Clay's Quilt (27 page)

“I never knowed of beans to still be on the vine in October,” Cake said.

“It don't happen often,” Easter said. “But it's been such a warm fall. I'm thankful for it.”

The voice of the fiddle and the loud pops of the green beans began to form a kind of music. The song rose and fell, the strings seeming to emit the troubled moans of a woman. Clay listened and pictured a woman walking the mountains, dying of grief.

“Lord God, that's the saddest old song I ever heard,” Dreama said.

“It's a lament,” Easter said. “A song of grief.”

Dreama leaned down and buttoned up Tristan's sweater. “What do you think will become of all of us, Easter?” she asked.

“Lord, I can't see the future of people I love,” Easter said, never looking up from the beans strewed across her lap. “I can't see the future, period.”

“Everbody knows you see things, Easter,” Dreama said. “I don't know why you deny it.”

“I wish I was like that,” Cake said. He had stopped breaking beans and sat there with his hands in his lap, looking at Easter with a broad smile etched across his face. “I'd give anything to be able to do that.”

“No, you wouldn't.” Easter's voice was hard, but she still
didn't look up from her work. The beans tumbled across her fingers, a blur in her able hands. She broke them perfectly, each one snapping out four singular pops. The pieces fell into the dishpan like green knuckles.

“Let's hurry and get this last mess broke so me and Dreama can start the canning,” Easter said. “It's starting to get too cool for the baby to be out here, anyway.”

“I'll set up with you all,” Cake said. Cake had been staying at Easter's a lot. Dreama had started going to church with Easter and had recently been baptized. When she moved in with Easter to get away from Gabe's parties and crowds, Cake started showing up on Easter's porch in the evening.

“Good, you can occupy Tristan while we put up the beans,” Dreama said.

“I ain't got nothing else to do,” Cake said.

Clay tapped his foot along to the beat of Alma's fiddle, whose soprano had intensified into a fast breakdown. He finished the beans that lay in his lap, put the strings and ends aside, and got up to clog around the yard, squalling out.

“That's the kind of music I like,” Dreama said loudly. She threw her newspaper on the ground and got up to dance with Clay.

“Come on, Easter,” Dreama called, but Easter just capped both hands over her mouth and laughed.

The song twisted and spun on crisp air. It echoed up the holler and went into homes, slithered around porch posts, beat against the faces of old cliffs.

“Dance with us,” Dreama begged. “Ain't no sin in music that pretty.”

Easter got up and began to dance around the yard with Clay and Dreama, looking embarrassed and happy. “Lord have mercy, if any church people drive by, they'll throw me out of the meeting Sunday,” she said.

Cake sat in his chair and clapped in time to the music. He looked like he was in love with all three of them.

T
RISTAN COULDN'T GO
to sleep with all the excitement in the house, and it was nearly midnight before he finally fell over while Cake played with him. Cake pulled the baby up into his arms and packed him into the kitchen, where Dreama was putting the caps on mason jars full of beans.

“He's finally out of it,” Cake whispered.

“Just lay him down back yonder on my bed,” Dreama said.

Cake walked slowly down the hall, holding Tristan tight against his chest. He lay him in Dreama's fragrant bed and pulled the covers up beneath his neck, then put two pillows on the edge of the bed and leaned down to kiss Tristan's cheek. He ran his hand down the side of the baby's face and walked carefully from the room.

“He's dead-asleep,” Cake said. “I played with him so hard that he'll sleep till ten o'clock tomorrow.”

“Well, good, cause it'd sure be nice to sleep late for once,” Dreama said. She put a lid on the last jar of beans and tightened it. “How long till them are done, Easter?”

Easter was wiping down the counter while the pressure cooker jiggled and steamed. She wore a cardigan even though the house was hot from the canning. The kitchen smelled so strongly of cooked beans that Cake's mouth watered.

“Be a few more minutes,” Easter said. “Go on to bed, if you want to, honey. I can do this last batch.”

“Go out here with me, Dreama,” Cake said, holding open the door. “I'll set and smoke one before I go to the house.”

The night air was growing cooler. The heat from the kitchen poured out of the door behind them as they sat down on the floor of the back stoop. Cake lit a cigarette and listened to the silence
of an autumn evening. He wondered where the crickets and katydids went in the fall. Across Easter's backyard, he could see the light in Clay and Alma's bedroom just being turned off.

“Give me a draw off that cigarette,” Dreama said, smiling.

“You better not let Easter see you, and you going to church now,” he said before handing it over.

She took the cigarette from him and sucked on it awkwardly. He could see that she didn't know how to inhale, but she didn't choke. “I'm trying to live for the Lord, not for them people down there at the church,” she said. She handed it back. “Here. I just like to take a puff off one ever once in a while. I smoke about one whole cigarette a year, just to be doing it.”

He looked across the yard, feeling animal eyes upon them. He could hear an owl screeching, far up the mountain.

“Pretty night, ain't it?”

“It sure is. I love this time of year,” Dreama said, looking up to the sky. “Seems like they's more stars in the fall.”

Cake could smell the beans on her clothes and in her hair. She sat with one palm up and the other hand massaging her wrist. Her fingers were red and indented from tightening jar lids.

“I swear, Tristan is crazy over you,” she said. “It's a sight his own daddy don't never fool with him. I'm glad you're around to play with him so much.”

“You still care for Darry?” Cake asked.

“Lord no! At one time, I would've laid right down and died for that man, too. Now I wouldn't spit on him if he was on fire. Love dies so easy when somebody hurts you that bad.”

Cake nodded without really thinking why he was doing so. He took one last, satisfying draw on his cigarette. He jumped when she touched him on the shoulder as she was getting up.

“I'm going to have to go and lay down, Cake. I'm so tired, I can't make it no longer.”

“Well, good night.”

She opened the door and stood with one leg in the house and one on the porch. “Thanks for playing with the baby. I don't know what we'd do without you.”

“It's all right,” he said.

“Well, good night,” she said, and slipped into the house.

Cake didn't feel like getting up and walking home. He wanted to sit right there on Easter's back porch and smell the damp, colored leaves up on the mountain. He lit another cigarette and looked up at the crowded sky. He thought about what Dreama had asked Easter earlier: “What do you think will become of all of us?” He took a deep breath of the scent of beans that floated out onto the night, and listened to the pressure cooker clucking and Easter moving around inside. He thought about Dreama snuggling up against the baby when she climbed into bed, and Clay and Alma just drifting off to sleep across the yard.

He whispered to the mountain: “I wish this is what would become of ever one of us. I wish we could stay just like this.”

M
ARGUERITE WAS AWARE
of a silence so thick and heavy that it made its presence known, hovering like a metal mist. It seeped about the squat houses, the black trees, the objects bound to the earth. She had never known such silence as Free Creek possessed at night. It was intensified by the snow that covered everything that night. The slicing February wind was gone now, and the air stood still and frozen, like curtains of ice that she was able to pass through. The tree limbs were bent low, nervous above the icy ground. The cliffs were too cold to hold snow against their faces, and gray stands of rock stuck out from the whiteness.

Marguerite had never grown accustomed to the quiet of a holler at night, and as she walked down Free Creek toward Easter's house, she found the hush maddening. She felt like screaming out for someone to come to her, but she didn't dare to pull the scarf away from her mouth. She could hear the blood pumping inside her body—the only sound besides the crunch of
her feet in the high snow, which was so loud that it sounded as if she were walking over bones that cracked beneath her. She turned to look back at her house on the mountainside for a moment and felt strange looking back at its dark silhouette against the snow: suddenly she felt an overpowering feeling of homesickness, but she wasn't thinking about the house. The snow made her miss the past.

She turned back and focused on the yellow glow of the coal-oil lamps that burned in Easter's windows. She felt that she would never make it that short distance down the holler, with the snow up to her knees and the scarf wet about her mouth and nose, the air freezing the skin around her eyes. But she could smell the fine, clean aroma of winter, and it soothed her throat, like taking a deep breath of liniment. She had lived in Kentucky for more than a quarter of a century now, but she still couldn't get over the snow. The smooth, undisturbed ground, like a shimmering beach of white sand, the ice clotting the trees and encircling the power lines. Winter was the worst time in the mountains; she could remember three or four miserable winters when she was snowbound in the house with Harold. But at the same time, it was the best season, too. She loved the way a draft in the house sometimes gave her a forgotten, erotic shudder, and the way the children's laughter echoed down the holler as they rode sleds off the mountain.

The sky opened up, just as quickly as it had closed before, and the snow came down like a million damp feathers. First it fell straight down, then to the side in a frenzied rush that looked as if it needed music to accompany it. It began to snow so hard that she could barely even make out Easter's windows. The big, square flakes blew behind her scarf, stung her lips, and stuck to her eyelashes. She felt as if she were fighting against a flood, each leg heavier and heavier as it pushed at the snow.

When she reached the porch, she ripped the scarf from her head and let the cold sink into her skin. She knocked twice before letting herself in. Heat surrounded her.

“Marguerite!” Easter cried happily, jumping up to help her in. “Come in, come in. Anything wrong?”

Marguerite kept her eyes cast down as she took off her coat, then her boots. “No. Just lonesome's all. Harold's been asleep all evening, and I was tired of listening to his snoring.”

She had known everyone would be here, and patting down her hair, she surveyed the whole room, where everyone sat smiling at her.

Dreama was rocking her baby to sleep and quietly singing “Barbara Allen” into his face. Alma and Clay were hugging each other beneath an old quilt. Gabe and El sat on the couch, laughing at a private joke. Cake jumped up from the Mennonite chair in the corner to take his mother's arm and direct her toward a seat. She smiled and pulled away. She hated it when Cake treated her like an invalid.

The room was lit by three coal-oil lamps made of old, heavy glass. A kerosene heater sat in the center of the room, pushing out warm heat and its acrid, biting scent. The power had been out since early that morning, and when such things happened, it seemed everybody always gathered at Easter's.

“Here, Marguerite. This'll warm you up,” Easter said, pushing a cup of steaming coffee into her hands. “Good thing we got a gas stove. I couldn't make it through a snowstorm without coffee,” she said to the whole room, settling back into her place on the couch between Gabe and El. “We heard on the radio that the governor was sending the National Guard down here to take doctors and the sick to the hospital and start digging us out.”

“You ought not to have walked down here by yourself, Mommy,” Cake said.

“You must not have been too worried about me, or you would have come to my house instead of Easter's,” she answered, and sipped her coffee.

Everyone fell silent after that, and Marguerite wondered if they had all been talking and cutting up before she came in. Finally, Easter spoke up to break the silence.

“Well, I'm glad you did come up. It's good for everbody to be together on a night like this. We ought to make some peanut butter candy, since we all here.”

Outside, the wind howled, and they all leaned forward to listen to it. They had been listening to the wind all evening, and every once in a while they heard the crack of another limb snapping from the weight of the snow and ice.

“I hope that big oak don't fall in on our house,” Clay said.

“Well, there ain't nothing you can do but set here and let it,” Gabe said.

Marguerite drank the last of her coffee and sat up very straight, putting her hands on her knees before her. She cleared her throat with her hand balled to her mouth and began to speak.

“I'll never forget the first time I saw snow. Real snow, I mean, here in Kentucky. I had only lived here about six months, and I was still not quite sure
how
to live here, and one evening, it began to snow. I stood at the window a long time and watched it fall. I expected it to come down a few minutes and then clear up, but it just kept falling and falling. The only snow I had ever seen was inside those little snow globes you shake up, and I couldn't get over it. I stood there for more than an hour, never moving a muscle. I had never seen anything so perfect and simple before. That's what I think of when I see snow—perfection.”

They all listened. They had never heard her speak at such length.