Clay's Quilt

by Silas House

  “What does?”

  “That Darry don’t care no more than that bout that baby. My daddy never even knowed I existed. Never even had a chance.”

  “Darry’ll regret it soon enough. People like that can only be happy so long. Eventually, he’ll be miserable, and then it’ll be too late.”

  “No. I used to think thataway. People like that just go on, looking out for theirselves. They don’t have to pay for their mistakes.”

  She didn’t answer him. He pulled away from her and leaned on the railing. He looked out over the town, where daylight had spread itself out white and flat without their even noticing. Smoke wound out of the buildings below, black against the winter sky. A thin snow dusted the ground, but the air was still.

  “God, you must think me and Cake are a couple of crybabies,” he said.

  “No, it looks to me like you both care about Dreama. That’s why I’ve went so crazy over you, Clay. You care about people. Seems like you care about everything, and I ain’t never met nobody like that.”

  He didn’t take his eyes from the town and stayed leaning over the railing, looking at the squat buildings, considering the tarnished sky. Silver breath pumped out of his mouth as he turned to her and said, “Marry me, then.”

  She folded her arms one atop the other and held her elbows in each hand, hugging herself.

  “Is that what you really want? I’m not for certain you’re ready to settle down.”

  “I already have, Alma. I ain’t going to stand here and tell you that I’ll plumb quit partying and drinking, cause that’s right in my blood, and I can’t change that, but I’ll always be right there with you, and I want you with me, too. I know you love me—I don’t doubt that for a minute. I want you with me all the time. That’s the best way I know to say it.”

  “All right, then,” she said, and she reached out her hand. He pulled her inside his big arms and held her as close to him as he could, feeling her solid and real against him.

  17

  MARGUERITE SAT ON her high front porch, thinking about Anneth. Upon her lap lay an open book, and she stared down at its full pages with the intent and concentration of a concerned reader, but the pages might as well have been blank. She had been thinking of Anneth all day, and her memories were all happy ones, so they were that much more troubling. Most people went through their lives trying to forget the dark corners of their past, but Marguerite was cursed to live with those good images that sometimes swam before her eyes. She had had a miserable life and she had built her friendship with Anneth up into the greatest thing that had ever happened to her. Ever since Anneth had died, she had been trying to purge herself of the time she had spent with her.

  The first time Anneth had taken her up on the mountain, they had stopped halfway up and lain on huge, flat rocks that jutted out of the mountainside like dinner plates. It was near dusk, but the rocks had sucked in the summer day’s heat, and the stone was warm and dry beneath them. Anneth lay flat on her back and held one arm up in the air, studying her hand.

  “My granny could read coffee grounds,” she said. “When I was thirteen, she read in my grounds that I’d die before I ever seen thirty.”

  “She told that to a child?” Marguerite asked.

  “Why yeah,” Anneth answered, as if it was nothing unusual. “She said that every day of my life I’d be happy and sad, both in the same day. That’s true. I can’t recall a day that I ain’t been happy as a lark, then all at once, just felt blue as I could be.”

  “Seems to me you’re happy all of the time,” Marguerite replied, looking up at the sky.

  Anneth ignored her, caught up in her own thoughts. “Granny said I’d sure die young, but I’d live more than most people ever do. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been trying to live up to what she seen in them grounds. Trying to make that come true all my life.”

  Marguerite didn’t know what to say, and it seemed that Anneth didn’t expect or need a reply, because they both fell silent and lay upon the heated rocks, letting the wind rush over them. The birds had stopped singing, and finally the wind stopped, too, and Marguerite lay there entranced by the stillness.

  Marguerite did not hear the boot heels on the steps or on the old planks of the porch, but when Clay said her name, she slid back out of the past.

  She saw only his silhouette, big and straight against the evening sky. “Clay. Lord, I haven’t seen you in ages.”

  “I know it.”

  “I miss seeing you. Remember when you were little, you practically lived here.”

  Clay had known Marguerite all of his life, but he had never known what to expect from her and had certainly never known how to talk to her.

  “That’s what happens, though, when children grow up. I never see Cake, either. Sometimes I can’t believe that he still lives here, because he’s never home.”

  “Where’s he at?” Clay asked, nervously.

  She either had not heard Clay or didn’t want to cut the conversation so short, because she didn’t answer. Instead, she closed the book silently and looked up at him. Clay was struck by her beauty. It was true, he thought, what the people said: she really did seem to be growing younger. Instead of looking like a fifty-year-old woman, she could easily have passed for a blooming woman in her early thirties. Her skin was tight and fair, her hair shiny and full of body—the curls about the sides of her face bobbed every time she moved her head. Her lips were perfectly drawn, full and bloodred without lipstick, against her straight, white teeth. Her wrists were small and smooth, as were the tops of her hands, free of veins or wrinkles.

  “Do you still have those records I gave you, when you were a teenager?” she asked.

  “Lord yeah. I listen to them all the time. I was just listening to that one by Paganini the other night. Easter found a box full of some of Mommy’s things, and I was going through it and listening to that record. I found a record album in that box, too.”

  “What was it?”

  “Harvest, by Neil Young. It must’ve been one of her favorites.”

  “It might have been, but I don’t know. She bought so many records that I couldn’t keep up with them all. She listened to every kind of music there was. She used to tell me that the only musicians I liked were dead ones.” Marguerite opened the book again and smoothed out the page with the flat of her palm, as if the paper gave her skin a sense of satisfaction. She fell silent, and Clay began to wonder if she had started reading again.

  “Do you remember her?” she asked, but did not look up.

  “Sometimes. I try to remember her voice, but I can’t.”

  “Her laugh was something to hold on to,” Marguerite said, and squinted up at him as if sunlight were in her eyes. “In the evenings, you could hear it all up and down this road.”

  Clay shuffled his feet and looked around the porch.

  “She took you for walks every day. Even in the winter. She’d bundle you up and carry you on her hip, up that mountain. She’d point things out to you. Make you run your hands over the bark of trees. She’d sit for a long time, just listening to birdcalls.”

  “She was here a lot, when I was little? I thought we lived with Glenn, on the other side of Buffalo.”

  Marguerite laughed quietly. “She left him every other week. She’d come here and stay a night or two, then go right back. She couldn’t decide which she loved best—Glenn or Free Creek. And even when they were together and getting along fine, she came up here all the time. She’d leave him playing poker with his brother, or out drinking, and come stay all night with Easter. You was here more than you was over at Glenn’s.”

  “What did you think about Glenn?” Clay asked.

  “I despised him,” she said, and closed the book. “I can’t even talk about how bad I hated him.”

  “Where’d you say Cake was at?” Clay asked, shoving his hands down into his pockets.

  “In the house. Just go on back,” she said, looking past him.

  Cake was in his room, looking through a
pile of CDs. His stereo emitted a faint guitar and mumbling, as Marguerite would not allow him to turn his music up loud enough for her to hear.

  “Let’s ride up the holler,” Clay said.

  They jumped on the four-wheeler Clay had borrowed from Gabe and raced down the road, across the old bridge, and up into the head of the holler, toward the old mine. The winter air was like metal against their faces, but neither of them cared. Clay drove, hunched over the steering handles like a racer, pressing his thumb as hard as he could against the accelerator. The lights of the houses faded behind them, and the darkness seemed barely penetrated by the dim headlight on the front of the four-wheeler. The creek widened as they traveled farther up into the holler and was soon so wide that they could hear its roar even over the rough purr of the engine. The mountain was even blacker than the darkness, thick with pines and crooked trees. Clay goosed the gas, sending them speeding over a smooth, round hill that made their stomachs sink.

  They came to the steep ridge where Anneth was buried. When the headlight cast its yellow gaze across the gravestones, they shone like the surface of water in sunlight. Clay cut the gas and sat silently. It was more quiet here, as the creek was on the far side of the graveyard, but still the water covered every other sound.

  “Been a long time since you come up here,” Cake said.

  “I’d come more often if I knowed how to act.”

  “You want to walk up there?”

  Clay swung his leg over the seat and jumped off the four-wheeler. He had no flashlight and would have to do with the gleam from the single headlight. He pulled his coat tightly about himself and walked slowly to his mother’s grave.

  Easter and Gabe had made sure that she got a headstone as soon as it could be chipped and delivered. A single rose had been cut into the stone, and below the rose, it read:

  ANNETH SIZEMORE

  Born 1940 Died 1974

  Beloved Mother and Sister

  A birth certificate had so many more words, he thought. The rose was all wrong, too. Even though Easter and Gabe had had nothing but the best intentions, if he had been big enough to make such decisions, he would have called for a bouquet of wildflowers to be carved into the gravestone: tiger lilies, daisies, jack-in-the-pulpits, Queen Anne’s lace.

  He crouched down and put his finger inside the lines of the rose. He touched the letters of her name, the years she had lived. The stone was so cold, so icy, that he feared it might blister his fingers. It felt just the way her skin had felt when she lay in the cedar casket. He could call up that image any time he wanted to: a lavender church dress, a wide purple belt with a plastic buckle, long eyelashes. Her hands had looked so alive that it had looked like blood was flowing right through the round veins. She had never seemed so still before. Even her sleep had been plagued by motion. He had wanted to breathe her scent in, but the smell of cedar had overtaken everything.

  “You all right?” Cake asked, and put his hand on Clay’s arm.

  “Easter must have just cleaned her grave off,” Clay said. The headstone was free of branches and leaves, and yellow mums had recently been planted on the grave.

  “She walks up here once a week to see to it,” Cake said. “I see her heading up the holler ever Friday. Mommy brought them mums, though. She made me go to town and buy them the other day. Said the more it frosted, the prettier they got.”

  “It was wrong of me, to never come tend to her grave,” Clay said, and stood.

  “What are you doing up here tonight? Where’s Alma?” Cake asked.

  “Staying all night up her people’s house.”

  “I didn’t think they was speaking.”

  “That’s why she went up there, I reckon,” Clay said. “I guess she was tired of being cold with em. I ain’t stayed with Easter in a while, so I’m going to stay there tonight. You ought to come up and set around with us.”

  “Might do it. UK plays tonight, at ten.”

  “Well, we’ll watch it,” Clay told him. He shoved his hands deep down into his pockets and kicked a square of coal across the dirt. “Can’t smoke in Easter’s house, though. That’s the only thing.”

  “We’ll sneak outside, like we used to.” Cake fished around in the inside pocket of his denim jacket and pulled out a half-pint of Jim Beam. “Lookee here.”

  “That’ll warm us up,” Clay said, and watched Cake throw down a long shot. “Better not drink much, though, if we going back to Easter’s.”

  “Like a half-pint would get both of us drunk,” Cake laughed, and handed the bottle over to Clay.

  The bourbon was strong and hot. Clay felt like it was flowing into every part of his body. “Cake, I didn’t get you to ride up here with me to see Mommy’s grave. They’s something I wanted to tell you.”

  Cake took a drink from the bottle.

  “I asked Alma to marry me. We’re getting married, soon as it gets warm weather.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” Cake said, and Clay knew he was lying.

  “You don’t sound glad. I’ve knowed you my whole life, and I know when you’re glad.”

  “It’s just that so much will change. Everthing will change.”

  “That’s what life’s all about, buddy. Change. This is a change I want.”

  “I sure hope so,” Cake said. “I hope you want it, cause that’s what you gonna get. No doubt about it.”

  “Well, I’ve thought long and hard about it, and it’s what I want. I need to start my life.” Clay got back on the four-wheeler and spoke with his back to Cake. “Don’t you ever get sick of working all week long, then getting stoned and drunk on the weekends? That ain’t no kind of life.”

  “Well, you tell me what else I got to do. That’s all I got. What else is they in this life for a man to do, if he don’t go to church?”

  Clay started the four-wheeler up and let it idle softly. “I guess you know I want you to be my best man.”

  “I can do that, I reckon,” Cake answered.

  “I wish you’d be happy for me, though. I know that ain’t something I can ask you to do, but I wish you would be.”

  “It’s just that I’ll miss you. It won’t be the same. Never again.”

  Clay took the last drink out of the bottle and handed it back to Cake. Cake started to throw it against the cliffs on the other side of the road, but instead he shoved it into his inner pocket and wrapped his arms around Clay’s waist again. Clay tore out of the dirt patch and headed back over the hill, racing toward the houses. They flew down the holler, as if they were floating on the darkness. Clay’s eyes watered in the cold air as he raced down the road, but Cake lay his face against Clay’s back.

  18

  THE MORNING HE WAS to be married, Clay went for a walk up into the mountain. The air was thick with the new smells of spring, and the woods were so filled with sighs and whispers that Clay thought to himself that this must have been the way it sounded before people ever came to these hills. He stopped for a moment, listening to the birds singing above him, the ones that called from far across the holler. The wind spread itself through leaves the color of green water.

  Many days before, he had noticed the hills growing red with buds, but only now did he realize that winter was over. It seemed to Clay that seasons crept up slowly, hardly changing their progress from day to day, and then one morning they were suddenly and finally here. Spring had come overnight, sneaking in, the blooms working throughout the darkness to be ready when sunlight hit the mountainsides. He considered the sounds of the mountain, listened for something more, and felt the desire to go on, as if someone were pushing him from behind. The first trees to show their new colors—sarvis, redbud, and dogwood—were in bloom, and their petals pushed at his face as he made his way up the old trail.

  He stopped to study one of the dogwood flowers, tracing his finger over the crimson stains on each petal. Jesus’ blood, that’s what he had heard all of his life. The flower was shaped like the cross, with a bushy middle that people said looked like the crown of th
orns, the stains on each petal the blood of Christ. He touched the stains and felt wetness on his fingertips, sweet dew from the early morning.

  He remembered that his mother’s letter had said she’d often taken him to a field of wildflowers atop this mountain. He had traveled this mountain every day of his life while he was growing up, but he had never known of such a place. He was sure that he had been over every square inch of this land and began to wonder if the field was a figment of his mother’s imagination. She’d written: “I came to the clearing on the mountain’s top, where the yellow and purple flowers bend their heads. This is your favorite place, Clay. I pack you there on my hip all the time and lean over so you can put your face to the flowers.”

  Maybe only a child could find it, he reasoned. Maybe he had been the one that had led his mother there. Perhaps he had not been meant to go back there yet; maybe it was too soon. But he wanted to find it—maybe that was where her spirit stayed now. When he was a child, he had often imagined that the morning mist was his mother’s ghost, easing down the mountain to seep out over the valley and watch him. When he got older, he was dismayed by how the white fog always burned away by mid-morning. A field of wildflowers would be a better place to think of her living.

  Sarvis and dogwood sliding over his face, he found himself climbing the mountain quickly, crushing the bluebells accidentally beneath his feet, as he did every spring when they popped up in the middle of the path. He saw scraps of sky above him and was vaguely aware of the call of sparrows and the thud of a woodpecker somewhere across the ridge. When he reached the summit, he walked from one end to the other, searching for a sacred field that might have existed all of these years without his knowing. He went off the path, making his way through tangled groves of mountain laurel and into brier thickets that pulled blood out of his hands with quick bites. He climbed over felled, moss-covered trees as big as ancient columns and over rocks that were still cold from the long winter. He walked down into a deep cove where springs bubbled out of the mountainside and ferns grew thick and low beneath the pines.