Clay's Quilt (24 page)

A birth certificate had so many more words, he thought. The rose was all wrong, too. Even though Easter and Gabe had had nothing but the best intentions, if he had been big enough to make such decisions, he would have called for a bouquet of wildflowers to be carved into the gravestone: tiger lilies, daisies, jack-in-the-pulpits, Queen Anne's lace.

He crouched down and put his finger inside the lines of the rose. He touched the letters of her name, the years she had lived. The stone was so cold, so icy, that he feared it might blister his fingers. It felt just the way her skin had felt when she lay in the cedar casket. He could call up that image any time he wanted to: a lavender church dress, a wide purple belt with a plastic buckle, long eyelashes. Her hands had looked so alive that it had looked like blood was flowing right through the round veins. She had never seemed so still before. Even her sleep had been plagued by motion. He had wanted to breathe her scent in, but the smell of cedar had overtaken everything.

“You all right?” Cake asked, and put his hand on Clay's arm.

“Easter must have just cleaned her grave off,” Clay said. The headstone was free of branches and leaves, and yellow mums had recently been planted on the grave.

“She walks up here once a week to see to it,” Cake said. “I see her heading up the holler ever Friday. Mommy brought them mums, though. She made me go to town and buy them the other day. Said the more it frosted, the prettier they got.”

“It was wrong of me, to never come tend to her grave,” Clay said, and stood.

“What are you doing up here tonight? Where's Alma?” Cake asked.

“Staying all night up her people's house.”

“I didn't think they was speaking.”

“That's why she went up there, I reckon,” Clay said. “I guess she was tired of being cold with em. I ain't stayed with Easter in a while, so I'm going to stay there tonight. You ought to come up and set around with us.”

“Might do it. UK plays tonight, at ten.”

“Well, we'll watch it,” Clay told him. He shoved his hands deep down into his pockets and kicked a square of coal across the dirt. “Can't smoke in Easter's house, though. That's the only thing.”

“We'll sneak outside, like we used to.” Cake fished around in the inside pocket of his denim jacket and pulled out a half-pint of Jim Beam. “Lookee here.”

“That'll warm us up,” Clay said, and watched Cake throw down a long shot. “Better not drink much, though, if we going back to Easter's.”

“Like a half-pint would get both of us drunk,” Cake laughed, and handed the bottle over to Clay.

The bourbon was strong and hot. Clay felt like it was flowing into every part of his body. “Cake, I didn't get you to ride up here with me to see Mommy's grave. They's something I wanted to tell you.”

Cake took a drink from the bottle.

“I asked Alma to marry me. We're getting married, soon as it gets warm weather.”

“Well, I'm glad,” Cake said, and Clay knew he was lying.

“You don't sound glad. I've knowed you my whole life, and I know when you're glad.”

“It's just that so much will change. Everthing will change.”

“That's what life's all about, buddy. Change. This is a change I want.”

“I sure hope so,” Cake said. “I hope you want it, cause that's what you gonna get. No doubt about it.”

“Well, I've thought long and hard about it, and it's what I want. I need to start my life.” Clay got back on the four-wheeler and spoke with his back to Cake. “Don't you ever get sick of working all week long, then getting stoned and drunk on the weekends? That ain't no kind of life.”

“Well, you tell me what else I got to do. That's all I got. What else is they in this life for a man to do, if he don't go to church?”

Clay started the four-wheeler up and let it idle softly. “I guess you know I want you to be my best man.”

“I can do that, I reckon,” Cake answered.

“I wish you'd be happy for me, though. I know that ain't something I can ask you to do, but I wish you would be.”

“It's just that I'll miss you. It won't be the same. Never again.”

Clay took the last drink out of the bottle and handed it back to Cake. Cake started to throw it against the cliffs on the other side of the road, but instead he shoved it into his inner pocket and wrapped his arms around Clay's waist again. Clay tore out of the dirt patch and headed back over the hill, racing toward the houses. They flew down the holler, as if they were floating on the darkness. Clay's eyes watered in the cold air as he raced down the road, but Cake lay his face against Clay's back.

T
HE MORNING HE WAS
to be married, Clay went for a walk up into the mountain. The air was thick with the new smells of spring, and the woods were so filled with sighs and whispers that Clay thought to himself that this must have been the way it sounded before people ever came to these hills. He stopped for a moment, listening to the birds singing above him, the ones that called from far across the holler. The wind spread itself through leaves the color of green water.

Many days before, he had noticed the hills growing red with buds, but only now did he realize that winter was over. It seemed to Clay that seasons crept up slowly, hardly changing their progress from day to day, and then one morning they were suddenly and finally here. Spring had come overnight, sneaking in, the blooms working throughout the darkness to be ready when sunlight hit the mountainsides. He considered the sounds of the mountain, listened for something more, and felt the desire to go
on, as if someone were pushing him from behind. The first trees to show their new colors—sarvis, redbud, and dogwood—were in bloom, and their petals pushed at his face as he made his way up the old trail.

He stopped to study one of the dogwood flowers, tracing his finger over the crimson stains on each petal. Jesus' blood, that's what he had heard all of his life. The flower was shaped like the cross, with a bushy middle that people said looked like the crown of thorns, the stains on each petal the blood of Christ. He touched the stains and felt wetness on his fingertips, sweet dew from the early morning.

He remembered that his mother's letter had said she'd often taken him to a field of wildflowers atop this mountain. He had traveled this mountain every day of his life while he was growing up, but he had never known of such a place. He was sure that he had been over every square inch of this land and began to wonder if the field was a figment of his mother's imagination. She'd written: “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.”

Maybe only a child could find it, he reasoned. Maybe he had been the one that had led his mother there. Perhaps he had not been meant to go back there yet; maybe it was too soon. But he wanted to find it—maybe that was where her spirit stayed now. When he was a child, he had often imagined that the morning mist was his mother's ghost, easing down the mountain to seep out over the valley and watch him. When he got older, he was dismayed by how the white fog always burned away by mid-morning. A field of wildflowers would be a better place to think of her living.

Sarvis and dogwood sliding over his face, he found himself
climbing the mountain quickly, crushing the bluebells accidentally beneath his feet, as he did every spring when they popped up in the middle of the path. He saw scraps of sky above him and was vaguely aware of the call of sparrows and the thud of a woodpecker somewhere across the ridge. When he reached the summit, he walked from one end to the other, searching for a sacred field that might have existed all of these years without his knowing. He went off the path, making his way through tangled groves of mountain laurel and into brier thickets that pulled blood out of his hands with quick bites. He climbed over felled, moss-covered trees as big as ancient columns and over rocks that were still cold from the long winter. He walked down into a deep cove where springs bubbled out of the mountainside and ferns grew thick and low beneath the pines.

At each turn he was sure that he saw a clearing where sunlight fell in a wide block on the ground, where the trees stepped back to make way for a field full of Cherokee roses, Queen Anne's lace, jonquils, jack-in-the pulpits, black-eyed Susans, purple daisies. He wondered if it was a place all of his ancestors had gone to, and if it was where his grandmother had picked out the names for her children. Anneth and Easter had both been named for wildflowers: Queen Anne's lace and Easter lilies. He imagined that every person in his family had journeyed to that tightly stretched field, so high atop the mountain that only flowers could grow there.

But there was nothing. He had known this mountain all of his life, and there was no such field. There was no bald spot on its summit, only jagged spears of rocks that stood in the ground like gravestones, surrounded by thousands of trees that moved as if they were underwater.

He lay down on a flat rock and peered up at the sky. He felt sunlight upon his face, and he could feel it all through his body,
beginning at his head and spreading down his chest and arms, into his legs and feet. He felt as the rocks and cliffs must feel, after a long, gray season of soaking up nothing but chill, when they suddenly find the sun. He felt like pulling off all of his clothes and lying there, but he was too relaxed to move. The field of flowers
had
to be close by—what else could have given him this sense of intoxication, if not the soup of a whole field of wildflowers?

He wanted more than anything to drift off into sleep and awake with a blue-black night sky filled with stars above him. Below, they would be looking for him, and it would be good to wake up and hear them hollering his name, down there. For once everybody else would be looking for something, and he would be content. He wanted to stay right here, up above reality, where no one could touch him, no one except God.

C
LAY REALIZED THAT
he had to go back down to be married. When he came off the mountain, he found that it was still morning, although he felt as if he had been on the mountain for hours.

Although Pastor Morgan did not believe in marrying someone who had been wed before, he agreed to marry Clay to Alma because he had known the boy all of his life. He stood on the porch with Easter's husband, El, who had taken his first day off in years to attend the wedding. When the pastor saw Clay, he smiled the way he did when he shook hands with everyone after church, and he folded the boy up in his long arms.

“Still climbing that old mountain, Clay?” the pastor asked.

“Yeah. I guess I always will.”

“I haven't been up there in years.”

Clay breathed deeply and laughed. “I'm nervous.”

“Well, a big breakfast'll cure that,” El said, putting his arm
about Clay's shoulders. “Easter and Lolie been cooking all morning.”

Inside, the table was crowded with bowls and platters bearing biscuits, fried apples, potatoes, tenderloin in a pool of redeye gravy, fried baloney, and eggs. Lolie was scraping brown gravy out of a skillet into a bowl while Easter poured coffee and directed everyone to their seats. This was the first time that Clay could ever remember the two of them cooking together. Uncle Paul sat at the table beside Aunt Sophie, who looked mad because Easter wanted her to rest and wouldn't let her help with the cooking.

El and Pastor Morgan sat down while Clay went into the bedroom to make sure that Cake and Jimmy Darrell, Alma's brother, were up. Everyone had stayed at either Easter's or Gabe's the night before, and it was good for them all to be together here like this on the morning of the wedding. Evangeline refused to stay all night at anyone's house, no matter the event, but would arrive later to sing. She had decided to head out for Nashville, along with her band, in hopes of finding a recording contract. She had put off their journey just so she could be at the wedding and would leave for Music City as soon as the vows had been spoken.

Dreama had insisted that Alma spend the night with her at Gabe's, the two of them sleeping in the same bed like sisters. Clay and Cake had slept together at Easter's, on a pallet on the floor beside the bed where Jimmy Darrell lay snoring like an old woman and hollering out in his sleep.

Gabe had made his way across the yard, and Clay was glad to see him. He hardly ever took meals with the whole family, and it was especially strange to see him seated at the table next to Pastor, although they talked like old friends. They had grown up together, and Pastor was one of the few men Gabe respected. All
of the men were at the table, while Easter and Lolie fluttered about them like birds around corn in the hottest part of the day.

“You all go on and eat now, then we'll set down and eat,” Easter said. Clay couldn't remember ever sitting down to eat at the same time as Easter during a big meal, not even at holidays. The women always ate last, when the men had finished and made room for them at the table.

“No, I want us all to eat together,” Clay said. “They's enough chairs. Call Dreama and Alma, and we'll all eat together.”

“Why, it'll be cold by the time them gals get over here,” Lolie said. “You all go ahead and eat. The women will eat later.”

“Call and tell them to hurry. I want us to eat together, now. That's what I want for my wedding day.”

Dreama and Alma came in laughing, and when Alma looked up, her eyes did not meet Clay's at once. Her face looked so clean and clear that it seemed to Clay she had found some blessed water to wash with. A noticeable silence fell across the room as everyone looked at her; then, just as quickly, Easter ordered them to sit.

“Lord, bless this food we are about to receive, and thank you for providing us with it,” Pastor said, without announcing that he was about to say the blessing. “And Lord, bless this day when these two young people commit their lives to each other, and help them to overcome the obstacles a couple face in life. Help them to receive your love and accept them into your life. We all know that you are the only way and the light, forever. Amen.”