Clay's Quilt

by Silas House

  “Why, no,” Clay answered. “I don’t see eye to eye with the church telling people how to serve the Lord.”

  “A person should go by their heart. That’s what I believe.” She put her hand atop his. “It’s good to see you.”

  She held the front door open, motioning to Clay to go on in. He pulled off his boots and left them on the welcome mat.

  Sophie went into the bedroom. “Paul’s in the living room. Go on in there while I put me on some clothes,” she hollered. “I’m going to cook us a big breakfast.”

  Clay found his great-uncle sitting at his quilting frame, where Paul was making a king-size quilt that filled up the whole room. The curtains and sheers had been thrown back so that the white sunlight lit the whole room in a cool glow, as bright as new snow. Paul sat in a stiff ladder-back chair and fished needle and thread up through the fabric without even noticing Clay.

  “What kind of quilt is that?”

  “One to keep you warm.” Paul smiled and peered over his glasses to see who the visitor was. “Why, Clay! I can’t believe you’ve come to see your poor old uncle. You’ve bout quit me, buddy. Remember how you used to come up here?”

  “Yeah.”

  Paul paused and straightened a hem. “This here is a crazy quilt, buddy.”

  “Why’s it called that?” Clay asked. Paul was a man who loved to answer questions.

  “I reckon because it’s just scraps and whatever pieces you can get. It’s a poor man’s quilt, I guess,” he said, watching the quilt. “They don’t go by no real design. It’s all up to the quilter. Ain’t the best-looking quilt there is, but I like em.”

  Clay watched the needle and thread, the scraps of fabric pulling into one another, separate one second and a part of a whole the next. Clay had spent many evenings here, watching Paul make the quilts. Paul would take the scraps out and lay them on the bed, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had to be fitted together perfectly. Clay had loved to watch the needle and thread go in, out, up, and through.

  The scraps sat in a half-bushel basket on the coffee table, where Paul could reach over easily and pick them up. Clay moved to the couch and picked up one of the triangles of fabric. With his eyes closed, he ran his thumb over the strange landscape. He felt geography and history beneath his fingertips.

  “Clay?” Paul asked. Clay handed him the scrap and watched as Paul worked it into the sea of color and shape.

  “You the only man I ever knowed of to quilt,” Clay said, without thinking.

  Paul secured the piece in place and laughed after a long pause. “Men nowadays wouldn’t pick up a needle if ever shirt they had was without a button. When I’s growing up, a man was more liable to quilt than a woman. That’s a fact. People forget where they come from, though.”

  “That’s how Paul got me, by quilting,” Aunt Sophie said, coming out of the bedroom. She wore an apron over her skirt. “I know that’s the only reason my mommy let me marry him. Mommy never had liked Paul, and one evening he brung a big Wedding Ring quilt in, while we was courting, and spread it out on the couch beside Mommy. She bragged on it a sight. When he said he’d made it, she accused him of lying. She finally believed him, though, and that night she said, ‘That’s the one, Sophie.’” She laughed her kitten cough and disappeared into the kitchen.

  “I was thinking bout your mommy right then, while I was stitching that piece,” Paul said. He pointed to a bright turquoise square crowded with small, yellow flowers.

  “She was a good hand to quilt, but she couldn’t hardly stand setting still that long. Anneth couldn’t stay in the house to save her life, and the only way she’d quilt is if we set the rack up outside. One summer, me and her and Sophie made the awfullest big quilt you ever seen, and we had a time with Anneth. She could stitch the best ever was, but she wasn’t worth a dime when it come to the colors. Only thing she’d use was bright colors. A quilt needs some browns and grays to even it all out, but she wanted ever quilt to look like a big field of flowers. She’d dig through rag piles to find all the wild colors.”

  Paul held the needle still for a moment and looked off into space, as if he had to pause to let his mind wander back through time. Finally, he said: “That bright patch there made me think of her.”

  Clay waited as long as he could without prodding further, but Paul didn’t say a word. Silence ate up the room, broken only by grease popping in the kitchen. “Tell me something else about her,” he said in a near whisper.

  “Well, let me tell you something I done to her and Easter one Christmas.”

  Clay nodded and Paul cackled out laughing. He had to calm himself to start the story.

  “We had the biggest time ever was. All the men got wild drunk on Christmas Eve—them that didn’t go to church—and we’d let off big powder kegs and fire shotguns way up in the night. We’d stand on the porch and hold Roman candles. We’d set up all night and either play the radio or have somebody there that could play the banjo or a fiddle. The women usually laid down and left all of us up, but Anneth snuck and got back up.

  “She wasn’t but bout fifteen year old, but we’s all drunk, and we decided to let her drink a little with us. She always fit right in with us men, anyway. Well, that gal drunk like you never seen the beat of. She set right up with us.

  “Anyway, the next morning, Anneth had to get up and help Easter and them women cook the Christmas dinner. Easter was running all over that kitchen, working like she was fighting a fire, and Anneth was just dragging behind her, barely able to walk. Hung over, you see. Easter was griping on her a sight for being so slow, and they was both standing at the kitchen sink, cutting up a big hen to fry. Well, I took a big mule and rode it right in the back door. I was real easy with him, real slow, and they never even heard me, they was in such a big fizz arguing and working. Now, I never knowed of Easter to be scared of nothing in her life, but when she felt that big mule’s breath on her neck and turned around eyeball to eyeball with it, she liked to died. She passed slick out.” Paul burst out laughing, holding both big hands against his belly. He closed his eyes and leaned his head far back, barely able to catch his breath. “Aye Lord, that liked to tickled me to death.”

  “What about Mommy?” Clay asked. “What’d she do?”

  “Oh, that never even phased Anneth. She just started laughing and liked to never hushed. That’s how Anneth was,” Paul answered, and started laughing again.

  Clay laughed, too, but only partly at the story.

  “Scoot up here, now, Clay,” Paul said. “Watch here.”

  Paul told him everything about quilting, things he would never remember, but he savored each word as if they were lost verses of Scripture. He watched the needles, and the pieces of cloth, and his uncle’s brown eyes. Paul hummed and never blinked. He had big, confident hands. The needle seemed very thin between his square-tipped fingers. Paul worked the pieces in slowly.

  Clay wished that he could piece the story of his mother together in the same way. He might find scraps of her life, stitch them together, and have a whole that he could pull up to his neck and feel warm beneath. Someday he might be able to fit all of his questions together and work needle and thread between them and the answers. If he did, he would take two corners in his hands, snap the whole out onto the good air, and let it sail down smooth and easy to settle on the ground. It would be a story made up of scraps, but that was all he had.

  3

  DREAMA’S WEDDING TOOK place on a cold, dreary day. A thin rain fell upon Free Creek. It was slow and quiet, falling straight down without the company of wind or black thunderheads; instead it brought along a gray, swirling sky that seemed to shift and wrap itself around the edges of the horizon. It smelled fresh and damp, like clothes that have been left out on the line after the dew has fallen.

  A rain like that brought spirits with it. The translucent sky gave off the hint of otherworldliness. The rain was so cold and the sky so dark that it looked like a scene from the past, either in another time or in another world.


  Beneath the pelting rain, the Free Creek Pentecostal Church sat up on the hillside at the mouth of the holler as if it were keeping watch over the houses and people below. It was an old church, but it looked just the same as it had when it was built in 1917. The people who had raised the roof were stern-faced and rough, and they had all held firmly to the belief that buildings were meant to be sturdy, not beautiful. The exterior of the church looked suitable for a funeral, but not the place for a wedding. Still, Dreama wouldn’t even have thought of being married anywhere else.

  Dreama was in the baptistery dressing room, standing in front of the full-length mirror and about to cry. Easter was bent behind her, trying to fasten the two dozen pearl buttons that ran down the back of her wedding dress.

  “I knowed it would rain on my wedding!” Dreama moaned. “It never rains on nobody’s wedding. Nobody’s. I knowed it would on mine.”

  “This rain hain’t hurting nothing,” Easter said. “Be glad for the rain; the Lord sent it.”

  Easter struggled with the buttons, which were supposed to squeeze through loops that weren’t half big enough. Against her will, she gave up. She was far too nervous to be irritated.

  “Geneva, come do this,” she yelled to Dreama’s cousin.

  Dreama looked at the ceiling and tried to hold still for Geneva. “Where’s Clay at, Easter?” she asked. “Bring him in here to me.”

  “Clay can’t come back in here, Dreama. Not in the dressing room.” Easter stood at the small stained-glass window on the outside wall of the room, watching the colors of the glass grow distorted in the streams of rain that ran down it. Imprinted in the glass were the words 1 CORINTHIANS 13, which Easter thought was fitting, since the room served as a dressing room for brides just as often as for people getting ready for their baptisms. Used to be everybody got baptized in the river, which Easter thought was so much prettier, but now they only did that in the summer. In the winter they used the baptism tank behind the pulpit, which had warm water and a painted mural of a blue river behind it.

  “Lord God, Geneva, have you got em buttoned?” Dreama asked. “Now I’m bout to pee.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to hold it, Dreama Marie,” Easter said. She felt anxious and sweaty, the way she sometimes felt just before something was revealed to her. She was aware of the possessed rain outside and hoped that Anneth wouldn’t appear today. Not today.

  “Get Clay in here,” Dreama said, and stomped her little foot. “I ain’t seen him all day and I want to see him once more before I do this.”

  Easter shook her head and ran her hand down the side of Dreama’s heart-shaped face. “If you wasn’t so pretty, I could refuse you. Geneva, run out there and see if you can find Clay.”

  Dreama twirled around with her arms out to her sides. “Easter, do I look a sight?”

  “No, baby. You the prettiest thing I ever seen,” Easter said.

  “Lord have mercy,” Dreama said loudly, and pinched her cheeks for more color. “If I had a cigarette, I’d fire it right up, I’m so nervous, and I don’t even smoke.”

  “Don’t talk about smoking in the church house, Dreama Marie.”

  From the sanctuary they could hear the sound of the fiddler playing “When You Say Nothing at All.” Ever since Dreama watched Princess Diana get married on television, she had dreamed of having violins play Pachelbel’s Canon in D at her wedding, but she had finally settled for a fiddler playing old mountain ballads and country songs. Everybody else said it was crazy not to have a pianist, but this was the one thing Dreama stood firm on.

  “Clay’s coming,” Geneva announced, rushing back in. “He looks so good I wish he wasn’t my cousin.”

  Dreama had made Darry go and personally ask Clay to be his best man. Darry had complained that his brother ought to have this honor, but Dreama had cried and pouted. She had reminded Darry that his own brother had run off to Jellico, Tennessee, and gotten married by a justice of the peace in an IGA and he hadn’t even asked Darry to go and be a witness. Darry had gone to Clay’s, where they sat out on the back porch and drank three or four beers, watching the river flow by, and Darry had shuffled his feet before asking Clay what he thought about being his best man. Dreama had always wanted them to be friends and was always trying to push them together.

  When Clay came in, Dreama cried out like she hadn’t seen him in ages. Seeing her in her wedding gown, Clay felt like crying. Memories encircled him, poking their fingers in his ribs. He never would have guessed that things would turn out like they had, that Dreama would fall in love so quick and so hard and get married before he even had a real girlfriend. Looking at Dreama, Clay felt very old.

  Dreama pushed him back to the corner of the room, where no one could hear them talking. She straightened his bow tie and picked lint off his jacket, never meeting his eyes. “I’m fixing to get married now,” she said, sadly.

  “I know it.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing, Clay. I’m afraid.”

  “If you love him, that’s all that matters.”

  She stared into his green eyes, which were framed by the coal dust that no miner could get out of his lashes. She nodded.

  “I know why you got so upset at me, that day up at the cedar,” Dreama said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I never knowed you had any intentions of even wanting to have something serious.”

  “I never did,” he lied. “It’s all right.”

  The bridesmaids all crowded in front of the mirror, pinning their wide-brimmed hats atop their heads. When they caught a glimpse of Clay leaving, they all turned to watch him go. His eyes settled on Easter.

  “This is the best-looking bunch of women I ever seen,” he said loudly.

  “You damn straight,” Geneva said, and Easter nearly passed out from hearing such a word uttered within the walls of the church.

  CLAY WALKED BACK into the sanctuary and down the aisle toward the foyer. The pews were full, and Clay nodded to everyone as he passed. There were people Easter went to church with sitting right beside people Gabe got wild drunk with, which made Clay smile to himself. There were aunts who told him how good-looking he was and asked why he wasn’t married yet. There were uncles who knew perfectly well that Clay didn’t hunt but continued to ask him when he was going to go squirrel hunting with them.

  In the foyer, Darry was leaning up against the wall, green-faced and red-eyed. None of them had lain down until six that morning because Gabe wouldn’t let them. Gabe got wilder than any of them and ended up on a crying drunk that half of them didn’t even remember. They all got up at ten in order to get ready for the wedding, and that was when everyone realized it had been pure foolishness to have a bachelor party the night before the wedding.

  “I hope you don’t get up there and puke when you’re supposed to say ‘I do,’” Clay told Darry.

  “I’ve never got sick yet. I’m tired, though.”

  Clay felt awkward when he couldn’t find anything else to say. He had known Darry all of his life, but for whatever reason, he had never even considered being friends with him. Darry talked slow and easy, choosing his words carefully, and Clay liked that about him, but he had never been able to like him. Weddings always made people feel closer—especially the men—but that was about as far as it went between Darry and Clay. They had been pushed together by the ceremony, and afterward they would just nod to each other when they met and not be able to hold a whole conversation. They stood side by side, waiting for the wedding to begin, and didn’t say another word.

  Clay stood and looked out at the crowd, remembering all the Sundays Easter had brought him and Dreama to church here. He recalled the way Pastor Morgan’s voice had shaken the church, as did the heavy thumping of his fists upon the podium. Clay had often wondered if God had a voice as powerful as the preacher’s. Sometimes the preacher would pull off his suit coat and let it fly through the air to land wherever it might. The singing gave Clay visible chill bumps, and he had been me
smerized by the women who spoke in unknown tongues and shouted, often falling onto the floor and shaking until someone spread a towel over their legs so that their skirts wouldn’t ride up and shame them. More than once he had witnessed Easter rising from her place at the piano midsong to take off running down the aisles, hollering, with her hands raised over her head. Once she had shouted and danced so hard that her hair had fallen out of its pins and she had broken one of the short heels off her shoes.

  He remembered the Sunday school classes he had attended downstairs, where it had always smelled of chalk and damp books. He had memorized the verses and the books of the Bible in order: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Clay never had felt really close to God inside the church, not the way he did when he could see the creek running over the rocks and the mist coming down off the mountain. By the time he was about thirteen, he began to realize that God didn’t just live inside this old church house, even though the preacher called it God’s house every chance he got. One Sunday, in the middle of the morning meeting, Clay told Easter he had to go to the toilet, but instead he left the church. He walked up into Free Creek and up the mountain. He ran quickly along the white path until he reached the big cedar tree and then sat on the rock ledge with his knees pulled up to his chest.

  He closed his eyes and felt God floating all around him. He felt His presence burning into the trees, popping on the air.

  No sooner than he found salvation, he heard Easter. “What do you mean, up and leaving during the preaching? You lied to me, right in the church house,” she said, her voice nearly as loud as Pastor Morgan’s.

  “I don’t know. I felt cramped up.”

  “You’ve got to learn the ways of the Lord, Clay. I’ve got to give that to you. I’m the only one will.”