The woman in the red coat was named Marian Delacroix, and she introduced herself to my daughter as the director of licensing for the company that makes holiday carving kits. She held a butter mold in her gloved hand, a round wooden one with a wheat sheaf cut into the bowl, and she turned it so the morning light fell across the carving. “Joan,” she said, quite pleasantly, “this is design number thirty one. The company paid three million, six hundred thousand dollars last week for the rights to sixty eight of these. Why is it five dollars?”
Joan, who had been counting a roll of ones in a lawn chair, rose so fast that the chair went over. My daughter is fifty two, a brisk, handsome woman in a quilted vest, with the square chin of her father, and a way of explaining things before she has understood them. “Oh, I am sure there is a mix up,” she said. “This is just old stuff of Mom. We are clearing the garage.” “Old stuff,” Dale repeated from the porch. My husband is eighty, a thin man with a bad hip and a quiet voice, and he did not often speak. “Joan. Where is the trombone?”
Joan went the color of her vest. I took the folded receipt from my apron pocket and laid it flat on the card table, beside the cash box. “Lot twenty six,” I read. “One Conn trombone, 1959. Three thousand, eight hundred dollars. Purchased from Joan.” I looked up. “Joan, I put that trombone in the hall closet myself. It was the one thing in the house I never meant to sell. Arnold played it in the Mason City band every Fourth of July until his lip gave out.” Behind me a car door closed. Neighbors had begun to stand at the curb in twos and threes.
A wooden butter mold passed from hand to hand at a yard sale and gave one carver the Saturday morning to bring her daughter back to the kitchen table.
She sat down on the grass, right there, in her good slacks. “I needed the money, Mom,” she said. “For the lawyer. I am getting divorced and I did not want to tell you, and I did not want to ask, because you always said a woman should have her own money.” She wiped her cheek. “I thought you were ready to give things away. You gave Dale the old truck. You gave the church the piano. I thought, she will not even notice a few boxes. I thought it was almost like helping you downsize.”
“Joan,” I said, “I gave the truck to your father because he asked me. I gave the piano to the church because they needed one. I have never given away a thing that was not mine to give.” I took one of her hands in both of mine. “You think the butter molds were only wood. They were the work of my life. Sixty eight wheat sheaves and Christmas stars, and every one carved after supper, with my own hands, with the radio on, while you did your homework at the table.” Her eyes filled again. “You were sitting beside me, Joan. Do you not remember?”
Marian Delacroix had said nothing for a long time. Now she shifted the butter mold to her other hand, and spoke with careful gentleness. “Mrs. Lund, I am so sorry. Please allow me to make a suggestion. The company would be glad to buy back the molds that have been sold, at any price, from the neighbors who bought them, and return them to you. It is the least we can do.” She hesitated. “And I would like to ask whether you would consider an exhibit. A traveling one. With your hand carved originals, and the story of how you made them.”
I looked at Dale. He had come down the steps, slowly, with his cane, and he stood beside me with his hand under my elbow. “Hedda,” he said, “I think you should say yes.” I said I would think about it. Then I turned to my daughter. “Joan, I am going to help you with the lawyer. Not because you deserve it. Because you are mine. But the trombone comes home today, and every dollar you took, you will pay back in time, and you will sit in my kitchen on Sundays and carve with me.”
She laughed, a wet, astonished sound. “Carve? Mom, I cannot even draw a stick figure.” “Neither could I,” I said, “at your age.” We bought back the trombone that afternoon. The man who had it was a young father with three children in a minivan, and when I told him whose it was he insisted on giving it back at no charge, and carried it to my car himself, in its battered black case, with the care of a man carrying a sleeping child. I held it on my lap the whole way home.
Joan came on Sundays. She was clumsy at first, and impatient, and she carved a wheat sheaf that looked like a mop. But she kept at it. By winter her cuts were clean, and by spring she had made a small round mold of her own, a lily, her first design. She pressed it into butter at the kitchen table and held it up to the window. “Mom,” she said, “look.” I looked. I said it was a good lily. It was a very good lily. I would not say it aloud, but it was better than mine.
The traveling exhibit opened in Des Moines in October, in a long white gallery, with sixty eight molds under glass and a recording of my voice. At the end of the room, on a small stand, lay the trombone that Arnold played. Dale and Joan and I stood in front of it together. Someone had put a card on the stand. It read, Played in the Mason City band, 1959 to 1988. Dale put his arm around me. Joan took my hand. And somewhere behind us, on the speakers, I heard my own voice saying, I carved them after supper.
