Clay's Quilt (2 page)

She pressed her face to the window, leaning her forehead against the cold glass. “I ain't never seen it so quiet on this mountain,” she said.

That was the last thing Clay was aware of, but afterward, he sometimes dreamed of blood on the snow, blood so thick that it ran slow like syrup and lay in stripes across the whiteness, as if someone had dashed out a bucket of paint.

C
LAY SLID HIS
blackened coveralls down his legs, jerked them off, and tossed the hard clump of clothing into the back of the truck. Coal dust twinkled on the metal of the truck bed. He put his work boots back on and pulled off his T-shirt, sailing it through the window and onto the floorboard. Already his chest was glistening with the sweat of July sun.

It was hot and white, and all up the hillsides, tangled trumpet vines wilted and thirsted. The blacktop of the parking lot glistened, so soft that it threatened to seep down the hillside. There was only the hint of a breeze and it felt as forced and tired as the heavy-footed men who made their way out of the coal mine.

The men laughed and loudly called out their good-byes. They climbed into their trucks, ground gears, and set out for home. They told Clay not to get too drunk this weekend, not to get into any fights when he went out honky-tonking. They loved it that every Monday he told them big tales about barroom
brawls and drunken women while the men leaned against the black walls of the earth and took their lunch. They all liked Clay. They called him Baby-boy, since he was the youngest man on the crew.

They talked with cigarettes bobbing up and down in their mouths, feeling deep in their pockets for their keys. As Clay got into his truck, they all hollered out in singsong voices: “Bye-bye, now Baby-boy. Be good this weekend.”

Clay wheeled his truck carefully down the steep incline of road that led to U.S. 25. Once off the company road and onto the highway, he shifted gears and laid rubber on the road, his tires issuing little barks. He passed two of the men who had gotten out before him. He laughed into his rearview mirror at the miners behind him, who gave him the finger and smiled with their teeth blazing white against their coal-dusted faces. He liked the way the ball of the gearshift felt, all cool and shiny, covered up in his fist. His big, rough hands slid over the steering wheel with ease as he sped down the road, shifting gears and pushing the gas all the way to the floor. He loved the rough purr of the engine and the smooth sound of tires humming sweetly on hot pavement. With one deliberate motion he clicked a cassette into his player, and Steve Earle started singing “I Ain't Ever Satisfied.”

The road was long and curvy, making its way around jutting mountainsides where sandy cliffs dripped sulphur and parched gullies lay where creeks usually spilled down. Close to the company land, it was heavily wooded with straight white pines and scaly-barked hickories. As Clay passed houses, he could see into the yards, where husbands and wives worked side by side in the dusty gardens, hoeing out the weeds that seemed to grow even more rampant in the heat. Boys leaned into the mouths of their vehicles, grease smeared up their arms and across their faces,
their tools lying silver and shining at their feet. Young wives swept the porch or sat in porch chairs breaking beans. At the Pentecostal church, the pastor was standing back to read the message he had just put on the large sign sitting on cinder blocks in the parking lot. It changed every Friday, and Clay loved to see what it would say each week. Today the sign read:
MAN IS BORN TO TROUBLE, SURE AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD
.

“Amen to that,” Clay said aloud. The preacher always knew exactly what to say, as if he predicted Clay's moods and put the scriptures there just for him.

Clay maneuvered the truck around the curves while his fingers tapped on the steering wheel. He sang along without missing a word and felt around on the seat until he found his cigarettes. The Zippo fired, and the scent of new smoke and lighter fluid came to him, filling his lungs with the sensation of something that would cleanse him.

On one side of the road, the shoulder dropped off to a kudzu-covered slope that slid down to the river. In some places the river was so shallow that he could make out the small slate rocks lining its bed. The houses all sat on the other side of the water, with swinging bridges leading out to the shoulder of the road, where the people parked their cars. In one of the shoals, a mother in a denim skirt and faded blouse held the hand of her little daughter. They walked in the river, passing under blue shadows of sandbar willows. Their feet looked pink when they brought them out of the water to take a step. When the woman let go of the child's hand, the little girl fell heavily into the water. The woman laughed, bending over to look the child in the eye, and they began to splash each other. There was always something to remind Clay of his own mother.

The valley widened out somewhat and small businesses began to come into sight. He passed a green highway sign that read
BLACK BANKS
just before he came up the last little hill and stopped at the red light where the highway became Main Street. There was a family-owned grocery store here, but a huge billboard on the mountain behind it told everyone to shop at the new supermarket in the shopping center. A new factory was out on the bypass now, and they were already building another lane on the highway that took travelers up to the Daniel Boone Parkway. A federal courthouse stood just up the street, and on the outskirts of town, rows of stores jutted from both sides of the Wal-Mart.

At the other edge of town, he sped up again and let the wind rush in to wash around the cab of the truck. The road grew wild again, following the path of the winding river beside it. His house sat between the road and the river, two stories, with the bottom half full of his landlord's storage. Clay sprinted up the wooden staircase and made his way across the high porch. Between the porch railings and the floor, ivy grew through the lattice like living cross-stitch.

He had rented the house when he was eighteen. On his eighteenth birthday, he had gone to the Altamont Mining offices and was hired on the spot. All his life, every boy he knew wanted to escape having to go down in the mines, but Clay thought it the most noble profession any man could have. As soon as he left the foreman's office, he had gone down into Black Banks and rented the house by the river. He had announced it over supper that evening, and Easter had cried until her eyes were red and swollen.

“Why in the world would you want to leave here? Why spend all that money on rent, and you just starting out in life? Don't make no sense. Is it one of us you running from?” she asked.

“I'm not running from nobody,” he said. “I just want to see some more of the world.”

Gabe laughed heartily, slapping the table. “I got news for you, buddy,” he piped in. “Living on the other side of that little town ain't seeing nothing.”

“That ain't what I mean.” Clay wanted to see what it would be like to be on his own, but he also felt like there were too many ghosts there. Still, he couldn't have told them this. His family was one that didn't leave one another. They did everything together, warm in the knowledge that kin was nearby. Gabe and Easter were both torn all to pieces, and he was only moving ten miles away.

“A family should live right together,” Easter said. She was being unusually hard-shelled about this, as she had always encouraged him to think for himself. “It ain't right.”

“What if I was moving plumb across the country, or going into the service?”

“Army's different,” Gabe told him. “Your people know you off doing for your country.”

“Well, I need to do this. It's just for a little while.”

Clay's house was so close to the water's edge that when the river rose in spring, the stilts under the porch stood right in the water. He liked the splash of the river and the night things that gathered there: katydids and crickets, frogs and cicadas. At night the smell of the river overtook his house. It smelled of everything it had passed on its way to him. It smelled of homes with families in them; of girls that sat in stiff chairs, painting their toenails and dreaming of far-off places; of boys who skipped rocks on the river's surface to break up moonlight. The river at night carried the scent of untamed mountains and long, cool fields where dew settled first and sunlight hit last in the mornings.

Clay pulled off his muddy boots and placed them beside the mat. On the porch, he slipped down his jeans and stood in his underwear a minute, stretching with bones popping. The air was
momentarily cool against his bare skin. He ran his hand over his tight chest and felt the grit of coal dust on his palm.

He grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and stepped into the shower, using the hottest water he could stand. He let the water sting the top of his head while he drank the beer down. He crushed the can with one hand and sat it on the edge of the tub, then watched coal dust gather and disappear down the silver drain. He washed slowly, feeling the hot water open up his skin. He closed his eyes and let the water pound his face, tap at his eyelids. It was his birthday, and that always set him to thinking far too much.

E
ASTER RAN THE
can opener around the top of the salmon can, drained it in a steady stream down the sink, cracked an egg, splashed it out across the fish, crushed up crackers in her pink hands, and cut up a whole onion, all in a matter of seconds. She mashed it all together with her hands, smoothing it and moving it around until she had a round patty that sizzled and popped when she slid it into the skillet full of hot grease. Steam rose as she took the lid off the potatoes. She moved the spatula under them fast, flipped them over, and replaced the lid.

Easter did everything quickly. She moved her arms fast and forcibly. When she wiped off a counter, she pushed down on the rag with her full strength.

She had devoted all of her time to her home since she finally quit her job at the school lunchroom last year. Sometimes, Easter walked slowly from room to room in her house, admiring what all she had. She ran her hands over the furniture, stroked a photograph, folded her arms and studied her home. Her granny used to say, “We've always been poor as Job's turkey and most likely always will be.” Easter was amazed at how well they had all done for themselves.

Easter didn't like to leave her house, even to go into town. On Saturday night, she and El went to Black Banks to shop and always stopped at the Root Beer Stand for a foot-long and a peanut butter milkshake. Besides that, she hardly went anywhere but church. Easter was the lead singer there, and her voice was known throughout the county. People drove from all over to gather at the Free Creek Pentecostal Church on Saturday nights, when they had all-night singings. On Sunday nights, sinners that lived near the church sat out on their porches in the evening just so they could hear her voice float down the valley to them.

She had gotten up at daylight this morning and cooked El a big breakfast before he left for the road again. He was a truck driver for Appalachian Freight, gone for five-day stretches. As soon as he had lit out, she had lit into the house, cleaning it even though it didn't need it. Then she started in on Clay's favorite meal for his birthday.

Sometimes Easter looked at Clay and felt like lying down on her bed and crying her eyes out. He was just like his mother, up and down. Some of that was not good, in Easter's eyes. Anneth had been wild, maybe the wildest woman in Crow County, Kentucky. Easter could remember how people went on about Anneth, how she would sometimes come in at three or four o'clock in the morning, smelling of liquor, a cigarette always ruining her pretty hand.

Even when they were teenagers, still living at home with their granny, Easter would sometimes be awakened by the rumblings of cars pulling down into the holler. Anneth would stumble out of the car, singing a Brenda Lee song at the top of her lungs, and then stop halfway across the yard as the car made its way back out of Free Creek.

She'd yell, “Easter! Get up! Come out here and look at the moon. Ever-damn-body get up and look!”

Easter ran out to her, clad in her long flannel nightgown. Anneth pulled her up into her arms, holding her so tight that Easter feared she'd break her bones. She grabbed Easter's chin roughly and directed her face skyward. She whispered with sweet whiskey breath: “Look at it, Easter. I love a little slice of a moon, don't you? They way better than a full one.”

“Let's go in, Anneth. You've woke the whole holler up.”

Anneth laughed. “We ought to stay out here all night and study that,” she said, staring at the sliver of moon. “That's church to me.”

Anneth just liked to have a big time all of the time. Easter had always been the good girl, but she had never been jealous of Anneth. She had never gotten distraught when all the pretty boys went after her sister, never mad when Anneth refused to go to church.

Anneth used to beg her to have more fun, but Easter would say things like, “Just watching you is enough for me.”

Anneth would fall back, her dress cool and thin against her milky thighs. “Easter, I don't want you to die and go to Heaven without having a little fun. The Lord forgives all things, honey. Live, sister!”

Easter had lived out her own sin through her sister, because God knows Anneth did enough of it for the both of them. She often asked herself how she could have been a Christian and condoned such actions. She loved it when Anneth threw back her head in laughter, letting all of her teeth show, her eyes clamped shut, hand pounding her red knees.

It didn't shock Easter when they came and told her that Anneth was dead. She was the only one Anneth never could surprise, despite how different they were. She had known that Anneth would not die naturally—somebody had to take a life like that. A person so full of life couldn't just up and die; a life like that had to be taken by force.