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. 