“YOU’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.
RO 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?
IT 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.