Clay's Quilt (14 page)

“I heard tell you was going out with that fiddler played at Dreama's wedding. Cake tole me.”

“She's Thomas Mosley's girl—you know, the Singing Mosley Family. You have tapes by them.”

Easter's face brightened and she sat up on the edge of the couch.

“She goes to church!”

“Naw, she don't claim to be saved. But she's a good person, Easter, she ain't wild or nothing.”

“I've heard tell of her!” Easter fretted her brows together. “She's the one that has made such a fool out of her daddy. I heard he was the best man ever was, and she was running wild all over the country and singing in clubs.”

“That's her sister, that's Evangeline. This is Alma I'm going with. You'll love her better'n anything, Easter, I know you will.”

“Well, you bring her up here to see me,” Easter said, and
settled back in her seat. She put one hand atop the other in her lap, the way people did when they had their photographs taken. She studied her hands for a minute, as if inspecting her fingers for cleanliness. “But I can't figure her not going to church with a daddy like that. When are you ever going to settle down and go to church? I worry myself to death over you.”

“Easter, let's not talk about this right now. I just don't believe that way. I can't make myself believe the way you do. And I won't be no hypocrite.”

They sat for a moment and listened to the rain. Easter studied her hands, and Clay went into the kitchen to fix them both a cup of coffee. When he came back, Easter was standing at the window, watching the rain. It was beating hard, and little puddles full of ringlets stood in the yard.

“Clay,” Easter said suddenly, with her back to him. “They's something I have to show you … and I don't know how.”

“What is it?” he asked.

Easter went down the hall and came back with the large Bible box. She set it on the ottoman in front of Clay and sat back down on the edge of the couch, her hands folded again, as if in repentance. “I just found it, Clay, day before yesterday. I should have went straight and called you, but I just couldn't bring myself to. Your mommy left all this stuff for you. There's a letter in there with your name on it. I didn't open it.”

Clay pulled the box up onto his lap and ran his palm over the top of the box. Pictures of flowers, cut from seed packs and magazines, were taped all over the lid.

“The box was your great-granny's. She ordered a Bible that come in it, and Anneth always loved that box better'n anything. She taped them flower pictures on there when she was little.”

Clay kept rubbing his hands over the box lid, suddenly dreading to open it. Staring down at the box, he quietly asked, “Where'd you find it?”

“I found it laying on the back porch. Somebody brought it here,” she said. “It had to be Marguerite. She's the only one who would've had such a thing.”

Easter drank from her steaming cup and then held it in both hands atop her legs. Her eyes were studying him intently again, seeming to outline every feature of his face, trying to etch it perfectly in her memory. “Just open your letter,” she said. “You can go through the box later, when you're by yourself.”

He knew Easter would not say another word, and there would be only the sound of the rain. He knew that every time he heard that sound from now on, he would look back on this and smell the old notebook paper of the letter he was now opening. He would feel the soft, almost damp paper under his fingers and see her beautiful, curved handwriting.

My Baby,

Tonight I intend to write about my life and my joys and my mistakes. I am writing a letter to your aunt Easter and to you, baby—to the two people closest to my heart. You are little as I write this. You're sleeping on the pallet across the room from me, all little hands and pided skin. I've been watching you sleep tonight, and it is such a pretty sleep, Clay, a sleep that only a child could have on a dark, lonesome night like this. Someday, though, you will read this and know of me. I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me for the things that I done wrong and to love me more for the things that I done right.

I have to set all this down to paper tonight because I feel like I'm going to bust from keeping it all in me. I want to get all the words down as right as I can and explain myself good. I know that I am about to die. Your aunt Easter, she has always been able to see things. She'd always know when somebody was going to get killed in a wreck or when
a big tide was coming or something like that. But me, I always knowed things just about me. Like when I was pregnant with you, I knowed the minute it happened. I just set right up in bed and said, “I'm pregnant.” And now it has come to me that I'm fixing to die. I don't know when—soon, though.

This morning I woke up before daylight, before anything, in that time when there is no day and no night. I went outside in my gown. The air went through the cloth and touched my skin, like water, and the ground felt so soft and new beneath my feet—I imagined that was the way the earth felt at the beginning of time. I went on up the mountain and walked the steep trail without taking one breath. I came to the clearing on the mountain's top, where the yellow and purple flowers bend their heads. This is your favorite place, Clay. I pack you there on my hip all the time and lean over so you can put your face to the flowers. You breathe them in and laugh. Someday you will be big enough to go see them flowers by yourself, and maybe you will remember me best there, because we spent many a time there. This morning, though, I just stood there and breathed in the sweet air and waited. Directly the day broke, and the far reaches of the sky become purple and streaked with new sun. It has always amazed me how silent the sunrise is. It is such a beautiful thing that I always expected a great noise to come with it. All the land seemed to open up below me as the morning fog burned away, and I felt like I could see for miles and miles.

It was awful strange. I could feel the dew from the flowers' mouths and it wet the backs of my legs. I could hear the birds begin to sing up there in the trees, welcoming in the day, and it seemed like I could smell each cool leaf on
every tree. But there was more than that. I could hear people far down in the valley as they went into their kitchens sleepy-eyed. I could hear women lay bacon into skillets where the grease set to popping and bubbling. I could taste vapors come up out of the mines on the edge of town and smell the bedcovers that had just been rolled back. I took long, deep breaths of the air and felt dizzy from it, like it was something that could make me drunk if I had too much of it.

I have heard tell of this. I have always heard people say that when your senses become like this, you are about to die. Plus I have a great burden on me, like a rock laying overtop my lungs. This is a sign of death, and I feel it all through me. I cannot deny that it is coming for me. I told Easter, this evening when I came back down off the mountain. She says this is foolish talk, but I read in her eyes that it is not. She said, Anneth, you are only thirty-four year old, girl. What do you mean talking death?

But I know it is true and this is why I have some things to tell you.

I never have been like other women, Clay. I've never let anybody get the best of me. There ain't no use letting people do you wrong in this life, baby, and just because I'm a woman don't mean they're going to. I have been known to outdrink a man and go dancing until daylight. I'm not ashamed of that. I'm not ashamed of anything about myself, because that's the way I was made. I am telling you this because I am a honest woman, too. That is one thing that anybody can testify to. People around here have always talked about me, talked about how wild I was. I don't blame them for talking—I am wild, but half of what they say is probably lies. You know that my mommy was full of
Cherokee blood and from this I have always been filled up with life. When I was little I can remember being so full of wanting more that I thought I might blow up if I didn't do something. A person so full of everything is never satisfied, though, and because of that, I have made a lot of mistakes in my life. But who hasn't?

These are the things that you will hear about me and maybe wonder about when you get big, so I want to be the one to tell you the facts. I have no secrets. I'm an open book.

Clay, I have been married three times. Now, a lot of people around here would say this is the worst thing ever was. But it ain't. There are way worse things, baby. I divorced my first husband because I didn't love him no more. We were married six months, and as soon as I married him I realized I couldn't even stand to eat at the same table with him. He made me sick to be close to. It's just one of them things that happen, that we can't control. I know in my heart of hearts that it's a much worse sin to live with somebody you don't love than it is to divorce them. Then I was married again for two years to a man who had another woman the whole time I was with him. I wouldn't about to take that off of no man. So I quit him and that was that. Then I married Glenn, who has been the only daddy you have ever knowed, since I was with him from the time you was inside me until you was three year old. But Glenn is not your daddy, and don't ever let anybody tell you that he is. I was pregnant when I married Glenn, and he knowed that, but he promised to treat you just like his own and raise you up the best he could. Soon as you was born, he went back on his promises. He wanted you to have his last name, but I refused, I wanted you to take my family name.
He always was jealous of you and that is why I am fixing to leave him. He is mean to you. Jealous of you, and one day I will have to pack up and leave him.

Now I'll tell you what I know about your daddy. This is the hardest part for me, the part you will have the aw-fullest time understanding. Before you was born, I just had divorced my second husband and I worked at the Depot Cafe. I run that little restaurant by myself. I was always meeting people because it was right there at the train depot and people was all the time getting off the train and coming in there to wait out the next one. One day a man come in there, and when I seen him I just about fell over. I cannot say what made me so crazy about him. Like all other things, it was just something that happened or was maybe meant to be. He was the prettiest man I had ever seen, that's for certain. His hands was what struck me the hardest. His fingers was big and straight, long and smooth, like somebody that ought to pick a guitar. His voice seemed to pour out of his mouth so calm and easy that it could smooth out your whole day. His name was Bradley Stamper, and he was from over in Laurel County. He was on his way to Ashland by train, going off to Vietnam. Back then soldiers was always coming through Black Banks on their way to Ashland. That's where they got sent to Vietnam from. He had some people up Ashland and was going up there to stay a couple of nights before he left. Soon as we met, I knowed I had to keep him with me as long as I could. It is too complicated to explain here without writing a book, Clay, but it is a feeling that someday I hope you will know of. I started talking to him that day and it was all just perfect, like I had just throwed a bunch of food into a pot and it had turned out the best soup ever was. Now,
I'm not simple enough to believe in love at first sight, but there was something there. The first night we met, we went for a ride. I had a little Falcon that I loved to drive, and I was always going off on long drives in that little car. We drove and drove, all the way to Virginia. When we crossed the state line, we pulled over on the side of the road atop this mountain and stood there and looked back at Kentucky. For a long time we stood there and watched everything below us. That is a hard thing to come by, comfortable silences between two people, especially two people who have only just met. Way over to our left we could see a strip mine. The mountain's top had been completely cut off and the sides looked like a big scar on the face of the earth. Your daddy studied this strip mine for a long time and finally said he couldn't understand doing that. As God is my witness, I believe that is when I fell in love with him. I had never met a man like that before. Seeing him look at the land like that just about killed me.

We spent two whole days together. We never slept or eat a bite. We met around four o'clock on a Thursday afternoon and he left me about six on a Saturday evening. In them two days, I felt like I knew him better than anybody in the world, and I told him everything about myself. Don't ever think I had a one-night stand and this is how you come into this world. That's not how it was.

He left on the train, but I wouldn't go to the depot with him. I had a room in the back of the restaurant made up for when I wanted to stay in town, and I just laid in that bed back there and cried and cried. I never had cried over a man in my life. I could hear the train pulling away and I just squalled into the pillow. I knowed I would never see him again and that I would never get over him. But he
had his papers to serve his country, and there was nothing he could do about it. Love is the last thing that can stop a war.

By the time I couldn't hear the train no more, I quit crying and put my hands on my belly. That's when I knowed I was carrying you.

He sent me one letter from over there, but I don't have it for you. After you was born, I never could find that letter. I know I didn't misplace it. It just disappeared, gone like a ghost had snuck in and took it away. So the only thing of his that I have to leave you is this little silver medallion that he give to me that morning he left. It says “Saint Christopher Protect Us” on it. When I was having you, I laid there in the hospital with that necklace wrapped around my hand, holding the medallion in my palm. I held it so tight that it bruised the inside of my hand. You could see the blue mark it made for days after. There was a little nurse in there that had to pry it away from me.

I don't reckon he ever knowed about you, baby. I wrote letter after letter, but I know in my heart that he never got none of them. He wouldn't have denied you, I know it. I don't know if he died over there, or if he come back to Laurel County or if maybe he settled somewhere. As bad as this sounds, I like to think that he give his life over there, otherwise why didn't he come back to me? I have tried to reach him. I checked the state casualties every week in the paper, looked for him in all the phone books in Laurel County, wrote and wrote the army. But I never could find him, and I'm sorry. I hope that if he is still alive, someday you'll be able to meet him. Just know this—there is nothing dirty or wrong with the way you come about. You are the most pure thing that ever come from me, Clay. People
say that I fall in love with every man I meet, but that's a lie. Your daddy was the only man I ever loved in my life.