“Yes, it is,” she said. And that wasn’t a lie; it was pretty, but it was sad, too, and Marian didn’t understand how something could be so sweet and so depressing at the same time.
Later that night Grampa was lying in his bed in the middle room and asked Mom if he could have a while alone with Marian and Alan. Mom said sure and kissed him goodnight. It was the first time Marian could remember seeing her mother kiss Grampa.
After Mom went to bed Grampa told Alan to go get him a small a can of soda pop and some chips, he was going to tell them a special story. When they were all situated and sipping away, he began.
“I wasn’t too good to your mother when she was a little girl,” he said. “I was young and had all this Get Up and Go. I liked to drink me a mighty good time, I did...so I’s never around much. That’s probably why your Grandma and me never made it. I left her to take care of your mother all by herself. That was back during the Depression. Thing’s weren’t good for a woman with a kid and no husband then. County had to finally take your mother away and put her in a children’s home for a few years...until your Grandma could get enough money to give her a proper upbringing.
“Anyway...that ain’t got a lot to do with what I wanted to tell you, but I seen the way you two’ve been watching me and your mother, and I know you’re not stupid kids so you were probably wondering. I just thought you ought to know.” He reached down under the blankets and took out a bottle. It was like no other bottle Marian had ever seen. It was made out of stone, and stoppered with an old cork. She was about to ask what it was but then Grampa started talking again; and all the time, his finger kept stroking the bottle’s stone surface. “I got myself shot overseas during the war and it did something to the bones in my leg and the doctors, they had to insert all these pins and build me a new kneecap and calf-bone—it was awful. Thing is, when this happened, I only had ten months of service left. I was disabled bad enough that I couldn’t return to combat but not so bad that they’d give me an early discharge, so they sent me back home and assigned me guard duty at one of them camps they set up here in the states to hold all those Jap-Americans.
“I guarded the gate at the south end of the camp. It was a pretty big camp, kind of triangle-shaped, with watchtowers and searchlights and barbed wire, the whole shebang. There was this old Jap tailor being held there with his family and this guy, he started talking to me during my watch every night. This guy was working on a quilt, you see, and since a needle was considered a weapon he could only work on the thing while a guard watched him, and when he was done for the night he’d have to give the needle back. Well, I was the guy who pulled ‘Needle Patrol.’
“The old guy told me that this thing he was working on was a ‘memory quilt’ that he was making from all the pieces of his family’s history. I guess he’d been working on the thing section by section for most of his life. It’d been started by his great-great-great-great-grandfather. The tailor, he had part of the blanket his own mother had used to wrap him in when he was born, plus he had his son’s first sleeping gown, the tea-dress his daughter had worn when she was four, a piece of a velvet slipper worn by his wife the night she gave birth to their son....
“What he’d do, see, is he’d cut the material into a certain shape and then use stuff like paint or other pieces of cloth stuffed with cotton in order to make pictures or symbols on each of the patches. He’d start at one corner of the quilt with the first patch and tell me who it had belonged to, what they’d done for a living, where they’d lived, what they’d looked like, how many kids they’d had, the names of their kids and their kids’ kids, describe the house they had lived in, the countryside where the house’d been...it was really something. Made me feel good, listening to this old guy’s stories, ‘cause the guy trusted me enough to tell me these things, you see? Even though he was a prisoner of war and I was his guard, he told me these things.
“It also made me feel kind of sad, ‘cause I’d get to thinking about how most people don’t even know their great-grandma’s maiden name, let alone the story of her whole life. But this old Jap— ‘scuse me, I guess I really oughtn’t use that word, should I? Don’t show the proper respect for the man or his culture— but you gotta understand, back then, the Japs were the enemy, what with bombing Pearl Harbor and all....
“Where was I? Oh yeah—this old tailor, he knew the history of every last member of his family. He’d finish talking about the first patch, then he’d keep going, talking on about what all the paintings and symbols and shapes meant, and by the time he came round to the last completed patch in the quilt, he’d covered something like six hundred years of his family’s history. ‘Every patch have hundred-hundred stories.’ That’s what the old guy said.
“The idea was that the quilt represented all the memories of your life—not just your own, but them ones that was passed down to you from your ancestors, too. The deal was, at the end of your life, you were supposed to give the quilt to a younger member of your family and it’d be up to them to keeping adding to it; that way, the spirit never really died because there’d always be someone and something to remember that you’d existed, that your life’d meant something. This old tailor was really concerned about that. He said that a person died twice when others forget that they’d lived.
“‘Bout six months after I started Needle Patrol the old tailor came down with a bad case of hepatitis and had to be isolated from everyone else. While this guy was in the infirmary the camp got orders to transfer a hundred or so prisoners, and the old guy’s family was in the transfer group. I tried to stop it but nobody’d lift a finger to help—one sergeant even threatened to have me brought up on charges if I didn’t let it drop. In the meantime, the tailor developed a whole damn slew of secondary infections and kept getting worse, feverish and hallucinating, trying to get out of bed and babbling in his sleep. He lingered for about a week, then he died. As much as I disliked Japs at that time, I damn near cried when I heard the news.
“The day after the tailor died I was typing up all the guards’ weekly reports—you know, them hour-by-hour, night-by-night deals. Turned out that the three watchtower guards—and mind you, these towers was quite a distance from each other—but all three of them reported seeing this old tailor at the same time, at exactly 3:47 in the morning. And all three of them said he was carrying his quilt. I read that and got cold all over, so I called the infirmary to check on what time the tailor had died. He died at 3:47 in the morning, all right, but he died the night after the guards reported seeing him—up till then, he’d been in a coma for most of the week.
“I tried to track down his family but didn’t have any luck. It wouldn’t have mattered much, anyway, ‘cause the quilt come up missing.
“After the war ended and I was discharged, I decided to take your Grandma to New York. See, we’d gotten married about two weeks before I shipped out and we never got the chance to have a real honeymoon. So we went there and saw a couple of Broadway shows and went shopping and had a pretty good time. On our last day there, though, we started wandering around Manhattan, stopping at all these little shops. We came across this one antique store that had all this ‘Early Pioneer’ stuff displayed in its window. Your Grandma stopped to take a look at this big ol’ ottoman in the window and asked me if I thought there were people fool enough to pay six-hundred dollars for a footstool. I didn’t answer her. I let go of her hand and went running into that store, climbed over some tables and such to get in the window, and I tore this dusty old blanket off the back of a rocking chair.
“It was the quilt that Japanese tailor’d been working on in the camp. They only wanted forty dollars for it so you bet your butt I slapped down the cash. We took it back to our hotel room and spread it out on the bed—oh, it was such a beautiful thing. All the colors and pictures, the craftsmanship...I got teary-eyed all over again. But the thing that really got me was that, down in the right-hand corner of the quilt, there was this one patch that had these figures stitched into them. Four figures. Three of them was positioned way up high above the fourth one, and they formed a triangle. The fourth figure was down below, walking kind of all stooped over and carrying what you’d think was a bunch of clothes. I took one look and knew what it was—it was a picture of that tailor’s spirit carrying his quilt, walking around the camp for the last time, looking around for someone to pass his memories on to because he couldn’t find his family.”