Clay's Quilt (16 page)

“Cake, this is stupid.”

“No, stupid is sleeping with a married woman.”

“She's sleeping on the couch.”

“Well, I don't see why.”

“I can't talk about this with you and you drunk.” Clay took the pack of cigarettes out of Cake's front pocket and lit one. Cake grabbed the pack roughly from his hand.

“You just piss me off, Clay. It's always been me and you, everywhere we'd go. Go everwhere together.” His words came out in a drunken mumble that Clay had to string together. “Now it's just me. I never thought you'd act like this over a woman.”

“Cake, I call you every day. You was just over here the other night—I cooked your big ass supper.”

“I never lay eyes on you on the weekend, though—”

“You have to give me a chance to adjust to all this, then me and you can get out every once in a while—”

“No, by God. I ain't got nobody else but you, Clay. Not a damn person. We're tight, buddy, we're just like brothers, and then all at once, we just ain't no more. I got nobody else in this world. And you know that, man, you know that.”

Cake's eyes were full of tears.

“I'm sorry, but you have to let me have this,” Clay said after a while. He stood naked to the waist, shivering in the cold, with his hands buried under his arms.

“Shit, man, I'm drunk.” Cake smoked his cigarette thoughtfully and seemed to be choosing his words before he said them, although they came out blurred and broken up, anyway. “I think you're being a asshole, Clay. Don't change for nobody. If you have to change for somebody, then you don't need em.”

“I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing the same damn thing ever Saturday. There's too much to see in this life to see it drunk. Can't you understand that I want this?”

Cake sat nodding his head but not accepting it, thinking to himself,
It's not good enough.
Finally he stood and steadied himself by the porch railing, then strolled across the porch without a word.

Clay went toward him quickly and grabbed his shoulders. “You ain't leaving here drunk. You ain't able to drive all the way back to Free Creek.”

“Let go of me.” He shoved Clay away. They had never struck each other in their lives, and Cake still couldn't bring himself to hit Clay, although he wanted to.

“Come on in here and lay down, now. You know the law would get you before you even got through town.”

“I don't care. I drove up here and I can drive back. I'm leaving,” Cake said, and shoved Clay across the porch. Clay hit the wall but managed to keep himself from sliding down onto the floor.

“Go on, then, by God!” Clay yelled, and his voice boomed out over the river.

Cake started down the stairs, knowing that Clay wouldn't let him leave there drunk.

Clay stood at the top of the steps, his hands out at his sides, as if admitting defeat. “Come on, Cake. Don't leave here like this.”

Cake stopped. He turned and made his way back up the
stairs. When he got to the door, he unscrewed the lid from the bourbon, took the last of it, and then threw the bottle in a high arc. It flew over the porch railing and fell silently through the trees. With a strange little smile on his face, he tucked one side of his shirt in and made his way through the door. In the living room, he stomped his booted feet on the floor and yelled, “It's five o'clock in the morning, sister!” and then laughed wildly all the way to the bed, where he went to sleep without saying another word.

Clay pulled off Cake's boots and pants and lay there with him for a few minutes, making sure he was asleep. After a while, he went back to the couch to lie down beside Alma. But he lay awake all night, watching shadows on the ceiling.

C
LAY DREADED GOING
through his mother's box the way some people dreaded sitting with a family that had just suffered a death: he was afraid he wouldn't know what to say once he got there. He had put it in the center of his coffee table and it sat there patiently until he finally got enough nerve to open it.

He sat on the couch and stared at the box for so long that the paper flowers pasted to its lid began to spin around. He imagined that he could smell their aromas all mixed up in the air above the box. He feared being sucked into the old Bible box like a leaf being drawn into a vacuum, ripped back to a past that he could never return from. He had been chain-smoking since coming home from work and he watched the box uneasily, waiting for it to run out of patience and simply fold the lid back itself.

Inside, he found many small, trivial things that he had no way
of comprehending: a dried and crumbling corsage, a quarter with a .22 bullet hole right through Washington's head, a napkin with a faded phone number written in pencil. He found an old, bone-handled Case knife that he supposed had belonged to his great-uncle who had been killed in World War II, a lid from a bottle of whiskey that he figured was from his mother's first drunken night, and a cigar that maybe someone had handed out when he was born. There was a small, carved box full of ticket stubs, and on the back of each one she had written the movie it had come from:
Bonnie and Clyde, The Sting, True Grit, The Last Picture Show.

There was an
I LIKE IKE
campaign button, which he imagined she had worn proudly as she walked the clean, polished halls of her high school, and a piece of construction paper with
WE SUPPORT THE TROOPS IN VIETNAM
written in large, Magic Marker letters. He thought that maybe she had grown weary of the war news and had written out the Vietnam placard herself; he could see her taping it up in the front window while she thought about his daddy. There were various news clippings: the JFK assassination, the Native Americans occupying Alcatraz. He pictured her sitting on the floor, cutting out the clippings to put up for him. He figured that she had probably longed to go west and stand in protest with the Native Americans during their long siege of the island.

She had lived through so much history. He could see that, now that he was able to look back on her life. His mind rattled off events that she must have been aware of, and he pictured her reactions to every situation. He saw her standing beneath the night sky, watching for the hydrogen bombs she feared might fall at any minute, turning the solid mountains into ash that would drift away with the wind. Years later, she stood under the same sky and watched the moon, wondering if men were really
walking on it. He was sure she had cried about Kent State, danced to the Doors, and gone to the drive-in to see
The Godfather.

He dug deeper. A worn copy of
Peyton Place,
a few
Life
magazines tied together with a ribbon. A guitar pick. There was a map of Cherokee, North Carolina, and a handful of photographs showing his mother and Lolie in bathing suits, standing on the beach at Blackhawk Lake.

He studied these pictures a long time. He wondered what the air was like that day, whether their hot skin smelled of coconut tanning lotion or perhaps baby oil. He looked at his mother's eyes, then at the cigarette in her hand, the bracelet on her wrist, the careful way she had applied her lipstick. The way her arm rested on Lolie's shoulder. Had he stood in that same spot, down on the lake? Had she gotten drunk that day and closed her eyes and smelled the water-scent that only the lake possessed, the way he so often did?

He found an envelope full of fine, auburn hair wrapped in a net. A poem that looked as if it had been ripped from a
Reader's Digest
—“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost. A brass Zippo with 1970 engraved on the front. Autumn leaves pressed in wax paper, a red Gideons Bible, Clay's first walking shoes. Wrapped up carefully in a piece of toilet paper was a feather from a redbird, as new and shiny as it must have been the day his mother plucked it off the forest floor while roaming the great mountain. In a square white box that might have held a cool corsage, he found a collection of seashells, and he felt their cold solidity, running his fingers over the rough spots and horns at their edges, wondering where in the world his mother had gotten them. He found her senior class pin, a book of matches from Eaton's Pizza Parlor in Cumberland Gap, Tennessee. Two record albums, in their original sleeves:
Pearl,
by Janis Joplin, and Neil Young's
Harvest.

He tried to remember her voice, singing “Me and Bobby McGee.” Frustrated when his memory would not serve him, he picked up
Harvest
and turned the album over to read the names of the songs. He saw that the title of one, “Old Man,” was completely circled in broken red ink. He got up with cracking knees and put the album on his turntable. The sound was grainy, but the record did not skip, and soon the melancholy guitar filled the room. In the song, a son was talking to his father, but to Clay it was as if his mother spoke through the record player.

The words, the pluck of the banjo, the swell of guitars, were all speaking to him, trying to tell him something. He stood over the record player, wondering if she had circled this song so that he might play it someday and try to interpret exactly what she meant. The song ended, and he lifted the needle and put it on its hook.

He thought now he could remember her. He could see her sitting at the kitchen table playing solitaire, or standing at the sink peeling potatoes. She put him on her hip and danced around the house when Melanie came on the radio to sing “Brand New Key.” He could recall watching her ironing clothes, sprinkling water from a Dr Pepper bottle. She always kept her fingernails painted. They were a deep, dark red and always reminded him of the color a rose takes on before it dies. He was taken back to a morning when he had stood on the porch and watched her walking down the holler road, dragging her purse on the ground behind her while she cried. They were mixed-up images and scents and tastes, as hard to comprehend as a thousand photographs scattered across the floor.

He saw a velvet jewelry box lying in the box and figured it had once held her wedding band. He clicked the box open and found the Saint Christopher medallion that his father had worn. He gathered it up, and its fine, small links glided snakily over his
fingers. The medallion rested square in the center of his palm. The silver chain and the medal—cold against his warm hand—sent sensations, imagined or not, shooting up into his arms. He held it close to his face, as if he might breathe in the scent of his father from the metal.
SAINT CHRISTOPHER PROTECT US
, it read, the words in a circle around a man packing a child on his back.

He dialed Information and asked for a listing for Bradley Stamper in Laurel County. He could hear the operator scanning her computer, then her dry, bored voice. “I'm sorry, sir, but I have no listing under that name.”

“Well, just give me a listing for every Stamper you have in the county,” he said, lighting a cigarette and exhaling loudly into the telephone.

“I'm only allowed to give out two listings per call, sir,” she said, polite but firm. “But I only have three. Hold, please.”

A computer voice rattled off three phone numbers and Clay jotted them on the inside of a book of rolling papers Cake had left on the coffee table. He clicked off the phone, lay it on his chest, and sat back on the couch. He stalled as long as he could, then finally picked up the phone again.

No answer. He tried the next number and stubbed his cigarette out while the phone rang. After twenty rings, a teenage girl said hello, hateful and quick, in a questioning tone.

“Hello, is this the Stampers'?”

“Yeah, who is this?”

“I'm trying to reach a man by the name of Bradley Stamper. Is this his house?” He heard his own nervousness and was afraid that his voice would crack, like the voice of a boy calling a girl for the first time.

“No.” He could sense that she was thinking about what else to say. “Why would you want up with him?”

“He was a friend of my mother's. She passed away when
I was little, and I was just trying to find out some things about her.”

“That was my uncle,” she said, and paused as if she expected him to say something else.

Was,
he heard her say, and didn't reply.

“He got kilt in Vietnam. They tole my family that he was a MIA, but they finally give up, I guess. My granny still won't accept it, but my daddy thinks he's dead.”

Clay couldn't believe how easily these words came out of her mouth. He felt like he was watching himself from far up in the air. The house was full of winter silence, and it seemed to press in on him. He was suddenly burning up, so he walked across the room and opened one of the windows, letting in crisp air.

“Mister, you still there?” the girl asked.

“Are your people Catholic?” he asked. His mouth was so dry that chalky strands of saliva stretched from the corners of his lips like strings. He couldn't swallow.

The girl cackled out laughing. “Lord no! If my granny heard you say that, she'd die stone-hammer dead. My granddaddy was a Holiness preacher for ages.”

“Well, thank you. I appreciate your help.” He hung up before she said good-bye, and put his face into his hands. He felt guilty at his lack of grief, but still felt like crying. No tears would come. He held his palm up, studying the medallion, and realized that he had never even missed his father. Only now that he realized that he was a part of two whole people—their creation together—did he feel this new emptiness.

He put the Saint Christopher necklace around his neck, felt the cold of the medallion on his skin spreading out over his chest and down into his arms, and lay his head back on the seat of the couch. There was no intense sensation issuing from the medallion now—it was just cold. He wished for some feeling, prayed
that his father's spirit might enter him, but nothing came. Things of the spirit never came when you asked for them. He looked up at the ceiling, one hand flat on the floor, the other running a finger over the raised figures of the medal: a man packing a child on his back.