Clay's Quilt (11 page)

El appeared in the doorway, coffee cup in hand. “Easter? What in the world you doing? I figured you was getting ready for church.”

“I ain't going to church this morning,” she said.

“What's that box?”

“It's something of Anneth's. I've just found it.” She closed her eyes and put the letter against her lips. The paper was so soft and white that it looked as if the letter had been written this very morning. She expected it to smell like Anneth, but it carried only the tangy scent of old ink.

“What do you mean, you hain't going to church? You've got to lead the singing.”

“I'm not going, I said. Just go on without me.” She shoved everything back into the box and closed the lid gently. “I just want to stay home. I believe I'll cook a big meal and tell ever-body to come up and eat.”

“All right, then,” El said.

When he left, she could see him walking all the way up the road, up to where the church sat, at the mouth of the holler. Sometimes she wondered if she went to church simply to try to purge herself of past mistakes. Some people made her out to be a saint, but she had done plenty of wrong in her life. She trembled all over, looking at that church, sitting on the hillside just like a solemn judge.

A
LMA WAS LEAVING
her attorney's office on Main Street when she heard someone playing “Sweet Old World” by Lucinda Williams in a car waiting at the stoplight.

She let the office door close quietly behind her and looked out into the street. It was Clay Sizemore. Evangeline had been kidding her about him ever since she had danced with him at the Hilltop, but she had put him out of her mind. There was no use even thinking about a man right now. Sometimes she wondered if she'd ever want to be with a man again.

She couldn't help watching him, though. She liked the way he sang along to the song, his arm stretched out across the back of the seat while he waited for the light to change. He moved around a bit while he sang, not caring who saw him. His face was covered with coal dust. He nodded his head and tapped one thumb against the steering wheel to the beat of the music.

God, he was good-looking. And she had always believed that you could tell a lot about a person by looking at the albums they had. She had been wrong about this only once: part of the
reason she had decided to marry Denzel was the simple fact that he liked Bill Monroe when everybody else was listening to Bruce Springsteen.

She wished the light would change so Clay would go on. Her car was sitting down the street, and if she moved past the lawyer's door, Clay would catch sight of her. If she kept standing there, he would eventually notice her, too. She was suddenly glad that she was dressed up. She held her purse before her with both hands and began to feel around for her keys, even though they were lying right on top of her billfold. There was no use even thinking about somebody like Clay, no matter how nice-looking he was, or how confident he had been when he strolled across the dance floor to ask her to dance, or what kind of music he liked.

Still, she looked up at him again. When she did, he caught her eye.

He lifted a hand to wave and smiled widely. She nodded and started to walk on toward her car, hoping he would go on, but he wheeled into the empty space along the sidewalk. A little sign stood there that read
NO PARKING ANYTIME
.

“Hidy, Alma,” he said, after turning down his radio. “You remember me?”

She put her purse strap on her shoulder and studied his face for a moment without a change of expression. After a moment of stalling, she said, “Why yeah, you're Clay.”

“I've been hoping to see you ever since we danced up at the Hilltop.”

She ran her car keys through her fingers, and their clinking seemed very loud despite the traffic that was sailing by.

“I've tried calling up Evangeline's, to get up with you. You all don't never stay home,” he said. She noticed his eyes were outlined with coal dust. They were green as unripe acorns, and the
whites of them were bright against his black face. “What've you been up to?”

“Not a thing,” she said. “You doing all right?”

“Be a lot better if I could get you to go out with me sometime,” Clay said. He stared her in the eye. She silently bet herself that he was an expert at asking girls out on dates. He had probably had half the girls in Crow County.

“I don't guess so, Clay,” she said. She should have told him that she was still married, that she had only just now started the divorce procedure. She should have told him that Denzel would go wild if he even saw her talking to a man. But she couldn't make those words come out of her mouth.

“Aw, come on, now,” he said. He smiled, showing teeth that were very straight and white. “We don't have to go honky-tonking. Go out to eat? Or to a movie over in London?”

“I better not, Clay.” She couldn't make herself say no, plain and simple. She wanted to tell him good-bye and walk on to her car, but instead she said, “That's my favorite song you was playing.”

“Yeah, that's a great one. I love all Lucinda's songs.” He reached for a box of cigarettes that lay on the dashboard, but apparently thought better of it and didn't pick them up. “Let me come get you Saturday evening. We'll just go riding around or something.”

A little breeze kicked down the street and lifted her hair. The air was cold and smelled of autumn. She stood there, leaning down so she could look into the truck.

“It's good of you to ask, but I can't,” she said. She looked up the street, trying to get away from his eyes. The breeze blew her hair into her face and she brushed it away. She kept her fingers behind her ear so the locks wouldn't blow out again. “I better get going.”

“Well, you can think about it,” Clay said. “Be nice to just ride around and listen to good music all night, wouldn't it?”

She smiled at that and walked away. She was aware of him watching her through his rearview mirror as she slid into her car and started it up. He sat there until she had pulled out onto the street and driven by him.

A
UTUMN SETTLED ITSELF
down over the land like a colorful skirt. Dusk came earlier and touched the leaves with sharp breath. The hills were filled with the smoke from smoldering patches of forest fires. When the season finally overtook the mountains, so complete in its work that the trees were nearly black in their nakedness, Clay and Alma met again.

During the first full moon of October, the Heritage Festival invaded Black Banks. A large carnival came in on rumbling rigs and campers, converting Main Street and its tributaries into rows of tall neon rides, concession stands, and barker games. The people of Crow County set up booths of their own, offering everything from chicken dumpling plates to peanut butter fudge. High school clubs manned hot dog stands and dunking booths, the ROTC handed out army stickers and told wild, beautiful lies to sophomore boys outfitted in Eastland shoes and thin mustaches.

Cherokees came up from the reservation to display their pottery and shirts bearing the seal of their nation. Festival chasers offered booths of junk and impulse buys. Large Pentecostal women hung their best quilts on high clotheslines, and the Mennonites sold hand-dyed fabrics and breads.

Music was the main draw of the festival, and the chamber of commerce enlisted local musicians to stroll through the crowd playing their instruments of choice. Nashville hopefuls sat on street corners and picked, the open guitar cases at their feet lined with a few quarters that they had supplied themselves. Stages were set up all over town.

The main stage—which was actually the long, wide porch of the courthouse—was now being dominated by Evangeline and her band, the Revolvers. That was where Clay went as soon as he and Cake got to the festival. He figured he'd be able to find Alma there. He had been thinking about her ever since he had seen her on Main Street. He had tried to call her several times but was always greeted by Evangeline's answering machine, which announced: “You know what to do. Leave a message.” He had done just that but had never received a reply. Every time he had called, he had pictured Alma standing right beside the phone, probably rolling her eyes when she heard his voice.

Evangeline moved all over the stage, dancing and singing, her skirt swishing about her knees, her head thrown back. The people were yelling out, whistling, singing along; they were in awe of her, like a swarm of dazed bees under the spell of a bee-charmer. The band began to strum a soft acoustic set while Evangeline paused to take a long drink from her cup of whiskey.

“We gonna change the pace a little right now,” Evangeline breathed into the microphone. She had brought the cup with her and took another long swallow. “Since this is the Heritage Festival,
we gonna do a real old song that come over from Ireland. This is one of my favorites, called ‘Barbara Allen.'”

It was a song that all of the people knew, a song that their parents had sung to them and that they had sung to their own children, but Evangeline transformed it into her own: the tragic look on her face made the song seem new and exotic. She sang every word perfectly, singularly. Her voice seemed to stream out over the whole town and overtake everything in its path. Her steady song went down and mingled with the music of the well-lit carousel and the chatter of the people browsing the booths, and farther down to mix with the subtle song of the river that had given the town its name.

Slowly, slowly she got up
And slowly she went nigher
And all she said when she got there
Was “Young man, I think you're dying.”

People began to dance. Lovers, mothers and their young sons, old married couples. Main Street was filled with dancers who stamped softly on a ground that was becoming decorated with the first fallen leaves of autumn. Clay looked about anxiously for Alma, but he saw her nowhere. He watched the dancers and felt a tightness in his stomach. He saw married couples much younger than him, some of them dancing while the girl held a baby right on her hip, and an older couple, who still seemed in love after all these years. He doubted love like that would ever come for him.

“Oh, yes, I'm sick, I'm very sick
I hear the death-wind howling
No better no better I never shall be
If I can't have Barbry Allen.”

Cake lit a cigarette and sighed heavily. “This song kills me,” he said. “It's too damn depressing.”

Clay did not reply because he could not take his eyes from Evangeline, who looked as if she was crying and trying her best to conceal it.

“You might as well forget that fiddler, buddy,” Cake said. “She ain't even here.”

“She's here somewhere. I guarantee that,” he said. “I bet she's one of them musicians they hire to walk around and play.” Clay wanted to keep walking through the crowd, to look for her, but somehow he thought this would not be right. The whole crowd was transfixed by this ancient song, and he felt it would have been disrespectful to move among them. It would have been like digging into the food while someone was right in the middle of saying the supper blessing.

She was on her sad way home
She seen the hearse come rolling
“Lay down lay down his corpse of clay
So I might look upon him.”

When the last notes of the music drifted away and Evangeline's voice was overtaken by the river's music, the people took their arms from one another, the moon went back into the clouds, and the microphone issued a long screech. Evangeline announced a break, and taped music came on.

Clay watched as the band and Evangeline went off the side of the courthouse porch and back into a large tent.

“I'm going to find out where she is. I'm tired of just thinking about her,” Clay said. “You going with me?”

“No,” Cake said, dropping his cigarette and smashing it out with his boot heel. “I'm going down to the carnival.”

He took off through the crowd while the people hollered out for the band to come back. “E-vang-line! E-vang-line!” the people chanted.

He found Alma standing at the entrance to the handicrafts booths. She was wearing a heavy wool dress suit, the black bright against her pale skin, her face peaceful and intent on her music. She held the instrument with the palm of her hand touching the neck of the fiddle, and her little finger stood out from her hand in a permanent crook. Her eyes were closed, but her lips had the hint of a smile on them.

She was playing an old song, something that Clay's Irish ancestors might have played as they danced about these mountains celebrating their newfound freedoms. Clay felt close to each pluck of the fiddle, wondering how many among the generations before him had heard those same notes. The music lifted and fell, was quiet, then loud, the notes rising and rising, only to fall low. Was he entranced by her, or by the music?

People walked by slowly or stood near her, as if she were a mechanical contraption some theme-park scientist had dreamed up. She did look too beautiful to be real, Clay thought. He saw something in her face that was sad and alive at the same time, which alarmed him and made all of his sensations begin to move at once. He could feel them surging through him like juices. Alma's face was out of place in this world—it was from another time, like the face of a young woman who stared out at you from a picture taken during some horrific period in history, looking tired and lovely, noble and slightly broken, all at the same time. It was not just her face or her hair or her body, but the way she moved, the way her eyebrows fretted together as she played the higher notes on the old fiddle. The slight bend at her knees, the graceful flow of her neck, the easy slide of her arm—everything about her seemed to be a part of the music, as
if the fiddle were the one in charge. She seemed possessed by the song.

When the song ended, there was soft clapping and people walked on in to see the quilts and pottery. But Clay remained, and when she finally let out a long breath, took the fiddle down, and lifted her head, he was looking her straight in the eye.