Clay's Quilt (23 page)

“What is it, Cake?” Alma asked. Clay was flying around the curves, his eyes fixed to the blacktop, and paid neither of them any mind. “You sound like you're crying.”

“No. I just can't believe Dreama's had a youngun.” He wiped his nose on the back of his hand and sucked all of his unfallen tears back deep inside himself. He wasn't about to cry in front of Alma, and he actually didn't know why he felt like it. “She's so little.”

“Are you all right?” Alma stretched her arm out on the seat behind Cake and cupped the ball of his shoulder in her hand.

“He's just on a crying drunk,” Clay said solidly, but he knew that Cake loved Dreama. He did not take his eyes from the road, and said, “You need to straighten up, brother. Can't go in there drunk.”

“I'
M GOING TO
call him Tristan, after that movie,” Dreama announced.

“What movie?” Easter asked, considering the name.

“
Legends of the Fall,
her favorite movie of all time,” Clay answered.

“Besides
Gone with the Wind,
” Dreama chimed in. “You know, Easter. I showed you that picture of Brad Pitt. That was his name in that movie.”

“Dreama, you know I wanted to call my first boy that,” Clay said.

“Tough titty. I beat you to it.” She looked from Clay to Gabe, laughing. Gabe stood close to Dreama's bed, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, staring at the baby. Dreama nodded toward
Gabe and laughed. “Daddy, you look like you're in shock. Look how much it looks like Daddy, right through its eyes.”

Gabe beamed and remained silent. Only Cake looked more uncomfortable, standing there beside Dreama's bed, as if he wanted to lie down right beside her and go to sleep. He hadn't said a word since they had gotten to the hospital.

“Here, hold him, Clay. You the closest thing to a daddy he'll ever have, my pinion,” Dreama said, and wrapped the blanket tightly about the baby. She handed the baby to Clay and fixed her own bedcovers around her. She looked down as she spoke, smoothing out the blanket into a neat, straight fold that disappeared on either side under her arms. “If Darry wanted to be part of this baby's life, he'd done been here. Any other woman wouldn'tve even called him, but I wanted to be able to say I done right by him.”

“That's all anybody can do,” Easter said.

Clay held the baby nervously. Its small body heated up the crook of his arm. He could feel the baby filling up with air, then exhaling it. He could feel life, right there in the palms of his hands. Clay fished the baby's hand out of the blanket and watched as it wrapped its long, narrow fingers about his own. Tristan's grip was tight. Clay couldn't help leaning over and kissing his wrinkled forehead. He had Dreama's high brow and a fine down of black hair.

Clay handed the baby to Gabe, who was standing closest to him. Now they were all looking at Tristan, and only Easter looked at Clay, puzzled by the strange wash of bewilderment on his face. Clay walked quickly out of the room and onto the balcony to smoke a cigarette. Easter found herself ready to go after him, as she always had, but realized that now it was Alma's place to do so. Easter folded her arms and bemoaned the fact that she was losing her boy.

“W
HAT IS IT
, C
LAY
?” Alma said from behind him. She had been around men enough to know that they didn't want you to look at them when they had been crying. Men were allowed to weep only in church. She put her hands above his waist, careful not to get too close. “Tell me.”

Clay turned quickly so she could not catch sight of his face, and engulfed her with his arms. Her face buried in his chest, she breathed in his good coal smell, feeling his frame quiver. He seemed to have fallen into her arms, and all of his weight was on her.

“Another fatherless child,” he said finally. His breath sizzled onto her neck and sent shivers down her back. “It kills me.”

“What does?”

“That Darry don't care no more than that bout that baby. My daddy never even knowed I existed. Never even had a chance.”

“Darry'll regret it soon enough. People like that can only be happy so long. Eventually, he'll be miserable, and then it'll be too late.”

“No. I used to think thataway. People like that just go on, looking out for theirselves. They don't have to pay for their mistakes.”

She didn't answer him. He pulled away from her and leaned on the railing. He looked out over the town, where daylight had spread itself out white and flat without their even noticing. Smoke wound out of the buildings below, black against the winter sky. A thin snow dusted the ground, but the air was still.

“God, you must think me and Cake are a couple of crybabies,” he said.

“No, it looks to me like you both care about Dreama. That's why I've went so crazy over you, Clay. You care about people. Seems like you care about everything, and I ain't never met nobody like that.”

He didn't take his eyes from the town and stayed leaning over the railing, looking at the squat buildings, considering the tarnished sky. Silver breath pumped out of his mouth as he turned to her and said, “Marry me, then.”

She folded her arms one atop the other and held her elbows in each hand, hugging herself.

“Is that what you really want? I'm not for certain you're ready to settle down.”

“I already have, Alma. I ain't going to stand here and tell you that I'll plumb quit partying and drinking, cause that's right in my blood, and I can't change that, but I'll always be right there with you, and I want you with me, too. I know you love me—I don't doubt that for a minute. I want you with me all the time. That's the best way I know to say it.”

“All right, then,” she said, and she reached out her hand. He pulled her inside his big arms and held her as close to him as he could, feeling her solid and real against him.

M
ARGUERITE SAT ON
her high front porch, thinking about Anneth. Upon her lap lay an open book, and she stared down at its full pages with the intent and concentration of a concerned reader, but the pages might as well have been blank. She had been thinking of Anneth all day, and her memories were all happy ones, so they were that much more troubling. Most people went through their lives trying to forget the dark corners of their past, but Marguerite was cursed to live with those good images that sometimes swam before her eyes. She had had a miserable life and she had built her friendship with Anneth up into the greatest thing that had ever happened to her. Ever since Anneth had died, she had been trying to purge herself of the time she had spent with her.

The first time Anneth had taken her up on the mountain, they had stopped halfway up and lain on huge, flat rocks that jutted out of the mountainside like dinner plates. It was near dusk, but
the rocks had sucked in the summer day's heat, and the stone was warm and dry beneath them. Anneth lay flat on her back and held one arm up in the air, studying her hand.

“My granny could read coffee grounds,” she said. “When I was thirteen, she read in my grounds that I'd die before I ever seen thirty.”

“She told that to a child?” Marguerite asked.

“Why yeah,” Anneth answered, as if it was nothing unusual. “She said that every day of my life I'd be happy and sad, both in the same day. That's true. I can't recall a day that I ain't been happy as a lark, then all at once, just felt blue as I could be.”

“Seems to me you're happy all of the time,” Marguerite replied, looking up at the sky.

Anneth ignored her, caught up in her own thoughts. “Granny said I'd sure die young, but I'd live more than most people ever do. Sometimes I wonder if I've been trying to live up to what she seen in them grounds. Trying to make that come true all my life.”

Marguerite didn't know what to say, and it seemed that Anneth didn't expect or need a reply, because they both fell silent and lay upon the heated rocks, letting the wind rush over them. The birds had stopped singing, and finally the wind stopped, too, and Marguerite lay there entranced by the stillness.

Marguerite did not hear the boot heels on the steps or on the old planks of the porch, but when Clay said her name, she slid back out of the past.

She saw only his silhouette, big and straight against the evening sky. “Clay. Lord, I haven't seen you in ages.”

“I know it.”

“I miss seeing you. Remember when you were little, you practically lived here.”

Clay had known Marguerite all of his life, but he had never
known what to expect from her and had certainly never known how to talk to her.

“That's what happens, though, when children grow up. I never see Cake, either. Sometimes I can't believe that he still lives here, because he's never home.”

“Where's he at?” Clay asked, nervously.

She either had not heard Clay or didn't want to cut the conversation so short, because she didn't answer. Instead, she closed the book silently and looked up at him. Clay was struck by her beauty. It was true, he thought, what the people said: she really did seem to be growing younger. Instead of looking like a fifty-year-old woman, she could easily have passed for a blooming woman in her early thirties. Her skin was tight and fair, her hair shiny and full of body—the curls about the sides of her face bobbed every time she moved her head. Her lips were perfectly drawn, full and bloodred without lipstick, against her straight, white teeth. Her wrists were small and smooth, as were the tops of her hands, free of veins or wrinkles.

“Do you still have those records I gave you, when you were a teenager?” she asked.

“Lord yeah. I listen to them all the time. I was just listening to that one by Paganini the other night. Easter found a box full of some of Mommy's things, and I was going through it and listening to that record. I found a record album in that box, too.”

“What was it?”

“
Harvest,
by Neil Young. It must've been one of her favorites.”

“It might have been, but I don't know. She bought so many records that I couldn't keep up with them all. She listened to every kind of music there was. She used to tell me that the only musicians I liked were dead ones.” Marguerite opened the book again and smoothed out the page with the flat of her palm, as if
the paper gave her skin a sense of satisfaction. She fell silent, and Clay began to wonder if she had started reading again.

“Do you remember her?” she asked, but did not look up.

“Sometimes. I try to remember her voice, but I can't.”

“Her laugh was something to hold on to,” Marguerite said, and squinted up at him as if sunlight were in her eyes. “In the evenings, you could hear it all up and down this road.”

Clay shuffled his feet and looked around the porch.

“She took you for walks every day. Even in the winter. She'd bundle you up and carry you on her hip, up that mountain. She'd point things out to you. Make you run your hands over the bark of trees. She'd sit for a long time, just listening to birdcalls.”

“She was here a lot, when I was little? I thought we lived with Glenn, on the other side of Buffalo.”

Marguerite laughed quietly. “She left him every other week. She'd come here and stay a night or two, then go right back. She couldn't decide which she loved best—Glenn or Free Creek. And even when they were together and getting along fine, she came up here all the time. She'd leave him playing poker with his brother, or out drinking, and come stay all night with Easter. You was here more than you was over at Glenn's.”

“What did you think about Glenn?” Clay asked.

“I despised him,” she said, and closed the book. “I can't even talk about how bad I hated him.”

“Where'd you say Cake was at?” Clay asked, shoving his hands down into his pockets.

“In the house. Just go on back,” she said, looking past him.

Cake was in his room, looking through a pile of CDs. His stereo emitted a faint guitar and mumbling, as Marguerite would not allow him to turn his music up loud enough for her to hear.

“Let's ride up the holler,” Clay said.

They jumped on the four-wheeler Clay had borrowed from Gabe and raced down the road, across the old bridge, and up into the head of the holler, toward the old mine. The winter air was like metal against their faces, but neither of them cared. Clay drove, hunched over the steering handles like a racer, pressing his thumb as hard as he could against the accelerator. The lights of the houses faded behind them, and the darkness seemed barely penetrated by the dim headlight on the front of the four-wheeler. The creek widened as they traveled farther up into the holler and was soon so wide that they could hear its roar even over the rough purr of the engine. The mountain was even blacker than the darkness, thick with pines and crooked trees. Clay goosed the gas, sending them speeding over a smooth, round hill that made their stomachs sink.

They came to the steep ridge where Anneth was buried. When the headlight cast its yellow gaze across the gravestones, they shone like the surface of water in sunlight. Clay cut the gas and sat silently. It was more quiet here, as the creek was on the far side of the graveyard, but still the water covered every other sound.

“Been a long time since you come up here,” Cake said.

“I'd come more often if I knowed how to act.”

“You want to walk up there?”

Clay swung his leg over the seat and jumped off the four-wheeler. He had no flashlight and would have to do with the gleam from the single headlight. He pulled his coat tightly about himself and walked slowly to his mother's grave.

Easter and Gabe had made sure that she got a headstone as soon as it could be chipped and delivered. A single rose had been cut into the stone, and below the rose, it read:

A
NNETH
S
IZEMORE
Born 1940 Died 1974
Beloved Mother and Sister