Ashes (40 page)

The voices spilled from the small room, three or four conversations going at once. Morris let Laney make the entrance. She had a way of setting people at ease, while Morris usually set them on edge. His style was fine on the local government beat, when you wanted to keep the politicians a little paranoid, but it didn’t play well among the common folk in the Appalachian mountain community of
Cross
Valley
.

“Hi, we’re with the paper,” Laney said. “We talked to Faith Gordon about the circle, and she invited us to come out and do a story.”

Five women were gathered around a table, in the midst of various stitches, with yarn, cloth scraps, spools of different-colored threads, and darning needles spread out in front of them.

“You ain’t gonna take my picture, are you?” one of them asked, clearly begging to be in the paper. That would probably make her day, Morris thought. The only other way she’d ever make the paper was when her obituary ran. She was probably sixty, but had the look of one who would live to be a hundred. One who knew all about life’s troubles, because she’d heard about them from neighbors.

“Only if you want,” Laney said. “But a picture makes the story better.”

“We just thought the community would be interested in the fine work you ladies are doing,” Morris said. That wasn’t so bad, even if the false cheer burned his throat like acid reflux.

“If Faith said it was okay, that’s good enough for us,” said a second woman. She was in her seventies, wrinkled around the eyes, the veins on her hands thick and purple, though her fingers were as strong as a crow’s claws. “I’m
Alma
.”

“Hi,
Alma
,” Morris said. He went from one to another, collecting their names for the record, making sure the spelling was correct. You could miss a county budget by a zero, apply the wrong charge in a police brief, and even fail to call the mayor on Arbor Day, and all these mistakes were wiped out with a Page 2 correction. But woe unto the reporter who misspelled a name in a fuzzy family feature.

Alma Potter. Reba Absher. Lillian Moretz. Daisy Eggers. The “other Alma,” Alma Moretz, no immediate relation to Lillian, though they may have been cousins five or six times removed.

“Just keep on working while I take some shots,” Laney said. She contorted with catlike grace, stooping to table level, composing award-quality photographs. The janitor stood at the door, appreciating her professional ardor. He was chewing so fast that his teeth were probably throwing off sparks behind his eager lips.

“So, how did you ladies meet?” Morris smiled, just to see what it felt like.

“Me and Reba was friends, and we’d get together for a little knitting on Saturdays while our husbands went fishing together,” Alma Potter said. “They would go after rock bass, but they always came home with an empty cooler.”

“God rest your Pete’s soul,” Reba said.

“Bless you,”
Alma
said to her.

Morris glanced at his wristwatch. Thirty column inches to go, plus he had to knock out a sidebar on a weekend bluegrass festival. All with the Kelvinator looking over his shoulder. Kelvin Feeney, Journal-Times editor and all-around boy wonder, a guy on the come who didn’t care whose backs bricked the path to that corner office at the corporation’s flagship paper.

“So,
Alma
, when did you start sewing?” Morris thought of making a pun on “so” and “sew” and decided to pass.

“Oh, maybe at the age of five,” she said. Her eyes stayed focused on the tips of her fingers as she ran the needle through a scrap of yellow cotton. Laney was working the scene, twisting the lens to its longest point, zooming in to get the wrinkled glory of the old woman’s face.

“Did you learn from your mother?” Morris asked, scribbling in his notebook. Maybe he could use some of this in the Great American Novel he’d been working on since his freshman year, which had been tainted by a professor who thought Faulkner was the Second Coming and Flannery O’Connor was the Virgin Mary.

“She learnt it from me,” Daisy Eggers said, her eyes like wet bugs behind the curve of her glasses. Daisy might have been anywhere between eighty and ninety, her upper lip collapsed as if her dentures were too small. When she spoke, the grayish tip of her tongue protruded, constantly trying to keep her upper false teeth in place.

“Good, we’ll get back to that.” Morris made a note as Laney’s shutter clicked. “Tell me about Threads of Hope.”

“You really need to talk to Faith about that,” the other
Alma
said. “She’s the one started it. We were all sewing anyway, and figured why not get together on it?”

Reba, who appeared a little less inclined to defer to their absent leader, said, “Threads of Hope gives blankets to sick kids in hospitals. Like the Ronald McDonald House and the Shriner’s Hospital. It’s all about the kids. But you’d best talk to Faith about that part of it.”

Okay, Morris thought. It’s not Pulitzer material but at least it has sick kids. Now if I could just work a cute babe and a puppy into the story, I’d hit the Holy Trinity.

“Is it local kids, or someone with a specific type of illness?” Laney asked the obvious question. She was actually better at that than Morris.

“Oh, just ones sick any old way. Faith, she’s a nurse at
Mercy
Hospital
, and she comes in about once a month and collects them, takes them off. We’ll get a dozen done on a good morning.” Reba held up the quilt she was working on and pointed to a scrap of denim. “That come from Doc Watson. You know, the famous flatpicker.”

Morris had written about Doc a dozen times. Doc was also up in his golden years, with six Grammys on his trophy shelf. The musician had tried several times to retire, but every time he did, someone would launch a festival in his honor and he’d feel obliged to perform there.

Lillian spoke for the first time since giving her name. “These scraps have stories in them. They’re like pieces of people’s lives. And we figure the kids get some of the life out of those pieces.”

“And a little hope,” the other
Alma
said.

“Threads of Hope,” Daisy said, knitting a fishnet-style afghan. Her knitting needles clicked like chopsticks, pushing and hooking yarn. The janitor came into the room, and though it was cramped, he managed to sweep the tiny scraps off the floor without once brushing against Laney. Morris wrote it all down, and they were back in the office by lunch time. The ladies had been all smiles by the time they left, speculating on how many copies of Friday’s edition they were going to buy and which relatives they would call.

The phone call came shortly after eleven in the morning. The edition couldn’t have been on the street for more than an hour, and those who received the paper via home delivery probably wouldn’t see theirs until late afternoon. Morris dreaded the post-edition phone calls. The tri-weekly had a low circulation, but the reading audience was exacting.

“Journal-Times news desk,” Morris answered, in his most aloof voice.

“Are you Morris Stanfield?”

“Yes, ma’am.” It was always bad when they guessed your name.

“We have a serious problem.”

“Ma’am?” Morris’ finger edged toward the phone, planning a quick transfer to the Kelvinator. Serious problems were beyond the capabilities of an ink whore.

“Did you write the Threads of Hope article?”

Sometimes they called to say thanks. Sometimes, but not often. “About the sewing circle.”

“Where did you get your information?”

“From the ladies.”

“The ladies.” She sounded like a high school English teacher who was upset that a student had opted for the Cliff Notes during the
Hawthorne
semester. Her voice sounded familiar.

“It was a feature about a group of friends who get together and sew. A people feature.”

“You were supposed to call me.”

“Are you Faith Gordon?” He had meant to call her, really, but between the domestic dispute that led to a police standoff and the damned bluegrass festival sidebar, Morris had been forced to slam his story out an hour before deadline. The Threads of Hope web site had provided some history on the organization, about how the effort had been started by a seamstress in
Kentucky
whose son had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. A story of courage and perseverance, a true sob story, fraught with unsung heroes and all that happy bullshit.

“This is Faith. The ladies said you would call.”

“I’m sorry. Deadline caught me. What’s the problem?” Morris tried to replay the article in his mind. Often, by the time he finished writing one, it was seared into his memory until the next pint of whiskey or the next skull-numbing city council meeting, whichever came first. Writing was all about remembering, while the rest of Morris’s life was all about forgetting.

“The headline,” Faith Gordon said. “It says ‘Local Women Stitch Blankets For The Needy.’ These blankets are for any sick child, not just those of economic difference.”

“I don’t write the headlines,” Morris said.

“But it has your name right under it.”

“Yes, ma’am, but the editor wrote that headline. Perhaps you can speak to him.”

“It says ‘Local Women Stitch Blankets For The Needy’ by Morris Stanfield. You’ve done serious damage to the organization, not to mention insulting the women in the sewing circle. You should be ashamed.”

“How did I damage the organization? I don’t think many people in our readership have even heard of Threads of Hope.”

“Exactly. Your callous disregard for the facts has tainted Threads of Hope for the whole community. And the ladies . . . poor Alma Potter was in tears.”

“I’m really sorry to hear that,” Morris said. He couldn’t remember if Alma Potter was the “other
Alma
” or not.

“No wonder people no longer trust the media. If this is any example of how you take the good intentions of an innocent group and twist it into a sensational story—”

“Whoa,” Morris said. “If I made a factual error, I’d be glad to run a correction. But I took my information directly from the sewing circle’s own words, with some Internet research on the parent organization.”

“You didn’t talk to me,” Faith said.

Morris at last saw the real problem. Faith Gordon’s name hadn’t appeared until the third or fourth paragraph. She obviously felt she was the real story, the tireless organizer who was practically an entire spool of hope, one who lifted the entire project on her shoulders and inspired everyone who could navigate the eye of a needle to great acts of charity.

“I’ll transfer you to my editor,” Morris said, and punched the buttons before she could respond. By leaning back in his chair, he could see out his cubicle to the glassed-in office of the Kelvinator. Feeney was checking on stock prices, probably in the middle of an editorial column on the dubious merits of funding public libraries. Morris waited until the editor picked up the phone, then turned his attention to his own computer. He opened his e-mail and found six messages about the Threads of Hope story. Three were from Faith, reiterating her displeasure. Two were from Reba, who was concerned about a misquotation, and the last was from Lillian, who said she thought the article was good until Faith had told her what was wrong. Now, Lillian wrote, she was ashamed to have her name associated with either the Threads of Hope or the Journal-Times, and she was canceling her subscription “right this second.”