The Coffin Quilt (7 page)

"Yes, Pa," Tolbert said.

"Fanny, you're to go along with him," Pa ordered.

I felt a thrill of importance. Alifair's look grew more
hateful. "Not fair!" she whined. "Not fair she goes again. I'm the oldest. It's my place!"

"When the time comes for the fighting, Alifair, you'll be right in on it, I promise," Pa said.

So I got to go home with Tolbert again that night. And the next day we set off again for West Virginia. I asked if I could bring some of Ro's things in a bundle, but Pa said no. "She won't be needing her things if she comes home, and if she doesn't she won't be getting them. It's up to you, Fanny, to tell your sister that."

***

S
O
I
TOLD
her. Right after Tolbert told her what Pa aimed to do if she didn't come.

"You want to start a war, Roseanna?" he asked her. I stood right next to him when he said it. "You think the last one was bad? If Pa gets all the McCoys together and storms over here, it'll be worse than the firing on Sumter."

As Ambrose Cuzlin would say when he picked up his switch, "The preliminaries are over." No more sweet words from Tolbert, no more cajoling. Ro had already told my brother again all about how much she loved Johnse, but Tolbert was not interested in hearing of it.

"Either he marries you today or Pa comes riding in here tomorrow, Ro," he said.

I held her hand. She needed me to do that. Johnse was nowhere in sight. His father, old Devil Anse, stood a distance away with two of his sons, Robert E. Lee and Elliot Rutherford. They were waiting. They knew trouble was in the air.

"I don't want anybody to get shot on my account," she said.

"Then you know what to do," Tolbert said.

She looked down at me. She patted my head. "Did you bring my things, baby?"

"Pa wouldn't let me, Ro. He said if you come home you won't be needing them, and if you don't you won't be getting them. Please come, Ro."

She nodded. Her face was white and drawn. She looked older of a sudden. "I have to talk to Johnse first," she said. And she disappeared around the corner of the house.

Tolbert and I waited on the porch. I saw Cap wandering around by the barn. He had a seven-shot repeating carbine in his hands. I nudged Tolbert.

"I know, Fanny. I saw him. Don't look at him is all."

"Will he stop us from taking Ro?"

"I'd like to see him try."

In about ten minutes my sister came back, wiping her eyes with her hand. In the other hand she had a bundle of things. The bundle was wrapped with the Coffin quilt, "I'm ready," she sniffed.

"You can ride double with Fanny," Tolbert told her.

"But one of these days me and Johnse will be wed properlike. Then nobody can keep us apart."

"When that day comes I won't stop you," Tolbert told her. "It's just that you gotta abide by notions of respectability and not sully our name."

"You're not bringing that quilt, Ro," I said.

"I aim to finish it before we wed."

"Can't you start another one?"

Tolbert scowled at her, then said to me, "Leave her be. And let's get out of here."

He helped Ro up behind me on the horse. He tied her things in the ugly Coffin quilt to the side of the saddle. As we started out of the Hatfield place, I felt dozens of eyes on our backs. I held my breath, waiting for the crack of Cap Hatfield's rifle. I thought,
No good will come of this. Some things just bode evil
I wished she hadn't brought that Coffin quilt.
No good will come of it,
I thought,
no good at all.

"Y
OU'RE NOT A-BRINGIN
' that quilt into this house." Those were the first words Pa said to Ro when we got back.

"It's all I got from Johnse," she told him. "I come home like you wanted. I was doing middling well there. But I'm here now, and I aim to finish my quilt."

I held my breath while she faced Pa down. We all did, because everybody had gathered round to see her. The facing down went on for a full minute before Pa spoke again.

"You look like the hind wheels of bad luck," he said. "Bring your quilt in if you set such store by it. But don't let me see one name of this family on those coffins, you hear? Nary a McCoy name goes on it, not even yourn."

"I hear," Ro said. So the Coffin quilt came into our house.

Those were the last words Pa said to her for the next month.

***

R
O SETTLED IN
, but it wasn't the same. Sometimes in the night I heard her tossing and turning on her bed and whispering Johnse's name. One moon-flooded night when I knew she was awake, I went over to kneel by her bed. "Ro," I said, "what is it like to love a body like you love Johnse?"

She thought for a spell. Then she answered. "It's like being at the door of hell sometimes," she said. "And other times it's like being at the door of heaven itself."

I vowed then that I would never love anybody like that. Look what it had done to Ro. She didn't eat right anymore. Her face was thin, her eyes had dark circles under them. And sometimes in the middle of the day I'd catch her on the edge of the woods, retching. She worked on the Coffin quilt, though. Said the quicker she finished it, the quicker she'd hear from Johnse. It came to be like an amulet to her, I think.

"Don't tell Mama," she'd say, when I caught her retching in the woods.

"Why? She'll make you some black snakeroot tea."

"It won't fix what I've got," she said.

She was sick. Likely she had stomach worms from living at the Hatfields'. How long could she keep that from Mama?

Somehow she did. While I was in school that October she helped Ma dry the fruits and berries. She picked
the little wild crab apples and pawpaws. She helped Ma cure meat and store the sweet potatoes. And she took Alifair's snide looks and hurtful remarks without sassing her back.

"I hope you're happy," Alifair said to her one day in the kitchen. "The bad feeling in this house is as thick as molasses."

"It's nothing like the feeling in my heart," Ro answered.

"I've never seen Pa so cast down," Alifair went on. "Can't you see how cast down he is?"

"I see nothing else, sister," Ro said. "He hasn't spoken a word to me since I came home."

"Well then?" Alifair asked. "Why don't you do something about it?"

"Onliest thing I can do is leave," Ro said.

To that Alifair said nothing, but that nothing was as powerful as the preacher on Sunday when he described hellfire to us. It was only the two of them in the kitchen. They didn't know I was listening right outside the door.

On the fifteenth, and I remember it was the fifteenth because lots of kids weren't in school but home for foddering time, Mr. Cuzlin let us out early.

That's when I saw Yeller Thing again.

I was walking home a little ways back from Adelaide and Trinvilla. The morning had been all blue and gold and the leaves on the trees were the colors of honey and blood. But by afternoon a wind had picked up, dark clouds scudded across the sky, and the sun disappeared. Right after we passed the holler where Belle Beaver
lived, I felt a sense of doom. And of a sudden the chattering birds and critters got all quiet.

It was by the wood bridge that crossed Cattail Creek that I saw it.

Something went flashing by in the corner of my eye I stopped and looked, but there was nothing there. Nothing to see, that is, but I knew something was about and lurking. I shivered. The day had turned cold. I felt disquieted, like the wind boded bad things.

Again I heard the whoosh of something streaking by. And then I smelled it, worse than a skunk by daylight. Worse than six outhouses in July.

Next I heard the growl, low and menacing one minute, high and screeching the next. It echoed in the woods. It bounced off the water in the creek. It was Yeller Thing all right. I stopped dead in my tracks. Maybe if I didn't move, he would leave me be. Oh why hadn't I made a cross in the dirt with my toe, spit in it, and made a wish when I left the house this day? I'd become careless is why. Ro was home. I thought there would be no more danger.

I can't say how many times Yeller Thing streaked by me, but I could feel the tremors he made. It was like the very earth shook each time he passed. And he seemed to be getting closer and closer with each passing.

Nothing to do but run, I decided. So I ran, fast as I could, right over that creek bridge, down the path in the woods where Adelaide and Trinvilla were walking, right past them and on up the hill. I knew he wouldn't bother them. It was me he was after. I ran so hard I
never looked around, but I could still feel Yeller Thing whooshing around me. One time I even felt his hot breath. It smelled like hog-killing day.

I fell once, right on my knee. Skinned it till it bled, but I got right up and kept on, all the time sobbing. Because I was scared, yes. But more because I knew that something awful was a-goin' to happen and Yeller Thing had come to tell me. What would it be?

***

I
T WAS LATER
on that night in our room, when she was working on her Coffin quilt, that Ro told me she was going to have a baby.

I stared at her, not understanding at first. Oh, I knew about babies, and how they came to be. I reckon I didn't want to understand. And she laughed a little while she stitched away on that old Coffin quilt. She had the names of everybody in the Hatfield family on each little coffin along the edges by now. Her stitching was so neat, better than Ma's even.

"Well," she said, and she gave me that heartbreaking smile of hers. "A wood's colt is what it'll be, Fanny. That's what they call babies when the parents aren't married. Isn't it?"

"What will Ma and Pa say?" I asked.

"I haven't told them yet, Fanny. Haven't told anybody but you. And you mustn't tell, either. Not until I find someplace to go and stay."

I said nothing. I hugged my pillow in front of me. She was leaving again. I might have known this wouldn't last. Of course it wasn't right, her being home, and her
and Pa stepping around each other like they were stepping around coachwhip snakes.

"Where will you go, Ro?"

"Well, I've been studying on it. And I think I'll ask Aunt Betty if I can stay with her for a while."

I nodded. Aunt Betty lived in Stringtown. She was wed to Ma's brother Allen McCoy. She had eleven young 'uns, but only three were left at home.

"It's not far," Ro said. "You can come and see me whenever you want."

"What will happen when you have the baby, Ro? Will Johnse and you wed then?"

"Oh, I'm sure, honey. Why, soon's he finds out about it, I'm sure we'll wed. And once we present his folks and ours with a new grandchild everything will be fine again. You'll see."

I wished she wouldn't use that tone. It was the same tone she used when she'd tell me stories and they came out all right in the end. I went back to bed, staring into the dark so hard I soon felt part of it. This wasn't going to come out all right in the end, no matter how Ro tried to wash it over. I'd seen Yeller Thing, hadn't I? That's why he'd come to me today. To warn me. To let me know things weren't going to come out right. Ever.

R
O WENT TO
Stringtown to talk to Aunt Betty. She brought gifts, a jar of fruit vinegar, and some crab-apple jelly. You don't visit hereabouts without bringing something from your larder.

"Do you want me to get word to Johnse about the baby?" I asked. It was early of a morning, the whispery pan where even the birds speak in hushed voices.

"No time," she said.

"I'll make time. He should know, Ro. Isn't right his not knowing." Was she going to keep it from him, then?

"He and his family are off timbering," she said.

It was the old of the moon. A good time for timbering. A good time for cutting hay, too, which was where Pa and my brothers had gone at first light. They never cut on the new of the moon, because the sap was still in the hay and it'd take longer to dry.

My family planted and harvested by the signs. The
rules for this are simple. You plant in the fruitful signs of Scorpio, Pisces, Taurus, or Cancer. You plow in Aries. You plant flowers in Libra when the moon is in the first quarter. It goes on like that and you dasn't go against the rules or corn will have small ears, potatoes will get nubs, and if you kill a hog in the growing parts of the moon the meat gets all puffy. Lots of town people just hoot about this, but it works for us so we keep doing it.

I had to go to school, so I couldn't go to Aunt Betty's with Ro. All day I thought about her. About that little bitty baby growing inside of her and her having to find someplace to stay because Pa would go crazy if he found out about it. She knew that as well as I did. All that jabber about the baby bringing people together was so much sassafras.

I half wished Aunt Betty would say no, that Ro couldn't five with her. She still had three young 'uns at home and it'd be a bad example for them having Ro around, her not being wed and all. Wouldn't it? But I knew the answer to that one, too.

Aunt Betty was the kindest creature around these parts who ever drew breath. She was a true Christian, good to everybody. She never talked about sin or hellfire. She just went about in her sweet way, and her door was open to anyone who was in need. So I wasn't surprised when Ro came home in two days laden with blackberry jelly, huckleberry puffs, fig pudding, and the news that she was moving in with Aunt Betty.

She told that at supper. Pa said nothing, because he never spoke to her. Ma just blinked. "Leaving us again, Ro? Now why?"

I waited for my sister to tell them about the baby. In the next moment, silent except for the clinking of forks, I saw Alifair watching her. Just like a fox. And it came to me. Alifair suspected about the baby. Oh, how she'd love to know. She couldn't wait for Ro to do something more to fall farther from grace. She'd be the first one to hop up from the table and move Ro's pebble on Ma's rock to the side of the damned, after it had been moved back to the side of the saved, too.

"I just feel like a burden here," Ro said.