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Show 01 COWKtm Tomer ruiprFCROYj X, g 'J. WN.U. SERVICE Ml THE STORY THUS FAR: Amos Croy settled on a farm at MarysviUe, Missouri, Mis-souri, where he married and a son, Homer, Ho-mer, was born. Homer's earliest recollection recol-lection was of a cyclone which blew down the sod barn and wrecked the orchard. or-chard. Sunday meant church, company for dinner and steer weight guessing. Dehorning De-horning of the calves, curing of hams and the weaning of calves were Jobs that Homer had to help with. Hog killing time meant that Homer would run the grinder while his mother added the seasoning sea-soning tm the sausage meat. The men weuM cut the meat while the women would strip the casings and soak them In salt water tor sausage making. There would be enough t last the year. voices would fall. My mother would sit a moment, thinking, then go to the bureau tn the spare room and get the wooden box that held Pa's wedding gloves and take out a piece of dress goods. "I believe I'll put it in," she would say, her voice very low now, because be-cause the piece was part of a dress that had belonged to my sister who had died before I was born. "Do you want to embroider her name?" Phebe would ask, and my mother would nod. "I'll chalk it for you," Phebe would say and would go and get her style book and take the piece of chalk I had brought home from school and make a fancy capital A, and the rest of the name Alice in small letters. Ma would take her silk thread and begin to stitch along the chalk marks. After a while Pa would come in and Ma would hold it up and he would say, "I'm glad it's going in." In going through the rag bag, Phebe would bring out a piece, "It's part of Homer's dress. Do you want it to go in, Aunt?" I could hardly believe I had ever been so little I had to wear a dress. But there it was. "I want it to go in," my mother would say and in it would go, because be-cause our crazy quilt was an album al-bum of the Croy family. The rag bag was a turning point. All year things had been going into it; if they went into it there was never any doubt about them. They were headed straight for the crazy quilt. But some things hung in the ment would vibrate over the house. I liked it, even if it meant extra work. "Homer, I want you to get the stove going," Phebe would say. More work. Sometimes the parlor wouldn't be used all winter. But It was on Quilting Quilt-ing Day. If a woman had her quilting quilt-ing in her everyday living room, she'd have to have a pretty good excuse ex-cuse or be talked about. By nine o'clock the first buggy would show up, then a surrey would appear, because it wouldn't do to go in a wagon on a stylish day like a quilting; pretty soon, Mrs. Gerilda Knabb would come over the brow of the hill in her sidesaddle, and I would have to dash out and hold her horse close to a surrey step so she could get down. Haying and threshing and clover-seed clover-seed hulling and road-work day belonged be-longed to the men. But Quilting Day belonged to the women. It was all right for a man to deliver his wife at a quilting, but he had to get away as fast as he could. If he went to the house and sat down with the womenfolks and tried to be sociable, they'd have run him out with brooms. No man in his right mind would go near the house. It wasn't proper for the women to sit around and visit; get right down to work, because work was more important than manners. It was a tremendous honor to be the first woman at the frames. There, in the middle of the floor, would be the frames with the quilt-to-be strung between them, and with cotton batten between the two lengths of cloth. The cloth would be stitched to the edging, but the quilt hadn't been tightened. When all was ready, one woman would take hold of one ratchet wheel and another woman would take hold of the other ratchet wheel and Phebe would dash up and down the frames giving the cotton the last smoothing out, then she would say, "Tighten!" and the women would begin twisting the ratchet wheels. A wooden tongue fitted into the teeth of a wheel and each time the tongue fell it gave a click. It was a hard job to get the quilt started Just right, because if it was slewed, the whole thing would be collywobbled and no amount ol work would ever get it itraight. So Phebe would dash up and down the frames, tightening pins and loosening loosen-ing threads, and having one woman tighten and another loosen until the quilt was finally squared on exactly right. "Fasten!" she would order, and the women would push the wooden tongues . down so they wouldn't fly loose and cause no end of trouble. Phebe was the leader. They all asked her how she wanted this done, or how she wanted that. She would tell them, now and then stopping to show how she turned a corner, or put in a rabbit ear. Ma wasn't important im-portant today. When the row of white lines was finished, Phebe would say, "I guess we can turn now." The women would go to the ratchet wheels and Phebe would say, "Roll," and the ratchet wheels would move and the little wooden tongues click; then the women wom-en would go back and take up their needles. The other women would be in the sitting room visiting, or helping Ma in the kitchen. But that-was only until the quilters got tired. Now and then one of the women from the sitting sit-ting room would get up and go to the frames and say, "I expect you're tired, Mrs. Kennedy. I'll take your place for a while." Mrs. Kennedy would say she wasn't in the least tired, but in a minute the new woman would be at the frames and Mrs. Kennedy would be in the sitting room visiting. On other days the polite thing was for everybody to sit down to dinner at the same time, but not on Quilting Quilt-ing Day. The frames must be kept turning. The women who were not quilting would eat, then go to the frames; those who had been quilting, quilt-ing, would go to the table. Not much to eat, but one expected fancy things, because today was workday. Get as much done as possible. After while we'd see Pa coming through the yard; then we'd heai him on the back porch taking ofl his overshoes. He'd sit down al the table, but there'd be no grace. He'd gulp down his food and get out of the house as fast as a tramp. After dinner the women would get sleepy and the chatter would fall off; now and then one would hold her hand, with a thimble on the middle mid-dle finger, up to her mouth and try to hide a yawn. Then she'd say, "1 was up with a calf last night," and everybody'd understand. Now and then one of the women, without a word, would get up and leave the frames and put fascinator fascina-tor over her head. We'd all know what that meant. When she came back in she'd hold her hands ovei the stove and say, "It's getting real chilly outside." Finally the quilt would be done and Phebe would say, "We can take it off now." Back the other waj the ratchet wheels would go and the quilt would sag in the middle frorr its weight, then it would be un stitched and unpinned from the edg ing. Phebe would hold it up and al would examine it to see who hac made the best diamonds. "Now th crazy quilt." (TO BE CONTINUED) CHAPTER VIII The hardest thing of all was to get from the ground into the wagon, for the lines must be held tight and the whale thing managed slowly and artfully, for the mules would stand more or less quietly, not knowing what to make of it alL Some way or other. Newt would get in and when he was in he would ease up on the lines and then suddenly slap them and out of the gate the wagon would go. My Job was to swing on the end of the wagon and get up in It, and there we would be, Newt and the mules and I. The mules didn't like this strange monster rattling and clanking along behind them and their ears would be tossing back and forth, pretty well convinced everything ev-erything was not right, but wanting to get a little better size-up of it Newt had a theory that no mule was any good until he had run away; couldn't trust him, he said. So he believed in taking the twig and bending bend-ing it early. Suddenly Newt would give the front of the wagon a kick and let off an ear-splitting yell. The effect this had on the mules was astonishing, their heads would go forward and their ears would go back and down 1 the road they would start at full speed, with the wagon rattling and swaying and leaping behind. The faster they ran the better he liked It; and so did I, although my heart was in my mouth. We always dreaded to meet anybody, any-body, but, such is human nature, we always hoped we would. A neighbor, jogging along in his buggy, could see us half a mile away; certainly he could hear us a mile. And when he saw the wagon tearing toward him, he would pull his team on the side of the road, then leap out and take his horses by the bits. Past him we would go, the wagon bouncing and rattling, and the man's own horses trembling in their traces as if the crack of doom had burst in their ears. Now and then we would meet a man with a load of hogs; the poor soul would have to pull over and he and the hogs would have to take their chances. Sometimes, Some-times, it seemed to me, the width of a pencil mark lay between us and the other wagon, but in some miraculous mirac-ulous way we always got past, and would leave the hog hauler muttering mutter-ing frightful curses. At last, we would come home, the brake off and the mules tired, their ears pitching hardly at all. There would be a little flurry when we tried to unhitch them, but not much. Then to the watering trough and a good feed of corn in the stable. And there Newt would stand, giving them love pats as they chomped, and talking to them as if they were children. This wild ride was not only once, but many times each fall, for Newt bought mule colts and broke them; or he brought range mules and broke them. This was smarter than it might possibly seem, for "broke" mules brought from $10 to $20 a pair more than ungentled mules. Not only did he get the money, but he also got the fun. And the very people peo-ple who had denounced him when they had seen him coming down the road, would wish they could get the fun out of things that Newt could. I liked Newt because he liked fun and because he wrote the One-Horse Farmer. Sometimes I would think, if I were writing the One-Horse Farmer, the kind of items I would send in. In November Phebe would say, "Aunt, don't you think it is about time to have the quilting party?" She would never say a because we hpd one each year. My mother would say, "Yes, I think it is. Go ahead and get things ready." My mother always had charge of the Sunday dinners, swimming parties, par-ties, sausage making, and so on, but Phebe was the quilter in our family and Quilting Day belonged to her. She was the best quilter in the neighborhood and was immensely proud of her ability. A thousand things had to be done. Cloth and thread and cotton had to be bought "Homer, will you bring home some chalk?" she would say. Word would be sent to the neighbors neigh-bors we were to have our quilting on a certain day, and, as the time approached, ap-proached, "mr house would get busier busi-er and bi'ier. There would be rolls of batten and piles of cloth, and out would come the rag bag we had been keeping all year, and Phebe would hunt through it and lay out in little piles the odds and ends for the crazy quilt. She would come to a piece and show it to my mother and their "It's the one I wore to sister Mary's wedding." balance, still good enough to wear, but just on the verge of going into the crazy quilt. Phebe would go to the closet in her room and bring back a dress and hold it up and say, "Aunt, do you think it ought to go in?" Ma would examine it and say, "I expect it better. Styles change so fast these days you probably can't ever use it again." "It's the one I wore to Sister Mary's wedding," Phebe would say a little choked, because Mary had married and Phebe hadn't. She would spread the dress on the table and cut out a piece under a pocket where it hadn't faded. "Do you want to put in anything of Blanche's?" she would say as the scissors made grating noises on the table. "Yes," Mother would say. "I've got something," Ma said and went to her own private box and came back with a campaign ribbon with Pierce and Breckenridge printed print-ed on it, and smoothed it with her fingers. "Do you think it's strong enough?" "I'll stitch a back on it," Phebe said. "Then I'd like it to go in." The day before the quilting, Phebe would say, "Homer, I want you to wash off the frames." More work for me. Always more work for me. That's the way it seemed. I would go to the smokehouse and get out the wooden frames. Two X's made the end pieces; when set up they were held together by two poles which were two or three feet longer than the average quilt. I would get a bucket of soap and water wa-ter and begin to scrub the frames, but no sooner would I start than Phebe would come trotting out. "Now don't you go and wet the edging." edg-ing." The "edging" was a piece of ducking about twice as wide as my hand which ran the length of each pole; to this the quilt was sewed while it was in process of construction. construc-tion. I would have to scrub the poles carefully so as not to get the edging wet. More work. I didn't have to be so careful with the X's. 1 could give them a slosh of water and a few quick rubs and be through. "Now you can lean them against the fence and let 'em dry." I would lean them promptly. We'd be up early on the day of the quilting, and a kind of excite- |