The Coffin Quilt (13 page)

You couldn't keep a thing like that secret, of course. My two big-mouth sisters told Alifair about it the first day, then Alifair went off to another of her healing meetings for a week and soon everybody was pondering it wherever you went.

Johnse Hatfield had himself another McCoy woman. How could he? Didn't he have the sense Cod gave a goose? Weren't there enough purty women over to West Virginia? Did he have to cross the river to Kentucky to find one
?

Oh, people were all fired up, talking about it.
Why didn't Nancy's brothers stop him
?

"How can he wed her when Ro just lost her baby?" Alifair asked. She was home from her healing group, looking wan and saying she was stronger in the Lord and filled with the light of holiness. For once I was in agreement with her about Ro. Especially when she added, "How can Johnse stand up to his pa about Nancy when he couldn't stand up to him about Ro?"

My own brothers were so fired up they were ready to ride out and tar and feather Johnse. Calvin went to visit Nancy. He talked with her brother Lark and came back and told us Lark liked Johnse, though Nancy's mother was going about the house slamming things when Johnse came to call. That was all Ma needed. She took herself off to visit Nancy's ma and stayed the whole day. I don't think she cared if Nancy married old Lucifer himself. She was doing it for Ro.

She came home grimfaced and sat down to table. We all waited. "Nancy's ma would rather see Nancy dead than wed to Johnse," she told us. "But she can't do a thing with Nancy, she's so spoilt. Lark is the oldest and he's taken up for her. He says it weren't Johnse's fault he didn't wed Ro. It was yourn, Ranel. And Devil Anse's. He says that Johnse is determined to wed Nancy and not let his pa interfere this time. Lark said he's a-goin' with them when they ask Devil Anse."

It went on all through the end of January and into February. Nancy kept coming to school and Johnse kept coming to fetch her after. People were saying no good would come of it, that Johnse was touched by the Devil and after what had happened to Ro and the baby he ought to be run out of Kentucky. But what could anybody do if Lark wouldn't stop them?

Then, at the end of February, Johnse Hatfield wed Nancy McCoy over in West Virginia. Calvin found out that Lark had gone with Johnse and Nancy to get Devil Anse's blessing, that Nancy had stood up to Devil Anse, who said he liked her "spark" and agreed to it.

The wedding quieted things down. Some folk from
Kentucky even went across the river to help build the cabin for Johnse and Nancy. None of my brothers went.

Johnse and Nancy moved in in March, the day my sister Alifair came down sick with the typhoid.

I
LAY IN
my bed in the dark while the March winds howled outside our house. Was that sound the wind? Or my sister Alifair howling? Might be it was Yeller Thing out there. Or all three.

"She a-goin' to die?" Trinvilla asked me. I didn't know which was worse—Alifair's yelling or having Trinvilla and Alelaide in the room with me for two days now. They couldn't be near Alifair. The doctor had come and gone, a rare occasion in these parts, and pronounced Alifair's sickness typhoid. The reason he was gone so quick was that a lot of families in the mountains had it. He couldn't tarry.

"I don't know," I said. I was in no mood to comfort my sisters. Now that Alifair was down sick they turned to me.

"She wouldn't die if Ma'd let me give her remedies,"
Adelaide said, "or sent for Aunt Cory instead of the old doctor."

More screaming. Alifair was what the doctor had called "delirious." Ma called it "out of her head." She kept yelling for Roseanna. "Roseanna, Roseanna, forgive me!"

"Nothing Ro has to forgive her for," Adelaide mumbled now in the dark.

"Well, she's out of her head, but she knows more than you," I told her.

"Why can't Alifair heal herself?" Trinvilla asked. "She goes to all those healing groups."

A good question. The great healer was sick. Where was her light of holiness now? Her power? I did not feel sorry for her. I just wished she'd stop yelling. I was getting a headache. "Ma will be down sick next," I said, "if she doesn't get some rest." For two days and nights now Ma hadn't taken to her bed for sleep.

"Will she die?" Trinvilla asked again. "I couldn't abide it if she died."

"Hush!" I said sternly. How many times had I wished Alifair dead? And with good reason. If she died now would the fault be mine?

More howling wind outside. It was still very cold. At that moment the bedroom door opened and Calvin stood there, all dressed, though it was near the middle of the night.

"Fanny, get up and dressed, quicklike. We're goin' to fetch Roseanna. Ma says if she comes, might be Alifair will get on the mend."

I sat up and stared at him, backlit from a lantern in the hall. "This time of night?"

"Now," he said again. "Be quick about it and dress warm. I'll fetch the horses."

***

I
T WAS WEEKS
before we knew Alifair wouldn't die. And from the night me and Calvin knocked on Aunt Betty's door and a light appeared behind the window and Ro started throwing clothes on, she didn't need convincing to come home. Alifair was took sick. It was enough. As we rode through the March night all she asked of Calvin was how bad Alifair was and what the doctor had said.
How can she care?
I asked myself. Alifair had been nothing but mean to her since the whole business with Johnse began. It was a part of Ro I could not understand. I supposed it was the part that had loved a man and had his baby. And buried it on a knoll behind the hill.

I wanted to understand, but I couldn't. Ever since the death of her baby, Ro was someplace inside her I couldn't go.

When we got home, she ran right in to help Ma, like she'd never been away. Times she slept, she settled right into her old bed in our room, though she didn't sleep that much. Trinvilla and Adelaide were put in the parlor.

I wasn't allowed in Alifair's room, but I stood outside and saw Ro run to her, saw Alifair reach out her arms, saw them embrace. For many a night after that I woke to find Ro's bed empty. I'd get up to walk out into
the hall, and there I'd see the shadow of Ro on the wall in Alifair's room, cast larger than life by a lantern. Nothing seemed real anymore. People moved about the house at night. Alifair continued to moan and thrash. Ma prayed aloud and walked around like she was under a spell. I worried that Ro would get the typhoid. Who would tend her? What would I do if she died?

Pa and the boys stayed out of the house as much as they could. They were doing the spring planting. Adelaide did the cow milking. Trinvilla washed the dishes. I cooked. I was somewhat of a fair hand at it, Tolbert's wife, Mary, let me help when I visited. Alifair never would at home. I made a right smart venison stew, too, though Calvin had to cut up the meat for me. I was a fair hand at quail, too. My brothers brought in two and I rubbed them all over with butter, salt, and pepper and put them in a pan until they got nice and brown in our stove oven. Mary kept us in fresh-baked bread and pies. Nobody complained about my cooking. Nobody complained or fussed very much about anything.

What seemed to be happening, if you put your mind to it, was that we were all getting along in our house, helping each other. We talked in soft tones. Even Trinvilla and Adelaide behaved and told me my cooking was near as good as Ma's.

Did we have to have death at the door, I wondered, for us to get on?

But most of all was the change in Ro. She'd come to us pale and in mourning. In the weeks in which she nursed Alifair color came to her cheeks. She was eating,
something Aunt Betty had said she hadn't done since the baby died. She was filled with purpose.

Pa didn't talk to her, no. He never said one word to her face. But neither did he bad-mouth her. They just sort of moved around each other real careful-like.

One day after he'd been to Pikeville, Calvin handed Ro a note. She read it and shoved it into her apron pocket. Nobody asked about it. But I think everybody was hoping it wasn't from Johnse.

"Fanny," Ro told me in our room that night, "for the first time since little Sarah died I feel I have a reason for living. Soon's Alifair is on the mend I'm a-goin' to Martha Cline's over to Pikeville. She's got six little 'uns and they got the typhoid. She's asked me to come and help her tend 'em."

"Suppose you get sick?" I asked.

"I won't."

"How can you be sure?"

"'Cause I don't care if I die, Fanny baby. And God don't take people like that. It means that living for such a person is a worse punishment. And God wants me to be punished."

"Why?"

"Why, for what I did to this family," she said simply. "For the way it's tore us apart. We're all tore apart, Fanny. And that's another reason I can't stay."

She left the third week in April to attend Martha Cline's family. And she didn't get typhoid. And she never once spoke of Nancy being wed to Johnse Hatfield.

Alifair recovered. We went back to school. I thought it an oddment that Alifair, with all her powers and her healing meetings, had needed Ro, a sinner, to make her well. But nobody else thought of it. And soon's Alifair was up and about she was back in the kitchen taking over and bossing me around, mean as a hornet all over again. Once, when she found out I hadn't scrubbed a certain pot after using it, she even hit me.

"I wish you'd a-died!" I shouted at her and ran out of the house.

Nobody cared that she hit me. Things were back to the way they always were.

I
F PEOPLE HEREABOUTS
recollect Election Day of 1880 as the day my sister Roseanna ran off with Johnse Hatfield, they will always mark Election Day of 1882 as the time of the Big Trouble. The day commenced with a heavy morning mist that everybody said would burn off and become heat. They were right. The heat lay on us all. So did the bugs and the mood of trouble. Because the Hatfields were coming.

The past summer had been quiet, with nobody fussing at anybody, but underneath you could sense that everybody was just a-waitin' for some trouble they couldn't put a name to. If we get through Election Day we'll be right as rain, they were a-sayin'. Everybody knew Devil Anse and his kin were coming. That put the hex on Election Day, of course, and made everybody nervous as an ugly girl at a box-supper auction.

I was nine then and old enough to get a purchase on
the feeling. The end of August is a bad time anyways. People are tuckered out from the summer farm work, the harvest is still not yet in, and they're strung tighter than a fiddle string about to break for too much pluckin'. My brother Floyd was the first to alert me.

I was up at his cabin because I was to help him bring his whiskey and toys. Right off I saw he was loading no whiskey into the wagon, but I didn't ask why. Instead I asked why Devil Anse and his people were even allowed to come to our elections.

"Don't they have their own elections in West Virginny?"

It was then that Floyd told me why they'd always come. "Old Devil Anse tries to run things in Pike County elections. Why you think one of the officers in our sheriff's department is a Hatfield? Devil Anse buys votes. And this year he's boating his own whiskey across the Tug. Warned me not to bring mine. If that don't rile me, I don't know what."

"Did you tell Pa?"

"'Course not. Ain't we had enough trouble? What trouble comes this year won't be on my account."

Everybody turned out. Everybody excepting Johnse and Nancy Hatfield and my sister Ro, of course. I missed Ro something awful. And I stayed on my lone most of the time, not joining in the kid games. After all, I was nine now, tall for my age, and I'd toted a lot of miseries. I was nobody's toady to be told to run a sack race or play toss and catch.

Watching the little kids play their games, I thought about my sister Ro. She was an oddment, that was a
given. There was Adelaide still studying to be a granny lady and Alifair still going to meetings to heal people, and without any of their foolishment, Ro was going around regular-like now and taking care of sick people, wherever they were. She was so busy, I scarce saw her these days.

Elections went on normal enough that day, with Hatfields at one end of the field and McCoys at the other. In the middle was the dance platform. My brother Bill commenced to play "Sourwood Mountain," and right off Tolbert started in a-dancin'. Nobody could dance like Tolbert. Everybody clapped for him and told him to dance some more. Right then Black Elias Hatfield, brother of Devil Anse, stepped onto the platform and started running his mouth. They called him Black Elias because he always dressed all in black.

"Ain't there room for a Hatfield on this dance floor?" he asked.

"Soon's you pay me the five bucks you owe me, Lias," Tolbert said.

Lias got all stiff then, like he had a bone in his throat. "What money's that?" he asked my brother. And right off you could tell they weren't talking about money, that money was the last thing they were talking about. But Tolbert went on to remind him about the debt. Lias just laughed, of course, and said how Tolbert should try to come and get it from him, which around these parts is spoiling for a fight even if you aren't a Hatfield or a McCoy. Everybody backed off, the music stopped, and mamas started grabbing their children.

Tolbert and Lias went at each other like a coon dog
and a possum. Men in back of the crowd were taking bets. Lias was bigger than my brother, but he was drunk on Hatfield whiskey, and soon he was laid out on the dance platform. The Hatfields didn't cotton to this at all, naturally, and soon Elias's brother Ellison stepped onto the platform, and more insults were traded as these two had at it. Some women screamed as blood was drawn on both sides.

I got afeared for Tolbert. He was all wore out. Finally Ellison got a hold on him, one of those holds that could break a person's neck. Everybody in the crowd gasped. But then, quicker than a June bug, Tolbert got a knife from somewhere on his person and started slashing at Ellison, who would have killed him then and there if he could.