Clay's Quilt (10 page)

Now Evangeline sometimes dragged their old tapes and albums out and laughed at their hairstyles or late-1970s clothes.

“God, can you believe we wore such shitty things?” she would ask Alma. “We look like the frigging Partridge Family.”

Alma had never been more than a backup singer in the group, since the family blood had given her the talent to play the fiddle. Fiddle music was not acceptable in church. Long ago, people had considered the fiddle an instrument of the devil, but even now the wild, eerie screams of its strings were too much for a church crowd. Her father hadn't forbidden it, but she had known better than to want to play her fiddle in church. She had resigned herself to singing harmony at an early age, but she hadn't done that for very long. Instead, she had sold tapes at the back door when church was over.

Alma used to sit in church and watch the way her parents and brother and sisters moved people and wish that she could do such a thing. She couldn't remember a time when she didn't feel guilty about something, and she had spent much of her childhood wishing she could move people to receive the Holy Ghost, fall to their knees in prayer, or burst out crying. She loved watching her brother's long white fingers race up and down the piano, loved the bump of her father's guitar, the exciting tingle of her sisters' tambourines, the symphony of all their voices coming into one and hovering over a congregation like the Holy Spirit itself.

Evangeline stirred in the backseat and rose up quickly, putting her chin on the back of the front seat. Alma capped her fingernails around the metal stub of the volume control and turned it down.

“Where we at?” Evangeline asked.

“Fixing to get off the parkway and onto the curvy road. You ain't going to get sick, are you?”

“Hell no.” She fell back down into the seat. “Turn that radio back up. I can't hear it.”

Tears came into Alma's eyes, but not on account of Evangeline. She was still thinking of her daddy. For the last month, she had been replaying over and over in her head the last time she had seen him. She felt as if he could cast the spell of guilt and send it out over distance or time.

Thomas Mosley was a big, square man with a voice as huge as his presence. She always likened his voice to the low, distant rumbling of thunder before a summer storm, the kind of thunder that shook the ground. He was not so much a fanatical Christian as he was incurably old-fashioned. Religion wasn't his problem—he merely used it to make his rules seem sensible and moral. He was famous within the family for distorting the Bible to make his points clear. It came as no surprise to Alma when he cursed and disowned her on the announcement of her divorce.

Alma had gone to him in the middle of the night. Her face was black and blue from the blows of her husband's fists, but she still felt at fault. Her lip was swollen, the blackened blood hard and smeared on her chin. Denzel's handprints were on her arms. She could still hear every word her husband had said to her. The words were far worse than the strikes. When she got to the door, she fell onto the porch and waited for someone to come out. She was barely able to hold her arm up in order to rap lightly on the screen door. Suddenly her father appeared, as if he had materialized out of the air.

“Help me up,” she said, and extended her hand.

“Alma, what's happened to you?” he thundered.

“Denzel's happened to me.”

Thomas put her on the couch and rushed into the kitchen, where he wet a rag. He wiped the blood from her chin without saying a word.

“I told you he had hit me before,” she said. Minutes before, she had barely been able to speak, but upon seeing her father, anger had bubbled within her. Her father had introduced her to Denzel, had pushed him on her. Denzel had been a young deacon at the Victory church, and every girl in the congregation had been after him. As soon as Alma married him, Denzel had quit going to church. “Now look, Daddy. Do you believe me now?”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing!” she screamed. “What's the difference, anyway? Look at me.” She was aware of her mother and brother entering the room.

“Why would he do this to you?” her mother asked, her voice full of tears.

“Because I live.” She could taste blood in her mouth, as thick and black as used oil. “I have to quit him. I can't live a life like this. I won't.”

“Hush now,” Thomas said, rubbing her hand. “The Lord takes care of all things. Divorce ain't the answer to everything. You have to work through this. You can't just give up on your marriage.”

“I'll be giving up if I stay with him. One of these days he'll kill me.”

“What you all need is to get back in church,” Thomas said. After a few minutes, he got up slowly, quietly, and went outside. She hoped that he was going to kill Denzel. That was what she wanted. She tried to rise up off the couch to go with him.

“Lay down now. You will leave him, no matter what your daddy says,” her mother whispered. “You get out of there as fast as you can. There ain't no changing a man like that. I've seen it before.”

When Alma awoke the next morning, her mother was still there with her, rubbing her back in a perfect circle. Her father
was sitting across the room, propped up in his chair and staring out the window. He had not slept, but from his expression, she knew that he had not changed his mind, either.

“Daddy, I'm leaving him,” she said weakly. “I don't care if it makes your singing group look bad or nothing else. Why in God's name would you want me to stay with him?”

He said nothing.

W
HEN SHE WAS SURE
Evangeline had passed out, she felt around in her purse until she found her Jean Ritchie tape and pushed it in. Jean had not even gotten out the first verse before Evangeline put her face up between the seats again and muttered, “Alma. Pull over.”

“You ain't getting sick, are you?” Alma asked, turning down the volume again.

“Yeah,” Evangeline said, her mouth already filling up. “I sure am.”

Alma pulled to the side of the road and held Evangeline's hair back while her sister vomited. Evangeline sat right down on the shoulder of the road and told Alma to leave her alone for a minute. Alma stood at the open door and looked up at the black mountain towering beside the road. The cliffs stood dark and solemn and made the silence more noticeable. There was no sound except the redundant bell signaling that the door had been left open. The stars were spread out as if spilled, and the moon was a smudged spot of gray on the black sky. The tears that had lingered in her eyes began to spill, although she didn't have a clue as to where they might have come from. After what she had been through in the past two months, she couldn't see how she even had any tears left, but they fell fast and straight down.

E
ASTER AWOKE TO WHISPERING
—low, cool whispers like the wind off a falling leaf. When she opened her eyes, there was no one, nothing. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, and in that space of time, she felt a slight breeze in the room, like the barely noticeable wind of someone's leaving. An image came to her mind: a woman quickly, gracefully leaving the room, clad in a dress made of silver winter air.

She had expected to wake up to someone there with her. Anneth, perhaps. She had been troubled by dreams of her sister all night long—dreams in which Anneth did not laugh, did not throw her head back, did not show her beautiful, straight teeth and red lips. They had been dreams of Anneth coming to her as she would have looked if she had lived to be very old. Her beauty had faded, changed into a different kind of loveliness, the kind that only very old women possess: the shadow of a lost hourglass figure, a widening of the hips, a silvering of the hair. In
the dreams, Anneth had tried to speak, but her mouth had been clotted with dirt, and it had trembled out to fall on the floor. The dirt had looked as dark and rich as chocolate, good enough to eat.

Easter often lay in bed feeling that someone was standing over her. But this morning it had been different: short, lisped whispers, like the comforting voice of seduction. The feeling of dread was all around her. Something was going to happen. She knew that as soon as she felt someone leave the room—the quiet, straight vacuum of air following someone out. She felt the dread seep into her body, moving slow as kudzu.

She looked at the clock and realized that she had never slept this late on a Sunday morning. It was well past eight o'clock, and as soon as she saw this, it seemed that the room was filled with morning, although it had been light for well over an hour. Beams of sunshine came in like thick planks of whitened lumber, slanting through the window and onto the floor. She heard the sounds of the new day: birds in the tree next to her bedroom window, roosters crowing far up in the holler, cars starting. She threw back her warm bedcovers and climbed out of the bed quickly, ashamed. Her grandmother had been a firm believer in not wasting any part of daylight, and she had ingrained this habit into Easter.

She sat back down on the bed, as if someone had pushed her back. She fell into the soft mattress heavily with the springs screeching under her. Her knees felt weak and her palms broke out in a cold sweat, the way her hands did when she was traveling a long distance in a car. She started to call out for her husband, El, who was most likely already up and drinking his coffee on the front porch, but then she didn't.

She sat there for a long moment, her head swimming from rising and sitting so quickly. She tried to remember the whispers
and was frustrated that she couldn't. It was the most annoying thing, just like trying to remember a dream. She put her face into her damp hands and scolded herself silently. Maybe she wasn't really a seer at all—maybe she was merely overimaginative. Or crazy. She sometimes wondered if she didn't make herself believe that she was cursed to see what others could not. Doomed to hear whispers when nobody was there.

She wondered if it could all stem from when she was just a child and had stood in the cornfield, listening to the pluck of a dulcimer far up on the mountain.

She had never heard such a sweet sound. She dropped her hoe and began running up the row of corn. The plants were thick and tall and green. Their sharp leaves sliced at her face, but she didn't feel the paper cuts they left on her cheeks. She ran through the corn, intent on running all the way up the mountain until she saw who was playing that music. She wanted to see whose magic fingers could make such a beautiful noise.

She almost ran right into the man. He was tall and slender, with black hair and coal-black eyes. Black birds flew off in a noisy frenzy. The dulcimer's song intensified. He had a face that was toughened by sun, work, and age. She could hear his footfalls in the tender soil, could hear the swish of air as he pushed the corn leaves out of his face. His lips moved, and she felt that she was meant to know what he was saying, but she could not decipher it.

She tore through the cornfield. She was not able to call out. All she could make move were her legs, and when she finally found her grandmother, bent over the hoe, she ran into her long brown skirts and held tightly onto her leg. Her grandmother pulled away, dropped to her knees, and put her hands on both sides of Easter's face.

“Didn't you see the man? Didn't you hear that dulcimer?”
Easter asked in a pleading voice. It seemed that her grandmother's face was made out of the earth she put the hoe into. Her eyes, blue as prized marbles, were always watery, but Easter finally realized her grandmother was about to cry.

“It's a sign,” the old woman said, and it seemed that her voice was full of dirt, too. “Don't fret. It's something God has gived you.”

A week later her grandfather had died, killed in the little mine that he had burrowed out behind their house to haul his own coal. Easter had watched as they carried him out, his body crumbled and broken, looking just like a cornhusk doll.

A superstitious old woman had told Easter she had the sight, and she had believed it from then on. Maybe that was the reason she had carried this curse with her all of her life.

She tired of waiting for anything to happen and left her bedroom to get herself some coffee. El had left her a half pot, and she poured a cup and stepped out onto the back porch to get a breath of morning. As soon as she stepped out, she saw the box lying on the top step. She recognized the box; she could remember the day it had been delivered to their grandmother. It had originally carried a huge family Bible, but Anneth had claimed it as a child and put all of her mementos within it. Easter hadn't seen the box in ages, probably since she was a teenager, and could not understand where it had come from. She stood quickly and walked around the corner of the house, imagining that she might see someone leaving her yard. There was no one to be seen.

Only Marguerite would have had something of Anneth's, and only she would have left it in such a mysterious way.

She sat down on the top step beside the box and lifted the lid. She leafed through its contents. These were her sister's possessions—the things she had really cherished, although they were strange
sorts of things to keep. Old napkins and matchbooks, a whole pack of unopened cigarettes. Carnival pictures, beads, newspaper clippings. There was a small Gideons Bible, which fell open to a marked verse. There were sketches that Anneth had drawn, postcards, catalog receipts.

At the bottom, Easter found two envelopes. One was addressed to her, and the other was to Clay. She ripped the first envelope open.

Dear Easter,

I know if anything ever happens to me, you'll find this old box. I want Clay to have it. I've wrote him a long letter to try and explain everything to him, but what he don't understand, I know you'll be able to answer. Don't keep no secrets from him. I don't know how to tell him who I am, but maybe you will be able to. I love you, sister.

Yours,
Anneth