The Coffin Quilt by Ann Rinaldi

Author:Ann Rinaldi [Rinaldi, Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Chapter Nineteen

FALL 1880

BABY CORA TODDLED about on fat little legs, shaking her head and saying "no, no" when you told her she couldn't do something. I fed her, bathed her, combed her wispy baby hair, and I would have played with her all day if Tolbert didn't make me go to school.

I stayed a week with them. I was feeling more and more at home at their place. The house itself comforted me. The wood in the common room seemed to gleam in the firelight more than ours at home. Mary had a quilt on the wall over the settee. Ma would say quilts belonged only on beds. Their candles smelled good, and somehow the things they used to live every day—apples drying on a table, Mary's butter churn and spinning wheel, her bunches of herbs hanging overhead, Tolbert's bullet mold, his pelts hanging on the walls, the baby's cradle—looked purty lying about. Ours didn't at home. Maybe it was only the play of the light, I told myself. The light seemed different here.

I especially liked Tolbert's books. He had lots of them. One was Declaration of the Rights of Man. One night when I was supposed to be doing my lesson I asked him, "What's 'rights'?"

He was molding bullets. "It's something God gives us that nobody can take. Rights to live and think free, worship, read, talk, have families and raise 'em the way you want. It's what our ancestors fought for in the Revolution."

"You always have to fight for rights?"

He smiled. "Most of the time, yes."

"Do only men have them?"

From a chair by the fire, doing mending, Mary spoke. "Well? Answer her, Tolbert."

But instead he smiled. "What do you want, Fanny?"

"I want to go visit Ro. I miss her and I'm afeared for her."

"Can't let you do that. Pa's got men in the woods with guns lest Johnse comes by. It's dangerous."

"You could come with me. It wouldn't be dangerous then."

Silence. He wiped his hands with a rag. His yellow hair gleamed in the firelight. I saw him look at Mary, saw the look on her face, like she was saying something without opening her mouth. Saw him nod to her. Then he said, "All right, I'll take you." And I knew that Mary had rights.

In bed that night I was so excited about seeing Ro I could scarce sleep. The last thought I had before going off was, Then didn't God give Johnse rights to wed Roseanna?

***

TOLBERT TELLS THE best stories. On the way to Roseanna's we passed Granny Meeker's place, which is about two miles from Stringtown. She was limping around her yard and waved to Tolbert. He waved back. "Know why she limps?" he asked.

'Course I said no. So he told me. Said that she was a witch. And she put a spell on old Henry Crumley, who had a farm down the road. And to go about without he should see her, she changed herself into an old hen turkey.

"Well," Tolbert said, "Henry got vexed with this old hen turkey poking around his place and tried to shoot it.

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