Two weeks later, our relatives gathered for a family remembrance at Mom’s house. Everyone was talking in the living room as I walked through the front door, and I had the quilts over both arms, and I set them on the dining table and asked if anybody wanted to see the backs.
Nobody had ever looked at the backs. That is not a criticism. You look at the front of a quilt. That is where the work is.
On the back of every one, down in the corner, is a label. Muslin, cut with pinking shears, and on it in permanent marker in my mother’s schoolteacher printing: the year, the pattern name, and one line about where the fabric came from.
Forty-one quilts. Forty-one labels.
The double wedding ring from 1987 says the blue is Daddy’s work shirts, the ones from the plant, the collars are gone but the backs were good. The nine-patch says every green square is Aunt Lucille’s kitchen curtains, she would not throw them out, she made me take them. There is a little crib quilt with a label that says this one is for a baby we did not get, 1979, I made it anyway.
My sister did not know about that baby. Neither did I until I read the corner of a quilt at forty-eight years old.
The tornado quilt is the one that stopped the room. May 2011, and the label says the shirts are from the boxes at the church, washed twice, I could not stand to see them thrown away, these belonged to people who did not come home. My mother pieced that thing for two years and never once hung it anywhere.
Folded inside the binding of the top quilt, where you would only find it if you were putting it away properly, was a piece of paper the size of a receipt.
To whoever is folding these: I did not give them to the daughter who wanted them most. I gave them to the one who asked what the fabric was. That is all a quilt is, girls — it is the clothes of people who loved you, cut up and put back together so you can stay warm under them.
My sister read it standing up and then she sat down on the arm of the couch, which is a thing my mother told her not to do for thirty years.
She did not want the quilts. That is what she told me, and I believe her. She wanted to have been the one who was told. She spent forty years thinking there was a room our mother let me into and not her, and the terrible part is that the door was never locked, it was just that I asked and she did not.
We have a rule now. Nobody stores them. Every one is out and in use in one house or another, and the cousins drew for them, and the labels stay attached and get read out loud at Christmas whether anybody wants to hear it or not.
My sister took the nine-patch with Aunt Lucille’s curtains. She is learning to piece. She is terrible at it and she will not hear a word about it, and last month she sewed her first label.