Clay's Quilt

by Silas House

  When the prelude was finished, Alma launched into the song fast and furious. One long leg burst out of the slit in her skirt, and her foot stomped on the stage. Her head and shoulders moved back and forth wildly, her hair swinging behind her like a fiery sheet hung out to dry. She began to move around the stage, and it seemed to Clay that she didn’t really mean to start pacing—it seemed as if she was forced to. The music had control of her.

  Geneva had begun to clog, and when she noticed that Clay was still staring up at the stage, she slapped him hard on the arm. He began to dance with her, but still he didn’t take his eyes from Alma. Everyone churned around them, feet stomping, skirts slicing through the air. People hollered out and kept their arms limp at their sides, careful not to let their eyes follow their feet. Shoes and boots clicked and beat on the wooden floor.

  Evangeline leaned back into the song, letting her voice rip from far down inside her. Clay half-expected her to break into tongues as she sang about being a cuckold. Alma also seemed to be taken by a higher power and moved around the stage with the slit in her skirt sneaking higher up on her leg, her body writhing with each cry of the fiddle. Clay decided right then and there that he wanted to know her. He wanted to hold her hand flat in his palm and look for the red lines the strings of the fiddle had left across her fingers. He imagined her fingertips would be hot as coals, and he longed to put his cool mouth around them.

  When the song was over, Alma tapped the strings lightly and bent at the waist for a quick bow. The club was filled with the roar of applause. Geneva held her hands high over her head as she clapped.

  “Damn, she could play,” Geneva said.

  When they got back to the table, everybody was still clapping. The band was noisily making its way offstage, taking their first break of the night. The canned music kicked on, and people raced back to the dance floor to do a line dance. Clay and Geneva, exhausted by the clogging, fell into their seats, taking great gulps of air. Cake slid another shot of liquor across the table, but Clay ignored it as he gathered his breath and senses.

  As soon as he saw Roe coming through the crowd, he motioned her over.

  “What is it, sugar?” Roe asked, balancing a full tray of beer over her head.

  “Who is that fiddler?” Clay asked quietly.

  “She’s Evangeline’s sister—”

  “I know that. Do you know her?”

  “Met her tonight, before we opened. Real sweet, from what I seen of her. Why, you wanting to meet her?” She laughed before he could answer. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Clay was unaware of anyone else at his table as he watched Roe deliver the beer and then go over to where Alma sat. He couldn’t see her table from where he was, but he knew she was over there.

  Geneva dipped a napkin into a glass of water and squeezed it so that streams ran down into her blouse, then wiped the sweat off her brow. “Anybody bout to pee?” she asked, looking around at the girls crowding the table. “I danced so hard it’s a thousand wonders it didn’t run right down my leg.”

  All the women left the table, and Goody and Cake scooted across the chairs until they sat next to Clay.

  “What’d you all think about that fiddler?” Clay asked. “She was a doll, I thought.”

  “She could play that fiddle, but she wasn’t all that to look at,” Cake said.

  “She looked good to me,” Goody said in his slow, careful drawl. “Had a nice little ass on her.”

  Cake cackled loudly and swatted Goody on the back. His heavy hand cracked against Goody’s leather jacket like a man’s face being slapped.

  Roe appeared at Clay’s shoulder, breathing as if she had just climbed the mountain up to the Hilltop. “She won’t come over to your table. Said if you want to talk to her, you’d have to come over there.”

  Clay nodded and took the shot of bourbon that Cake had offered him ten minutes before.

  Roe grabbed his arm roughly and set her face close to his. “Now go over there, Clay Sizemore. Talk to her. No use in being lonesome.”

  “I will, soon’s I get me a sup of beer.” He grabbed Goody’s ice-cold Miller and drank half of it straight down.

  Alma was sitting at a small, round table pushed up against the stage. Evangeline sat with her, smoking a long cigarette and waving it around in the air as she talked. Alma listened intently without an expression on her face. Before he could reach the table, Evangeline threw her head back in wild laughter.

  “Hey, Evangeline,” Clay said, and both women looked up as if startled by his sudden presence. Evangeline studied Clay for a long second. She was half-drunk and had snorted so much coke that she might as well have worn the powder on her nose.

  “Well, hidy, Clay. I bout didn’t know you. What’re you up to?”

  “I come over to talk to your little sister, here.”

  “Well, hell, there she sets, son,” Evangeline said, and roared with laughter again. “Talk away. You don’t need my permission.”

  “Hidy,” Alma said, and nodded.

  “This here is Clay Sizemore,” Evangeline said dramatically.

  Evangeline gathered up her cup and cigarettes and pushed her chair back so hard that it fell backward. She laughed loudly, looking at the chair as if it had fallen from the sky. “Hey, you all want to hear anything special?” she asked.

  “I’d like to hear a good two-step,” Clay answered.

  “You got it, then,” Evangeline said, winking, and walked away.

  Clay looked at Alma. “You know we met before, don’t you? At Dreama Sizemore’s wedding? Well, she’s a Spurlock now. Dreama that married Darry Spurlock.”

  Alma squinted her eyes at him, as if she could not see him clearly. “That is right. You tried to pay me.”

  The band began playing the first strains of “Heart Full of Love.” A huge speaker hung over their table, so Clay had to lean forward and yell out, “Well, you want to dance this one with me?”

  “I ain’t much of a dancer,” she screamed.

  “I don’t care. Come on. I love this song.”

  He put his hand out, and she hesitated before giving hers to him. He had been right, imagining her hands. They were as hot as freshly stoked coals. On the dance floor, he put one hand on her waist and took her hand as they began to two-step. The song was a fast two-step, but calm and easy. Clay moved his hand up to the small of her back, where the soft fabric was cool and thin. He could feel her muscles moving there, hard and flat in the palm of his hand. They danced well together, their feet and hips moving in exact time. Alma looked over his shoulder without moving her face, like someone watching a movie and waiting for something to happen.

  “You ought to play that fiddle up here more often,” he said, for lack of anything better to say.

  “I wouldn’tve done that a-tall if Evangeline hadn’t begged so. I ain’t much on playing in front of a crowd. Your cousin’s wedding was the first time I ever played anywhere besides on the front porch, or my bedroom.”

  “You’re lying,” he said.

  “No, I swear. That was the very first time, and tonight was the second.”

  “Well, I seen your first two performances, then,” Clay said.

  They danced silently for a moment, and Clay breathed her in. He could still smell the Coast soap on her. She smelled clean and soft and made him picture the ocean.

  “Your breath smells good,” Alma said suddenly, and laughed with embarrassment. “I love to smell whiskey and cigarette smoke mixed up together.”

  He laughed too loudly, not knowing what to make of her.

  “I mean it. You prob’ly think I’m crazy, but I love that smell.”

  “Where you from? I hadn’t never seen you before the wedding, and we look bout the same age. Why didn’t we go to high school together?”

  “We live plumb up on Victory,” she answered. Victory was at the farthest edge of the county, so far away that the students there were bused to school in neighboring Laurel County. Victory was famous for being a strictly
religious town, populated solely by members of the same church. Clay knew that Evangeline was the daughter of the well-known Mosley Family and suddenly realized that this meant Alma was, too. He wondered what their father would do if he knew both of his girls were gracing the stage of a place like the Hilltop.

  “You still live at home, with your people?” he asked.

  “Naw, I live with Evangeline right now.”

  The song ended, and Clay realized that he hadn’t heard one word Evangeline had sung. He wondered how he and Alma had moved so gracefully around the dance floor, when they had both seemed to live that moment outside of the music.

  Alma let her hand drop out of his. “Thanks for the dance. It was nice.”

  “Save another’n for me?” he asked, and heard himself sounding desperate.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I better not.”

  “You be up here next weekend?”

  “I sure don’t know,” she said, and started walking away. “Thanks for the dance.”

  Alma moved away and faded into the crowd, not waiting for him to walk her back to her table. When he finally stopped looking for her, he realized that he was standing in the middle of an empty dance floor.

  5

  BACK AT HOME, Clay shoved a John Mellencamp CD into the stereo and began moving around the room to the beat. He closed his eyes, moved up and down, bent his knees, shook his hips, jerked his head to and fro with the rhythm. His arms moved all around him, his sock feet finding their way easily around the kitchen floor.

  Clay was filled with a wild blood that he was always conscious of; he sometimes felt it pulsing through his veins with such fire that he thought it might burst from the tips of his fingers. Maybe it was the mixture of his Irish and Cherokee blood. He was sure of one thing—he came from a long line of lively people. He knew enough about his mother to be sure that she had been one of the wildest women in the untamed tangles of Crow County.

  He danced two or three songs straight through before falling heavily onto the couch beside Cake. Cake had been watching him with a half-grin on his face, and only now did he cackle out in his wild madman’s laugh.

  “I believe you drunk,” Cake said.

  “Naw, just high on life,” Clay replied, and patted his shirt pocket for his cigarettes. “I was wild until we went through that roadblock. That sobered me up right quick. You still drunk, though.”

  Cake laughed again, that high, piercing laugh that people either found charming or annoying. “That’s right.”

  Goody had dropped them off at Clay’s house but wouldn’t come in because Geneva was so drunk that he had had to pack her out of the Hilltop with her mouth lolled open and her skirt hiked up to show her panties. Clay had hoped for a big party to develop after they left the club, as it usually did, but it seemed that everybody had gone their own way tonight. It was just him and Cake.

  “I got you knee-walking drunk, son,” Clay said. “You ought to go lay down.”

  “Naw, I’m fixing to go over there and make us some breakfast.” Cake stood up and unbuttoned his jeans, letting them drop down about his ankles. He kicked his leg furiously until the jeans glided across the hardwood floor and into the middle of the living room. He stood in his long shirt and boxer shorts. “Them damn Levi’s come one ace of killing me tonight,” he said. “Too frigging tight.”

  Clay lay back on the couch and watched Cake as he made his way into the kitchen to cook them some breakfast. Cake put on a pot of coffee, opened a can of biscuits, and slid them into the oven, then fried baloney and eggs.

  “You want to make gravy?” Cake asked with his back to Clay. “You always say mine is like mush.”

  “Naw, we can do without it tonight.”

  Cake got the biscuits out of the oven and let the pan slap onto the counter. They fished some beer from the refrigerator and went out onto the porch to eat. They ate silently, listening to the music that came out of the house and mingled with the song of the river below. The night had turned cool and damp.

  “Best part of the meal,” Cake said, lighting a cigarette after he had placed his emptied plate on the floor beside his chair. His voice echoed out across the river.

  “I can’t get that fiddler out of my head,” Clay said suddenly.

  “What fiddler?”

  “That girl that played up the Hilltop tonight. Evangeline’s sister. I know you ain’t too drunk to remember her.”

  “Can’t get her out of your head?” Cake laughed sarcastically. “Lately you been wanting to get a woman so bad that you’d be crazy over the first one you come into contact with.”

  Clay thought Cake might be right, but he didn’t say so. “She could play that fiddle, couldn’t she?”

  “That’s for damn sure. She could play that thing like Charlie Daniels or somebody.”

  “No, it was more than that. It wasn’t just the music, but that look on her face. You could tell she felt that music. You know, like when some people sing a song, you can see right on them that they feel ever word of it,” Clay said. “I don’t know. They was just something about her. She just killed me.”

  “You danced with her, didn’t you?” Cake asked. “Why didn’t you ask her out?”

  “I tried to, but she didn’t seem that interested.”

  “Well, all I can tell you is that if she made that big an impression on you, you ought to try and get her. That sounds like something real to me. Nobody ain’t never made me feel that-away.”

  “Let’s go lay down,” Clay said. “I’m killed.”

  “I ain’t nary bit sleepy,” Cake said, “but I’ll lay down and talk to you awhile.”

  They had slept with each other all of their lives. They climbed into the bed and smoked, with an ashtray sitting between them. Before long, Cake faded off to sleep, but Clay sat up in bed wide awake until morning.

  CLAY AND CAKE were connected by their mothers. Easter had said that Anneth was the only friend that Cake’s mother, Marguerite, had ever had since she arrived on Free Creek.

  Cake’s father, Harold, had met Marguerite in Baton Rouge, where he’d spent three weeks after his tour was over in Vietnam. They had known each other only fifteen days when they were married by a justice of the peace. Two days after they were married, Harold brought her home to Free Creek.

  Everybody in the holler had made their way up to Harold’s house to welcome him back from the war and get a look at his new wife, including Easter and Anneth. Harold was as red-faced and deceptively jovial as ever, the men all pumping his hand and the women hugging him while they told him of the many prayers they had sent up for him while he was overseas.

  Harold’s new wife had sat on the couch, hugging herself, looking as if she would pass out any second. Her eyes had darted all over the room, not settling on anyone. She hadn’t known what to make of these people and jumped with a start each time they spoke in their loud voices. She didn’t say a word unless she was spoken to first, and even then her replies came out in short, whispery tones, so that everyone had to ask her to repeat herself. People distrusted and disliked her right away.

  Even Easter was put off by her. In fact, she was frightened by her. On that first day, Easter saw that everyone else had begun to shun Marguerite because of her doe-eyed silence, so she sat down on the couch beside her and pulled Marguerite’s hair out of her collar.

  Easter told her what she told every other person she was meeting for the first time: “You’ll have to go to church with me sometime. What religion are your people?”

  Marguerite touched her hair where Easter had straightened it and didn’t look up. “They’re Catholic,” she said, quietly, “but I’m not.”

  “Well, what religion are you?” Easter asked innocently.

  “None at all,” Marguerite said.

  Easter had never heard such talk in her life. Even Anneth said she was a Pentecostal when asked by a stranger, knowing that sinners as well as the saved had a chosen denomination. Easter was dumbfounded. All this could possibly mean
, Easter reasoned, was that Marguerite was an atheist. This had upset her so badly that Easter got hold of Anneth’s arm and made her leave with her right then. She vowed never to talk to Marguerite again.

  After that first day, nobody went around Marguerite. All the women in the holler went to the grocery together, sat out on the porch together, hollered to one another across their yards as they hung out clothes, but they never asked Marguerite to do anything. It made it all the worse that Marguerite didn’t seem to care. She sat out on her porch alone and read books all day while Harold was off at the mines. She read with wet washcloths on her forehead and never even looked up when Easter passed on the road. The women stood in their yards and talked about her. They said that her house must have been a hog pen, since she never did anything but read. They certainly did not have time for such entertainment. They had never even seen her making a fuss over her little baby, Cake. She was probably crazy.

  Their suspicions were heightened the day she took a fit in her yard. It was spring, and she was sitting on her porch, reading, with Cake in a bassinet beside her. Everybody was outside and they all saw what happened.

  They had long since gotten past the point of watching her, but when she threw her book onto the wooden planks of the porch, they were all startled enough to look up to her house. The book hit the floor with the amplified sound of a wall falling down, and as soon as it did, the baby started wailing. Marguerite tumbled down the porch steps and fell into the sandy yard, where she convulsed and kicked at the tufts of grass about her, holding her hands around her neck as if she were choking herself.