Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 18, No. 5, May 1973

The Patchwork Quilt by Pauline C. Smith

There seems to have been more under that hood than people thought.

I didn’t think Tommy should go up on the mountain that morning, but it was the day for Miss Mattie Jackson’s quilt, and since Tommy’s got a calendar in his head instead of brains, he was, of course, determined. I argued thieves and killers until I was out of breath, with Tommy’s only rebuttal a firm and stolid reiteration that Miss Mattie Jackson would be finished with her quilt and expecting him.

Tommy takes his responsibilities very seriously, probably because it’s the first time in his eighteen years he has had any. He does all my running around for me, and believe me, that’s some running around. I own and operate the Jane Flagg Old Time Store in Mountain Hollow, specializing in stitchery done in the old-time manner — cross-stitch mottoes, appliqued coverlets and patchwork quilts, crewel and other embroidery, needlepoint, wax-work, feather-work, quill-work, all lovely, and offering these hill women a pride of achievement and a bit of independence they have never known.

My best worker, Miss Mattie Jackson, lives alone, high up in a narrow gulch of the mountain. She was old when I was growing up in these parts, so she must be ancient now. Nobody ever sees her; nobody except Tommy, who drives the jeep up those treacherous roads on the first day of each month, carrying supplies and materials, and returning with her newest quilt.

Her patchwork quilts are wonderful, the stitches fine and true — with, each month, an old and different historical pattern, such as Tippecanoe And Tyler Too, reminiscent of the William Henry Harrison campaign, and Clay’s Choice, a memory of the bitter Calhoun and Clay days. She does the old and favorite patterns and those that are old and rare.

My mother was a quilter, as was her mother and grandmother before her. They all lived in this house and left here records of the quilts of their times. I can identify most of Miss Mattie Jackson’s patterns by searching through the detailed and titled sketches carefully recorded by these women of my family and stored in a suit box. Sometime I plan to copy them on graph paper for publication, except that nobody quilts anymore, nobody but the hill folk who quilt for the few traveling customers willing to leave the fast traffic of the superhighway and slow down for the old Mountain Hollow road.

I don’t know exactly when I decided to come back to Mountain Hollow to stay, but it was long after I finished college, married and had Tommy. Probably Tommy and his father Brian finally decided me — poor Tommy, whose body grew but whose brain did not, and arrogant Brian who accused my hillbilly blood of causing the retardation.

I didn’t argue the matter. Who could argue with an uptight businessman who thought of a wife as decorative background to his ambition, and a slow-witted boy as something to hide? I just went on getting my hair done each week, being nice to the right people, and trying to find someone who could spark the few brains Tommy was born with to make of him a reasonably functioning facsimile son of a rising executive.

Well, after a series of pathologists, psychologists and special schools, at last I did what was best for him — for me, too — and came home to Mountain Hollow where the people wouldn’t know the difference between a rising executive and a falling star, and where Tommy was accepted with love and admiration both for the calendar in his head and his way with a jeep.

“Tommy sure can drive that jeep,” Mountain Hollow folk exclaim in wonder; and he can. He also understands what is under the hood and keeps it in perfect running condition. Tommy has realized his potential and now I don’t have to get my hair done each week, which is a big relief.

I like breathing the clean air and living the slow life of Mountain Hollow. I like the unsophisticated goodness of the people. Nothing touches us here; nothing until those hoodlum killers got close — or were they close? Nobody really knew. Actually, nobody knew who they were, how many there were or what they drove. Nobody knew anything about them except that where they had been, they’d left death.

The radio newscasts dropped separate announcements: liquor store robbed, all witnesses killed; drugstore looted, proprietor slashed to death — until the separate announcements made a chain of identical iniquity along the superhighway, still far away, but heading toward the turnoff that entered Mountain Hollow. Then, after seven murders, the newscasts reported nothing new. It was as if these phantom killers had vanished, evaporated somewhere before, beyond or between the roadblocks set up along the highway — they and their phantom vehicle.

The hillbillies of Mountain Hollow, not having any great imagination, breathed a sigh of relief and I began to worry. If the killers weren’t killing, where were they now? I worried more actively on the morning Tommy insisted on driving up to Miss Mat-tie Jackson’s cabin in the gulch because he had this calendar in his head instead of brains, and the page had flipped to the day Miss Mattie’s quilt would be finished.

“All right, all right,” I finally cried, “go on,” and he loaded the jeep with supplies, as happy as a dumb lark, doing his thing on the day he was supposed to do it.

I had a radio going in the shop, which used to be the parlor of the house when my folks and my folks’ folks and their folks lived here. Tommy and I live in the rest of the house. I didn’t give much ear to the country music, which is about all we have on the local radio station, but I did listen to the news spots that offered such shameful items as Big Jed Bartlett’s drunken tangle with the law at the local tavern and juicy little bits about Mary Louise Plunkett’s latest hair-pulling melee; but nothing new about the killers who were “at large,” the newscaster vaguely announced.

It took Tommy an hour to make the trip up to the gulch... what was it they used to call that place...? Well, I can’t remember now. Anyway, it was about an hour’s trip up there, then fifteen minutes to unload the supplies and load on the new quilt, so all in all, I figured Tommy should be back in two hours and fifteen minutes, if everything went all right...

We’ve got a sheriff; well, actually, we don’t have him, the county has him, and it’s a pretty big county. After Tommy had been gone a little over an hour, I phoned the sheriff and got him, too. He wasn’t out chasing killers or standing beside roadblocks, he was right there at the sheriff’s station, answering the phone!

“What makes you think, Mrs. Flagg, that they’re around Mountain Hollow?” he asked with slight surprise.

“I didn’t say I thought they were here,” I shouted quickly and vehemently. “What I said was I thought they might be here, holed up somewhere.”

“Well, I suppose they might be at that, Mrs. Flagg,” he said with the drawl all mountain people have, probably because they live so slowly, their thoughts slow down and their tongues too, to match. “And if they come out, Mrs. Flagg, we’ll try to catch them.”

I sat there at the phone, shaking with inward rage. I could see the sheriff in my mind’s eye, lolling back in that old swivel chair of his. How could he catch anything, lolling in a swivel chair — even flies?

“If they’re holed up somewhere, Mrs. Flagg,” he said, “they’re probably holed up maybe fifty miles from here because that’s where the hoodlums were last heard from...”

I banged down the receiver in despair, thinking: These people! There’s not an ounce of imagination in all their pea-brains rolled together. I set about to rearrange the entire shop, hoping to keep my mind off of what my imagination was conjuring up while I waited for Tommy — who drove up to the shop, exactly on time, two hours and fifteen minutes from the time he had left it! Thank heaven!

I hugged him between the quilt he carried in his arms, and plied him with questions: Had he seen anyone on the way? Had he heard anything — like shots? Were there any dead bodies around? Was Miss Mattie Jackson all right? To which he answered, Heck-no-Mom, and Sure-by-golly-Mom, and went outside to shine up the engine of the jeep.

I stood there in a grateful daze, holding the quilt, and looking through the big window I’d had put in the front of the shop, at Tommy leaning lovingly inside the open hood of the jeep. I stood there quite a while with a heart full of thanksgiving and a bit of regret for banging down the receiver on the sheriff, who had probably been right in his assumption that the killers were holed up fifty miles away.

Then I spread the quilt out on a table. It was a bright and cheerful pattern, done in different shades of orange and yellow, the sunshine colors, and I ran for the suit box to find out whether it was the Sunbeam or Rising Sun pattern. I couldn’t be sure as they are very similar; the one a circle with curved triangular patches forming a larger circle, around which are stitched smaller sunray triangles on a block; the other, a square with alternating shaded triangles. I studied the sketches.

It turned out to be the Sunbeam, simpler of the two blocks, and very lovely. I admired it for a few minutes, reached down for the part of the quilt that draped over the table and extended almost to the floor, then bent frozen, with my hand outstretched in rigid shock as I saw the bottom blocks of the quilt, which had none of the Sunbeam pattern, but was all in somber color, each different from the other!

I cried, “Oh, no!” and moved at last, yanking the bottom of the quilt to a heap on the table. “Oh, no!” thinking for sure that Miss Mattie Jackson had flipped her lid.

I had here a quilt, five 12-inch blocks wide by six 12-inch blocks long, regulation size, regulation Sunbeam pattern in variegated shades of orange and yellow, a beautiful and classic quilt until that very bottom row with its dark colors and strangely blocked patch work. I leaned over the quilt in a kind of limp supplication — poor Miss Mattie, she must have popped her cork.

I brooded for a while, then I went to the front door of the shop, opened it and called out to Tommy. “Tommy, did Miss Mat-tie Jackson say anything strange when you were up to her cabin today?” I had to call Tommy’s name four times before he pulled his head out of the jeep engine long enough to stare at me blankly. Then he said, “Heck no, Mom,” and stuck his head back under the hood.

He wouldn’t know.

I closed the door and went back into the shop. Well, if Miss Mattie Jackson had become psychotically senile after a lifetime of living alone up there in that mountainous gulch, she had the right, I guess, and the years.

I picked up the phone and called Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn, who said she’d be right over even though she was cluttered with trouble and busy as a bumblebee in a bucket of tar, which was probably true, what with a bunch of grandchildren and great-grandchildren always underfoot. Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn was as ancient as Miss Mattie Jackson and had just as much right to go crazy with senility, but probably wouldn’t since she lived in the valley with all her posterity to keep her mentally alert.

I showed her the quilt, with the last row tucked under, as soon as she arrived all out of breath. “Look,” I said. “Look at that!”

“As pretty a Sunbeam pattern as ever I did see,” she admired.

Then I whipped the last row of blocks free on the table and watched her expression, which didn’t change one iota.

“Well...” I said at last.

“Looks like Miss Mattie Jackson changed her mind a bit before she finished this here quilt,” she offered.

“It looks like maybe she lost her mind,” I said dryly, and Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn studied me with the remote gaze of the hill folk for outlanders.

“I mean,” I said desperately, “it looks as if maybe something is very wrong; a quilter like Miss Mattie Jackson, an expert, an artist, suddenly going off the beam like this, throwing in just any old block pattern...”

“Maybe it ain’t just any old block pattern.”

“She might be sick. She is, after all, very old. And living alone the way she does... Well,” and I spread my hands helplessly in an attempt to explain senility to one who was ready for senility, “she might not have really known what she was doing. What do you think?”

“I ain’t had time yet to think,” Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn chastised me. “I am still at the ponderin’ stage.”

So there she stood — pondering — without intellect, without imagination, while her friend, a poor little lady alone on the mountain, went crazy with old age. “What I mean,” I said, “I think she needs help and somebody ought to go up there and bring her down where she can be taken care of.”

Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn nodded, but instead of racing out of the shop to round up some able-bodied nonworking men to go up the mountain and bring down that poor crazed woman, she leaned over the quilt and drawled thoughtfully, “I reckon Miss Mattie Jackson is offerin’ up a message and it’s up to us to unscramble it. Now this, what would you say this block meant?” as she pointed at the first block in the last row of five, a seemingly helter-skelter design of different colored patches forming a staggered diagonal pattern.

“It’s a crazy-quilt block,” I said impatiently, and Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn tolerantly answered that no, it certainly was not, it was an Old Maid’s Puzzle block, probably put there purposely to make me read the rest of them, or for someone to read, she added with the barest hint of scorn that made me suddenly feel like a dull-witted clod before such bright perception.

“Miss Mattie Jackson is sharp as a pin. Always has been, always will be. These blocks ain’t just staggerin’ off course. They’re tryin’ to tell us somethin’ here.”

Looking down at them, I regained my equanimity. Those blocks weren’t trying to tell us anything, not unless they were trying to tell us that poor Miss Mattie Jackson had finally come unstrung after all the years alone up there on the mountain and, each time she made one of those blocks for that last row, thought she was starting a whole new quilt... “For instance, that block,” I said, pointing at the second one. right after Old Maid’s Puzzle, “that’s a Bat in Flight and, really now, what meaning could it have?”

Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn cocked her head and studied the block. “It does look like a Bat in Flight and that’s for sure,” she said with wonder.

I began to riffle through the open suit box for a sketch of the block in question, when she stopped me dead. “But Bat in Flight, as I remember, flies out ward toward the corner of the block, and this one sure is flying inward and looks a heap more like a Bear’s Paw to me.”

She was right!

It was a tricky little pattern the block sectioned off in five squares across and five down, the center being dark, its corner squares dark, with those adjacent to each comer square, triangled dark fabric patches, forming the wings and tail of a bat, four bats to a block; but, in this case, the pad and toes of a bear’s paw, four paw prints to the block.

I looked at Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn with dawning respect, and then I said, “But Bear’s Paw doesn’t mean any more than Bat in Flight.”

“Not,” she said, “unless you remember that Bear’s Paw is the name of the gulch where Miss Mattie Jackson lives.”

I remembered at last. They used to say, when I was a girl in Mountain Hollow, “Miss Mattie Jackson, up at Bear’s Paw.” Now I was sure that Miss Mattie Jack-son, of Bear’s Paw, was sending a message through the Sunbeam quilt — an Old Maid’s Puzzle to be worked out, block by block.

The next was obvious: a patchwork house set in a ground of flowered material. I called out the name of the pattern almost as quickly as did Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn: House On The Hill. The cut patches were not as true, nor the stitches as tiny — Miss Mat-tie Jackson had become nervous or hurried, or frightened?

The fourth block was a teaser. Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn frowned over it and I riffled through the patterns, whispering names: Drunkard’s Path, a block of four squares; Wild Goose Chase, no, that was sectioned off into diamonds... “Jack In The Box!” I cried. My voice rose and Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn nodded.

I ran for the phone and called the sheriff.

Thank God he was still sitting on his swivel chair at the sheriff’s station. I yelled into the phone that Miss Mattie Jackson was being held prisoner up at Bear’s Paw in her House On The Hill, and just as I banged down the receiver, Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn added that she was being held by five people, or had been held for five days, or something five anyway, because the last block was a V Block, and what else could it mean but five?

I raced back to look down at the V Block, formed of narrow V’s, four of them, so placed on the block that their points came together in the center; the final stitches, not Miss Mattie Jackson’s fine overcast, nor her hurriedly wavered stitch on the Jack In The Box, but an uneven basting that made me fear for her life.

“Well, jump down my throat and gallop my insides out, if Miss Mattie Jackson ain’t in a heap of trouble now,” breathed Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn, and reached out blindly for a place to sit down. I led her to a chair and she dropped, sitting stiffly with her hands folded on her lap.

I finally got Tommy’s head out from under the hood of the jeep and into the shop, and questioned him while we waited for the sheriff to arrive. “Now, Tommy, this is important,” I said seriously. “What did you see when you were up at Miss Mattie Jackson’s this morning?” remembering suddenly that it was no longer morning, but afternoon, and Miss Mat-tie was still being held by five people, or had been held for five days or — my goodness — would be held for five more hours before they killed her and took off!

“Tommy, think!” I cried. “What did you see at Miss Mattie Jackson’s?”

He furrowed his brow, then he smiled. “Why, Mom, I saw the trees and the chickens like always.”

“No, Tommy,” I cried, grabbing his shoulders and shaking him in desperation. “Did you see anything different? Were there any people around?”

He shook his head, attempting to break away and head out for the jeep that was the love of his life.

“You see, Tommy,” I said, my voice shaking, “we think those killers are in Miss Mattie Jackson’s house. Did you go in the house?”

He shook his head vigorously, and I knew that he never did. He brought the monthly supplies up to her door and she handed the quilt out to him. Tommy was not gregarious nor was Miss Mattie sociable. They had that together, the rapport of two loners. “Did you hear anything?”

“Heck no, Mom,” he said, smiling. “Not even the chickens. She told me where to drive so the chickens wouldn’t squawk and stop laying eggs. She said, ‘You drive clear off the road down below and through the trees and up to—’ ”

“All right, Tommy,” I interrupted him. “All right, you can go on out now and shine up the engine of the jeep again,” and I gave him a little shove.

From the minute the sheriff drove up in a jeep, Tommy stuck to him like a burr, probably feeling close kinship with another jeep driver, and stood right behind him while the sheriff and his two deputies leaned over the quilt and Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn explained the message.

“This here,” she said, pointing to the first block of the last row, “is the Old Maid’s Puzzle, that’s how I knew Miss Mattie Jackson wasn’t just throwing on any old piece of patchwork because her brains was dusty, but that she was giving us a message, starting right out with, ‘This here is Miss Mattie Jackson talkin’.’

“Then the next one, Bears Paw being where she lives, and adding the House On The Hill to it, I knew she was tellin’ us that something was going on there. Jack In The Box was real inspirational — I don’t know of anything else she could have used to let us know she was bein’ held prisoner.

“This last one though, has kinda got me,” admitted Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn. “Maybe it means there are five of them cowardly dogs there in her cabin. Maybe it means they been there five days. Whatever, she’s sure trying to convey a message in that there V Block...”

“That’s the V,” said Tommy pointing over the sheriff’s shoulder. “That’s the V of trees where Miss Mattie Jackson tells me to drive the jeep so the chickens won’t set up a ruckus and stop laying eggs. That’s the V right there. Miss Mattie Jackson says, ‘You drive clear off the road down below and go on up to that stand of trees...’ The V, she calls it. ‘It looks like a V,’ she says, ‘and that V of trees cuts off the sound so the chickens won’t be bothered.’ ”

“And so, whoever’s in there with Miss Mattie Jackson won’t hear us until we get right up on them.” The sheriff thrust out a hand. “Son,” he said, “you’ve got a brain and a half on you,” and I wanted to cry with pride. It was the first time anybody had ever told Tommy he had any kind of brain.

“You put that boy’s brain in a jaybird’s head and he’d fly straight and true,” announced Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn. “Why don’t you deputize him, Sheriff, and let him drive you up to the V? He knows right how to get there, and he’s the best jeep driver around.”

Before I could protest, Tommy had become a smiling-faced deputy and was on his way up the mountain, carrying three officers of the law loaded down with guns!

Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn sat with me through part of that long afternoon. The spot newscasts on the radio continued to offer no news as to the killers. However, Mrs. Rachel Peabody, at the south end of the county, swore she saw what looked to be a very suspicious character fishing on the river bottom, and Mrs. Frankie Mae Pangborn snorted out her opinion that Mrs. Rachel Peabody’s mouth was so wide that if it weren’t for her ears, the top of her head would be an island.

I walked the floor, looked at the clock every ten minutes and, in between the country music, listened to the weather reports, crop and hog prices and the local news items — until Tommy arrived home at near-dark and told me all about it. He told it as only a boy with the sophisticated, arrogant, ambitious part of his brain left out, and the homespun, down-to-earth, ready-to-help part left in. He told it chronologically, with few words and little emotion.

“I took them up there to the V place, and told them how to get to the house. Then I watched. They made me the lookout, Mom,” he said proudly, and I patted his shoulder and swallowed.

He told how there were three against three, the sheriff and two deputies against the girl and two boy killers, and some shots fired, “...but they didn’t do any hurt except to get the chickens to squawking so they probably won’t lay any eggs for a while.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess Miss Mattie Jackson won’t never mind about that,” dropping into the vernacular of the hill people — my people and Tommy’s — these wonderful people with great imagination and the talent to send a message on a quilt and have it read correctly.

The country radio music stopped abruptly to allow the latest news report to come through, all about the apprehension of the three young killers, found in their mountain hideaway. They didn’t know the half of it!

“Miss Mattie Jackson is all right?” I asked Tommy.

“Sure, by golly, Mom,” he said. “She told me she was going to make a special quilt for me. She said it would be like a letter. How can she make a quilt like a letter, Mom?”

“Well, she can,” I said. “Miss Mattie Jackson can send a beautiful letter on a quilt. Now, would you like to shine the engine of the jeep before supper?”

Tommy didn’t get a chance before darkness fell, for the sheriff came to pick up the county jeep and told the story again, more graphically and more in detail, but not nearly as well as Tommy, who knew what the V Block really meant, and because he knew, Miss Mattie Jackson can make patchwork quilts until she dies a natural death.