Clay’s Quilt, by Silas House.
Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2001.
$21.95 - 292 pages.

For those of us who live in Appalachia, this vague geographical region that embodies Kentucky coal mines, Georgia textile mills and the blue mountains of Western North Carolina, we come to know that the word “home” is subjective and arbitrary. Yet, the “sense of place” that makes a home-sick man from Rabun County, Ga., abandon a job in Cincinnati and hitch-hike home differs little from his counterpart in Kentucky or up-state New York. For better or worse, many of us need mountains, coves and fog as much as we need food and water.

Much of Appalachian literature concerns itself with the interaction between people and their environment. Our greatest literary works are permeated with variations on this theme: the loss of home, the subsequent sense of alienation and the yearning to return. There are numerous subtle variations in which the bond is physically or psychologically broken and the protagonist struggles to be reunited with family and place. In the final analysis, an Appalachian writer’s reputation may depend on his ability to capture this theme. In fact, his ability to evoke the sights and sounds of a particular region are frequently the justification for calling him an “Appalachian writer.”

The young Kentucky novelist Silas House possesses a near-magical ability to recreate a singular place - Free Creek, Ky. His protagonist, Clay Sizemore, searches for reunion with a land and a culture that he has never left. Clay is a young coal-miner who was orphaned at the age of 4 by a tragedy that is shrouded in mystery. He launches an odyssey into his past in order to discover his own identity. Each subsequent revelation brings him closer to an understanding of his family, his parentage and his culture, but it also takes him to the edge of a dark abyss. Clay’s journey of discovery is filled with anguish — as Robert Morgan notes, the novel’s narrative “is so real it is painful to read in places.”

However, Clay’s Quilt also exudes a vitality and a kind of perverse joy which is as indigenous to mountain culture as its Scots-Irish heritage. Clay and his cousins (male and female) are a “high-passioned breed.” They drink, dance, fight and love with considerable intensity, and it is in the depiction of this lust for life that makes the author an Appalachian writer.

Clay and his best friend, Cake, cruise through the Kentucky nights drinking beer and smoking pot while the tape deck plays Dylan, Bill Monroe and Lucinda Williams. Up at the Hilltop tavern, they buck-dance, flirt and talk to their cousins - maybe fight a little. The graphic description is raw and real. From the permanent stain of coal dust in Clay’s eyelashes to the Root Beer stand in Free Creek where teenagers sit talking on the hoods of their cars - in a town that shuts down at dark - this novel is packed with authenticity. With the description of the wash and thunder of a passing 18-wheeler coal truck, the strains of “Wayfaring Stranger” drifting from the Pentecostal church to the fried-baloney-and-egg sandwich that Cake eats for breakfast, Clay’s Quilt defines a remote and self-contained Appalachia where “If the War on Poverty passed through here, we never heard the guns.”

It is also a world refreshingly free of stereotypes. There are no rants against the coal companies, no moonshiners and no snake-handlers. Instead, we have Clay’s Aunt Easter who loves her church, sometimes feels the Spirit move (she has been known to speak in tongues), and possesses “second sight.” She is a wonderfully conceived character that represents one of the best - and most commonly misunderstood - aspects of mountain religion. And then, there is Alma, who plays the fiddle (“Smoke on the Water” and “Bile ’em Cabbage Down”). She’s a refugee from a bad marriage who comes to love Clay Sizemore. Indeed, the courtship of Clay and Alma made me sweat a bit.

Perhaps the most significant recurring theme in the novel is mystical - a growing awareness of invisible bonds; a kind of intangible bridge between the present and the past. For Easter, Clay’s dead mother is a potent force in the young man’s life. She believes that the spirits of the dead abide in the mountain fog, living in the strains of Gaelic music, a distant fiddle tune that she sometimes hears (and others sense).
There are negative forces, too. Clay’s Quilt has an abundance of abusive husbands, drunken philanderers and gun-toting hot-heads who nurse an unresolved grudge. However, one of the attributes of this novel is the fact that it acknowledges and embraces the total human landscape - the flawed, petty and ignoble as well as the admirable, lovable and courageous. Clay Sizemore’s growing self-knowledge requires a confrontation with the violence in his own heart - a truth that almost destroys him.

Finally, I want to comment on this novel’s exquisite style. The passages are too numerous to quote, but I wish to briefly note the author’s impressive talent for imaginative details. In one marvelous surreal passage, the grieving Clay imagines the death of the man who murdered his mother - Clay imagines him attacked by a thousand avenging redbirds who cover the killer’s body, forcing him to collapse in a frozen creek where he drowns. In another passage, Clay imagines his ancestors, including the man who killed his mother, standing in the fog-shrouded valley below his aunt’s home - a specteral, mute phalanx that vanishes in the distance - witnesses to his life. Finally, there is Alma’s fantasy as she sits in cheap motel room on a South Carolina beach. She imagines all of the past occupants - children, lonely people, drunks, newlyweds - all of the countless striving, yearning souls that have slept there.

It seems safe to venture a prediction about Silas House. We will hear from him again, I think, and we will be honored to do so.

(Gary Carden is a writer who lives in Sylva. His book, Mason Jars in the Flood, was recently named Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association. He can be reached at gcarden498@aol.com)

 

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