At the far end of the sunroom, Clara Penney hummed softly to music of the Sousa march as she bent over the quilt she had been working on for three months. It was a part of the natural rhythm of her work that, every ten seconds, she pushed a pair of wire-rimmed glasses higher on her nose with the tiny fore-finger of her left hand.

In the sunlight that filtered through the high, dark-framed windows, Clara's groomed hair shone above the starched high-neck of her white shirt. The room's old lace and wicker fussiness suited her clean, plain features as did the old fern that spread its dusty fronds along the top of a pine sideboard. With her dark hair combed back in a tight bun and a figure that was already matronly, she appeared older than her twenty-seven years.

Perhaps that had a little to do with the fact that, so far, 1936 had not been a good year for Clara, and it was only half over. In January, her doctor had told her that she would never have a child -- not that her husband, Homer, had ever wanted one. "They're just expensive nuisances," he had said. Nevertheless, it had made her feel less than a whole woman.

Then in April, at the Spring meeting of the Presbyterian Ladies Guild, her bid for a place on the finance committee had been ignored. That upset Homer, and he had called her a loser in front of the minister. She had been quietly humiliated. After all, she'd thought, I hadn't asked to be born a Catholic.

And now, to add to her lonely self-doubt, the music was all she was going to know of Whitewood's Independence Day parade this year. As a child, she had always looked forward to it and had attended for the two years that she'd been married to Homer. But this year, even though he had ordered her to go, she had refused.

"How is it going to look if you're not there with the other wives?" Homer had asked.

But Clara had not budged from her decision. Last year, she had stood across the street from Papa and Mama and her sisters. They looked so happy. But when Homer paraded in white robes and pointed hat that hid his face, she vowed never to be there to watch their pain again. Homer carried a banner that read, "Keep the Pope in Rome. Down With The Papists." Even though her parents had not spoken to her since her marriage, she couldn't abide them to be hurt for being Catholic.

Two years before Clara's wedding to Homer, Papa had discovered that Homer was a Presbyterian. "You will not break Mama's heart by marrying out of the Church," he'd warned. "I forbid you to see Mr. Penney again."

Clara's younger sister had two weddings, once in the chapel at St. Aloysius and again in the Lutheran church in Blackhawk, but Mama and Papa had never found out. So, it was to be she, Clara, who was to feel Papa's wrath, for she had known that she must defy him. She was in love.

Clara's body jerked up from her stitching. She cocked her head to the side like a startled sparrow to listen more closely to a rustle of dry leaves in the back yard. But she heard nothing further and again concentrated on her stitches. It was the quilting that kept Clara's mind straight. Along the north wall of the sunroom, behind the doors of the mahogany cupboards lay two hand-stitched quilts. They were the most significant result of Clara's three-year marriage to Homer. Every three months, almost to the day, she would lift them out of the cupboard and spread them on the dining room table.

"My, you're beautiful," she'd say, and run her hand over each of them. Then she'd brush them with an old pig-bristle hair-brush, replace the mothballs, fold them, and stack them again on their shelf. It was when her husband was away that she performed this ceremony. He made fun of her quilts.

"These are a waste of time, Missus," he'd complain. "Unless, of course, you could find someone to buy them."

But Clara would never part with them. It was her mama who had taught her to quilt. The battered pine frame was a permanent fixture in the far corner of the shabby parlor on the ranch. Clara would watch as her mother's lips moved in quiet prayer as she worked the needle in and out of the cloth. Mama had quilted to keep her family warm.

A knock on the back door made Clara jump from her chair and bump the polished pine table scattering the sorted quilting scraps. She knew who it was. Everyone else would be at the parade. Last week, one of them had knocked, and Homer had said to keep silent until he went away. But they were getting bolder with each week. Besides, she was alone today. She had never had to face one alone. Clara had heard that two of them had entered a house and stolen some food. She was glad that all of the doors on her house were locked and bolted. Homer had always insisted on that.

"What I have is mine, and it's to stay that way," he had warned.

Clara had not disagreed. She feared these unshaven men with the dead eyes who came to find work but begged for food instead. It wasn't her fault that the depression brought them streaming into the small towns from the cities hoping to find work on the ranches for the fall harvest. There it was again, the knocking, only this time the door knob rattled. He wanted in. Because the band music had gotten louder, she knew that her husband would not be coming home soon. It would be long after the sound had died away on the east side of town before she'd see him.

Clara didn't move. As the knocking turned to pounding, Clara slid to the floor to make herself small, like a child playing hide-and-seek nesting her face between her knees with her hands over her ears. After it had been quiet for several minutes, she struggled to her feet careful not to make a sound. The crunch of a footstep on the hard clay dirt under the sunroom window let her know he was trying to see in the windows, but they were too high. She was safe for the moment, and she eased into a wicker chair and lifted her feet onto the Victorian footstool, one of the few pieces of furniture Homer had gotten from his mother that Clara claimed as her own.

As she pinched a withered frond from the old fern beside her, she remembered how her mother would pinch insects off her plants and squeeze them between her work-worn fingers. Clara looked smugly at her own clean, white nails then closed her eyes and warmed herself in the dusty sunbeam thrusting through the high window and prayed that the intruder was gone.

The clock in the parlor struck twelve � lunchtime, and she was hungry. But she longed to go back to the unfinished quilt stretched on its frame in the corner. It was the first quilt that she had designed. She named it, "South Dakota Ranch Family." There was a brown corral, a red barn, a two story house, a silo, and even some trees, all on a wheat-gold background. Throughout were human-shaped patches at their chores and a magenta path that wandered from scene to scene, tying the quilt together. She had even managed to fashion a tiny rosary with a silver cross in a discreet corner. She was careful to keep that feature out of sight, though Homer rarely looked at her quilts.

Clara kept a small brass key on a silver chain around her neck. It was the only key that opened the padlock on the mahogany doors. On the shelf with her quilts were two shell pelicans from Tampa, a papier-mache cactus from Phoenix, and three plaster-of-Paris peaches from Atlanta, memoirs of trips with her husband. On the bottom shelf there were twenty-four volumes of National Geographic � Homer had given her a subscription for her birthday. Alone on the middle shelf was her most treasured possession � a faded cigar box, inside there was a small pink rosary that Clara had as a child, some prayer cards, her catechism, and an old tintype photograph of her mother holding a baby. It was the only picture of Clara as a child. Her mother had mailed the box to her the day after her marriage.

Another footstep jolted Clara upright and her glasses nearly fell off her nose. She remembered that her parents had never been afraid to open the door to a stranger. It was always Papa's way that everyone who knocked on his unlocked door got food, water, and a place to sleep, even when there was no work. Clara had seen many desperate people come to the ranch through the first years of the depression.

Late one afternoon about a year before she and Homer were married, a rusting and dented Ford rattled up from the road and grunted to a stop at the front gate. It was after the harvest was done, and winter was beginning to roll in across the prairies. Mama and Papa had gone out to the car to greet a man and a woman. The man had looked like the others except he wore a shiny, wrinkled brown suit which hung two sizes too large on his shriveled frame. He attempted to smooth his hair with his fingers as he helped a sad-eyed woman with a fussing baby into the kitchen.

Clara had been curious. It wasn't often they had a woman and baby with them, and she had followed them into the kitchen. The baby stopped her weak cries, and from deep within black sockets in its tiny face, two watery eyes stared unseeing toward Clara. She felt an icy chill mixed with nausea as her mother took the child in her arms. She asked Clara to get a warm blanket from the hall closet, but Clara fled to her room and pulled a quilt over her head. The next morning, she had awakened to the thud of the pick hitting the solid red clay soil at the far end of the garden. A sorrowful sound of wailing floated up through the bedroom window on the cold, autumn wind and Clara didn't move until the tired chug-chug of the old Ford had died over the horizon.

******

As the minutes passed, Clara's dread slackened in the warmth of the sunroom, and a hollow gurgle from her stomach reminded her again of lunch. She eased out of the rocker, and hugged the kitchen wall as she made her way to the pantry, a small room on the far side of the kitchen, close to the back door. She pulled the door shut and pungent fumes from the bag of hanging onions aggravated her hunger. As she stooped to the lower shelf and squinted to read the label on a can, another knock startled her, this time from the front door. She snapped upright, dropped the soup can on her foot, and knocked the side of her head on the edge of an overhead cupboard.

Blood oozed through her stocking where the edge of the can had struck the bone just above her shoe, and a lump rose above her right temple. The pain had prompted tears, streaking her pancake makeup. She must remember to fix her face before Homer comes home. He likes her to complement their perfect house.

She stopped still to listen for sounds from the front of the house. The music had grown dimmer. Her husband would not be home for an hour or more. He would sit at a folding table, eat the Ladies Guild sandwiches, and talk. Clara had known nothing of Homer's friends before their wedding. She only knew that they, like Homer, were the rulers of Main Street, the financial power of Whitewood.

When Clara found the robes in the back of their closet a few days after they had been married, she was curious. "What are these?" she had asked him.

Homer had jerked them from her and shook his finger close to her face. "You keep this to yourself, hear?"

She had cringed, but Homer apologized and wrapped his arm around her. "All right, Missus," he'd said. "Pour us some tea and play, Amazing Grace, on your new piano. We'll sing together and forget this ever happened."

Clara had tried to busy herself in another room this morning at ten o'clock while Homer tucked the costume into a bag. The less she knew about this robe, the better she liked it. The sheriff had warned these men against creating any trouble at St. Aloysius Academy. Whitewood's economy depended on the rich boarding students that enrolled each year at the Catholic girl's school. Clara had attended mass at St. Aloysius with her family.

Although Clara never prayed anymore, she remembered how one prayer had made her feel as a child. "Father, forgive me for I have sinned," it began. Was she a sinner in God's eyes? Perhaps she should say that prayer now, she thought as she poked her head around the pantry door half expecting someone to be standing in the kitchen. But she couldn't remember more than that first line. Was it a prayer? Careful not to make a sound, she tiptoed into the parlor toward the front door. The fright and the pain in her head and foot made her forget about her hunger.

Clara had never, in the three years that she had lived in this house, felt that the parlor belonged to her, but she admired its quiet richness and had been thrilled that she might call it hers. Homer had built the house during the three years of their engagement and had surprised her with it on their wedding night. He had chosen all of the furniture.

As she worked her way to the front window, she touched the polished surface of the walnut buffet that had been his mother's and rubbed her hand over the rich damask sofa and matching chair that he'd had recovered. She had loved walking on the soft, quiet surface of the room-sized faux-oriental rug that he had bought mail-order. She had hated the busy, messy house on the ranch and the memory of the pungent reek of thresher sweat made her empty stomach feel queasy. She eased onto the piano bench careful not to make the keys sing. That odor is not possible here -- only the smell of lemon oil and Homer's Havana.

******

Homer had been one of those threshers. She noticed him first at the wash-stand behind the kitchen door scrubbing the morning's work off his hands, and she knew by the way he brushed his nails clean, that he was different.

"I've brought you a dry towel." Clara had hurried out the screen door.

"Thank you miss," he had said bowing slightly. It was his manners and fine talk that set him apart from the others, and that had interested Clara. She was twenty-one and two of her younger sisters, were already married. Some had accused her of becoming an old maid.

"Better an old maid than a poor farmer's wife," she had vowed.

For the next two weeks of that threshing season, the grime and the sweat had not concerned her. It was the first time she had ever volunteered to serve a meal to threshers, and she did so without a complaint. Afterwards, she had even offered to haul the slop-buckets to the pigsty on the far side of the bunk-house. It was then that she almost always got a glimpse of Homer, and each time that he'd looked her way, she'd blushed and lowered her eyes. One warm evening, they met on the path between the kitchen and the bunk-house.

"Good evening," he had said and tipped his hat.

"Good evening to you too," Clara replied. "I hope all is well with you."

Although she had not expected a reply, Homer had offered one. "All will be well when harvest is finished," he had said. "I'm not fond of farming as a vocation. I much prefer a cleaner business."

It was at this moment that Clara had fallen in love. "To tell you the truth," she had whispered behind her hand, "I dislike the dirt also."

It wasn't until after supper on the evening that the harvest was finished and the threshers were preparing to move to another ranch, that Homer had approached her again. She had been day-dreaming on the bench that Papa had built around the crab apple tree.

"Miss," he began with his curious little bow, "may I have your permission to call after harvest is over?" He had washed, put on a clean shirt and taken off his hat, an unfarmer-like gesture. His thick hair was dark with a hint of gray, and she had to strain to hear his words above the pounding of her heart.

"I would be happy to have you call." She had wished her voice would behave. "Mama would let us have her parlor to ourselves for an evening." She would make certain that the lamp was dim so the room's shabbiness would not be so apparent.

"Thank you miss. I'll be back in four weeks," Homer replied, and it was four weeks to the day, after the evening chores and supper, that he had come back to the farm. He shook Papa's hand, bowed to Mama, and followed Clara into the dim parlor.

All Clara remembered of that evening was that he had said, "I have plans, Clara, and I want to include you in them. It will be three years before we can marry. May I presume you'll wait?"

"Yes," she had answered, not realizing how long three years would seem.

She saw him but seldom after Papa forbade their courtship. There had been one significant meeting during the second year of their engagement. Her parents had driven the wagon to the next ranch to help the family after the death of the mother. Clara sent a message to Homer, and they had spent an evening holding hands and talking in the moonlight. It was on that night that he had made her promise never again to attend a Catholic mass, nor even say one of their prayers. It was also the night that she surmised that she would never again be poor.

Aside from a few more stolen moments, it had been nearly impossible to meet undetected in the small town of Whitewood where everyone knew everything. Even the ranches that were sometimes fifty miles apart were connected closely by the party phone lines.

It was exactly three years, almost to the day, that Homer proposed again. They met on horseback low in the alkali breaks, and he detailed his plans for a quiet, private wedding in the Presbyterian annex. Of course, Clara had not dared to suggest a Catholic wedding.

"Mama, the ladies of the Altar Society have asked me to help mend the lace on the altar cloths," Clara had lied before meeting Homer at the Presbyterian Rectory. She had fretted about entering a protestant church, but she was already twenty-four. It was too late to change her mind now.

******

Clara sat in dim silence in the parlor that belonged to someone else. Everything seemed to be closing in on her. She had to get to a window. Surely he's gone. She pulled a heavy drape and aside and peeked out and gasped. A gaunt, unshaven man, leaned against the rail. The halter straps on his faded overalls were tied with rope at the front, and the sleeves on his tattered plaid shirt hung halfway down his bony hands. The squeak of the chain on the porch swing pierced the silence.

There were others. Clara let go of the drape. It closed heavily knocking her glasses to the floor. She dropped back to the floor and her hand fell on top of her glasses, shattering the glass, driving sharp shards into her palm. Blood stained her skirt as she pulled it up to crawl past the front door into the darkened bedroom. Shades were always drawn in that room.

"No sense in letting the sun fade the carpets and drapes in here," Homer had commanded.

Clara sat up. The dark room seemed to have no air. She must have more air. Not the door. Homer'd be angry. The window. Just a crack. She'd have air. Blood seeped up the white shade as she lifted it. To her horror, a young woman huddled, a child in her arms on the porch swing. A filthy, gray, wool dress hung on the woman's thin frame like a shroud, and her shoes were men's high-top workboots with knotted and frayed laces. It was as if God had hung the feet on the wrong body.

Clara saw the red, raw hands and bare feet on the tiny baby. But it was the eyes. They'd had come back. Those eyes in the black sockets in the tiny grave behind the hollyhocks. She'd seen the stone marker by accident. She had never again gone near it. But the eyes lived in her nightmares.

The baby was crying. Clara turned on her knees toward the sunroom. They wouldn't find her there. She'd be safe. Her heart pounded like the parade drum as she struggled to keep from getting caught in her skirt.

The Sousa march had ceased, leaving the house in dead silence except for the shrill squeak of rusty chains. Goose bumps rose on Clara's arms as she crawled faster leaving a trail of blood on the oriental carpet. She gasped again and again to draw the stale air of the parlor into her starving lungs and again became nauseous at the odor of old sweat. The bruising cold of the dining room's hardwood floor made her knees ache, and the rough grass rug of the sunroom scraped them raw. The throb of the lump on her head made her dizzy.

In the familiar air of the sunroom, she filled her sunken lungs. With her body pressed against the mahogany cupboard, she put her hands over her ears.

"They know I was here all the time. They know all about me."

Clara yanked the chain at her neck and felt a sharp pain near her throat as it broke. The key clattered to the floor. Her bloody hand trembled as she turned the key in the padlock and pulled it open. It dropped to the floor with a heavy thud, and she yanked the old cigar box off the middle shelf and clasped it in her arms.

"Papa, please help me, Papa," she pleaded in the voice of her childhood. "Father, forgive me for I have sinned . . . the quilt . . . Mama said to get a quilt . . . for I have sinned . . . forgive me . . . I have sinned."

As the parlor clock finished striking five, the baby's cries again pierced the silence of the empty house. Clara folded her arms tighter around the old box and rocked her body back and forth on the grass rug. "Away in a manger, no crib for a bed. The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head," she sang. "Father, forgive me. . . no crib for a bed . . . I have sinned. Papa, forgive me . . . help me Papa . . . the quilt." Clara crawled to the corner toward the quilting frame.

The room was growing dark except for the bright orange gleam of the sunset through the high windows above Clara's head. The front door opened then slammed shut. "Mama will help me. She'll know what to do," Clara mumbled. She tore at the quilting frame until it fell to the floor and shattered into pieces. The "Ranch Family" quilt dropped to Clara's side. She hid her face in its folds and hugged cigar box closer to her body.

"Missus, I've brought you a sandwich. Where are you? Missus?"

"Amazing Grace . . . forgive me, I know not what I do. . . . that's it, the prayer, amazing forgiveness . . . no bed for his head."

"Did you hear those beggars on the porch? They left in a hurry all right, after I let them know we're not running a charity house here."

Homer stared. Clara's hair stood in snarls around her swollen, blotched face. Her skirt twisted around her hips and her stockings were stuck to her foot and knee where the blood had dried, and fresher blood oozed from a chain-like mark on her neck.

"Missus, get up. This is very unbecoming." Homer took one step toward her then stopped and grasped the wicker back of the rocker. "Get off that floor and go take a bath."

Clara put her thumb in her mouth. She was so cold and hungry. Mama promised to bring her soup and a warm quilt. She would just sleep now, and wait.