Clay's Quilt

  “I want to go home, Lolie.”

  To one side of them, there was nothing but woods. On the other side, there was the straight-up incline back to the road, where Glenn’s truck had driven away.

  “Come on, baby,” she said, and when she stood, she cried out in pain. A crew of redbirds flapped noisily out of the tree overhead. “You keep your arms around Lolie’s neck, now, and put your face down on my shoulder. Don’t pull your face away, now. Keep it down. All right?”

  “Well,” he said, his voice full of tears.

  Lolie began to climb up the mountain, leaning forward. With each step she took up the incline, Clay was certain that she was going to fall backward and they’d roll down. He held on to her with all of his strength and never took his face away from her shoulder. His mother’s scarf had come unwound and it trailed in the snow next to them.

  They reached the shoulder of the road, and Clay could feel Lolie’s heart pumping against his chest. His body rose up and down on the great heaves of breath she took. She stood for a moment, leaning against the guardrail, and then stepped over and stood on the side of the road. There were no sounds.

  He knew she was going back to see if any of them were alive, but he reckoned they weren’t. He had heard the gunshots, the screams, but had kept his face in the snow. He knew what the gunshots meant. He knew all of them had been shot except for him and Lolie, but now she was going back. He started to rise up from her bosom, but she capped her hand over the back of his head and shoved his face back to her pounding heart.

  “Keep your little face down, now, Clay. Whatever you do, don’t raise up, baby.”

  She walked toward the car, and when she got there, she stopped for a moment and there was nothing but the sound of cold. All at once, he could hear her. She was not crying but sounded as if she were choking, like there was a scream stuck in her throat. And he could smell the blood, although he could not put a name to the scent. It smelled like metal.

  Clay tried to pull away from her, and before she could push his head back down again, he saw blood streaked across the snow in long, crooked fingers. Then his face was against her breast again and she was running. Her feet slapped against the frozen road. He knew she was running back down the mountain, back to where the houses sat close to the road. He could smell the coal smoke pumping out of their chimneys. Lolie began to run faster and faster.

  25

  THEY STOOD ON the beach, looking out at the blackness. The darkness over the ocean was so thick that it looked made of syrup. There was no moon, and even the stars were dimmed by the bright lights of the tall hotels lining the shore. It was beautiful and frightening at the same time. Clay thought about that darkness stretching for miles and miles over cold, deep water. He wondered if that was what death was like, so tight and thick that it smothered you just to look into it.

  “It’s scary, ain’t it?” he asked.

  “It’s scary to me knowing we’re standing at the end of America,” she said. “This is where it ends, besides some islands out there.”

  The wind came at them in a constant, unceasing breeze. Back home, a wind came down into the valley and then moved on, leaving trees shivering and chimes singing; here the wind seemed never to stop. It didn’t give anything time to grow still before it attacked again. The water was different here, too. Back in Crow County, water was always moving, always racing to get away. It spilled over rocks in white frenzies, frantic to keep going. Here, the water went nowhere. It seemed caught in a sad purgatory. It washed out to sea, then came right back in again, never getting anywhere.

  “It’s not how I had it pictured,” Alma said. “I thought they’d be a moon.”

  “Don’t you like it?” Clay asked.

  “It’s beautiful. I ain’t never seen nothing like it, but I thought it’d be different, somehow.” She began walking down the beach.

  They had arrived in town at midnight. They had parked on the street and run right down to the beach, standing in silence for a long time without touching each other. Now Alma put her hand out behind her, and Clay took hold of it. He felt like pulling her to him, but he couldn’t. He wanted to stand there on the beach and hold her, looking over her shoulder with hopes that a moon might pop out of nowhere, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He felt awkward and ashamed without knowing why. She had convinced him to take off his shoes with her, and as they walked, the surf ran beneath them, sucking against their feet as it went out again. The water was still cold. He had not expected this at all. He had figured it would be so hot that they could have run right out in the water when they arrived.

  There were a few other people on the beach. A group of teenagers sat on a deck near the sand, smoking cigarettes and laughing. An old couple walked down the beach, holding hands, watching the ground before them. Everyone they passed talked low and none of the people looked up to speak as they went by. Some people carried small flashlights and buckets. They stopped to glide their hand across the sand to search for seashells. Clay watched them and felt sorry for them. It seemed they were all people looking for something that they would never be able to find.

  They came to a place on the beach where sand had worn down to large rocks that looked like the hard, speckled backs of whales half-buried on the beach. Alma sat down and pulled him beside her. She put her hands between his knees and lay her head on his shoulder.

  “It is beautiful. I never seen nothing so powerful,” she said. “I won’t know how to describe it to everbody when we get back home.”

  He didn’t speak, and for a long time they sat listening as the water pounded the shore and the wind beat against them.

  “Clay, I can’t lose you now,” Alma said. Her voice was a whisper over the roar of the surf.

  “I never meant to kill him, Alma. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Why yeah. He didn’t leave you any other choice. He had a pistol, Clay. He would have used it.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I ain’t no better than the man that killed my mother. Taking a life is all the same, whether you mean to or not. You’ve still done something that only God is meant to do.”

  “That’s foolish talk, Clay. Some things just can’t be helped.”

  “Well, you don’t know what it feels like, to have to carry something like that with you.”

  She put her hand on his leg and ran it up and down his thigh. “I know, but if it wasn’t for me, none of this would have happened.”

  “If it wasn’t for you, then I would still be alone. I’d still be miserable inside.”

  She dug her feet deep into the sand. “Well, we have to just go on.”

  “That’s all a person can do, I guess,” Clay said. That’s what he had been trying to do his whole life.

  THEY RENTED WHAT the manager called a suite at the Misty Bay Motel, a stack of stucco boxes painted turquoise and vermilion, which seemed to be the two requisite colors in the town.

  The suite was a small room that held two beds, a card table, and a scarred dresser with a built-in desk and yellow sheets of stationery in the drawer. A television sat on the dresser so it could be seen from the two beds. There was another room in the back, crowded with a couch and a dinette set that stood beneath a large, paneless window. A small refrigerator was built into a counter, along with a half-stove and a coffeemaker.

  The motel sat two streets back from the beach, but they could catch a glimpse of the ocean between two tall hotels standing shoulder to shoulder on the shore. The water looked like a smudge of dark paint against the white sky. Their room was on the top floor, the fourth, but they couldn’t see much of the town through the palm tree leaves near the balcony railing. From their picture window they could look down on the surprisingly clean pool, where people lounged around reading paperbacks and drinking cocktails. Beyond the pool sat rows and rows of cars, all with different license plates.

  “It ain’t too bad,” Clay said.

  Alma sniffed the air and ran a finger over the dresser. “It’s clean. That??
?s all that matters to me.”

  Alma pulled open the nightstand to make sure a Gideons Bible rested inside.

  “Thank the Lord,” she said. “There’s a Bible in here. I wasn’t about to sleep in a strange room without one.”

  “How many days did you pay for?” she asked.

  “I paid for a week,” he said. “If we stay longer, I figured we could go renew.”

  Alma sat down on the bed while Clay went out to carry the rest of their things in. She lay back and stared at the ceiling, wondering what it had seen in its years. Here was a place where countless people had had sex, where women had sat and rubbed suntan oil on their pasty thighs. People had gotten drunk in here, or had little spats or sat laughing at each other’s jokes. Lots of plans had probably been hatched here. For all she knew, somebody might have died in this little motel room. She wondered if anybody had ever come here as they had, running away, thinking a different geography would change their insides.

  She got up and slid a tape into the stereo Clay had packed. Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys started playing “Cheyenne.” Mandolins, banjos, and fiddles swirled in the air. She was tempted to get out her own fiddle and play along with them, as she had so many times before, but couldn’t bring her fingers to unlatch the case.

  “What’s wrong, baby?” Clay asked, and ran his hand down the length of her body. She had not felt his touch in a long time. His hands felt big and familiar, and his voice was almost the same as before. It seemed he had already begun to heal, though she knew that that was not possible.

  “I’m wore out.”

  “Lord God, you slept more than halfway here.”

  “I know it, but I’m still tired. Just lay down here and we’ll get up early in the morning and go to the beach. I want to lay here beside you and not worry about a thing.”

  The promise of rest was a thing he had come to know better than to expect, but he lay down with her. For the first time in a long while, he slept through the night. He dreamed of blackness and nothing else. When he woke up in the morning, Denzel’s face wasn’t the first thing that came to his mind.

  26

  CLAY FLOATED ON the ocean, a part of the water. He lay flat on his back, his arms stretched straight out on either side, his feet one atop the other. His eyes were open against a white sky. If they had had enough sense, gulls flying overhead would have thought him crucified. He watched the birds but couldn’t hear their chatter because his ears were under the water. He heard only the dull roar of the ocean and felt as if he were listening to the machinery that moved the earth, toiling far beneath him. It was a constant churning sound that he had to focus on to keep hearing.

  He had always thought that working back in a coal mine was about as close as a person could get to being a piece of the world, but being in the ocean felt even closer. He closed his eyes and entertained the thought of floating like this all the way to Ireland or Spain. As a child, he had watched white leaves glide down onto the waters of Free Creek and be washed away. He had wondered if they were carried on to the Cumberland and then to the Tennessee, and finally into the Mississippi River. He had thought of the towns that the leaves would pass, and the smells that would come to them before they were finally pushed out into the Gulf of Mexico on a rushing wave, lost forever. Now he knew that little leaves like that would not have made it very far. They would have been caught in tree limbs that littered the creek, or sloshed up onto shore and stuck against a mossy cliff. Even if they had reached the ocean, they would have been washed right back up onshore by the determined surf, where they would have crumbled in the hot sun and flown away on the wind in a hundred different pieces.

  He lay back with every muscle in his body relaxed and tried not to think.

  ON THE BEACH, Alma lay on a beach towel, reading To Kill a Mockingbird for the tenth time. She never was able to read much at a time, since she got headaches easily, so after every fifteen pages she put the book facedown on the towel and looked out at the ocean, her eyes scanning the waves for a sign of Clay. The day had turned out to be unusually hot, and people had crowded onto the beach. The water was still too cold for most people to dive in, and there were not many people in the ocean. She could see him out there, floating, as he had been for the past twenty minutes. She couldn’t figure how anybody could float that long. It wore her out just to watch him. He had the strange ability to completely relax on the water, though. Beyond him she saw a large boat drift by on the horizon. Its solidity seemed smudged in the haze that burned along the line where sky met water. She couldn’t get over the flatness of the ocean and the land that met it. The flatness made her nervous and short of breath. She couldn’t stand having everything all laid out before her. Wide-open spaces forced her to take in every little thing at one time.

  She lay back on the gritty towel and felt her skin burning. Radios were playing all up and down the beach. She could hear a blend of everything from rap to George Strait. Next time she came to the beach, she would definitely bring her own radio so she wouldn’t have to hear that wild mess. She eyed the bronze, blond girls lying on a blanket just down the sand from her and wondered what they would think if she played some of her tapes of Jean Ritchie or Bill Monroe.

  Alma had been thinking all day of the beach back home. Over on Blackhawk Lake, there was a long strip of sand that had been hauled in. The sand was dark yellow, but when you stepped in it, you left perfectly shaped white footprints. Along the shore, the lake was still unless a boat went by and stirred up some waves. Pines and sandbar willows pressed close to the water’s edge. Buckeyes—round and black as marbles—floated just below the surface of the water, along with light green leaves that had blown out of summer trees. People pulled pontoons up on one end of the beach and set up tables on the sand. They had grills attached to the front of their boats, where they cooked barbecue ribs, whole heads of cabbage, and baked potatoes. People sometimes danced on the beach and everybody got to know one another. Boys climbed up onto the cliffs to jump off, and the women lay out in the sun on air mattresses, making a circle on the water as they held on to each other. Clay and Cake would hold their beer bottles up and sing “Looking for Love” together or swim over to flip the women off their air mattresses. Once, she and Clay had swum right up under one of the pontoons and made out like a couple in high school.

  Alma opened her eyes to the big South Carolina sun when Clay fell onto the towel beside her. He ran his hand down her oiled leg and shook his head, sending cold drops of water onto her back.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “I was thinking about the sandbar back home,” Alma answered.

  “Yeah, this beats that beach all to hell, don’t it?”

  “Not really. I don’t believe I’d trade Blackhawk Lake for this whole big ocean.”

  Clay rolled over on his back and peered up at the big sky. “I swear, I wouldn’t mind living here someday.”

  Alma sat up and dusted sand off the tops of her legs. “Lord God, Clay, you’re talking pure nonsense. There’s no way you’d ever leave home. You wouldn’t stay away from Easter and Dreama or Cake, or home, period.”

  “I don’t guess I would,” he said after a long pause. He dried off his fingers and felt around on the sand until he found his cigarettes.

  “Ain’t you the least bit homesick?” Alma asked. “We’ve been here over a week.”

  “Well, I miss everbody, but I’m not exactly dying to get home. I took ever bit of my three weeks’ vacation. Ain’t no use rushing home.” Clay sat up and fired his Zippo, sucking in smoke. He patted her behind lightly and lay back down. She looked off down the beach.

  “If you’re wanting to go home, we’ll load up right now and light out,” he said. “I thought you was enjoying this.”

  “I am. I just don’t want to blow every dime we have while we’re down here,” she lied.

  “We won’t go broke. Only reason I agreed to come here is so you could see the ocean,” he said. “When you want to go home, you tell me.” br />
  I can’t, she thought. For once in her life, Evangeline had apparently been right. It seemed like this place was reaching inside and stitching Clay back together. Alma didn’t know if it was the distance or the time, but it had worked so far. He was becoming himself again, as if he had been covered in coal dust and she had rubbed it away to find him.

  THAT NIGHT, ALMA went onto the balcony and looked out into the salty dark. The wind was hot and sticky, and her body was instantly drenched in a film of sweet dampness. She had never seen a place so lit up, and she wondered if maybe the people on the other side of the ocean could see the glow of this place on the horizon. The bright neon of the town destroyed any chance of studying the stars, which she was so used to doing back home. There was never a moon here, and she couldn’t figure that out. In the movies, there was always a moon floating over the ocean, so big and yellow it looked ready to pop.

  It was only ten o’clock, and the street below was strangely quiet. There always seemed to be a truckload of teenagers going by, their music thumping down the street. She had grown used to hearing people laughing and yelling softly to one another as they lay by the pool at night. Airplanes sometimes shook the earth as they flew just above the motel, heading for the air force base up the road. Tonight was silent and calm. The only sound was the incessant drone of the air conditioners that hung out of each front window of the building.

  Clay had gone to the store to fetch them a cantaloupe, as she had been craving one all day. Her mouth watered at the prospect of cutting the firm melon apart, dousing the pieces in salt and sucking the meat down to the rind. She looked down the street, waiting to see him come up the sidewalk. She wanted to see if that same old feeling came to her gut when she laid eyes on him. She relied on this feeling to remind her of how much she loved him; she hated this place so much that she was beginning to blame him for bringing her here.