Clay's Quilt

by Silas House

  “That’s the kind of music I like,” Dreama said loudly. She threw her newspaper on the ground and got up to dance with Clay.

  “Come on, Easter,” Dreama called, but Easter just capped both hands over her mouth and laughed.

  The song twisted and spun on crisp air. It echoed up the holler and went into homes, slithered around porch posts, beat against the faces of old cliffs.

  “Dance with us,” Dreama begged. “Ain’t no sin in music that pretty.”

  Easter got up and began to dance around the yard with Clay and Dreama, looking embarrassed and happy. “Lord have mercy, if any church people drive by, they’ll throw me out of the meeting Sunday,” she said.

  Cake sat in his chair and clapped in time to the music. He looked like he was in love with all three of them.

  TRISTAN COULDN’T GO to sleep with all the excitement in the house, and it was nearly midnight before he finally fell over while Cake played with him. Cake pulled the baby up into his arms and packed him into the kitchen, where Dreama was putting the caps on mason jars full of beans.

  “He’s finally out of it,” Cake whispered.

  “Just lay him down back yonder on my bed,” Dreama said.

  Cake walked slowly down the hall, holding Tristan tight against his chest. He lay him in Dreama’s fragrant bed and pulled the covers up beneath his neck, then put two pillows on the edge of the bed and leaned down to kiss Tristan’s cheek. He ran his hand down the side of the baby’s face and walked carefully from the room.

  “He’s dead-asleep,” Cake said. “I played with him so hard that he’ll sleep till ten o’clock tomorrow.”

  “Well, good, cause it’d sure be nice to sleep late for once,” Dreama said. She put a lid on the last jar of beans and tightened it. “How long till them are done, Easter?”

  Easter was wiping down the counter while the pressure cooker jiggled and steamed. She wore a cardigan even though the house was hot from the canning. The kitchen smelled so strongly of cooked beans that Cake’s mouth watered.

  “Be a few more minutes,” Easter said. “Go on to bed, if you want to, honey. I can do this last batch.”

  “Go out here with me, Dreama,” Cake said, holding open the door. “I’ll set and smoke one before I go to the house.”

  The night air was growing cooler. The heat from the kitchen poured out of the door behind them as they sat down on the floor of the back stoop. Cake lit a cigarette and listened to the silence of an autumn evening. He wondered where the crickets and katydids went in the fall. Across Easter’s backyard, he could see the light in Clay and Alma’s bedroom just being turned off.

  “Give me a draw off that cigarette,” Dreama said, smiling.

  “You better not let Easter see you, and you going to church now,” he said before handing it over.

  She took the cigarette from him and sucked on it awkwardly. He could see that she didn’t know how to inhale, but she didn’t choke. “I’m trying to live for the Lord, not for them people down there at the church,” she said. She handed it back. “Here. I just like to take a puff off one ever once in a while. I smoke about one whole cigarette a year, just to be doing it.”

  He looked across the yard, feeling animal eyes upon them. He could hear an owl screeching, far up the mountain.

  “Pretty night, ain’t it?”

  “It sure is. I love this time of year,” Dreama said, looking up to the sky. “Seems like they’s more stars in the fall.”

  Cake could smell the beans on her clothes and in her hair. She sat with one palm up and the other hand massaging her wrist. Her fingers were red and indented from tightening jar lids.

  “I swear, Tristan is crazy over you,” she said. “It’s a sight his own daddy don’t never fool with him. I’m glad you’re around to play with him so much.”

  “You still care for Darry?” Cake asked.

  “Lord no! At one time, I would’ve laid right down and died for that man, too. Now I wouldn’t spit on him if he was on fire. Love dies so easy when somebody hurts you that bad.”

  Cake nodded without really thinking why he was doing so. He took one last, satisfying draw on his cigarette. He jumped when she touched him on the shoulder as she was getting up.

  “I’m going to have to go and lay down, Cake. I’m so tired, I can’t make it no longer.”

  “Well, good night.”

  She opened the door and stood with one leg in the house and one on the porch. “Thanks for playing with the baby. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “Well, good night,” she said, and slipped into the house.

  Cake didn’t feel like getting up and walking home. He wanted to sit right there on Easter’s back porch and smell the damp, colored leaves up on the mountain. He lit another cigarette and looked up at the crowded sky. He thought about what Dreama had asked Easter earlier: “What do you think will become of all of us?” He took a deep breath of the scent of beans that floated out onto the night, and listened to the pressure cooker clucking and Easter moving around inside. He thought about Dreama snuggling up against the baby when she climbed into bed, and Clay and Alma just drifting off to sleep across the yard.

  He whispered to the mountain: “I wish this is what would become of ever one of us. I wish we could stay just like this.”

  21

  MARGUERITE WAS AWARE of a silence so thick and heavy that it made its presence known, hovering like a metal mist. It seeped about the squat houses, the black trees, the objects bound to the earth. She had never known such silence as Free Creek possessed at night. It was intensified by the snow that covered everything that night. The slicing February wind was gone now, and the air stood still and frozen, like curtains of ice that she was able to pass through. The tree limbs were bent low, nervous above the icy ground. The cliffs were too cold to hold snow against their faces, and gray stands of rock stuck out from the whiteness.

  Marguerite had never grown accustomed to the quiet of a holler at night, and as she walked down Free Creek toward Easter’s house, she found the hush maddening. She felt like screaming out for someone to come to her, but she didn’t dare to pull the scarf away from her mouth. She could hear the blood pumping inside her body—the only sound besides the crunch of her feet in the high snow, which was so loud that it sounded as if she were walking over bones that cracked beneath her. She turned to look back at her house on the mountainside for a moment and felt strange looking back at its dark silhouette against the snow: suddenly she felt an overpowering feeling of homesickness, but she wasn’t thinking about the house. The snow made her miss the past.

  She turned back and focused on the yellow glow of the coal-oil lamps that burned in Easter’s windows. She felt that she would never make it that short distance down the holler, with the snow up to her knees and the scarf wet about her mouth and nose, the air freezing the skin around her eyes. But she could smell the fine, clean aroma of winter, and it soothed her throat, like taking a deep breath of liniment. She had lived in Kentucky for more than a quarter of a century now, but she still couldn’t get over the snow. The smooth, undisturbed ground, like a shimmering beach of white sand, the ice clotting the trees and encircling the power lines. Winter was the worst time in the mountains; she could remember three or four miserable winters when she was snowbound in the house with Harold. But at the same time, it was the best season, too. She loved the way a draft in the house sometimes gave her a forgotten, erotic shudder, and the way the children’s laughter echoed down the holler as they rode sleds off the mountain.

  The sky opened up, just as quickly as it had closed before, and the snow came down like a million damp feathers. First it fell straight down, then to the side in a frenzied rush that looked as if it needed music to accompany it. It began to snow so hard that she could barely even make out Easter’s windows. The big, square flakes blew behind her scarf, stung her lips, and stuck to her eyelashes. She felt as if she were fighting against a flood, each leg
heavier and heavier as it pushed at the snow.

  When she reached the porch, she ripped the scarf from her head and let the cold sink into her skin. She knocked twice before letting herself in. Heat surrounded her.

  “Marguerite!” Easter cried happily, jumping up to help her in. “Come in, come in. Anything wrong?”

  Marguerite kept her eyes cast down as she took off her coat, then her boots. “No. Just lonesome’s all. Harold’s been asleep all evening, and I was tired of listening to his snoring.”

  She had known everyone would be here, and patting down her hair, she surveyed the whole room, where everyone sat smiling at her.

  Dreama was rocking her baby to sleep and quietly singing “Barbara Allen” into his face. Alma and Clay were hugging each other beneath an old quilt. Gabe and El sat on the couch, laughing at a private joke. Cake jumped up from the Mennonite chair in the corner to take his mother’s arm and direct her toward a seat. She smiled and pulled away. She hated it when Cake treated her like an invalid.

  The room was lit by three coal-oil lamps made of old, heavy glass. A kerosene heater sat in the center of the room, pushing out warm heat and its acrid, biting scent. The power had been out since early that morning, and when such things happened, it seemed everybody always gathered at Easter’s.

  “Here, Marguerite. This’ll warm you up,” Easter said, pushing a cup of steaming coffee into her hands. “Good thing we got a gas stove. I couldn’t make it through a snowstorm without coffee,” she said to the whole room, settling back into her place on the couch between Gabe and El. “We heard on the radio that the governor was sending the National Guard down here to take doctors and the sick to the hospital and start digging us out.”

  “You ought not to have walked down here by yourself, Mommy,” Cake said.

  “You must not have been too worried about me, or you would have come to my house instead of Easter’s,” she answered, and sipped her coffee.

  Everyone fell silent after that, and Marguerite wondered if they had all been talking and cutting up before she came in. Finally, Easter spoke up to break the silence.

  “Well, I’m glad you did come up. It’s good for everbody to be together on a night like this. We ought to make some peanut butter candy, since we all here.”

  Outside, the wind howled, and they all leaned forward to listen to it. They had been listening to the wind all evening, and every once in a while they heard the crack of another limb snapping from the weight of the snow and ice.

  “I hope that big oak don’t fall in on our house,” Clay said.

  “Well, there ain’t nothing you can do but set here and let it,” Gabe said.

  Marguerite drank the last of her coffee and sat up very straight, putting her hands on her knees before her. She cleared her throat with her hand balled to her mouth and began to speak.

  “I’ll never forget the first time I saw snow. Real snow, I mean, here in Kentucky. I had only lived here about six months, and I was still not quite sure how to live here, and one evening, it began to snow. I stood at the window a long time and watched it fall. I expected it to come down a few minutes and then clear up, but it just kept falling and falling. The only snow I had ever seen was inside those little snow globes you shake up, and I couldn’t get over it. I stood there for more than an hour, never moving a muscle. I had never seen anything so perfect and simple before. That’s what I think of when I see snow—perfection.”

  They all listened. They had never heard her speak at such length.

  She looked into the air in front of her, as if she could see the picture before her.

  “It was far past time for Harold to get home from work, and I suddenly realized that the snow had rushed in so fast and thick that he would never make it over the mountain and back from the mines. It came to me to put on a record to watch the snow by. I thought about one of my favorite pieces, ‘La Campanella,’ and I put the needle to the record, then went straight and raised the window. The cold air rushed in and filled up the room. The music was a perfect match to the way the snow fell. They kept time with each other, like they were meant to be played together. I turned up the volume as loud as I could, and I’m sure that everyone heard it, although they probably had no idea where it was coming from.”

  She breathed out with a short shudder.

  “And then, no sooner than the violins began to saw, I caught sight of a woman coming out into the road. She wore a bright red topcoat that struck her just below the knee, and a black beret that she had pulled down just over her eyes. She made her way out into the middle of the road, bouncing and twirling just like a little ballerina. She thrust her arms into the air, spinning round and round, then skipped back up the road, twirling around with her head thrown back to catch the snowflakes on her closed eyes. She was a sight! That red blur against the snow, dancing like she was celebrating life.”

  She looked directly at Clay, smiling broadly. “That was the first time I saw snow and Anneth.”

  “I remember that red coat,” Easter piped in.

  A loud gust of wind and the bonelike crack of a limb took everyone’s attention. It was as if the tree had broken right there in the living room. Everyone jumped up like they expected a limb to pierce through the ceiling.

  “Oh my Lord!” Easter hollered out.

  “I better go over there and check on the house,” Clay said.

  “They ain’t no use in it, Clay,” Easter said. “Don’t get out there in that storm.”

  “I need to go make sure the heater’s all right,” Clay said. “I can’t get no peace for worrying over it.”

  Cake followed him out.

  CLAY AND CAKE lit cigarettes as soon as they got inside Clay’s house. They could barely taste them for the sharp air that they had breathed outside.

  “God, I was bout to have a nicotine fit,” Cake said. “I was ashamed to smoke in front of Easter, though.”

  “Me too. That’s mostly why I wanted to come over here.” He leaned down to check the heater, then walked to the back door to look at the trees closest to his house. They were bent low with ice and snow, but they looked too frozen to break.

  In the living room, Cake was standing at the picture window with one side of the curtain lifted. He was staring out at the road.

  “Clay, they’s somebody setting out in the road, staring at your house.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. He’s just setting there on a four-wheeler, looking dead at the front porch.”

  “Probably some of them boys out fooling around,” Clay said. He pushed Cake aside and looked out the window. A man sat on a four-wheeler in the middle of the road as if he was taking a break from a long ride. He had a wool cap pulled low over his eyes and was outfitted in coveralls that made his body look bigger, but Clay recognized him. He could tell who it was, even through the blowing snow.

  “That’s Denzel,” he said. “He’s set home in this big snowstorm and got drunk. I guarantee he’s rode that four-wheeler all the way up here.”

  “Ain’t no other way he could’ve got here,” Cake said.

  “Well, I’d like to know what that son of a bitch thinks he’s doing.” Clay went to the bookshelf in the living room and took down his .22. He shoved the pistol down into the back of his Levi’s and ripped open the front door.

  “Aye!” he hollered, standing on the porch. His call was lost on the wind. “What’re you doing here?”

  Denzel swung one leg over the four-wheeler seat and jumped down. He strolled into the yard and walked halfway to the porch. For a brief moment, as Denzel walked toward him, Clay found himself blinded by the white that covered everything. But over the wind Clay could hear Denzel’s boots in the snow as he shifted from one foot to the other.

  “Where’s Alma?” Denzel called. “Send her out here.”

  “She ain’t here, Denzel. You might as well just go back to the house,” Clay said. He looked for a pistol in Denzel’s hands but could not see one. There was no doubt he had one
on him, though. “Just go on and they won’t be no trouble.”

  “She’s my wife and I want to see her,” Denzel muttered. The snow swirled and danced about him. Snowflakes caught in his eyelashes.

  “She ain’t your wife no more.” Clay could hear his voice echoing off the frozen cliffs lining the creek.

  “Sure she is,” Denzel said, almost smiling. “Bring her out here.”

  Denzel walked into the yard without taking his eyes off Clay’s face. He walked right up onto the first porch step, so that he appeared a head shorter than Clay. “Alma!” he hollered. “Get on out here, now, I said!”

  He was so close that Clay could smell him, and their breath trailed out of their mouths to collect silver between them.

  “Denzel, I don’t want no trouble with you. You ain’t got no business here.”

  “Alma is my business. I want her to come out here to me.”

  “I want you the hell out of here,” Clay yelled. He thought of pulling the gun out of his pant waist and putting it in Denzel’s face, just to scare him off. But he thought of what Gabe had always told him: If you pull a gun on a man, you better be ready to use it.

  Denzel didn’t flinch. He stood still and studied Clay’s face, looking into his eyes the way Easter did when she was trying to read him.

  “Go on, now,” Clay said, and quickly ran his hand over the pistol’s handle, as if to reassure himself it was still there.

  Denzel cut his eyes away and reached into his coat. He felt around as if patting his pocket for a pack of lost cigarettes, then pulled out his gun. He brought his arm up, and Clay could see the silver of the barrel, Denzel’s finger on the trigger. The sound of the hammer being thrown back made a grinding click.

  Clay heard the sound of his own pistol bounce off the mountains before he saw the blast of light. The sound echoed down the holler, booming louder and louder with each reverberation. His ears rang with the explosion.

  Denzel staggered down off the steps and out into the yard. He pulled his hand away from the wound in his chest and slung blood out across the snow. His unfired pistol fell out of his hand and disappeared in the snow. He slumped down onto one knee and looked up at Clay. “Goddamn you. Goddamn you, you’ve shot me.”