A Little Needling

Madge had been smelling death for thirty-two years. It could no longer sneak up behind her as it did some. For some, death is a dark ghost stalking each counted step. But not for Madge. Death for Madge was an old friend that just called to check in a few times a week. Death seemed to wear on her sweater like a cheap perfume. She had seen all the dearly departed as they arrived and she could read on their faces how it was they’d left this world: some had that look of unrepentant panic on their faces, some the pang of unfinished business and some the fear of one who has just realized that his fate had always been in someone else’s hands. A rare few have the peace of a well-lived life. But it was the look of the former not the latter that wore on Billy Jack’s face as his end neared and Madge was imagining every moment of his agony as he looked on his afterlife like an eternal root canal without anesthetic.

But to understand how Billy and Madge came to this moment, you probably ought to know a few things….about both of them.

Madge had a secret. Maybe it wasn’t so much a secret seeing as most of the town knew what Madge was up to; but it seemed that Madge didn’t think anyone knew, and so no one said, and she didn’t let on, and that’s just the way things were. But few people could keep a secret that good in a town that small anyhow. 

You should know that Madge had been the receptionist for the Eternal Serenity Mortuary and Crematorium for some thirty-four years. No one in the town could exactly recall how she’d come to have, want or keep the job but it just seemed that she’d always been there. Madge had started the job just out of college and just days after her twenty-second birthday. Few knew much about Madge before she came to be in her position at the ESM & C. The first that Madge learned of death was watching her mamma go and not long after her pa and by the age of sixteen, she was an orphan in the world, and some say that she just had a way of hanging on to things and to people.

Some say that it took those first couple years for Madge to really fit in to working for the mortuary but somehow after those first months of jumping just a little at the sound of the phone ringing, it soon became second nature to her and a year or later, she began doing the thing she’d become famous for in the little town of Wurlington.

Madge had always seemed like she was fifty something, even in the early years. Madge had taken up quilting. She and some of the women in the town, most of which were at least twice her age, had begun a little club of “stitching ladies” and they got together every Friday night with some piece quilting to keep their hands busy and some town gossip to keep their lips busy and oftener than not those lights were burning late into the evening in the basement of the church - the Chapel of Saint Mary’s - until long after ten o’clock.

          Madge had grown up with a father who was meaner than spit and was too cheap to put a penny in the collection plate. He was of the belief that man couldn’t give back to God what was His to begin with and that religion was just a way of putting down rules that you lived by in practice if not in emotion. You pray in the morning, pray before ya go to bed and work like the devil the other fourteen hours of the day. Madge was her daddy’s biggest fan. Madge was no stranger to hard work and hard men.

It was just about six months after Madge got the job at the ESM & C that Billy Jack Thornton moved into the small town of Wurlington. The Thornton family had moved into the old Westergard house at the end of Westergard lane. Old lady Westergard never would have sold her property to the likes of the Thornton family but as her unfortunate luck would have it, her only son Wilbur, who’d try to knock off the convenience mart more times than anyone could count, was off to his third unfortunate incarceration and her husband, Old Man Westergard, had taken to pushing up daisies three years before Old lady Westergard picked up the profession herself. The now falling-down house came on the market just as the Thornton’s came into the picture.

The cold hand of death came for Mrs. Thornton less than half a year later and Billy Jack Thorton and his father came into the mortuary where Madge was working to make the plans for her eternal resting place. Billy Jack took a liking to Madge right off, most likely due-to-the-fact that he had just lost his mother and Madge looked, acted and smelled just like her. And it was a widely known fact that when Madge took to cookin' that Billy Jack was spot-on for a place at her table. Madge was walking down that long marriage corridor in a white gown before anyone, especially Madge, had time to learn the true character of Father and Son Thornton.

It didn't take long for the rumors to fly about what was happening to Madge at her husband’s home and by his hand. But Madge was as tight-lipped as it came about her own story and so the rumors flying about the bruises that came and went were all speculation based on a truth that not many of the women talked about in those days. Oh, there was still gossip to be had round the quilter’s circles on Friday night but all the sisters shied away from the topic of Madge and her new husband and his quick hand. He was as blue-collar as they come, and he learned from Father Thornton that you guide a woman's actions in your own home by the “laying on of hands” and you know what I mean. But as a faithful wife of those days and times, Madge cleaned and cooked and made the king of her home as comfortable as she could. Each night, even those Friday nights that she was out with her sisters, Madge had a plate warm and prepared on the table for her Mr. Thornton.

Madge stitched on. It seemed that piecing together quilts was what she was born to do. She could work out a quilt in half the time it took any of the other sisters. It was from this gift that sprang Madge's secret. Madge was in the business of borrowing from the office. Now most of us have taken a pen or two without much harm done so who can blame Madge for a bit of petty theft around her place of business. Madge took the liberty of taking a quilting square from each of the clients that came rolling by her desk at the ESM & C.

Now, in a town the size of Wurlington, it ain't too hard to put together the pieces, pardon the pun, that when you had a loved one who bought the farm, that the following Friday, a little piece of the loved one you buried would appear on the top of the new Mrs. Madge Thornton's quilt. You never could tell by looking in on those folks in the casket that a square of material had gone missing from their suit pant leg or the back of their skirt where it folded into the satin resting place of each departed soul.

Madge's secret had a unique way of bringing the town together. The citizens of the town of Wurlington seemed to take a strange pride in the quilts that the new Mrs. Thornton displayed at the local library and on the sacred walls of Saint Mary's. It lent truth to the strongly held belief that our dearly departed, or at least a recognizable piece of their resting clothes, are always with us. Townsfolk knew the quilt which held their treasured memories and would touch it in reverence as they passed.

As the years came and went and so did the citizens of the town, the name of Billy Jack Thornton became a hiss under the breath of even the best of citizens including the Right Reverend MaCallough. Some of the well-meaning would say things to Madge about things not being right at her home but she would smile, nod and say, “But God has plans for Billy.” The sisters took to talking about piecing their power together for Madge and stitching her freedom. “A time will come for Billy,” Madge would say and the sisters would nod sadly. They kept telling her that she could sell her quilts in town and have money enough to leave Billy Jack and live comfortable until the end of her days and she would smile, “in time.” 

 It seemed a blessing to everyone that no children came to Billy Jack and Madge during those years. But there was a longing in Madge all the same and she lingered at the cradle-side of a baby just a few minutes longer than most of the sisters.

There was only one time that anyone can remember that Madge didn't borrow a bit of cloth from a citizen at rest and that was the day that Father Thornton made his way into Madge's mortuary.

That was the night that Billy Jack started adding liquid fire to his anger and began spending the first few hours of his evenings at the tavern in the next town over. It was rumored that one night just a few months past his father’s death that Billy Jack came home and tore to shreds the latest of Madge's creations and then tore into her. Madge didn't come to work or to the sister’s circle that week.

Madge was a ghost after that. Though her body walked the streets of Wurlington, her spirit seemed to be somewhere just behind the horizon. Her hands were still and nothing that the sisters had to say could put them back to her fabric canvas again. This went on for some time and many began to think that Madge was gone forever.

Until....somehow a year to the day that Father Thornton left Wurlington in a casket, the light seemed to change in the town, somehow. That Friday night when the sisters got together at the Chapel of Saint Mary's, Madge sat in her usual spot with a pile of piecing squares, a needle in her hand and a smile on her face and the smell of formaldehyde on her fingers. All she would say is, “I think it’s time for Billy Jack.”

It is guessed that at nearly the same time that Mrs. Billy Jack Thornton was telling her sisters that the time had come, Billy Jack was just reaching home from his evening tavern trip. He was sitting down to the plate that Madge had left for him. Had Billy Jack been to the bedroom first, he would’ve seen each of his shirts in a neat pile on the bed as well as several pairs of blue jeans and his sole pair of dress pants and its possible he might have noticed a perfect square missing from each matching perfectly the pile of piecing squares that now sat at Madge's feet.