The Coffin Quilt (2 page)

Anyways, we were riding over to West Virginia to fetch Ro home. Pa sent Tolbert because he's so level in the head, and Tolbert took me because I was close to Roseanna. In this family, being so many of us, the young 'uns sort of attach themselves to an older one. Trinvilla and Adelaide belong to Alifair. Bill follows Bud around like a coon pup.

"Why do our sheep just lie down and get ready to die when they're attacked?" I asked Tolbert. "Why don't they fight?"

"Got nuthin' to fight with," he said. "And they know it."

"It's not fair that God didn't give them anything to fight with," I said. "Most other creatures can defend themselves."

"Maybe God was tryin' to show us that there's two kinds of creatures in this world. Those that fight and those that don't," he said.

"You mean the sheep are like Mama? They'd rather pray?"

"Maybe," he said. "But that don't make 'em stupid. You think Ma's stupid?"

One thing Tolbert wouldn't hold with was my sassing Ma or Pa. Even though he knew they were both wrong about things sometimes. So I said no. Because I didn't ever want to earn myself the rough side of Tolbert's tongue.

"The sheep aren't stupid," he said. "Look how they know to come home after bein' out in the mountains for weeks."

Our sheep come home at least once a month. You open your eyes one morning and there they all just are, come for salt. Pa or one of the boys would give them some, and then they'd be gone again. All on their own.

I was kind of hoping that's the way it would be with Roseanna, that I'd just open my eyes one morning and she'd be there in the bed next to me. I missed her something powerful. "Do they come home only for the salt?"

"'Pears to be so."

"For nothing else?"

He looked at me. Tolbert was the tallest and he was
fair of hair and eyes, but it was what was in those eyes that held you. He didn't say much. But when he did, you listened. "What's goin' on in that head of yours, Fanny?"

"Well, I just thought maybe they come home because they know they belong here," I said. "And they want to make sure it'll all still be here for them. The house and us, I mean."

"They come home for the salt," he said. "But I like to think that all creatures want to come home sooner or later."

"Do you think Ro will come home, then?" I asked.

He didn't say anything for a minute. Just kept his eyes on the trail ahead, like he does sometimes. "Hope she's got the sense of our sheep," he said.

"Tolbert, why does Alifair hate me so?"

"She doesn't hate you, Fanny. She hates herself. Hates that she's lived twenty-two years and don't know what she's about. Hates that you're just a young 'un and still have the chance to find out. My guess is once she forgets about this healing business and pays mind to that young Will Bectal who wants to court her, she'll be a happier woman."

"Does she have the light of holiness? When she comes at me I want to kick her or bite her. But how can I if she's got it?"

"She's got the light of too much Ma. She should have got out from under Ma's shadow and been married years ago. Ma's a good woman, but she's trying to make Alifair into herself all over. She's got no light and no holiness, and the sooner she finds it out, the better we'll all be. So you kick and bite her all you want to defend yourself.
Onliest reason I tell you this is because Alifair's been so hard on you. Not so you don't reverence Ma. You understand?"

I said yes. And since he was explaining things so good I thought I'd push further. "Why do Hatfields and McCoys hate each other?"

He grunted. "I hold it goes back to when Pa lost his sow and his pigs, two years ago. Ma says no, before that even. During The War Amongst Us, Pa's younger brother Harmon was murdered by bushwhackers. Everybody says it was old Devil Anse Hatfield and his Wildcats. You see, in 1863, Virginia's western counties broke away and became West Virginia. When men from that area got to come home on leave, they just didn't go back. They'd been fighting for their own ground, and now it was Union blue ground. So they formed their own Home Guard in West Virginia and stayed Confederate. Called themselves the Wildcats.

"And those were the people, headed up by Devil Anse, who shot and killed Pa's brother Harmon when he came home for a Christmas furlough. Shot him for coming out for the Union."

"So it started with the war?"

"Let's say the war just continued, only in a different way," Tolbert said.

"Ma always said it was the fortunes of war that made the men hereabouts so lawless and disorderly."

"Lawless and disorderly be danged. There's nothing lawless about wanting your own sow and pigs back," Tolbert muttered. Only he didn't say
danged.
"It's just in the McCoy blood to make right a wrong done to you or yourn. And to uphold the family honor while you're doing it. People around here, for the most part, are very serious about honor, though nobody more than the McCoys. It goes back to our ancestors in Scotland, who were Highland Celts. That Celtic strain runs right through our blood."

I looked down at my hands holding the reins, at the tiny blue veins I could trace on their backs. I wondered what Celtic blood looked like and how it was different from other people's blood. I liked Tolbert's explanations. They made sense. Especially about Alifair. It was good to know she didn't have the light of holiness. Next time she started on me I'd kick and bite her good. Then let her heal herself and see how good she'd do.

T
HE FIRST TIME
I saw Yeller Thing was right before Ro ran off. And from then on I saw him just before every bad thing happened to any of us. I was the only one who ever did see him. And I haven't seen him since she's gone.

Yeller Thing was the most terrible creature you'd ever want to run into in these mountains. Stinking worse than a skunk. I never could lay my mind hold of what he was so I could tell my brothers, who all went gunning for him. Oh, they heard him, all right, and smelled him, thrashing around out there in the woods. But they never saw him like I did. He wasn't a painter cat, they said, and he wasn't a bear. He was something nobody could explain.

Except me. Because Yeller Thing came for me, to warn me of what was to happen to us, of how there was
evil amongst us. But not only that, he came to show me how evil often had the face of beauty and good. Like Alifair with her light of holiness. And Ro with her pretty looks and ways. And sometimes evil even attached itself to good, to draw strength from it. Like it did with Mama, in spite of, and maybe even because of her prayerful ways.

But I was too young. I didn't know. I thought it was just a haint, like people sometimes see in these parts. I thought it was enough to make a cross in the dirt with my toe, spit in it, and make a good wish every time I left the house so Yeller Thing couldn't get me.

And all the time evil was there. In our house. And had got us all already.

***

D
OES ANYBODY KNOW
what it's like to have an older sister like Roseanna? So purty that just being next to her is better than a piece of rock candy? Just being around her you didn't need a spring tonic. When she walked by everybody looked. Then looked again. Once wasn't enough. Ma said that she could turn a person into a pillar of salt. Or if not that, then an addled idiot.

I wanted to be like her. The way she dressed, walked, tossed her hair was just perfect. She sang, made a pie, diapered a baby, even slopped the hogs better than anybody.

I can still smell the glycerin and rosewater she used. Sometimes of a dark night I'll smell it in the house just
like she's there, roaming around in her white nightdress.

Sometimes I think she still is.

***

I
SUPPOSE
I ought to put down about Pa's sow and pigs, just to keep things straight.

It was 1878 and I was five, so I'm just putting down what was told to me. But here it is. Like every other family in these mountains, we raise hogs. And like the sheep, we let them go in the hills to forage. This is done right before hog-killing time. The nuts fatten them up. And so they don't get mixed up, every hog owner marks his own.

Pa's mark was a slit in the right ear and an overbit in the left. But when time came to go fetch those hogs home, Pharmer, Calvin, and Bill, three of my brothers, couldn't find them. As it turned out, one of those hogs, Pinky, was my pet, even though I knew she'd have to be slaughtered and eaten. I trudged along after my brothers and called and called for Pinky, but I was just a mite glad she wouldn't be found. I hoped she'd stay free until after hog-killing time. Then I could have her for another year, and maybe convince Pa to let me keep her.

My brother Bill was twelve at the time, already given to long periods of silence, and he played the fiddle sweet as Gabriel's horn. He was on his way home from Stringtown, where he'd been playing for a family wedding, when he passed Floyd Hatfield's cabin and saw Pa's pigs, one of them Pinky. Soon's he came home, Pa
was off with his gun, like The War Amongst Us was still going on.

Of course Floyd wouldn't give back those pigs. So Pa had the Justice of the Peace make a warrant, and Floyd was charged with stealing those pigs. You'd think that would be nobody's business but Floyd's and my pa's, wouldn't you? Not in these parts. Seems every McCoy in Pike County and beyond was already loading his gun because their kin's hogs had been stolen.

Stealing a hog is a serious business. There isn't any part of the hog my family doesn't use—head for stew or scrapple, tongue to be boiled in water and sliced and served cold, the liver for pudding, the backbone, tail, and ribs can be barbecued or made into stews, and of course the lard for fat.

Some people eat the lights, or the lungs. We feed them to the dogs.

So you can see that a hog thief is the low-down-est, bloodsucking-est snake there is.

Mama, of course, right off told Pa he shouldn't of brought charges. "Trouble will come of it," she said. Mama sees trouble behind every red maple tree. She can't help it. What I can't figure is how anybody can be walking with the Lord for so many years now and be afeared all the time. She's always singing that song, "If Everybody Was Like Jesus What a Wonderful World This Would Be." She's had her feet washed in Meeting, just like the women in the Bible washed the feet of Jesus. It's an honor that doesn't come to everybody.

Anyways, the judge was a Hatfield but the jury was both Hatfields and McCoys. The judge said he'd be fair if everybody put away their pistols. The jury was split right down the middle on whose hogs they were, so they took a vote. The last one to decide was Selkirk McCoy, who was married to a Hatfield. Selkirk said the hogs belonged to Floyd, and that was it.

A fight almost broke out in court, but Pa abided by the judge's decision. And I had to give up Pinky.

Then Squirrel Huntin' Sam McCoy comes into it.

It's as much of our history as the fact that Pa and Ma are first cousins and that Pa served in the Confederate army in the war.

Squirrel Huntin' Sam is a nephew of Pa's and the best hunter of squirrels in these mountains. But he's teched in the head. I ought to know. He was still in the sixth grade when I started school. For the third year. At recess he'd catch birds and kill them, just for the fun of watching them die. I could have told them about Squirrel Huntin' Sam, if they'd asked me. But nobody ever does ask me much of anything, even now. When you're the youngest, you stay the youngest forever.

It was fall. Hunting season. Which is almost a religious holiday in these mountains. The crops were laid by and the men were off. From our place, through the autumn woods, you could hear the sounds of the hunt: squirrels and partridges rushing to take cover, the braying of the dogs, the calling of the horn, and then the distant report of the guns going off. It was exciting and scary at the same time. I love the woods as much as the next person, but I always knew that hunting time was a
time of death, that it had a dark side to it that meant the ending of things.

It was the ending of things for Bill Staton, who was half Hatfield and had sworn at the pig trial that he'd seen Floyd mark those creatures as his own. Squirrel Huntin' Sam had taunted him for a lying traitor after that, and Staton saw his chance to get even.

He shot Paris McCoy, Sam's brother, who was out hunting with him. Sam fought Staton and killed him. Paris recovered, but Sam was taken to Logan Jail in West Virginia to be held for trial.

Before you knew it, there was Pa, his gun at the ready, saying they had to get Sam out of jail. Most of the time Pa wouldn't even admit to kinship with Sam. But a McCoy was a McCoy. And a McCoy in a West Virginia jail was like a chicken in the jaws of a fox. Pa rallied his kin. A hundred of them went to the trial. But Sam was freed, and he's still floating around out in those woods, disgusting as ever, killing things for the fun of it.

That's the big story about Pa's sow and pigs, which means nothing to me. I don't care how much they all say the trouble started with that.

It would have sat there, that trouble, and never festered, never started up again, if not for my sister Roseanna. And I can say this, because I loved her best of all.

R
OSEANNA AND
I had little iron bedsteads in our room in the house on Blackberry Fork. They were covered with quilts Mama made. And we had calico curtains on the windows, too. It was a real nice room. Roseanna made it nice. She had a looking glass over a little wooden dressing table that brother Floyd made for her. "Like grand ladies do," she told me. I don't know how Ro knew what grand ladies did, but I took her word for it She let me use the little dressing table and taught me how to curl up my hair in rags. And she let me touch all her things, like the brooch Pa gave her when she turned twenty-one that belonged to his very own mama. Even the combs she put in her hair, her good embroidered handkerchiefs, and her scented soap. She made that soap herself. When we cooked up a batch, she took some aside and put some decoction in it that made it smell
good. Adelaide called it her witch's brew. I knew for a fact that the scent came from some little heart-shaped leaves in the woods. But I didn't tell anybody. I know how to keep a secret.