Clay's Quilt

by Silas House

  Clay dropped the pistol onto the porch floor. It bounced down and fell heavily onto the first step. Denzel eased down onto the ground, and his body twitched. His arm jerked, and then he was still. Snow blew down the neck of Clay’s shirt.

  Clay screamed. He let go of all the screams that had been latched away inside him ever since he was a child, ever since he was a little boy lying facedown in the snow with his dead mother’s scarf wrapped around his hands.

  22

  WHEN THE LAW came for Clay, Easter fought them with all the combined strength of herself and her dead sister. One of the troopers tried to get hold of her, but she tore at his face with her fingernails, ripped his hat from his head, kicked him in the shins. The trooper tried to ignore her at first, as he was used to mothers acting in such a manner. But she struck out at him with such ferocity that he had to fight back.

  The other trooper shook Clay awake. Clay looked around as if he didn’t know where he was, then up into the eyes of the officer. The trooper helped him up and Clay leaned against him as they walked to the car, Clay’s feet dragging in the snow. Easter broke away and ran after them, screaming an unintelligible barrage of entreaties. When the trooper caught up to her, he shoved her away to make his way around to the car door. She stumbled back, then reached down to pull up handfuls of snow that she threw at him in great, wet sprays.

  Dreama screamed, her voice full of tears: “Easter, please quit!”

  All at once Marguerite breathed into Easter’s ear. “It’s all right. Let them go now,” she whispered. “They’re just going to talk to him.”

  Through a haze of tears, Easter saw the blue lights of the police four-by-four moving away, the red taillights. She brought a clenched fist up to her face, fingers toward her, and saw the blood caked underneath her nails. A ghost had come into Easter, a strong ghost, full of life. She had felt Anneth slipping into her, just stepping into her as easily as a woman steps into a beautiful gown. She had felt Anneth directing her hands, opening her throat. She had felt all of the life she had never possessed before—all the raw strength she had always longed for—course through her blood vessels and make the frame of her body a crowded place. This is what it feels like to be truly alive, she had thought. This is what’s it’s like to be strong. When the state Bronco pulled away, Anneth slipped back out of Easter’s skin and became air again.

  Marguerite lifted Easter up out of the snow and lay her across her arms. She stood straight-backed and carried her as gently as a mother packing her growing child off to bed. Easter was aware of being packed away, aware of figures moving in the yard, but she had no comprehension of them. She didn’t see Dreama walking slowly behind them. She did not notice Cake standing in the middle of the road, watching the taillights move farther and farther away. She did not know that Gabe was having to sink his thumbs into Alma’s arms to keep her from running after the police car.

  Marguerite maneuvered through the deep snow, stepping high to keep her balance. She made it up onto the porch, slid one hand beneath the bend of Easter’s knee to twist the doorknob, and carried Easter into the bedroom. Marguerite lay her on the bed and kneeled down in the floor, running a hand over Easter’s forehead. Easter could feel Marguerite’s warm, coffee breath playing out across her forehead.

  “I’ll set up with you all night,” Marguerite cooed. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Easter didn’t know if she was dreaming or simply remembering, but an image came to her so plain and clear that she felt she might have stepped back in time.

  She was sitting on the ground in her garden. A garden of October, made up of nothing more than crisp fodder, yellow pumpkins, and rows of leafy mustard. She was snapping off the mustard and shoving it into a brown paper bag.

  Clay was standing at the edge of the garden, holding a bulging hunting sack. He was ten years old, and Gabe had outfitted him in clothes twice too big.

  “Kill anything?” she asked, and looked back at her mustard.

  “Naw.” He came closer and set his hunting sack down between rows. The top of the bag slumped over and a few walnuts spilled out and rolled toward her fingers.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Walnuts,” Clay said. “I wasn’t doing no hunting, so I figured I might as well gather them.”

  She smiled and watched the mustard as she broke it. He began to help her, and the sound of breaking stalks chattered between them.

  “You ought to concentrate more on something like this,” she said. “You a good hand in the garden to be so young. If you don’t want to hunt, just tell Gabe. Ain’t no shame in it.” She put another handful of mustard in the paper bag and shook it so the dirt would gather at the bottom. “It’s a lot better way, if you ask me. Raising up food beats killing it any day.”

  Clay said nothing, but he nodded in agreement. The mist moved down low over the garden, slipping off the mountain. High up on the ridge, another shot rang out, but neither of them acknowledged it.

  “You never wasted the morning,” she said. “That’s the aw-fullest big bunch of walnuts ever was. This evening we’ll hull them.”

  “It was a pretty morning, too,” Clay said.

  “It sure was. I been up prob’ly before you.”

  “No, I mean from up there,” he said, nodding toward the mountain. “It’s different.”

  She stopped momentarily and looked at him. “I know,” she said.

  Now Marguerite was talking to her again, her voice just like a sweet little song. So easy, so soft. “Try to rest,” she said.

  Marguerite got up and took a quilt off the foot of the bed, then spread it out over Easter. She tucked the edges in around Easter’s body. Beyond the room, the house was busy with talking and crying: Alma wailing uncontrollably, Dreama singing in a cracked voice to the baby, Cake asking questions that Gabe did not answer.

  23

  ALMA WAS CRYING into the telephone, holding it close against her face, as if it were a hand upon her wet cheek. She looked into the living room, where Clay sat with his face in his hands. She sank back into the kitchen, unable to watch him.

  “I think he’s losing his mind,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I can stand this much longer.”

  “Maybe you all ought to get away for a while. Get out of that town—get out of Kentucky, period. I’d hit the interstate and drive as far away as I could,” Evangeline said. She was on a pay phone in Nashville, on a loud street in front of the apartment she shared with every one of her band mates. They still hadn’t been able to get their demo listened to. “You all could come see me. I’m so lonesome for home I’m bout to die.”

  “No, that’s when he’s the worst, when we’re round a big bunch of people. Some days he’s all right, but usually he comes straight home from work and sets down in that chair and just stays there the rest of the evening.”

  “Well, God awmighty, it ain’t like he murdered Denzel. He didn’t have no choice but to kill him. Even the police told him that.”

  “I know it. I think it bothers him on account of his mother dying the same way.”

  “Can’t Easter do nothing with him?”

  “No. You know if I can’t talk no sense to him, then nobody can. I swear, I don’t know what to do.” Alma wiped her face with the back of her hand and tried to get ahold of herself. It was funny how you could be so hurt and go without crying, then talk to somebody you love and just lose it. Talking to Evangeline in bad times had always made her break down. “I feel like everything’s done.”

  “I tole you what to do. Talk him into getting out of there. You know they’ll let him off from the mine. Time and distance is the only thing that can heal a wound. I know. I’ve been running from things all my life.”

  “You can’t run away from your problems, Evangeline,” Alma said hatefully. All she could think of was the way Evangeline had always gotten away from her troubles: by being so doped up that she didn’t even know where she was.

  “Sure you can,” Evangeline said with confide
nce. “Out of sight and out of mind. That little saying is true.”

  “Well, it ain’t that easy for most people,” Alma replied, but she couldn’t help thinking about what Evangeline had said. She wouldn’t mind getting the hell out of here herself. She was tired of walking through town and seeing people looking at her as if she had somehow manipulated Clay into killing Denzel.

  She was not happy that Denzel was dead, but she was not sad about it, either. In a way, she felt almost responsible for it: she had certainly wished him dead enough times while she was married to him. The only thing she ever felt was an occasional pang of guilt because she was finally free of Denzel. You couldn’t get much more free of someone. Still, the shame did not last long, and now she knew how people without souls must have felt—empty. It was a real, physical feeling, and it made her feel like she carried a stone in her belly.

  “Alma? Honey, are you all right?” Evangeline asked, as if she had read Alma’s mind. “You’re the one I’m worried about.”

  “I’m fine, Vangie. It’s just Clay. If you seen him, you’d know why it hurts me so bad. He’s grieving himself to death.”

  “I’ll call you back in a day or two and check on you,” Evangeline said, soft and out of character. “Things’ll be all right. Love ye, now.”

  “Love you, too. Bye.” Alma hung up before Evangeline could drag out the conversation any longer. She ran cold water onto a dishrag and held it to her eyes, then walked to the doorway and looked out at Clay. He had turned on the news, but she knew that he was not watching it. It seemed he was looking through the television, through the walls of the house, through the mountain across the creek, and seeing nothing. Dusk had fallen outside, and the living room was lit by gray winter shadows and the square, blue light of the television.

  She dreaded going to him. Only two days ago, Easter had come to him—pale and red-eyed—and asked him if he would let her pray with him. He had looked at her with ice in his eyes, a stare so cold that he might as well have screamed out to her that he felt as if God had left him and there was no need to call him back. But she had prayed anyway, and her voice had shaken the whole house. She asked the Lord to help him through this torment, to save him before he slipped away. She prayed for a long time, with tears falling down her face. Alma had stood watching, not doubting for one minute that God had dropped everything to listen to her.

  Finally, Easter had taken Clay’s hands in hers and said, “Sometimes you just have to accept that some things in this life are unbearable, and go on.”

  But he had not replied, and Easter had left without another word.

  Alma sank down on the floor in front of Clay. She wrapped her arms about his leg and lay her head on his knee, but he did not move. He had not bathed or even changed out of his dirty clothes since coming home from the mines, and she felt the gritty black against her face. She could smell the earth, the coal, and the cold from outside on his pant leg. He looked straight ahead, and she forbade herself to cry. They sat there like that for a long time.

  “Clay,” Alma finally said, “let’s get out of here. Let’s just pack up and leave for a week or two and try not to think about all this. You have to take me out of here.”

  He looked her in the eye, but his face did not change. His eyes looked like coins.

  “We have to get through this somehow,” she said quietly.

  He put the rough, broken skin of his hands to her face and ran a thumb under her eye, then pulled her up onto the chair with him. He encircled her with his arms, holding her tightly about the waist so that her head had to come to rest upon his shoulder. She thought that he had done this so that she would not see him cry, but when he spoke, his voice was neither tear-stained nor broken.

  “That’s the one thing I never wanted to do,” he said. “Kill somebody. The one thing I thought I’d never have to do.”

  “Well, you need to go on. That’s the past.”

  She wondered if he was seeing everything all over again—his mother lying on the bloodstained snow, Denzel’s eyes just before the gun sounded. He had not told her as much, but she knew these two incidents were now like a picture that has two negatives developed on it, one atop the other.

  She felt his tight body relax beneath her.

  “Let’s go, then,” he said. “Let’s leave this place for a while.”

  24

  WHEN THEY LEFT Crow County on Highway 25, there was no sign that announced what county they were about to enter; instead there were three crosses on a grassy slope that ran off the mountain lining one side of the road. The cross in the center was bigger than the two that flanked it and was painted a blinding white. The white was so solid and shiny that Alma thought someone must have climbed up there every six months and applied a new coat of whitewash. The smaller two were as yellow as highway stripes.

  This was the last thing Alma saw when they left Free Creek behind them. She looked at the three crosses silently, then closed her eyes as tightly as she could. She thought she might be able to burn this image into her mind, marking the three crosses on her eyelids. She had been trying to memorize the landscape that she had never been away from, but this was the image she chose to take to the ocean with her: a soft, rolling bank—smooth and pronounced as a woman’s hip—sliding down from the jagged mountain, and three crosses.

  She lay her head back on the seat and tried to imagine how many times she had passed those crosses on her family’s trips to sing the gospel throughout the mountains. On those thousand drives, she had always looked at them and thought of them as marking the boundary between home and the other places, and when her family had come back by cover of midnight, she had waited until she saw the middle one—so white it glowed in the blackest of nights.

  She thought that if Evangeline had been wrong, if you could not leave your troubles behind, these crosses would be imprinted on her eyelids for strength. She prayed silently, hoping that her father’s belief that God did not hear sinners’ prayers was wrong, and scooted over closer to Clay.

  They rode in silence all the way out of the state. They got to Cumberland Gap and headed through the long tunnel that would carry them into Tennessee before they entered Virginia. The hum of their tires filled the truck. Other drivers laid on their horns, as people always do in tunnels, but Clay did not join in. His face was so straight and firm that it looked as if it had been sculpted out of coal. When they came out of the tunnel, they were in Tennessee. Alma didn’t need a border sign, for she felt the line cross through her, felt home recede farther and farther behind.

  “Well, there it goes,” she said.

  “What?” Clay asked solidly.

  “Home. Before too long we’ll be standing on the beach. I can’t imagine it. Can you?”

  “No,” he answered, with no inflection in his voice, and lit a cigarette without taking his eyes off the road.

  Alma felt smothered in the close quiet of the truck and she cracked her window. It was late March, and still cold. The air streamed through the window with the sound of a never-ending shh. She dug around in her purse and finally found a tape of driving songs she had made before they left home. When she slid it into the player, Bob Dylan started singing “Mozambique,” accompanied by a sad fiddle. A perfect song, Alma reasoned, a place where magic and love were easy to come by. She took Clay’s hot hand into hers and fell asleep, dreaming of crosses.

  CLAY DROVE ACROSS five states without noticing anything they passed. He played the tape that Alma had made, but couldn’t have told her one song that was on it. All he could think about was the movie that had played out in his mind the night he shot Denzel. When he had realized that Denzel was dead, he had seen everything so plainly that he might have been looking down upon it from a high vantage point. He had remembered what happened that day after his mother was shot, and he had been remembering it ever since.

  He had cried uncontrollably, and his wails slid out over the snow and echoed across the valley to the mountains. The sound spread through the woods, over
the creek, slapped against frozen cliffs. It floated through the air and over the dead bodies on the side of the road.

  He had been silent the whole time he and Lolie were rolling down the mountainside, and had lain there a long time without making a sound after Lolie’s breath had been knocked out of her by the big tree. Most of her weight was on him, and he had suddenly had the great fear of smothering to death beneath her bulk. Although he was having trouble breathing, he cried out. He didn’t know what else to do. Little flashes came to his eyes: the car fishtailing over the icy road, his mother’s gloved hands folded over his, the woman’s face turning into that of an old woman, sparks flying out of the end of a pistol, blood on the snow.

  He could hear a car motor now, moving away from them. He could see up the steep ridge, and through the black, straight trees he could make out the side of the road, where they had jumped over the guardrail. He couldn’t see the vehicle, and the sound of its motor was growing more and more faint. He cried out again, reckoning that they might hear him and rescue them.

  A redbird, its blaze even more brilliant against the snowy backdrop, lit on a tree branch above Clay’s head. The redbird considered him, looking concerned, and then darted off.

  Lolie sat straight up and pulled Clay up onto her lap. She held one arm tight about his chest and put the other arm around his head so as to protect his ears from the cold. She began to rock back and forth, as if she was trying to get him to sleep.

  Clay felt the bruising on his back and the pains that radiated out from it each time Lolie rocked him in her arms, but the pain was warm. Snow stuck to their clothes like bits of wet paper.

  “Shh, shh,” she whispered. “Hush now, baby. It’s all right. Lolie’s here.”