I saw at once what she meant. The bad corner, the one Carla had talked about, where the binding was gone and the batting showed through, was cut off. A clean, straight line, maybe eight inches on a side, a right triangle of white with half of a blue star in it, lay a little apart from the rest, on its own. The rest of the quilt was whole.
I made a sound. I'm not sure what kind.
"That's all," said Nell quickly. "That's all I cut. I swear to you. I always take the worst part off first, so I can see what I've got. And I put it under the lamp to look at the batting, and I saw—" She went over to the table and reached up to a gooseneck lamp that was clamped to a shelf above it and swung it down low, almost to the surface, and turned it so the light came across the quilt from the side, raking, the way Dad had said, like late afternoon. "Go on and hit that switch by the door, would you? The overheads."
Carla hit it. The long room went dark except for the one lamp, and the bears went into shadow on their shelves, and the quilt lay there in the hard sideways light, and I saw my grandmother's handwriting come up out of it like a photograph in a tray.
It was not really handwriting, of course. It was stitches, white on white, so small and so close you'd think they were a line drawn in pencil. But it was her. I'd have known it anywhere. The same way she wrote Junie on my birthday cards, the J with a long loop below the line, the little hitch she put in her capital B. In the center of every white block, inside the feathered wreath, in light and shadow, there were words.
Ruth A. Boy. 8-2-61. Daniel.
Betty Jo K. Girl. 8-19-61. Faith.
Wanda M. Boy. 9-30-61. Samuel.
I went down the first row with my hand hovering just over the cloth, not touching it, and then the second. A Marlene. A Joyce. A girl named Patsy R. who'd had a boy on Thanksgiving Day and called him Jesse. And in the third row, in the center, in the block my fingers had found a thousand times in the dark without knowing why it was the one they always went back to:
Ivy C. Girl. 11-9-61. Rose.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
"My granny used to tell me," Nell said finally, quietly, "that women wrote in quilts what they couldn't write anywhere else. I never believed her. I thought it was one of those things people say at the fair." She touched the edge of the table, not the quilt. "I've cut up four hundred quilts, I guess. I never once found anything but stitches."