireless and devoted member of your mother’s Ladies’ Aid Society—and one of Mother’s oldest friends. And do not seek to lay blame at someone else’s feet. You are the one who stepped into that print room today and emerged looking like some hapless immigrant mill girl.”

  Emilie swallowed. She blinked back tears. She’d lost. She could have made Father see reason—if only they could have spoken alone. Just the two of them. But Father was already at Mother’s side, preparing to retire with her. “My penchant for sparing you the consequences of your choices over the years has not served you well,” he said. “I see that now, and I’m moving to correct that mistake.” He forced a smile. “Once you’ve calmed down, I doubt you’ll be all that disappointed, anyway. You weren’t really happy writing the Ladies’ News. And to be quite candid, a lighter hand and a more…feminine, for lack of a better word, tone will not be a bad thing for the column.”

  The words hewed a new wound. Father had just said that her journalistic voice wasn’t feminine. A lighter hand would be more fitting for the Ladies’ News. A different hand. And Father never “lacked for a better word.” He always said exactly what he meant, which was one reason he and Emilie got along so well. She hated the way women talked around things instead of about them.

  All was silence in the study, while Emilie fought the urge to raise her voice. To cry. To beg. None of which, she knew, would move Father, and all of which would only serve to assure Mother that they’d just done the right thing. Mother had no inclination to come out and be honest about what she thought—or felt—about things. She called honest arguments “unseemly emotional outbursts.”

  Taking a deep breath, Emilie willed her voice to remain calm and steady as she rose from her chair, her gloves clutched in one hand. “I should see to my hands.”

  Something in Father’s expression shifted. Was that relief shining in his eyes? He gave a little nod.

  Mother spoke again. “In time, you’ll see that this was for the best, my dear.”

  Emilie turned to go, pausing just long enough to look back at Father. “When I was setting type today, I heard that the daily print run will increase by thousands during the assembly.” She swallowed and allowed the bitterness she felt to sound in her voice. “Thousands of people could have read my work. How could you take that away from your own daughter and give it to Hazel Penner? How could you?”

  She made her way out into the hallway and into the kitchen. Father called after her in a gentle voice she hadn’t heard in a long time. She heard Mother murmur something. She ignored them both, moving from pantry to kitchen table to stove and back again until she had everything she would need. She warmed water and mixed Dinah’s concoction, then dipped all ten fingers into a bowl. And as she sat there staring at the squares of pale light cast onto the kitchen floor by the moonlight streaming in the windows…she wept.

  CHAPTER 4

  Noah Shaw (born LeShario) loved walking at night. It was a habit borne of necessity, for once he’d appeared on a small-town stage, “The Man of Many Voices” effectively surrendered anonymity. To have any chance of privacy, any chance of simply enjoying new surroundings, he’d learned to do so by moonlight.

  Standing out in a crowd wasn’t a new phenomenon. It wasn’t even all that bad. He owed his career to it. Being tall for his age had landed him his first dramatic role—Abraham Lincoln in a second-grade school pageant—and in every school pageant thereafter until Ma died.

  When his voice dropped into the lower registers and his schoolmates were still squeaking and squawking, that saved him more than one fight after school. The average boy from Missouri might not like the idea of Italian last names and dark Sicilian coloring, but no one was going to pick a fight with a boy who sounded like a full-grown man, who towered over them, and whose dark eyes warned them away. “I’m not looking for trouble, but if you start some, I’m not the type who runs.”

  In point of fact, Noah LeShario had rather enjoyed being different—until, at the age of eleven, he fell head-over-heels in puppy-love with blond-haired, blue-eyed Sally Bennet, a newcomer to St. Charles, Missouri. Sally took a shine to spindly Eldridge Mason, who had his very own pony, which he rode to school every day. No one had ever been allowed to so much as touch the creature until Sally. Once Eldridge showed her how to give his pet sugar cubes, the two of them spent nearly every recess near the tethered pony. And Noah knew jealousy for the first time.
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  The day he finally rounded up the courage to try to lure fair Sally away from both the pony and its owner by offering to help her practice her part for the upcoming school pageant (in which he would, of course, be Abraham Lincoln), Sally snubbed him. Later that day, Noah heard her snickering about it with Eldridge Mason. “Surely if he only used soap more frequently,” she sneered, “some of that brown would wash off.”

  The wound opened by those words festered, until one day Noah decided to take action. He’d seen how Ma lightened lace and fabric and how she removed stains. Maybe the recipe would help him look more like fair-skinned Ma—and less like he needed a bath in the eyes of Sally Bennet.

  Buttermilk made no difference at all. Lemon juice failed, too.

  Ma caught him just as he was dipping a rag into oil of turpentine. “What do you think you’re doing!”

  Noah ducked his head. “I don’t want to be Sicilian. I want to be American. And I want to look like you.”

  When Ma finally got the whole story out of him, anger flashed in her blue-gray eyes. She cupped Noah’s chin in one hand and leaned down to stare into his dark eyes. “You got your good looks from one of the best men who ever walked this earth—a man who died saving my life and yours, too. Don’t you ever let me catch you trying to erase God’s handiwork again, do you hear me?” She couldn’t say any more. Tears choked off her words.

  The idea that he’d made his little mother cry broke Noah’s heart. He flung his lanky self into her arms and choked out an apology. That night after Ma was asleep, Noah crept across the room they shared above a bakery to retrieve the small mirror atop her dresser. Moving over to the window, he looked at himself in the moonlight. I look like Pa. He was brave.

  After that night, Ma began to talk about the past more often. In the evenings, she’d sit with handwork in her lap and tell stories “from the old days” while she sewed. About heading west to start a new life and camping under the stars at night. About the other argonauts on the trail. About the soldiers who guarded the way. About Pa dying and a freighter taking pity on her and letting her ride with him back to Nebraska City. About working her way home to Missouri on a steamboat called the Laura Rose. About losing everything and being lonely and then—having God bless her with a baby boy who looked just like his Pa. In time, Noah realized that he didn’t really like Sally Bennet anymore. Eldridge Mason could have her.

  Noah was thirteen when Ma took ill. She was only sick for a few days, but pneumonia settled into her lungs and took her life. Noah was sent to live with a distant cousin he’d rarely seen, even though she lived in nearby St. Louis. It didn’t take Noah long to understand that Cousin Beulah would do “her Christian duty,” but she despised it and would rejoice on the day it was once and for all fulfilled.

  A year later, being different came in handy again. Noah might have been only fourteen, but he was over six feet tall and strong as an ox when he stowed away on a freight car one night, bent on riding as far away from Cousin Beulah and her black snake whip as possible. Before long he was loading and unloading freight cars. Helping unload a theatrical troupe in Kansas City introduced him to Professor Harry Gordon, and Professor Gordon introduced him to Shakespeare and Whitman, Dickens and Coleridge, Byron and Shelley and Keats. And now, ten years and what felt like a lifetime later, Noah Shaw had educated himself and found a life in which his big voice and his height and even his dark looks all gave him an advantage.

  Using Mother’s maiden name had been Professor Gordon’s idea. “There is no reason to give people an excuse not to hire you, my boy. It’s as wrong as it can be, but that statue to liberty they put up in New York harbor a few years ago hasn’t done a thing to change the average American’s opinion of the tired and poor if they happen to be Italian or Irish.” He’d pronounced it Eye-talian, to make his point. “As long as Eye-talian means the same thing as Papist, that’s two strikes against a man. What was your mother’s name before she married?” He’d waited for Noah to respond and then nodded. “There you have it. Be Noah Shaw. It’s a good English name. Protestant, too. Oh, I know it could be Irish or Scot, but you just let people think your roots go deep in the land of the Bard himself. That’s perfect for a theatrical career.”

  Noah had felt guilty about it for a while, but then he decided there was nothing wrong with paying tribute to a woman by using her name. Pa had loved her, too. He’d understand. And so here Noah Shaw stood in southeastern Nebraska, at the place where the prairie met the edge of Beatrice in Gage County, gazing up at a clear night sky. He was looking forward to the moonlit walk about the Chautauqua grounds and along the banks of the Blue River. He’d be able to listen to the same night sounds he imagined Ma and Pa hearing about twenty-five years ago when they’d camped on the banks of this very same river.

  Once he’d stepped through the arched entryway to the Chautauqua grounds, Noah paused and looked up to locate the Big Dipper in the night sky. Next he found the Bear, which spread out from the Dipper, and then Orion and the Pleiades. He smiled. Ma had embroidered the Big Dipper and the Bear on the surface of the quilt rolled up inside the duffel back in his hotel room. It was his only physical connection to her. He wasn’t certain which he valued more, the quilt or Ma’s stories about the things she’d embroidered on it. He didn’t know how old he’d been when she began calling him her “Little Bear.” That had transformed to “Bear” when what she called his “growly voice” emerged. They’d laughed about it, and she’d drawn a real bear standing on its hind legs and added it to the quilt she was making for him.

  An owl hooted. As Noah glanced in the direction of the sound, he caught a moonlight glimpse of a great bird swooping down out of a tree and landing in the tall grass up ahead. Ma had embroidered an owl on his quilt. A wagon wheel and flames of fire. It was almost as if the old bedroll was coming to life as he imagined wagons camped nearby and campfires flickering over by the river.

  When he finished here in Beatrice, he’d be headed to the Long Pine Chautauqua, some three hundred miles north and west of here. He wondered if he’d have a chance to see a live buffalo out that way. They were almost extinct now, but Ma had told him about seeing herds that spread across the prairie like a dark wave. What that must have been like!

  He stood still and closed his eyes, listening to the sound of the prairie at night. And he said a prayer for this season, which was about much more than monologues and storytelling. This season was a quest. Somehow, somewhere in the broad expanse of the western sky, Noah LeShario Shaw hoped to find the piece of himself that had always seemed to be missing.

  At the sound of footsteps on the wide porch just outside the kitchen door, Emilie snatched her fingertips from the bowl of warm water on the table before her. She stood up, hoping the sound of her chair scraping the floor wouldn’t carry to the bedrooms upstairs. Drying her wrinkled fingers, she went to the door and peered out, smiled, and opened the door to Bert.

  “You should be home by now.” She glanced past him toward the drive and the hitching post. “And where’s Royal?”

  “As if I would take your horse and leave you trapped here all day tomorrow.” He hesitated. “I couldn’t head home until I knew you were all right.”

  With a glance behind her, Emilie stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind them. “They’ve taken the Ladies’ News column away.”

  “Oh, Em.” Bert reached for her hands and gave them a quick squeeze. “I’m so sorry.”

  She almost leaned in to have him comfort her, but instead she squeezed back and let go. “I’ll be all right.” She took a deep breath. “It’s just a detour.”

  “But you loved writing for the paper.”

  Emilie shrugged. “Father said something tonight that made me realize it was the idea I liked—not the assignment. It wasn’t really much in the way of real news. Just a list of events. Apparently Mother disapproved of even that—much more than I realized.” She paused. “This was going to happen sooner or later. Father as much as told me that tonight. ‘A
ctions have consequences,’ he said. And he couldn’t spare me anymore. Not if he wanted to keep the peace at home.” She paused. Forced a little laugh.

  “He gave the column to Mrs. Penner. If she can do it, why would I even care about their taking it away?” Still, her voice wavered and she had to bite her lip to keep from crying again. Because she did care. Even if it wasn’t much, it had been hers. Her name in print.

  “Well, don’t give up,” Bert said. “People everywhere are going to read Emilie Rhodes someday. I just know it.”

  Emilie kissed his cheek. “You are the best friend a girl could ever hope for.”

  Bert pointed up at the moon. “Nice night for a walk.”

  “It is,” Emilie agreed, “but Father laid down the law. And now that my fingers are all prune-y from getting the ink out from beneath my nails, I have to get upstairs and write that farewell column.” She glanced toward the carriage house. “You really should save your leg and ride Royal home. Mother has plans to keep me tied to her apron strings all day tomorrow. I won’t need him.”

  “I have a feeling you’ll think of a way out of it—and wish you had your horse. Besides, like I said, it’s a nice night for a walk.” Bert paused. “You’re sure you’re all right?”

  Emilie thought for a moment, surprised that she could honestly say she was. “Not that I didn’t have a pity party a little while ago, but I’m all cried out.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll be fine. And I’ll see you Thursday evening at the opening ceremonies.”

  “Save me a seat.”

  “I thought the Penner twins had that taken care of.”

  Bert cleared his throat. “Friends do not let friends get hornswaggled by the Penner twins. Save me a seat.” He stepped off the porch and headed into the night, whistling as he walked.

  Back inside, Emilie hurried to pick up after herself in the kitchen and then tiptoed up the back stairs and into her room. Once she’d lit the lamp at her desk, she spread out the assorted bits of paper in the folder Father had handed her earlier: cryptic notes from this member of that committee and that chairman of this board. Ice cream socials, quilting bees, silent auctions, Ladies’ Aid meetings, chorale recitals, and of course the opening exercises for this year’s ten-day Interstate Chautauqua.