The Coffee Can
Rhonda ran the raffle every year.
She sold the tickets. She kept the coffee can of stubs. She drew the name herself, up front, with the microphone.
That’s how it had been at Grace Lutheran in Belden, Iowa, for eleven years. Ever since Rhonda took over the Fellowship Committee from old Ruth Kessler, who passed the job on along with her recipe for scalloped corn and a firm belief that nobody else could be trusted with either.
So when the church supper ended that Saturday night in October, and the pie plates were scraped and the folding chairs were scraping too, Rhonda stepped up to the little podium at the front of the fellowship hall with a red Folgers can in one hand and the microphone in the other.
“All right, everybody,” she said. “This is the moment you’ve all been waiting for.”
The quilt was hanging on the wall behind her.
My quilt.
They’d strung a clothesline between two coat hooks and draped it there, so it hung down all the way to the floor. Double Wedding Ring. Soft colors. Pale yellow, sage green, a rose pink so faint it was almost white. Interlocking rings across the whole top, every ring made of thirty-two little curved pieces.
It was the prettiest thing in that room, and I’m not saying that to brag. Everybody said so. Women had been coming up to touch the edge of it all night, running their fingers along the binding.
“Joan, how did you ever get those curves so even?” Edna Stoltz asked me during the meatloaf.
“Patience,” I told her. “And my mother’s thimble.”
I had pieced that quilt all winter.
Every curved seam by hand. Ten stitches to the inch. I started the second week of November, after the corn was in, and I didn’t put the last stitch in the binding until the first week of March. Four months of my evenings. Sitting in the rocker by the woodstove in our front room after supper, with the lamp turned up and the radio on low, while Dale read the Farm Bureau Spokesman and fell asleep in his chair.
My mother’s thimble on my finger the whole time. A silver one, worn thin on top from forty years of her pushing needles through cotton. She gave it to me the year before she died.
It was for the furnace fund.
The furnace at Grace Lutheran was older than me. That’s not an exaggeration. It was installed in 1958, an old oil burner the size of a pickup truck, down in the basement next to the Sunday school rooms. Every winter it took three men and a prayer to get it started.
Last January it quit entirely during the Christmas program. The children sang “Silent Night” in their coats, and you could see their breath.
The church council got an estimate for a new one in February. Fourteen thousand, eight hundred dollars, from Kaufman Heating in Waverly. For a little country church with sixty-three members on the rolls and about forty in the pews on a good Sunday, that was a mountain.
So everybody pitched in. Bake sales. A pancake breakfast. A free-will offering at the Easter service. And the fall supper raffle, with a quilt.
My quilt.
Two dollars a ticket. Three for five.
We sold the most tickets we ever had. Five hundred and seventy-three of them. That came to over eleven hundred dollars, Rhonda announced proudly, after the pie and before the drawing. The biggest raffle Grace Lutheran had ever had.
“Because that’s the prettiest quilt we’ve put up in years,” somebody said from the back. Harlan Moeller, I think.
Everybody clapped. I looked down at my shoes.
Now Rhonda stood at the podium with the red Folgers can.
She held it up so everybody could see. She smiled. She had on her good fall sweater, the orange one with the little embroidered leaves, and her hair was set the way she does it for church, in stiff blonde waves.
“Before I draw,” she said into the microphone, “I just want to thank Joan Hartwig for donating this beautiful quilt. Joan, stand up so everybody can see you.”
I was by the coffee urn in the back with a dish towel on my shoulder. I’d been refilling cups all night. I raised my hand a little. Everybody turned and clapped again.
“Isn’t she something?” Rhonda said. “My brother’s a lucky man.”
Then she reached into the can.
I watched her do it. I want to be clear about that. I was standing in the back of that fellowship hall with a dish towel on my shoulder, and I watched every single second.
She didn’t shake the can. Not once.
When you draw a raffle ticket, you shake the can first. Everybody knows that. You shake it hard, so the stubs get mixed up, so the ones on the bottom have the same chance as the ones on top. You hold it up over your head, so nobody can say you looked. You close your eyes or turn your head. That’s how it’s done. That’s how Ruth Kessler did it for thirty years.
Rhonda didn’t shake it. She didn’t hold it up. She tipped it toward herself and reached in with her right hand and felt around for a second, looking down into the can.
Then she pulled out one stub.
She unfolded it slowly. She read it. She put her hand on her chest.
“Oh my goodness,” she said into the microphone. “Oh, you all are not going to believe this.”
She looked up at the crowd. Her eyes were shining.
“The winner,” she said, “is Katie.”
Katie is her daughter.
Twenty-three years old. Getting married in June to a boy named Tyler Brandt who worked at the John Deere plant in Waterloo. She was sitting at the second table from the front, next to her fiancé, wearing a sweater the exact same orange as her mother’s.
Katie’s face went red. She put both hands over her mouth.
People clapped. Some of them, anyway. I heard a few laughs, the kind that don’t have much behind them. I heard Edna Stoltz say, “Well, isn’t that something,” in a voice that meant something else entirely.
Rhonda was laughing into the microphone. “I swear I didn’t plan it! A wedding quilt for my girl! Honest to goodness, the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
I was by the coffee urn with a dish towel on my shoulder.
I smiled.
I know how to smile with nothing behind it. I learned at my own mother’s funeral, standing in the receiving line for three hours. You turn up the corners of your mouth and you keep your eyes soft and you nod. You can do it for a long time if you have to.
I stood there and smiled while Katie came up and Rhonda hugged her, and they took my quilt down off the clothesline, and Katie held it up against herself and everybody clapped again.
Then I turned around and filled the coffee urn, even though it was already full.
Chapter Two: The Drive Home
I did not see her slip a stub.
I want to be honest about that, because honesty is the only thing I have in this whole story. I did not see Rhonda take a ticket out of her pocket or her sleeve. I didn’t see her mark one. I didn’t see her pull it from the top of the pile where she’d put it.
Nobody did.
But a fair person shakes the can first. She didn’t shake it. I would swear to that in church, with my hand on the Bible.
Swearing isn’t proof, though. I know that too.
Dale drove us home in the dark.
We live four miles out of Belden on a gravel road, in the farmhouse Dale’s grandfather built in 1922. We farmed three hundred and twenty acres of corn and beans for thirty-eight years. Now Dale rents most of it out to the Hoffman boys and keeps forty acres and a few beef cows, because his knees aren’t what they were.
He drove his old Silverado with the window cracked, the way he always does, even in October. The headlights swept across the ditches. The fields on both sides were stubble now, gray and flat under a half moon.
He didn’t say anything for the first two miles. Neither did I.
Then, just past the Mueller place, he cleared his throat.
“You going to say something,” he said. It wasn’t really a question.
“Say what,” I said.
He didn’t answer right away. He reached over and turned down the radio, which was already off.
“That I think she pulled her own girl’s name?” I said.
There it was. Out loud. In the cab of the truck, in the dark.
Dale didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes on the road.
“She didn’t shake it,” he said quietly.
“No.”
“Ruth always shook it. Every year. Like she was mixing paint.”
“I know.”
He was quiet for another half mile. Rhonda is his little sister. Six years younger. He taught her to ride a bike and drove her to her prom and walked her down the aisle when their father was too sick to do it.
“Pastor Dahl could ask her,” Dale said finally. “Quiet. Just ask her.”
“And then what,” I said.
I’d been thinking about it since the moment she said “Katie.” I’d been thinking about it while I washed forty coffee cups in the church kitchen.
“She cries,” I said. “Katie cries. Rhonda says how dare anybody accuse her, after eleven years running that raffle for free. She says she’s never been so hurt in her life.”
Dale didn’t say anything. He knew his sister.
“And half the church takes her side,” I said. “Because she’s done the funeral lunches for twenty years. Because she brings scalloped corn to every potluck. Because she cried.”
“And the other half,” Dale said.
“Takes mine. Because I made the quilt. Because Edna Stoltz saw it too. Because a lot of people have been waiting a long time to say something about Rhonda.”
I looked out the window at the dark fields.
“And come Easter,” I said, “we have two churches in one building. Sitting on opposite sides. Not talking at coffee hour. Arguing at council meetings about the furnace. Over a quilt.”
We’d seen it happen before. In 1997, Grace Lutheran almost split over whether to put carpet in the sanctuary. The Heinrichs and the Volkmanns didn’t speak to each other for six years. Three families left for the Methodist church in Denver.
Over carpet.
“I can’t prove she rigged it,” I said. “And I won’t split the church over a quilt.”
Dale nodded slowly.
“So you’re going to say nothing.”
“I’m going to say nothing.”
He reached across the bench seat and put his big rough hand over mine. He held it the rest of the way home.
For a week I scrubbed things already clean.
That’s what I do when something sits wrong in me. My mother did it too. I scrubbed the kitchen floor on my hands and knees. I took every plate out of the cupboard and washed it and put it back. I cleaned the oven. I washed the windows inside and out, even though it was forty degrees and the wind was blowing.
Dale came in from the barn on Wednesday and found me on a ladder, scrubbing the top of the refrigerator.
“Joan,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Nobody’s been up there since 1985.”
“Then it needed it.”
He stood there in his barn coat looking at me for a long time. Then he went back out.
It wasn’t the quilt. Not really.
I mean, it was. Four months of my evenings, hanging on Katie Pfeiffer’s bed. I won’t pretend that didn’t sting.
But it wasn’t the cheating either. Rhonda’s been bending little rules her whole life. Taking the biggest piece of pie. Cutting in line at the pancake breakfast. Getting her picture in the paper for the food drive even though Edna did all the work.
That wasn’t what kept me up at night.
What kept me up at night was Pearl.
Chapter Three: Sixty Dollars in Quarters
Pearl Wendt is eighty-one.
She lost her husband, Vern, in a bean field nine years ago. He was walking beans on a hot July afternoon, pulling volunteer corn out of the rows by hand, the way the old-timers still did. He was seventy-five. His heart gave out somewhere around the middle of the field.
Pearl found him at suppertime when he didn’t come in. She walked out to look for him in her house shoes.
She said later he was lying on his back between the rows, looking up at the sky, like he’d just decided to take a rest. His seed corn cap was still on his head.
They’d rented their farm. They’d never owned land. When Vern died, the landlord’s son rented the ground to somebody else, and the farmhouse went with it.
So Pearl moved to town. Into half a house on Third Street. A little white duplex near the grain elevator, built in the forties, with a sagging porch and a storm door that didn’t latch. She rented the east half. Four hundred and fifty dollars a month, from a man in Cedar Falls she’d never met.
She lived on Vern’s Social Security. Nine hundred and twelve dollars a month. That’s it. No pension. No savings to speak of. They’d spent everything they had on Vern’s bypass surgery in 2009.
I didn’t know Pearl well before that October. I knew her the way you know people at church. She sat in the back row on the left, in the same spot every Sunday. She wore the same navy blue coat every winter. She always brought a pan of bars to the potluck. Plain ones. Oatmeal or peanut butter. Never anything fancy.
She was quiet. She didn’t serve on committees. She didn’t sing loud. She came early and left late and smiled at everybody.
Then, at the fall supper, I saw her buy raffle tickets.
It was before the meal, at the card table by the door where Rhonda was selling them. I was carrying a tray of coffee cups past, and I stopped, because Pearl was counting out money.
In quarters.
She had them in a little cloth coin purse. She was taking them out and stacking them on the card table. In fours. One dollar. One dollar. One dollar. Little silver towers, in a neat row, like she’d been practicing.
She stacked up sixty dollars.
Two hundred and forty quarters.
“Pearl,” Rhonda said, laughing. “That’s a lot of tickets, honey.”
“It’s for the furnace,” Pearl said. “And I’ve had my eye on that quilt since you hung it.”
She looked over at the wall where it was hanging. My quilt. The Double Wedding Ring in the soft colors.
“I never owned a quilt somebody made new,” she said.
She said it so simply. Not complaining. Just a fact, like the weather.
“Vern’s mother had some old ones,” she said. “But they were all worn through by the time they came to me. I’ve been sleeping under one with a hole in the middle for forty years.” She smiled. “I’d like to sleep under something new before I go. Just once.”
Rhonda counted the quarters. She tore off sixty dollars’ worth of tickets. Thirty-six tickets. At three for five, it should have been thirty-six. She gave Pearl thirty.
I noticed. I didn’t say anything.
Pearl folded her stubs carefully and put them in her coin purse. Then she went and sat down in the back row of the fellowship hall with a plate of meatloaf.
She didn’t win either.
When Rhonda said “Katie,” I looked at the back row. I couldn’t help it.
Pearl was sitting there with her coin purse in her lap. Her face didn’t change. Not a flicker.
And then she clapped for Katie.
Slowly. Politely. From the back row. The way you clap at a funeral when somebody finishes a hymn.
That was the part I couldn’t let go of.
Not the cheating. Not my four months of evenings. Not even Rhonda standing up there saying the Lord works in mysterious ways.
The sixty dollars.
A widow’s grocery money. Two hundred and forty quarters she’d saved, probably one at a time, from God knows where. On a paper chance. For a quilt she’d never own.
That’s what had me on a ladder scrubbing the top of the refrigerator.
Chapter Four: The Visit
The second week, I drove into town on a Tuesday.
I told Dale I needed thread from the Ben Franklin. That was true. But I drove past the Ben Franklin and turned left on Third Street and parked across from the little white duplex by the grain elevator.
I sat in the car for a long time. I didn’t know what I was going to say.
Then I saw Pearl come out onto her porch. She was wearing her navy coat and carrying a plastic Hy-Vee bag full of something. She came slowly down the porch steps, one hand on the railing, and walked down the sidewalk toward the end of the block.
I followed her. Slowly. In the car. Like a fool.
She walked two blocks to the Casey’s General Store on Main Street. Not inside. Around the back. To the redemption machine by the dumpster, where you return your pop cans.
She opened her Hy-Vee bag and started feeding cans into the machine. One at a time. The machine sucked them in with a little rattle and spat out a ticket.
Five cents a can. That’s what Iowa pays for a returned can. The bottle bill.
She had maybe forty cans. Two dollars.
When she was done, she took the ticket into the store and came back out with two dollars in quarters. She put them in her cloth coin purse.
And walked home.
I sat in my car in the Casey’s parking lot and cried so hard I had to turn the engine off.
Two hundred and forty quarters.
Twelve hundred cans.
She walked the ditches. I found that out later. Along Highway 3, and the county road out past the cemetery, and the ball diamond after the Little League games. Picking up cans other people threw away. Every day. For years.
She took that money and bought raffle tickets for a quilt. For the furnace fund. For the church.
That night, I couldn’t sleep.
I lay in bed next to Dale, listening to him snore and the wind push at the old windows. I thought about Pearl’s quilt with the hole in the middle. Forty years.
I thought about my mother. About sitting on the floor of her sewing room in Clarksville when I was eight, sorting scraps by color into coffee cans while she worked. About the sound of her treadle machine. About the way she’d hold up a finished quilt to the window and squint at it.
