The Coffin Quilt

by Ann Rinaldi

  "Johnse can be grown as last year's corn. There's no way he can come into Kentucky and see Ro without his being killed," I told her.

  "He's been here many times," the reverend said.

  "To this house?" I asked.

  The reverend stirred sugar into his coffee. "Haven't you ever seen the man in the wool hat in the rowboat on the river? He's seen you. Said you waved to him many a time."

  Now I felt like I was out in the windy night, looking in the window at them. The man in the woolen hat? Johnse Hatfield? "Why did he never give me his howdy if it was him?"

  "He didn't want to put you in a compromising position."

  "What's that?"

  "He didn't," Trinvilla explained, "want to make you waver between telling Pa he was there and loyalty to him."

  "I've got no loyalty to Johnse Hatfield," I said.

  "Does that mean you won't deliver the note to Ro, then?" the reverend asked.

  "I don't know what it means. I have to study on it."

  He put his hand inside his coat pocket and something crackled. Paper. He drew out the note and set it on the table next to me. "Why don't you leave it to your sister if she wants to see him."

  "Why don't you deliver the note to Ro?" I asked him.

  "I have to leave for Pennsylvania in the morning. My sister is dying. It will be an extended stay."

  "Where would this meeting take place? He'd come in his wool hat on the river and expect her to come sashaying down the bank in the cold and dark?"

  "In this house," the reverend said. "It is a safe house. Neither side comes here."

  "It'll be right cold soon," Will put in. "And the fall rains will come, making the roads muddy. There's no way we could justify a trip here for an ailing Ro if we wait much longer."

  They were all in on it. Had it planned. It was why they'd invited me. Not because they cared about me. I took the note from the table and put it in my pocket. Safe house? I almost laughed in their fool faces. I'd come, and look what had happened. I'd been lured, trapped. Crazy, they all were, I decided. Plumb crazy.

  Chapter Thirty–Five

  FALL 1889

  I SUPPOSE I could have done it. What reason not to? After I got shut of my anger at prissy old Trinvilla, who was turning out worse than Alifair had ever been, who still hated Ro and was just playing some part for her reverend father-in-law, I saw no reason not to do it.

  I went home set on doing it. What did I care if Ro and Johnse met? What did I care about any of them anymore? Look what caring had done to me. I was mooded up all the time and worrying, and there was Trinvilla, happy and loved and out of it all, yet feeling good about herself. It meant no nevermind to her if Ro and Johnse met. Why should it matter to me?

  Then I looked at Ma, all crippled up and scarce able to walk. I thought of Bud, Bill, Pharmer, Tolbert, Calvin, and even Alifair. All of them lying underground. All who should still be living. Even Alifair, mean as a hornet as she'd been. And I thought how I couldn't dishonor them like that by bringing together the two people who had started this whole mess. So I went home and put the note under my pillow, ate supper, saw to Ro, and went to bed, as muddled in the head as I'd ever been.

  Next day Dr. Grey came to visit Ro. Ma had sent for him. He was in that room awhile with her, I can tell you. Then he talked awhile with Ma. I waited in the parlor to see him out. On the front stoop I drew a shawl around me in the late September chill and squinted up at him in the midday sun. "How's Ro faring, Doctor?"

  "Well, I'll tell you, Fanny, 'cause you're old enough to know. How old are you now?"

  "Sixteen."

  "Your ma's not fit to hear it. Your pa's not around, and Ro seems not to care. I think if you all could get her interested in something, might be she'd take a turn for the better."

  "Interested?"

  "She's dying inside her, Fanny. Dying from the inside out. The worst kind of ailment. Nothing a doctor can do for her. She needs hope."

  I nodded. Sounded like so much folderol to me. Like the kind of thing doctors said when they couldn't cure you.

  "I know you all been through a heap of trouble, but your sister just needs something now to make her want to get well."

  "What?" I asked.

  "She's your sister, Fanny." He patted my arm. "Now I've got to go."

  ***

  SO THAT'S WHEN I decided to give her the note that lay at that moment in my apron pocket. That's when I decided to dishonor Tolbert, Pharmer, Bud, Bill, Calvin, and Alifair. They'd want me to do it, I pondered. Even Alifair. I was sure she would.

  I waited all day, but Ma was always around. Then some snoopy old ladies from the church came, not Reverend Thompson's church but the Baptist one in town. Brought food and baked goods and we had to fuss over them and be nice. And then Ro slept and I didn't want to bother her. Then it came around to suppertime and I had to see to it that Ma ate and get her to bed. I went to my room and, while I waited for Ma to fall asleep, I fell asleep, too, and awoke like somebody put a hand on me to hear a noise downstairs. I jumped up, real scairtlike. Were we being attacked? I crept down the stairs and there in the kitchen was Ro in her nightdress, walking around with a lantern in her one hand and dragging something that looked like a dead body in the other.

  "What are you doing up and about?" I asked her. "What have you got there?"

  "Oh, Fanny." She set the lantern on the kitchen table. "I just had a hankering for some tea. I couldn't sleep. I thought I'd come down here for a while and work on my quilt."

  So that's what she was dragging around. Might as well have been a dead body. I made her some tea. The candlelight threw our shadows against the wall, larger than life. I wondered if Johnse was out on the river in his boat, wearing that wool cap, watching the house. Wondered how many times he'd been out there and we hadn't known it. I set the tea down.

  "You're so good to me, Fanny," she said.

  I got to feeling all twisted inside when she said that, I can tell you. She was lifting the quilt from the floor and spreading it on her lap. "Hard to work without a frame, but I've gotten used to it. I just do a little piece at a time. Hard to work in candlelight, too. I wish Ma would allow kerosene."

  I still had the note in my pocket. This was the time to give it to her, I minded. Now. Then she looked up at me, all hollow around the eyes and thin in the face, and smiled. "Want to ask you something, Fanny."

  I nodded.

  "Are you ready now to promise to take my quilt? I asked you once before. You said you'd study on it. Don't say no, please. It means so much to me. I know you don't like it. Don't approve. But I want it to go to somebody I love."

  "You're not going to die," I said. It was all I could think of. My throat wasn't working right. I loved Ro. Much as I ever had, I suppose. And I hated her all at the same time. She'd always been the special one in the family, the one everybody gave in to. Because she was so purty. I'd looked up to her so. And now here she sat, empty and pitiful, the cause of all our troubles. Oh God, I wanted to give her that note. I did!

  "You see here?" She was bent on showing me that fool quilt. "Look how purty it is. I am going to die, Fanny. I've got nothing to live for. Don't want to live anymore, anyways. A person can will themselves to die, you know."

  I thought of Bill then and how sweet he could play the fiddle. How he'd frozen to death on that hill by the graves, willing himself to die. And I hated her again.

  She had the quilt spread on the table. Her work was so neat, her stitches so small. "Isn't it a beauty?" she asked.

  I looked. And I saw. There, in the light of the candle, among the coffins all around the edges that still had to be moved to the middle, was mine. And hers and Ma's and Pa's. Jim's and Sam's and Floyd's. Trinvilla's and her baby's. Tolbert's baby Cora.

  I stared at them and felt the rage go through me. Then I looked up at her smiling at me like that, and I saw the bones in her face without the flesh, the eye sockets without the eyes, the teeth without the lips. Grinning at me. "Ain't it purty?"


  I saw in the fight of the single candle what I had known inside me all along.

  Ro was kin, somehow, to evil. She courted it, beautiful as she was. There was something about her that flirted with it, like moths flirted with flames. That day of the election so long ago now, when she'd gone off with Johnse, she'd been flirting with it. Much as she'd been flirting with him. She sought destruction of herself. And she'd dragged so many of us with her.

  In that moment I knew I would never give her the note from Johnse. And I recollected what Mr. Cuzlin once told me: "Sometimes we don't have to leave to get away. Sometimes we just have to choose." I chose.

  I loved her. I still did. But I knew that the best thing in the world for all of us would be to get away from her before she did more destruction.

  If I gave her the note and she went to Trinvilla's to meet Johnse, bad would come of it. Somebody would find out. And there would be more death. Maybe Trinvilla this time. Or her husband or baby.

  "I'd love to have the quilt," I told her. "Now why don't you finish your tea and I'll take you up to bed."

  Epilogue

  DECEMBER 20, 1889

  I BURNED THE note the next day. I was supposed to send one to Trinvilla and Will and let them know when to fetch Ro, but the note I sent two days later said she was too sickly to travel.

  They didn't come 'round. I didn't reckon they would. They'd never been to see us at the Pikeville house. Didn't want to dirty their hands by coming. Maybe they were right, I don't know. Maybe they saw things as they were long before I did. I don't fault them for it. In the trouble, we all had to find our own way out the best we could. Do what we had to do to survive.

  Ro died a month later. Willed herself to. The night before, I was in the kitchen locking up when I saw a light out back. I looked out, thinking, Oh, I hope it's not Johnse come anyway in his old wool hat. And when I looked, he was there, just outside the window.

  Yeller Thing.

  I couldn't believe it was him, come all the way from our old homeplace! I hadn't seen him in two years! How'd he find us here? Did I have to ask?

  I opened the door and went outside. I wasn't scairt. I felt about him like an old friend now. I knew he wouldn't harm me. "She's a-goin' to die tonight, isn't she?" I asked him.

  He just lowered his head, his tongue all lolling out like he'd traveled a long way. But those eyes, how they glowed! And the smell of him! Then he did a strange thing. He lowered himself down like a lost dog and rested his head on his paws, all greenish yellow and ugly as can be. Why, he is pure tuckered out, I thought. And I knew then that it was the last time I would see him.

  "I thank ye for the warning," I said. And then I went into the house and upstairs to check on Ro. She was sleeping real peaceful-like. She wasn't feverish. I looked out the back window from the hall. Yeller Thing was gone.

  Next morning Ro never got out of bed at all. I went upstairs to find her dead. Pa buried her in Dils Cemetery, other side of Pikeville. He never said why he didn't take her back to Blackberry Fork and bury her with the others. We didn't ask.

  I think I knew.

  I think we all did, though none of us ever spoke the words. I think might be I was the last one to know about Ro and what she was about. But I thank God I came around to knowing.

  All the newspapers carried news of her death. They played it up, all the things we'd rather forget. How Roseanna McCoy was the one who caused the feud between the two families, how a war had been fought over her. Like Helen of Troy. Imagine! My sister!

  Trinvilla and Will didn't come to the funeral. Reverend Thompson was still in Pennsylvania. Johnse Hatfield didn't come, either. None of the Hatfields came. I think my family would have killed them right over her gravesite if they did.

  Might be if I'd given her the note she would have rallied. I think of it as saving more lives. Though at night when the house is quiet I mind that I probably lulled her by not giving it.

  I think how strange this fight was between our families. How the killings, the raids, the maiming, the burning, and loss of property and home was all so bad. But the things we didn't do when we should have were just as bad.

  Ma didn't give Jim permission to send for Pa and form a posse. I didn't give Ro the note from Johnse. People who knew didn't tell the judge that Ellison Mounts wasn't to blame for killing Alifair. And the wrong man was hanged. Oh, I tried to tell Pa. We had a regular fuss about it. But he wouldn't hear it. "Somebody has to hang for killing Alifair," he said I told him it wasn't right, that I'd go to the judge myself, and he laughed and said no judge would listen to a woman, look how they'd called Ma a liar in court, and she was there. So I knew he was right.

  The things we don't do are just as bad as the things we do in this life. It can drive you pure daft, if you think about it.

  I have thought about it. A lot. Which is maybe why I've told Mr. Cuzlin I want to take that exam and get into normal school. And try to become a teacher. Might be some good will come of it that wouldn't be if I just sat around here taking care of Ma every day and brooding. Ma will get taken care of. Let Adelaide come home and stay for a while I've decided to do it.

  Think on it. Something good coming out of something a McCoy did. That's a hoot, isn't it?

  I've not seen Yeller Thing again and I don't expect to. I still have Ro's Coffin quilt. And someday soon I'll burn that, too.

  Author's Note

  ALTHOUGH THERE HAVE been other famous feuds in America, the Hatfield-McCoy feud is the most famous and widely recognized. Like most recognizable events in our history, it has now been elevated to the realm of folklore. Having achieved this status, there are many versions and interpretations, the most popular being that it started in 1880 when Roseanna McCoy of Pike County, Kentucky, ran off with Johnse Hatfield of West Virginia.

  However, by 1880 the bad blood was already evident between the Hatfields and the McCoys. Some say it started during the Civil War (what the clans in West Virginia and Kentucky then called The War Amongst Us) when Ranel McCoy's younger brother Harmon, who had come out for the Union, was home on leave and killed by West Virginia bushwhackers who were Hatfields as well as Confederates, men who had come home to find that their part of the state had pulled away from the rest of Virginia and become Union.

  Was this when the seeds for the bad blood were planted? Nobody knows. But we do know that the Civil War conditioned men who fought in it to kill and to hate, and that in many instances they went right on hating and lulling after it was over. This happened especially in the West, where it gave rise to many notorious guerrilla gangs or gunfighters. And in this far-flung region of the country, the West Virginia-Kentucky border, where nobody kept count of who was doing what, where the mountain people held to their own code of ethics. So in actuality we can say this feud was a continuarion of the war.

  At any rate, the bad feelings that rose from the lulling of Harmon McCoy smoldered and surfaced again after the war in 1878 when Ranel McCoy lost his hogs, which he alleged were taken by Hatfields. A trial followed and Ranel McCoy lost. The enmity that ensued here was kept under control, apparently, until the elections of 1880, when Roseanna McCoy, Ranel's prettiest daughter, ran off with Johnse Hatfield, the handsome son of Anse Hatfield, nicknamed "Devil Anse."

  Ranel McCoy considered this act a betrayal by his daughter and revenge against him by Devil Anse, and the feud was fed by it and went on with fighting and killings becoming a way of life for both families until 1889. Hatfields and McCoys took to shooting each other on sight. Arrests in home territories always resulted in acquittals, since every other deputy was a relative of the family on their home turf. Posses were constantly formed by both parries to cross and recross the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River and invade "enemy" land. As the feud gained momentum, farming was neglected and land was sold off to get money to invest in hiring detectives, to pay hired guns, and to buy ammunition.

  The worst of the bloodshed happened on New Year's Eve in 1887, when Hatfields attacked Ranel McCoy's house on Pond Creek
on the Blackberry Fork in Kentucky. The open gunfire of the raid caused the deaths of Ranel's daughter Alifair and his son Calvin. During the battle Ranel's wife, Sarah, was beaten and nearly killed, and the house was burned to the ground.

  Newspaper accounts called this New Year's Eve attack worse than any ever committed by Indians on the pioneers, the worst in Kentucky's history.

  Yet somehow, after all the killings and hatred, the warfare between the two clans eventually ended. One possible reason was the advent of commercial coal mining in the area. Developers would not abide such behavior and pressured the law to end it. Some even offered a reward for the capture of old Devil Anse, who hid out in the hills until he died in 1921.

  The feud, which had lasted so long in the steep and rugged ridges of the West Virginia-Kentucky border, was over.

  Hatfields became respectable mine operators. McCoys went back to their lives, too, cultivating the land, raising ginseng, keeping bees, breeding cattle, hogs, and sheep, and displaying many of the traits and talents the people of these parts are famous for—the traits that mark the pioneer, the survivor, the breaker of the land, the raiser of the family, the churchgoer, the good neighbor. The most famous American family feud disappeared into the annals of American folklore, and today most people may recognize the Hatfield-McCoy names, but know nothing about them at all.

  ***

  WHEN I TOOK on the project of this novel I immediately saw how vast and far-reaching the story was. So I knew I had to contain it. If one does factual reading about the feud, one will discover that many characters involved in it, but not central to the telling, are not in this book. I could not encompass everything in the Hatfield-McCoy story. For instance, where was Josephine, the oldest in the McCoy clan, born in 1848? She does not figure in the feud and was apparently married and gone from the area, so I did not involve her. The same went for Lilburn, a son born in 1856, so I have him off "seeking gold."