Clay's Quilt

by Silas House

  “I don’t know why not,” he said, taking her hand and pulling her up. “I won’t be able to sleep noway.”

  He led her down into the surf, and their feet sank into the earth each time the receding waves sucked at the sand beneath them. He put both hands to the sides of her face and kissed her—not her lips, but her whole face. He kissed her eyelids and her forehead, her cheeks and her nose.

  When they got back to the motel, Alma convinced him to stay the night, as she was too tired to set out on the road. Besides, she felt a celebration was in order, one that could not take place in a moving vehicle. She put a bluegrass tape into the stereo and pulled him onto the bed.

  “If it’s a girl, we’ll name it Maggie, after this song,” she said.

  28

  AFTER DAYLIGHT HAD lit the room with a white glow, making everything inside seem to have a light burning within, Clay slipped from the bed and dressed without making a sound. Alma lay as she always did this time of the morning: on her side with one slender hand under her heart-shaped face, her auburn hair spread out across the sheet behind her. He looked at her for a long time, then decided to let her rest. He pulled on his Levi’s and sneaked outside.

  A cool, light rain was falling. Steam rolled up the street and off the parking lot, reminding him of the thick mists that eased over the mountains in the evening. The rain had washed away the scent of salt that always seemed present here. He took inventory of every scent and sound that came to him and tried to capture them in his mind. He wanted to remember everything perfectly because he felt this was the first day of his life. This is where he would begin when his children asked him about his life.

  He walked to the beach and stood in the needles of rain, looking out at the endless stretch of water. There were already people out walking along the shore: old people with their pant legs rolled up and their shoes hanging off the ends of their fingers, children skipping and running through the surf. He spoke to everybody, even those who didn’t glance at him until he had done so, and would have told them all that he was going to be a father if they had taken the time to stop and talk to him a few minutes.

  When he went back to their room, he eased in so as not to wake Alma, but she was already sitting up in the bed, rubbing her eyes.

  “Let’s go home,” he said.

  “I’m ready.”

  They didn’t have much to pack, but Alma insisted on cleaning the room before they left, even though Clay assured her that was what the motel maids were paid to do. She tied up the garbage, stripped the beds, and even washed out the bathtub before she would leave.

  Clay peeled out of the parking lot, leaving black marks. He pushed in the tape that Alma had made for them to travel by. All the way home, he played one side of the tape, then flipped it over to hear the other again. They already knew every word to every song and sang them all the way across five states. They passed through violent thunderstorms, with lightning crashing down on either side of them as they raced along the flat fields of swampy grass. Houses and vehicles in the distance appeared distorted in the haze of heat and gasoline. Directly, the sun broke through and burned the purple clouds away. They rolled down the windows and let their hands push on the racing wind.

  Alma fell asleep just outside of Asheville. Clay turned the radio down and sang to himself as the landscape began to look more and more like home. When they crossed into Virginia and he was sure the mountains he saw rising in the distance were those of home, he shook her gently and she started, rising up in her seat as if she thought they were in a wreck.

  “Look up yonder,” he said. “That’s Kentucky.”

  When Alma saw the signs announcing that they were about to enter Cumberland Gap Tunnel, her stomach was heavy with homesickness. She fast-forwarded the tape to play a Bill Monroe instrumental called “Scotland.” It was a full-throttle mess of wild, twirling fiddles, clicking Dobros, and plucking mandolins. They entered the tunnel, and when they burst out the other side in their own home state, the song had reached its fever pitch.

  Alma squalled and yelped, slapping her hands against the dashboard. She couldn’t control herself anymore and put her knees on her seat so she could hang out the window. She leaned her waist against the door and held her hand above her head. “Home!” she hollered. Her hair slapped against her face and the top of the truck cab.

  29

  THE QUILTER DIED quietly on a spring morning.

  Sophie got out of bed sleepily, shook Paul’s shoulder, and hollered for him to get up, then pulled on her housecoat and went out onto the front porch to sneak her usual cigarette. She pulled the housecoat tightly about her. She couldn’t remember a spring morning being so cold. A thick frost had fallen and crystallized on the ground, making the grass and rooftops look as if they were covered with a light dusting of fine, sugarlike snow. The petals on the dogwood and redbud looked caked with ice.

  Inside, Paul still wasn’t up, and this was the first time she could remember this happening in ages.

  “Get up, old man!” she bellowed. “It’s wintertime out!”

  She walked toward the bedroom, undoing the tie on her housecoat so she could get dressed to start breakfast. As she entered the bedroom, the cold outside seemed to consume the house. It was as if the morning air were steaming under the cracks around the windows like dry ice. Paul lay on his side with his back to her, the covers pulled up to his chin. She fell atop him on the bed, knowing that he was gone from her forever. She lay there with him a long time, then got hold of herself, began to smooth down his hair, and tried to close his mouth. She went into the bathroom and filled a dishpan with warm, soapy water. She didn’t cry as she washed his face, his arms, his legs.

  After the funeral, everyone gathered at Sophie’s house, which seemed even larger now, sitting near the mouth of the holler. Sophie sat small and straight-backed within a circle of people who figured plenty of conversation would keep her mind off the matter at hand. Easter and Dreama took over the kitchen, dipping out heaping plate lunches that were passed into the living room. Marguerite brought a German chocolate cake and asked if she could help them get the food ready for the crowd. Most of the men stood out in the yard, smoking and talking about what a good man Paul Sizemore had been. Cake raced around the yard, playing ball with Tristan and the rest of the children.

  Clay couldn’t stand being at the house without Paul there. He had barely made it through the funeral and had almost refused to be a pallbearer; he had been afraid he would break down while he was helping pack the casket to the grave. He had helped to lower his great-uncle’s casket into the ground, but he couldn’t stand being here now. He had even forced himself to sit up all night with Sophie and the rest of the family the night before the funeral, but he couldn’t take any more. He decided to use the baby as an excuse to leave and parted through the people with Maggie on his hip and Alma holding his hand. He bent down in front of Aunt Sophie and reached Maggie out to her.

  “Give Auntie some sugar,” he told the baby. Maggie threw her arms out and laughed when Sophie tickled her belly. Sophie took the baby and pulled her close. She ran her hand down the side of Maggie’s face and kissed her on the mouth.

  “Look at that curly red hair,” she told the women crowded around her. She handed Maggie back to Clay. “That’s the friendliest little thing ever was.”

  “We’re gonna have to go get her on home. She’s wore out,” Clay said. “If you need anything, you call me, all right? We love you.”

  “Love you all,” Sophie said. “You all go on home now and get you some rest.”

  Clay and Alma pushed through the crowd, hollering goodbye to everybody they passed. They walked across the porch, where people sat eating, with plates in their laps, and across the yard, where Cake was playing tag with all of the children. They went out the gate and had started walking down the holler road toward their little house when they heard Sophie calling for them.

  “Clay! Wait, honey!” she hollered from the porch. Easter was standing besid
e her, wiping her hands on a dishcloth and smiling as if she knew something that they did not. Sophie came rushing through the crowd with a bundle wrapped up in newspaper that rattled loudly.

  “I bout forgot,” she said, out of breath. “Paul made this for the baby. It’s a Flying Bird quilt. It worried him a sight because he didn’t have her a quilt made when she was born, but he was getting to where he barely could move his fingers to stitch. He got it done bout a month ago and was waiting for the baby’s birthday to give it to you all.”

  “Lord, you don’t know how much that means to me, to have this,” Clay said, and turned quickly to go. He didn’t want to cry in front of her.

  “Wait,” Sophie said, grabbing his arm. Her small hand held him so tightly that he glanced down at it. “Paul got fooling around in the basement last summer and found a big trunk of Anneth’s clothes. Some of them was dry-rotted, but he saved what he could and made that quilt from them. It’s made from her clothes. He knowed how much you missed your mommy, I reckon.”

  Clay looked at Sophie for a long moment, then let the gate slam shut between them and ran down the holler road with Maggie bouncing on his hip. Alma ran at his heels, hollering for him to wait, but he didn’t. He ran to their house, burst through the front door, and fell to the living room floor. He sat Maggie on the floor beside him and ripped off the newspaper wrapping.

  When Alma rushed into the house, she stood in the doorway and didn’t say a word. Clay was standing in the middle of the living room with the quilt pulled up to his face. He breathed in his mother’s scent. It was probably long gone, since the clothes had sat in a musty basement for twenty-some years, but he could still catch a scent of her there. He smelled cigarettes and Tabu perfume, Teaberry chewing gum and the detergent in her dresses. He could smell her skin and her strawberry shampoo.

  He snapped the quilt out onto the air and let it settle on the living room floor. Alma got right down on her knees and ran her fingers over the fine stitching. Clay smoothed one hand out over the quilt and wrapped his other one around Maggie’s neck. She watched him as if she knew what was happening.

  “This was my mother’s,” he told her.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Clay awoke with Maggie pushed close to him. Alma lay on the other side of the child, sound asleep. He slipped out of bed quietly, taking the baby with him.

  It was early, but full daylight, and when he came out of the house, he squinted in the new sun. He tried to wake Maggie, but she fell back into a thin sleep with her head on his shoulder. He put his face in her hair, which smelled of the bedcovers. He climbed the mountain easily, and it seemed he could hear the sun glistening on the branches of the trees that stood straight and tall, their limbs reaching toward Heaven. Easter had once told him that she thought the birds sang so beautifully early in the morning because they were giving thanks to God.

  He moved along the steep mountain path effortlessly, feeling as if he were going to the top of the world. The sun fell in straight lines through the bright new leaves. Dew dripped out of the sarvis and dogwood.

  He climbed over rocks and splashed through the narrow creek that made its way down the mountainside. The farther up he went, the thinner the morning mist became. It was slowly being eaten away by the spring sun. Halfway up the mountain, Maggie awoke, but she didn’t take her head from Clay’s shoulder.

  At the summit, the sun washed out over the earth, so bright and yellow that he could see through the leaves fluttering on the trees. He walked across the top of the old mountain and looked out at the land below. There were no strip mines to be seen from here, no scars on the face of the earth, only mountains, pushing against the horizon in each direction, rising and falling as easily as a baby’s chest.

  He walked along, showing leaves and new buds to Maggie. When he looked up again, he stood in a small clearing that he had never noticed before. The trees here were thin saplings, so small that he couldn’t understand how they withstood the heavy winds that sometimes blew at the top of the mountain. Clumps of bluebells grew at his feet, but that was all. There was no field of wildflowers. That place was lost forever, Clay figured. His mother had taken a piece of the world with her. There were no birds here, either, and it seemed like he could hear the world turning beneath his feet. A breeze, no stronger than a breath, danced through the treetops. It caused leaves to tremble and limbs to scratch together, and it sounded to him like the high, soft sound of a dulcimer. He held Maggie’s arm out in front of her and twirled round and round, as though they were in the middle of a wild square dance.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to the following people for their guidance, generosity, and friendship: my agent, Barbara Kouts; Kathy Pories, my editor; Ingrid Robinson and everyone at NSAL; participants and staff of the Hindman Settlement School’s Appalachian Writers’ Workshop; Sidney Saylor Farr, for my first break; and Sandra Stidham, the epitome of what a fine teacher should be.

  To my wonderful friends: Leetta Angel, Donna Conley-Birney, Mike Croley, Doug Dixon, Jane Hicks, Jamie Hill, Genie Jacobson, Lisa Parker, Julia Watts, and Marianne Worthington. Special thanks to Gretchen Laskas for sharing her wealth of knowledge and support.

  I am especially indebted to my family, storytellers all. I am blessed to have such parents as Donald and Betty House, as well as my sister, Eleshia Sloan, and brother, Terry Hoskins. Profuse gratitude goes to Thelma Smallwood, Wanda and Johnny Shepherd, and my cousins. I am compelled to invoke the memory of Dave Sizemore, Jack Hoskins, Red House, Jean Priest, and lastly, Jasper House and Anne Sizemore—neither of whom I ever knew, but whose fire I hope to have inherited.

  Finally, to Teresa. Thanks for always being right there.

  This novel was funded in part by a generous grant from the Kentucky Arts Council.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  ©2001 by Silas House.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  An excerpt of this novel appeared in

  Appalachian Heritage magazine.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-297-2