The Quilt

For America, World War II lasted for nearly five years. During those years there was a time when the boy could not live with his mother.

His father had gone off to fight one week after the boy was born and his mother went to work in a munitions factory in Chicago. At first the boy lived with her in the tiny apartment by the elevated railway. Soon, though, other people—men—came to visit her and she started to do very grown-up things. He did not fit in, and when life with his mother became too difficult, he went to live with his grandmother.

The first time this happened his grandmother was
working as a cook for a group of men building a war road from northern Minnesota up into Canada. They spent a wonderful summer together; later he would remember only good things about those months and indeed all the times he was with his grandmother.

He called her Grandma. Her name was Alida but he called her Grandma and he loved her very much, as he would love her the rest of her life and his life, and she adored him as well and cooked him apple pies and knitted stockings and mittens for him even though it was summer and read him letters from his mother, which made him love his mother, even though sometimes he would look at the paper his grandmother held and see that there was no writing on it. And she spoke to him in Norwegian as if he were a little man and not a boy.

The second time he went to live with his grandmother he was just six and he stayed with her at first in her small house in a little town near the Canadian border, in Minnesota.

There were only a hundred and forty people living in this town and he lived with her in a two-room house that was set on the outskirts of the village near
a small stream. The water made a wonderful burbling noise that helped him sleep when he thought of his mother in Chicago and missed her.

Once, while his grandmother was sitting at the small table in the one room that served as parlor, living room and kitchen, he asked her, “If I miss Mother so much”—and he called her Mother then, although when he spoke to his mother he always called her Mom—“why is it that I can't be with her?”

And his grandmother, who was crocheting what would become a bedspread, put her crocheting down on her lap. She took him in her arms, which he always liked but did not see a reason for now, and said, “She is living in a very fast time, your mother, and working very hard, and she would not have time to spend with you and that would make her sad. It's bad to be sad.”

“Sometimes in the night when I think of her and miss her
I'm
sad.”

“I know, I know. And that is why you're with me. That's just the way things are now.”

“Is it because of the war?”

“Yes. It's the war.”

“I thought it was because of the men who came home with her from the plant where they make bullets for the soldiers.”

“No. Those men are nothing and you mustn't think about them.”

“Do they come home with her because of the war?”

“Yes. They are nothing to think about.” And she went back to her crocheting except that he could see that her fingers went very fast and hard with the crochet hook, and she missed a stitch and had to go back. He could tell that she was upset but could not understand why and thought it was something he'd said, and hugged her and stood next to her that way for several moments. Then he said, because he thought it would help, “I don't miss my father at all.”

Her fingers stopped for a moment, then continued, more slowly, and she sighed. “You never saw him. He was in the deserts in California training in tanks when you were born and they sent him right overseas.”

“But I will see him someday.”

“Yes.”

“After the war.”

“Yes, after the war.”

He thought for another moment. “When will the war be over?”

Her fingers stopped again and her voice grew tight and with the clipped sound of her Norwegian accent had almost knife edges. “When men are sick and tired of being men …” She trailed off. “Never mind. The war will be over when it's over. Go play outside.”

It was summer and he played on the edge of the water and in the stream, which was only ankle-deep, making boats with leaves and sticks and lying down on his side to make them look bigger so they were like ships as they bounced and careened down the rapids. Enemy ships, which he had seen in newsreels on the rare occasions when his mother had taken him to Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies in Chicago, which he liked very much—the movies—even though he did not know exactly what an enemy was except that one was German and one was Japanese and he did not know exactly what
they
were except that they were bad and soldiers were fighting them.

He played war with the stick boats and leaf ships
and dropped rocks on them and pretended they were bombs, and each time he sank one of them he pretended he was helping his father in some way, by killing the Germans and Japanese, and he would be able to come home and send away the men who visited the boy's mother in Chicago.

He would sometimes play in the stream all day until his grandmother called him in to eat. He would find that it was very late and still light and his eyes could barely stay open.

They ate potatoes and small pieces of venison that his grandmother got from neighbors who hunted deer. And she made him apple pies, as she had in the cookcamp in the woods the year before. Sometimes they had
lefsa
, a kind of big tortilla made of potato flour, which she cooked on a piece of iron on top of the stove.

The
lefsa
was delicious, especially when she smeared it with butter and rolled it into a long tube with chokecherry jelly she had made from berries picked in the summer.

Sometimes he would find himself in her lap, falling
asleep with
lefsa
in his mouth and the sun still bright outside.

“Why is the sun still out at night here? It's not in Chicago,” he asked one day, sitting at the table. “Is it because of the war?”

She shook her head and smiled. “No. God makes the days long in summer in the north so Norwegians have more time to get all their work done.”

“What's a Norwegian?”

She laughed. “Why you are, little one. You're my brave little Norwegian.” And she sang a song about a thousand Swedes who ran through the weeds with one Norwegian chasing them, and he didn't understand really what it meant but tried to hum along with her.

She sang a lot in that time when the two of them lived in the little house and most of his memories of then would have her singing. She sang short songs with a foreign sound, which he would find was Norwegian. She sang while she cooked, leaning over the stove with flour on her cheeks and in her hair, her eyes crinkled with smiles.

One day she decided to hang new wallpaper in the
little bedroom and she made paste with flour and water and took out the wallpaper with the pretty flowers that she had ordered from Sears and Roebuck. A neighbor lady came to help. Her name was Clair and she was old like his grandmother and had the same lines by her eyes from smiling all the time. She brought a quart jar full of red liquid that she said was her special berry wine.

He had often seen his mother drinking beer in the Cozy Corner Bar in Chicago when she met with men. She'd have him stand on the bar and sing the “Mares eat oats and goats eat oats and little lambs eat ivy” song, which he always got wrong and sang, “Marzeedotes and goazeedotes and liddlamseetdivey.”

Everybody laughed when he sang and gave him drumsticks of Southern fried chicken and nickel bottles of Coca-Cola. He liked all that, but he didn't like what the drinking did to his mother.