The Quilt Walk by Sandra Dallas Read Free Book Online Page B

Buttermilk John said as he rode up to our wagon.
    “Said I would,” Pa replied. But he added, “We took some water. I hadn’t expected that.”
    “This is the hardest crossing ’tween here and Denver City,” Buttermilk John said. “We’ll have to cross the Platte River a time or three or four, but it’s not so deep, nothing a wagon like yours can’t handle. Look at that wagon over there.” Buttermilk John pointed with his chin. “The wagon’s made of green wood. This child thinks they’ll be lucky to make it halfway across the plains, if they don’t break down before.”
    Buttermilk John went on to the next wagon, and I asked Pa, “How come he calls himself ‘this child’ and you ‘old son?’”
    “He’s a mountain man. They talk that way.”
    “What’s a mountain man?” I’d never heard of one.
    “An old-time trapper. The trappers were the first white men in the West. They caught beaver and other animals for their fur. But the West has been trapped out. The animals were plentiful in the 1820s and ’30s, when the mountain men first arrived, but not now. Besides, with all the settlers coming in, there isn’t room for the mountain men anymore. So they work as guides. Some of them married Indian women and lived with the tribes. Their wives make their buckskin suits and bead them, making holes in the buckskin with a tool called an awl. Those Indian women work harder than any woman I ever met, except maybe your ma.”
    I decided to tell Ma what Pa had said because he didn’t praise her very often.
    After our wagon was unpacked and our wet things spread on the ground to dry, Pa and Uncle Will went to a meeting with the other men in the wagon train. A woman came over to Ma and Aunt Catherine and introduced herself. “I’m Esther Reid from Illinois, and we’re headed to Georgetown, Colorado, where we expect to find a gold mine. My husband does, at any rate. Me, I’d be happy to find a cabin with a feather bed to sleep on—that is, if there are feathers in Colorado.”
    Aunt Catherine sat down on a box and took off her sunbonnet. “A feather bed would be nice, but I think I would like best to have a cook stove.” She’d burned the hem of one of her dresses in our campfire the first week out.
    “A rocking chair. That’s what I’d like,” Ma said.
    “You can come sit in mine any time you care to,” Mrs. Reid said to Ma. “I told my husband I’d as soon leave behind a wagon wheel as that chair. I have him take it down every night. That way I can sit by the fire with the Good Book and my piecing. I’m just as happy as if I was back at home.”
    “It seems all of us have brought our piecing,” Ma said. “I do mine sitting on the wagon seat, and I’ve observed women stitch as they walk along.”
    “Quilting’s a woman’s way of dealing with troubles. There’s nothing so bad that piecing with the colors doesn’t help,” Mrs. Reid said. “Working with a needle in my hand brings me peace.”
    “Amen,” Aunt Catherine said.
    “Does the young ’un quilt?” Mrs. Reid asked, looking over at me.
    Ma looked to me to answer for myself, and I squirmed. “Not really,” I said.
    “I believe she’d rather hunt insects and toadstools than sit with her quilting,” Ma explained.
    “Of course, what troubles does a girl that age have? Nothing at all for her to worry about.”
    “I think she might miss her home just a little,” Ma said.
    I was pleased Ma remembered how much I’d missed our farm when we’d started out, although I didn’t think about it as much now.
    Just then, another lady walked up and said, “Mrs. Hatchett.” Both Ma and Aunt Catherine were Mrs. Hatchett, because Pa and Uncle Will were brothers, so both of them turned to her.
    “Mrs. Bonner,” Aunt Catherine said, recognizing the woman we’d met at the Patee House. She explained to Ma, “Mrs. Bonner sneaked off for tea, too. But she is a newly married woman, so I suppose her husband indulges her.”
    Mrs. Bonner