The Blanket

A singularly happy dream that had graced her ten-minute nap drifted upward to mingle with the rafter cobwebs as Allie sat up, shaking hay from her hair. The muffled screams coming from the house on the other side of the barn were even louder than they’d been when she went to sleep in her effort to escape the noise. Her right hand reached up to comb absentmindedly through scruffy bangs – “mousey,” Mama called them – while the fingers of her left hand opened and shut around the edges of the beloved blanket with its fading pattern of purple lambs and crescent moons.

All other vestiges of her very recent childhood had long disappeared to be re-used or re-purposed. Allie lived in a world where multiple functions could be, must be performed by any given object, which was why she’d waited until her parents were out working hay before sequestering the only remaining blanket from her younger days up to this spot, an opening among the studs behind the hayloft that was known only to her. The blanket’s nubby surface was worn to a sheen, but the outlines made by charcoal-colored threads kept the pattern clear enough. Mama had woven the blanket back when Allie’s existence was years of hope away. Not an emotive person by nature, Mama was always willing to re-tell the story of conjuring Allie while she washed, carded, dyed and spun the wool, weaving it into the design she created to feature her favorite things: sheep and moonlight.

“It’ll be alright, don’t worry,” Allie whispered, bringing the blanket to her cheek. “Mama’s ok. We’re eight years old and all grown up. We’re going to be older sisters now, so no more naps. Naps are for babies!” The blanket fell from her hand as Allie noticed the quiet. All of her attention reached from her ears into the world as she listened for the cry of a baby but received only silence in return, even the sheep and goats in the barn below her settling softly into the coming darkness.

Anticipation and mystified excitement guided her to the house. Edging slowly forward through her parents’ bedroom door, she squeezed herself into the space between Mama’s spinning wheel and the wall. It took only moments for the sight of the blood, the dead baby, and her father sobbing over her mother’s spent body to send Allie running back to the barn, where she scrambled up the ladder and wrung herself into the tiniest ball she could manage, begging the hay blanket to rescue her from the horrific scene in her parents’ bedroom. Once more sleep granted her solace, this time for the entire night. When the morning sun pierced the barn’s dust-filled air through the hole in the roof, she stretched from under the blanket and leaned her head out of the screenless loft window. The sun’s rays bounced back to her eyes, diamonds dancing on the water’s surface in the trough below as Papa’s few remaining sheep ambled through the gate leading to the west meadow. Her mind wandered back longingly to this time a year ago, when their sheep had numbered in the hundreds, before soremouth decimated the herd and forced Papa into a job at the lumber mill.

Her meditation came to an abrupt halt. “Allyson? Come down here! C’mon down, now, your papa needs you! Allyson!” Mrs. Campbell, ever a force to be reckoned with, had no patience left in her after having midwifed the previous day’s horror, including cleaning up the mess and tending to Papa through the night. Allie skidded down the ladder, knowing better than to defy her well-meaning, no-nonsense neighbor from down the road. “Allyson Greddy, your mama has entrusted the care of her husband to you. You have to look after him now, Allie,” she said, her mouth set in a Dakotan stance of determination and fortitude. “Your mama isn’t coming back. Don’t you worry about her. That baby boy will keep her company and the two of them will be fine together in a place much better than this. Stop those tears, now, a big girl doesn’t feel sorry for herself. Your papa has to go back to the mill and it’s up to you to keep the house and make sure he’s fed.”

Every night Papa came home with his clothes, his hair, his fingernails, his lungs and his soul brimming over with grime and sawdust. When he burned all of Mama’s things one night in a fit of fury, Allie convinced him to keep the spinning wheel on the condition that she move it to the barn so he wouldn’t have to look at it. Allie knew how to milk the goats and Mama had shown her how to make the savory meat and vegetable pies that Papa took with him to keep his stomach full from morning ‘til night. It was harder to know what to fix for him at suppertime, but every so often Mrs. Campbell would stop in and show her something new in the kitchen, or a stitch she hadn’t yet learned. During the long months of darkness and winter Allie listened from the house over the clickety-clack of her needles for the sounds of the animals across the way, praying their bodies would warm each other sufficiently to overcome the draft and darkness of the decaying barn. Doing Mama’s work was bone-wearying, but Allie managed a bit of daylight to herself each afternoon, wandering through the field among the Targhees or staring toward the distant future. Gazing out to where the prairie met the horizon, she remembered a time when the air was filled with the scent of living wool and Papa had taught her how to shear.

One day while straightening up Papa’s room she tripped over a warped floorboard, only to find underneath the board a drop spindle wrapped with wool the color of the chocolate bar that Papa had given Mama for Christmas one year, black but a kind of black that had been dipped in a cloud of auburn. The Targhees grew only white wool that of course could be dyed black, but not any kind of black like this. She sat down on the floor, gently fingering the delicately carved spindle with its chocolate-black thread that once upon a time had outlined ewes and circles of white, imagining Mama with her spindle in one hand and baby Allyson in the other. Allie replaced the spindle under the floorboard, comforted that Papa had saved this one remembrance and startled into curiosity about the wool that called her name.

A dozen years went by as Allie cooked and cleaned, slopped and herded, made repairs to the barn as funds were available, looked after Papa, perfected her handcrafts and began learning to spin as her skill set expanded into weaving on a backstrap loom. She had just reached her twentieth year when the mill accident took her father’s life. Added to the income from her needlework, the insurance money enabled Allie to purchase a seed herd of Black Welsh Mountain Sheep, the first such animals ever seen in South Dakota. Mrs. Campbell, whose despair over Papa’s death caught Allie by surprise, gave her the runt from her Border Collie’s latest litter. An addition to the barn provided space for a floor loom in the former storage area behind the lambing pen, and further repairs ensured that the fickleness and extremes of Dakota weather were no threat to Allie’s new charges, the ones with auburn-tipped black wool. She rested in her hayloft nook during deep winter nights, savoring their company through the darkness under the watch of purple lambs and crescent moons.