The Quilt by T. Davis Bunn

ONCE UPON A TIME, not so very long ago, there was a little girl who grew up and had a family and tried to raise it as she thought the Lord would want. After a while, in the ways of this earth, she found herself growing old. The seasons seemed to whirl by with ever-increasing speed. The older she became, the harder it was to stop and savor each little moment, because all the moments that had come before were now ganging up on her, pushing her with ever greater pressure toward that final door. Life’s current became so swift that the days and weeks and months which used to mark her passage no longer held any meaning. They all flowed together into a kindly pastel blur, with little flecks of light every now and then to illuminate the world before her failing eyes. Grandchildren were born, other little girls to help take the first fragile steps upon life’s way. Lifetime friends passed on to that higher ground, their absence like vacuums in her world. And the faster the currents seemed to flow, the more still she seemed to become. All her remaining energy became focused on that which lay ahead.
    There came a time when her hands grew swollen and twisted by arthritis. She would look down at them and have difficulty seeing them as they were. Somewhere deep inside, she knew, was captured the fragile beauty of a seventeen-year-old farm girl who had given her life in holy matrimony to a man now eleven years in the grave. Sometimes she would look away from the window by which she sat, or look down from the television that kept her company between visits of her beloved family, and she would knead and squeeze her hands, one with the other.
    There were so many skills within those hands, so many memories, so many stories to tell. And something would touch her heart then, a gentle yearning, the whisper of a melody she would strain and still not be able to hear. It was like waking in the middle of the night, lying there in her lonely darkness, staring at the ceiling overhead, and listening to the laughter of children who had now grown up to have childrenof their own. Yet she could still hear her young children and feel them so close that it was almost as though they were there in the room with her. Exactly what it was they said, she could not make out. But somehow she felt it was important, as though these gentle ghosts of a time long gone were there to remind her of something. And during her days, as she sat and pressed and kneaded her fingers, she would hear a gentle voice calling to her. There was something left undone.
    When the neighbors talked of her, which was often, they all used one word to describe her. The word was beautiful.
    They would even say it to her face, some of them. “Mary, you are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on.” And they’d mean it.
    Her reply was always the same. “Honey, your eyes are worse than mine.” Then she’d peel off her trifocals, blink in that fragile way of very old ladies and pass her glasses over, saying, “Here, see if they help you any.”
    And the people would always laugh and change the subject, wishing there was some better way to tell her what the feeling was they had right then in their hearts.
    Even Everett, her son the businessman, would come in and sit longer and quieter than he’d ever sat in his life. Wednesday morning was Everett’s time, on account of his having to be at the farm-machinery auction on that side of town. He’d come in and pour himself a cup of coffee and lean over and kiss his mother very self-consciously on the forehead. Everett had always been self-conscious about any show of emotion. His wife had once confided to Mary that Everett was the only man she’d ever met who could get red in the face hearing the preacher talk about love.
    â€œEverett is about the strangest child I’ve ever seen,” Mary replied.
    â€œYou mean was the strangest child,” Lou Ann, Everett’s wife