The Coffin Quilt (19 page)

"Middling," I answered. "Ma can't put a finger on what's ailing her."

He smiled. "I spoke to Johnse just yesterday."

I gaped, waiting. Something was coming, I was sure of it.

"I minister to folk on both sides of the river, Fanny. You must remember that. I take pride that both Hatfields and McCoys trust me. I like to think I've quenched some fires on both sides and kindled some understanding."

"Yes sir." He was rooting around it like a hound dog. All that talk of quenching and kindling fires. I looked at my sister. Under the soft light of the kerosene lamps, she glowed. Whatever he was getting at she knew about it.
Imagine,
I thought.
Being privy to what a reverend was thinking!

"Johnse is worried about Roseanna," he said. "He heard she was took sick. And he asked after your ma, too."

I bridled. "He's got more nerve than a Yankee at a Southern camp meeting," I said. "After they raided our house that night."

"Now, now, Fanny," the reverend said soothingly. "Johnse wasn't there that night. I can vouch for that.
You think he'd be part of that lulling and maiming? He still loves Roseanna."

Before I could give my opinion on that bit of hogwash, he went on.

"Jim Vance attacked your ma. Johnse's brother Cap shot Alifair."

"Then why have they got Ellison Mounts in prison for it?"

"Because," he answered softly, "Cap promised Mounts five hundred dollars, a rifle, and a saddle, if he'd take the blame. Promised he'd spring him from jail before they hanged him."

I stared at the man in disbelief. Then at my sister and Will. Trinvilla smiled in a way that made me want to smack her the way I did when she tattled on me to Alifair. "It's true," she said.

"What's it all got to do with me?" I asked.

"In the spirit of Godly forgiveness and forbearance that I myself preach and your sister and brother-in-law practice in this home," the reverend said, "I have a letter to Ro from Johnse. I'd like for you to deliver it to her."

I felt a blinding light behind my eyes. My head hurt. My food turned to sawdust in my mouth. "Aunt Martha Cline was just this day telling Ma how foolish she was with all her forgiveness and praying," I said. "And how, if she'd let Pa go after the Hatfields sooner, my brothers and Alifair might still be alive."

Nobody said anything for a minute. Trinvilla made a to-do about pouring coffee. I suppose she learned how to pour real fancylike from all those ladies' meetings she went to in church. She was getting notions, that's what
her problem was. Thought she was too good for us anymore.

"What does Johnse want from Ro?" I asked the preacher.

"Just to see her. As I said, he's heard she's failing."

"He loves her still, Fanny," Trinvilla put in.

I scowled. "I suppose there's no sense in asking why you care, when you always hated Ro."

Her snide was like a knife. It was kindly but bespoke things between them that I was too young to understand. "We were all children back then, Fanny," she said. "We're all grown now."

"Johnse can be grown as last year's corn. There's no way he can come into Kentucky and see Ro without his being killed," I told her.

"He's been here many times," the reverend said.

"To this house?" I asked.

The reverend stirred sugar into his coffee. "Haven't you ever seen the man in the wool hat in the rowboat on the river? He's seen you. Said you waved to him many a time."

Now I felt like I was out in the windy night, looking in the window at them. The man in the woolen hat? Johnse Hatfield? "Why did he never give me his howdy if it was him?"

"He didn't want to put you in a compromising position."

"What's that?"

"He didn't," Trinvilla explained, "want to make you waver between telling Pa he was there and loyalty to him."

"I've got no loyalty to Johnse Hatfield," I said.

"Does that mean you won't deliver the note to Ro, then?" the reverend asked.

"I don't know what it means. I have to study on it."

He put his hand inside his coat pocket and something crackled. Paper. He drew out the note and set it on the table next to me. "Why don't you leave it to your sister if she wants to see him."

"Why don't
you
deliver the note to Ro?" I asked him.

"I have to leave for Pennsylvania in the morning. My sister is dying. It will be an extended stay."

"Where would this meeting take place? He'd come in his wool hat on the river and expect her to come sashaying down the bank in the cold and dark?"

"In this house," the reverend said. "It is a safe house. Neither side comes here."

"It'll be right cold soon," Will put in. "And the fall rains will come, making the roads muddy. There's no way we could justify a trip here for an ailing Ro if we wait much longer."

They were all in on it. Had it planned. It was why they'd invited me. Not because they cared about me. I took the note from the table and put it in my pocket.
Safe house?
I almost laughed in their fool faces. I'd come, and look what had happened. I'd been lured, trapped. Crazy, they all were, I decided. Plumb crazy.

I
SUPPOSE
I could have done it. What reason not to? After I got shut of my anger at prissy old Trinvilla, who was turning out worse than Alifair had ever been, who still hated Ro and was just playing some part for her reverend father-in-law, I saw no reason not to do it.

I went home set on doing it. What did I care if Ro and Johnse met? What did I care about any of them anymore? Look what caring had done to me. I was mooded up all the time and worrying, and there was Trinvilla, happy and loved and out of it all, yet feeling good about herself. It meant no nevermind to her if Ro and Johnse met. Why should it matter to me?

Then I looked at Ma, all crippled up and scarce able to walk. I thought of Bud, Bill, Pharmer, Tolbert, Calvin, and even Alifair. All of them lying underground. All who should still be living. Even Alifair, mean as a hornet
as she'd been. And I thought how I couldn't dishonor them like that by bringing together the two people who had started this whole mess. So I went home and put the note under my pillow, ate supper, saw to Ro, and went to bed, as muddled in the head as I'd ever been.

Next day Dr. Grey came to visit Ro. Ma had sent for him. He was in that room awhile with her, I can tell you. Then he talked awhile with Ma. I waited in the parlor to see him out. On the front stoop I drew a shawl around me in the late September chill and squinted up at him in the midday sun. "How's Ro faring, Doctor?"

"Well, I'll tell you, Fanny, 'cause you're old enough to know. How old are you now?"

"Sixteen."

"Your ma's not fit to hear it. Your pa's not around, and Ro seems not to care. I think if you all could get her interested in something, might be she'd take a turn for the better."

"Interested?"

"She's dying inside her, Fanny. Dying from the inside out. The worst kind of ailment. Nothing a doctor can do for her. She needs hope."

I nodded. Sounded like so much folderol to me. Like the kind of thing doctors said when they couldn't cure you.

"I know you all been through a heap of trouble, but your sister just needs something now to make her want to get well."

"What?" I asked.

"She's your sister, Fanny." He patted my arm. "Now I've got to go."

***

S
O THAT'S WHEN
I decided to give her the note that lay at that moment in my apron pocket. That's when I decided to dishonor Tolbert, Pharmer, Bud, Bill, Calvin, and Alifair. They'd want me to do it, I pondered. Even Alifair. I was sure she would.

I waited all day, but Ma was always around. Then some snoopy old ladies from the church came, not Reverend Thompson's church but the Baptist one in town. Brought food and baked goods and we had to fuss over them and be nice. And then Ro slept and I didn't want to bother her. Then it came around to suppertime and I had to see to it that Ma ate and get her to bed. I went to my room and, while I waited for Ma to fall asleep, I fell asleep, too, and awoke like somebody put a hand on me to hear a noise downstairs. I jumped up, real scairtlike. Were we being attacked? I crept down the stairs and there in the kitchen was Ro in her nightdress, walking around with a lantern in her one hand and dragging something that looked like a dead body in the other.

"What are you doing up and about?" I asked her. "What have you got there?"

"Oh, Fanny." She set the lantern on the kitchen table. "I just had a hankering for some tea. I couldn't sleep. I thought I'd come down here for a while and work on my quilt."

So that's what she was dragging around. Might as well have been a dead body. I made her some tea. The candlelight threw our shadows against the wall, larger than life. I wondered if Johnse was out on the river in his
boat, wearing that wool cap, watching the house. Wondered how many times he'd been out there and we hadn't known it. I set the tea down.

"You're so good to me, Fanny," she said.

I got to feeling all twisted inside when she said that, I can tell you. She was lifting the quilt from the floor and spreading it on her lap. "Hard to work without a frame, but I've gotten used to it. I just do a little piece at a time. Hard to work in candlelight, too. I wish Ma would allow kerosene."

I still had the note in my pocket. This was the time to give it to her, I minded. Now. Then she looked up at me, all hollow around the eyes and thin in the face, and smiled. "Want to ask you something, Fanny."

I nodded.

"Are you ready now to promise to take my quilt? I asked you once before. You said you'd study on it. Don't say no, please. It means so much to me. I know you don't like it. Don't approve. But I want it to go to somebody I love."

"You're not going to die," I said. It was all I could think of. My throat wasn't working right. I loved Ro. Much as I ever had, I suppose. And I hated her all at the same time. She'd always been the special one in the family, the one everybody gave in to. Because she was so purty. I'd looked up to her so. And now here she sat, empty and pitiful, the cause of all our troubles. Oh God, I wanted to give her that note. I did!

"You see here?" She was bent on showing me that fool quilt. "Look how purty it is. I
am
going to die, Fanny. I've got nothing to live for. Don't want to live
anymore, anyways. A person can will themselves to die, you know."

I thought of Bill then and how sweet he could play the fiddle. How he'd frozen to death on that hill by the graves, willing himself to die. And I hated her again.

She had the quilt spread on the table. Her work was so neat, her stitches so small. "Isn't it a beauty?" she asked.

I looked. And I saw. There, in the light of the candle, among the coffins all around the edges that still had to be moved to the middle, was mine. And hers and Ma's and Pa's. Jim's and Sam's and Floyd's. Trinvilla's and her baby's. Tolbert's baby Cora.

I stared at them and felt the rage go through me. Then I looked up at her smiling at me like that, and I saw the bones in her face without the flesh, the eye sockets without the eyes, the teeth without the lips. Grinning at me. "Ain't it purty?"

I saw in the fight of the single candle what I had known inside me all along.

Ro was kin, somehow, to evil. She courted it, beautiful as she was. There was something about her that flirted with it, like moths flirted with flames. That day of the election so long ago now, when she'd gone off with Johnse, she'd been flirting with it. Much as she'd been flirting with him. She sought destruction of herself. And she'd dragged so many of us with her.

In that moment I knew I would never give her the note from Johnse. And I recollected what Mr. Cuzlin once told me: "Sometimes we don't have to leave to get away. Sometimes we just have to choose." I chose.

I loved her. I still did. But I knew that the best thing in the world for all of us would be to get away from her before she did more destruction.

If I gave her the note and she went to Trinvilla's to meet Johnse, bad would come of it. Somebody would find out. And there would be more death. Maybe Trinvilla this time. Or her husband or baby.

"I'd love to have the quilt," I told her. "Now why don't you finish your tea and I'll take you up to bed."

I
BURNED THE
note the next day. I was supposed to send one to Trinvilla and Will and let them know when to fetch Ro, but the note I sent two days later said she was too sickly to travel.

They didn't come 'round. I didn't reckon they would. They'd never been to see us at the Pikeville house. Didn't want to dirty their hands by coming. Maybe they were right, I don't know. Maybe they saw things as they were long before I did. I don't fault them for it. In the trouble, we all had to find our own way out the best we could. Do what we had to do to survive.

Ro died a month later. Willed herself to. The night before, I was in the kitchen locking up when I saw a light out back. I looked out, thinking,
Oh, I hope it's not Johnse come anyway in his old wool hat.
And when I looked, he was there, just outside the window.

Yeller Thing.

I couldn't believe it was him, come all the way from our old homeplace! I hadn't seen him in two years! How'd he find us here? Did I have to ask?

I opened the door and went outside. I wasn't scairt. I felt about him like an old friend now. I knew he wouldn't harm me. "She's a-goin' to die tonight, isn't she?" I asked him.

He just lowered his head, his tongue all lolling out like he'd traveled a long way. But those eyes, how they glowed! And the smell of him! Then he did a strange thing. He lowered himself down like a lost dog and rested his head on his paws, all greenish yellow and ugly as can be.
Why, he is pure tuckered out,
I thought. And I knew then that it was the last time I would see him.

"I thank ye for the warning," I said. And then I went into the house and upstairs to check on Ro. She was sleeping real peaceful-like. She wasn't feverish. I looked out the back window from the hall. Yeller Thing was gone.