Clay's Quilt by Silas House (review)

for the publisher. The stories in this collection represent his most unforgettable sketches after the "curing." It is a long overdue assembly of Jesse Stuart at his best. But it's been worth the wait. —Marshall Myers House, Silas. Clay's Quilt. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2001. 304 pages. Hardcover, $22.95. Author Silas House has chosen an appropriate metaphor to title his first novel: CZay's Quilt is the story of a young man trying to stitch together his personal history in a way that makes sense. Coming of age in the rural, mining culture of Eastern Kentucky, protagonist Clay Sizemore's life has more tough angles and strange strips of cloth than most of us can imagine. Clay's mother Anneth was "the wildest woman in Crowe County, Kentucky" (17), and his father was a soldier she met two days before he shipped off to die in Vietnam. Glenn, Clay's stepfather, died an equally untimely death by drowning—but only after murdering Anneth and the friends who were helping her leave him. Clay's only memory of this incident was a dream "of blood on the snow, blood so thick that it ran slow like syrup and lay in stripes across the whiteness, as if someone has dashed out a bucket of paint" (7). Orphaned at four, he was reared in the holler of Free Creek by his extended family, sleeping in the double-wide trailer of his hard-living Uncle Gabe and taking meals and maternal nurture from his mother's Pentecostal sister, Easter. As a result, the boy grew up with one foot in Christian fundamentalism and the other in a never-ending party. Put so baldly, the situation sounds like a teaser from a television talk show. But the empathy of Silas House shows itself immediately: the disrespect often directed toward people in such situations never crosses the page. The darker facts of the characters' lives are hard, to be sure, but they are always presented in a context of realistic detail that precludes simplistic judgments. In fact, the more sordid aspects are overshadowed by the grounded values that pervade the text—values that find their foundation in the deepest veins of Appalachian culture. In approaching such values, House employs an engaging cast of characters to portray two competing social forces: fundamentalist Christianity, as represented by Free Creek Pentecostal Church; and the consumer culture that infiltrates ruralAppalachia, clearly displayed by the Hilltop Club. While church is the center of life outside the family for Easter and her kind, the bar is the social center for the non-religious 66 population—it's where Clay and his friends spend their weekends. In contrast to most expectations, the Hilltop is a fitting comparison to the Pentecostal church: a real if hazy kind of fellowship takes place there, as friends congregate and enjoy each other's company, drinking hard, sometimes using illegal drugs and dancing to the music of the local star, Evangeline. It is to House's credit that he can show both forces not only in their weaknesses but also in their strengths—and in their similarities. A significant strand is that music is an equally important form of expression in the church, where the lead singer is Clay's Aunt Easter, and in the bar. Indeed, the Hilltop Club's Evangeline is the cokesnorting daughter—and the former lead singer—of the Mosley Family, Easter's favorite gospel group. Of course, the destructiveness of an alcohol-oriented consumer culture goes without saying, but the church culture, too, is far from perfect. We learn, for example, that Evangeline's sister Alma was courted by her abusive husband in just such a church, and that later her father, because of this association, encouraged her to stay with him regardless of the beatings. Neither of these forces becomes the ultimate grounding influence in Clay's growth. Unconsciously he seems to be seeking something deeper, and he finds it through Alma, the girl who becomes his heart's desire. Though she is Evangeline's sister, she does not share the bar-singer's approach to life; but neither does she find her musical roots in the gospel music...