The Quilt by T. Davis Bunn Page B

sweaty-palmed and shaky. Sooner or later, those problems all came out.
    And Mary listened. She didn’t often say much, and when she did speak, it wasn’t for very long. Mostly she just sat and looked at the person there beside her with those expressive eyes of hers. Even as they swam behind her trifocals, Mary’s eyes held more love than most people ever thought existed onthis earth. And when it came time to reach out and comfort those burdened with the world’s woes, Mary’s eyes filled the room with light.
    After the words and sometimes the tears had passed, folks tended to sit for a time, sharing in Mary’s silence. And when the outside world called them back again, to stoves and jobs and restless children, they carried a bit of Mary’s stillness along with them.
    The strange thing was, people rarely talked about sitting there with Mary. To their closest friends, they might say something like, I stopped by to see Mary today. She gave me her special recipe for German chocolate layer cake. And they’d smile in an almost embarrassed fashion, as though there was something to be ashamed about in being so touched by something they couldn’t put into words. The closest they ever came to explaining it was by describing something external.
    For instance, Everett kept telling his wife Lou Ann that he ought to have those seven Bibles his mother kept stacked by her television rebound. They were so ragged and worn with age and use they had to be held together with binder twine. Someday they’re gonna be all that is left of that woman, Everett would say, and right then and there Lou Ann would make him stop. She just couldn’t bear to imagine a world without Mary.
    One young man was just out of seminary school and real worried about getting sent to a good church. He found himself driving out by Mary’s one day, kind of meandering all over the county before deciding what he wanted to do with his afternoon. That evening he told a couple of his buddies it had seemed as if the old needlepoint that hung above the hall door, the one that said “In Everything Give Thanks,” had shone in his eyes the whole time he’d sat in Mary’s front parlor. The next day the young man was real embarrassed about what he’d said, even though nobody’d laughed at him. He promised himself never to talk about stuff like that ever again. He called it conduct unbecoming to a minister.
    The first Wednesday after the young minister’s visit, Everett stopped by Mary’s as usual, to find his elder brother Jonas working out by the woodshed. Jonas was the son who most resembled their father, big and gangly and silent, a real lover of the land. Jonas had stayed where he had been born, building his own farmhouse down at the base of the hill, tilling his garden on land that his father’s father had first cleared and planted, making his living as a joiner and cabinetmaker.
    Everett stood and watched Jonas for a spell, wondering what brought him up here in the middle of the week, feeling pretty put out that his Wednesday morning routine was being disturbed. Finally he said it, “Jonas, what in Sam Hill are you doing?”
    â€œMomma wants to make a quilt,” Jonas said in his quiet, slow-talking way, not even looking up from his work. He handled the wood-planer and hand-sander and hammer as if they were all extensions of his rough-hewn hands.
    Everett sucked in the belly that he told everybody had come with his job, on account of his brother standing there all sunburned and rock-solid. He opened his mouth, but closed it again. He didn’t know exactly how he could say what was really bothering him, which was that he looked forward all week to having these few moments alone with Mary. He didn’t often talk about anything more than what farm prices were doing or some problem he was having in the office. But way down deep inside himself, Everett knew he always walked away from