Halloween 2016, horror. FirstFruits
Firstfruits
2009 Angelia Sparrow
The icy winter road that took the lives of Clarindy Wishom's family melted into spring-wet blacktop shaded by yellow-green leaves before the three small coffins and one large one were lowered into the ground at Beulah Hill Cemetery. But as Easter passed and summer came on, the church ladies worried about Miss Clarindy's frame of mind.
“All alone in that big house, just rattling like a pea in a can,” one would say.
“Hasn't got rid of their things, either. It must be just awful, seeing those little toys every day.”
Everyone agreed something had to be done. But nobody was pleased with who did it.
Clarindy sat watching the front walk, as she always did this time of afternoon. It often took her until almost four to realize that Lila and Evan weren't coming home from school and that Michelle hadn't just taken a long nap.
Most evenings, she went to the kitchen, stared listlessly at the frozen dinners and covered-dish casseroles, watching the frost sparkle among the lumps of hamburger or chopped potatoes or pies. She'd frozen a lot of stuff from the wake and she wasn't even sure it'd be good five months later.
The doorbell startled her out of her watching. She used the coat-rack mirror to pat down her hair in a gesture so automatic, she would probably do it when the Judgement
Trump sounded.
The sight of Oholah Jenkins on her doorstep, a bundle in her hands, shocked Clarindy into motion. Oholah Jenkins never went calling. Nor would most have received her if she had. Although she sat in the third pew, her cane planted solidly between her feet, every Sunday at Pisgah Baptist Church, common gossip still called her a witch.
Even Clarindy knew that more than one love-struck teen girl visited Oholah's back door for a charm, only to come back again in a couple months for a drink to ward off the
effects of the last charm.
But even the shock could only keep her moving so long. She stood in the door and stared. She stared so long Miss Oholah gave her The Glare, a semi-legendary look that had been known to quell troublemakers in church at every age from toddlers up to their graying grandfathers.
“Clarindy Wishom, you never had any manners,” Miss Oholah stared. “It's about to rain.”
Clarindy shook herself. “I'm sorry, ma'am. Please, come in.” She realized as she looked around the room that she hadn't dusted or vacuumed in ages or replaced the burned out bulbs in the lamps. As Oholah seated herself on the sofa, Clarindy hurried to the kitchen.
There was no cake or pie or even cookies to offer her guest. She was out of tea, too. She couldn't remember the last time she'd shopped. Or eaten for that matter. She found a lone can of soda in the back of the fridge and took it to the front room.
“Can I off you a drink, Miss Oholah?”
The old woman shook her head. “Looks like you need it more, daughter. I came because you need something more.” She untied the bundle, spreading it over the sofa. “You need to grieve and continue instead of being stuck in your shock like a fat turtle in a garbage pail. That's why I'm here.”
Clarindy sat down on the other end of the sofa and looked into the bundle. Cloth, lots of cloth, most of it black or gray, lay in neatly folded smaller bundles. She
didn't understand.
“We're going to make a graveyard quilt. It's an old mountain mourning custom, been out of fashion for a hundred and fifty years, but my family always made them. Seemed to help the women-folk move along life's path. You got no mother or aunty or grandmother or sister to teach you and help you do this. So, get your sewing box and some paper, Clarindy, and we'll start this.”
“A quilt?” Clarindy's laugh shocked her with its bitter anger. “You think a quilt will help anything?”
“Tain't just a quilt, daughter. It's a record of your people. It's a way for you to feel the pain and let it go instead of cuddling it close in like it was a teddy bear. Pain is a bear, right enough, but it will eat your heart and your life and you as well, like a grizzly bear.”
Oholah took out an old-fashioned snapshot book. She offered it over. “These are graveyard quilts. Take a look. Think. Is there a pattern you wanted to make but
never did?”
Clarindy looked at the pictures. All the quilts had a central square fenced off from the rest of the pattern and a path that ran to the border. Little black six-sided coffins bearing embroidered names and dates lay within the center and more coffins with names but no dates were tacked to the border of each quilt, all awaiting more deaths.
She shivered and handed the book back to Oholah. “That's morbid.”
“And you sitting here in the dark, not eating, waiting for children who aren't coming home from school ever again, ain't?” Oholah snapped, her famous temper peeking through.
Clarindy just looked at her, blank and aching.
“Well-a-day.” Oholah sorted the fabric into stacks by color and size of print. “We'll get you through this, Clarindy, just you watch.”
Clarindy sat in her big chair, not paying attention to the television. She had always hated embroidering and the satin stitch of the graveyard fence was coming slowly.
Black on light gray. At least she'd gotten some blues and violets in among the grays and blacks of the churn-dash squares. Oholah was right, she did feel better. She'd been to the store and to church this week and last week too. She'd cleaned some. She still slept too many hours and caught herself listening for Everett and the children. She still felt like she was moving through a fog. But at least she didn't feel like there were weights on her ankles and wrists anymore. She suspected the weight where her heart should be might never go away.
She stitched another picket and then turned off the tv. It was late, she should get the babies to bed. She stopped the thought. Maybe next week, she would bundle up the kids' clothes to go to Goodwill.
Seventeen churn dash squares, eighteen plain black ones. She'd had a busy month. Oholah Jenkins came over on Tuesdays and Thursdays to sit and sew and talk.
Clarindy stacked the quilt squares neatly and went to bed. She dreamed of her family. The sewing made her feel closer even as she let them go, but in the dreams she was with them again. The children laughed and played in the summer sunshine as she and Everett cuddled on a blanket and watched.
She woke with tears on her face. Instead of getting up, she took two sleeping pills and went back to bed. Maybe she could find her way back to the dream.
The coffins were the hardest, as she had known they would be. She stitched her grandparents' first, letting the good memories ease her into the work. Baking cookies for Christmas, riding the lawn tractor, hanging laundry and planting petunias. Long sunlit afternoons on the porch swing, steaks on the grill, cutting asparagus and rhubarb. She appliquéd the coffins into the graveyard in the center of the quilt, remembering the funerals.
Everett's coffin came next. She tried thinking of the good things. Their first date for ice cream and how he'd gotten it on his nose. Their wedding day. Buying the house. She cried the whole time as she embroidered and could not bring herself to appliqué it on. She pinned it where she wanted it and went to bed.
She dreamed of Everett all night long.
Clarindy's alarm went off at eight and she dragged out of bed. As she passed the quilt, draped over the arm of her favorite chair, she noticed it didn't look right. Everett's
coffin was no longer in the graveyard. The pin lay on the floor and the coffin itself had been basted back onto the border.
She'd think about it after she had her tea. Or not.
It was easier just to pin it back and start on Lila's coffin. Her tears had all been spent. She stitched dry-eyed, remembering little things like the dress she had crocheted for Lila's fourth birthday and the all A report card the girl had brought home days before her death. “Lila Marie Wishom,” she embroidered and the dates. “Even Lee Wishom” came next, along with memories of his first Christmas, when he'd been just big enough to rip into the wrapping paper like his big sister, but more interested in
teething on the boxes.
The tears came again with baby Michelle's. Her tiny girl, so soft, who hadn't even lost that sweet baby smell yet. Not even walking. She clutched the quilt and cried, rocking
and pretending she could feel the downy head against her cheek and smell the baby wash.
Oholah would come tomorrow. There would be time to sew the coffins down then. Clarindy went back to bed for the rest of the day.
The pins had popped their heads again and the coffins were out of the graveyard and back on the border when she took it back up with Oholah the next afternoon.
She'd showered and eaten and even checked her mail. Once again, she thanked Everett silently for setting up the automated bill-paying out of their account. The insurance
settlement had been enough that her day to day expenses would be no worry for the next five years. Maybe in five years, she'd feel normal again and able to work.
“Miss Oholah, the coffin patches keep moving.”
Oholah nodded. “Happens that way sometimes. Specially when the living don't want to let go of the dead. The dead can hang around, you know, waiting and watching what used to be their lives.”
Clarindy looked at her in shock. “Really?”
Oholah nodded and stitched on one of the pickets. “Oh indeed. One of my little playmates was run over by a car when we were wee things. She never seemed to learn
she was dead. We played together many evenings, until my Mama caught wind of it and prayed over her to send her on to heaven. I never quite forgave Mama for taking my friend away like that, but I was really getting too big to be playing tag at twilight time.”
Clarindy set her lips in a hard line. “Ain't been praying much lately. I just don't feel God around like I used to. I reckon He abandoned me about the day of the wreck.”
Oholah made the sign of the Evil Eye. “Clarindy Wishom, you can be as rude as you like to me, but don't you be rude to God.”
“Why? Isn't He big enough to take it? You, an ordinary woman, can tolerate it, but the all-powerful King of the Universe can't?”
Oholah muttered a fast prayer and turned her shawl inside out to ward off the bad luck. “You just sew, missy. You'll feel bad enough about blasphemy later, so I won't
add to it.” She looked up, her old gray eyes the color of ice. “Do you want me to send your people on? Tain't good for them to just hover and watch. That's why you're still bitter in your grief. They're too close and you can feel them. There's no getting them back, you know.”
“I know,” said Clarindy. She got the coffins stitched down. Oholah had given her a lot to think about.
Clarindy and Oholah finished the quilt top before July. Oholah gave her directions on how to pin it all together for the quilting part. They set up Oholah's quilting frame and set to work. The coffins had stayed in the graveyard after she'd sewed them down.
Clarindy kept her conversation light, much lighter than she felt. She had been talking to Everett and the children nightly. Her prayers had changed. She talked to her dead instead of God. They answered her better. Everett came to her at night and lay beside her. She could smell his aftershave and the smell of him, warm and male, in her bed.
She slept better.
Oholah had taken to carrying a small mirror with her on a chain. “You're haunted, Clarindy. And since it's by your choice, nothing I can do will change it. But I don't aim to be taking ghosts home.” She still came twice a week and they quilted all the long hot summer, to the soft hum of the central air and “Turkey in the Straw” playing from the passing ice cream truck.
The quilt lay, finished, across the hanger. Clarindy had moved her grandmother's oil painting and her mother's hideous macramé owl made in '73, in preparation to hang it. She ran one finger over all the black coffins basted to the border. No one would embroider her death date on the one that bore her name and then sew it down. She was the last of her family.
She took the quilt from the frame and laid it atop her bed. Something in the back of her mind told her it was a bad idea. But Everett's voice told her she needed to sleep
under it, just once. Yes, sleep, dream of her lost family and be with them once more in her dreams.
Clarindy snuggled down under the graveyard quilt. She'd hang it in the morning.
“Mama, teach me to embroider,” Lila begged.
Clarindy smiled and picked up a black coffin-shaped patch as big as her hand. “Just like this, little one.” She used the white chalk to draw an L on the coffin and threaded Lila's needle.
“Can we do this all the time?” Lila turned a neat outline stitch around the letter.
“Of course, we can, punkin.”
Lila threw soft warm arms around Clarindy's neck. “We miss you and want to come home.”
Clarindy woke in tears, an unusual thing these days. The clock showed midnight. She knew what she had to do.
She turned on the light and went to get her seam ripper. The four little black coffins had been quilted down in a curving pattern that Miss Oholah called Baptist Fans. Clarindy thought it looked like sunrise across the graveyard. She had to be done by sunrise.
She ripped out the quilting stitches that held Everett's coffin. Then she took the appliqué stitches. Once the coffin was free, she ripped the final date from the patch
and basted it back to the edge, next to her own. She took the children's from the graveyard and erased their deaths.
Let Miss Oholah fuss. She didn't care. It was obscene. Eight years, six and one. Those dates shouldn't be carved on any stone or written in any family Bible or sewn into a death quilt like this.
Clarindy wadded the quilt into a ball and threw it into a corner of the sofa. She was done with mourning. She was done with grief.
She sat in her big chair, her Bible on her lap, and waited. Her fingers flipped the pages, but finally came to rest in First Corinthians. She glanced down to see one had
alighted on chapter fifteen, verse twenty. “But now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” She smiled and waited.
At three, the front door scraped open.
2009 Angelia Sparrow
The icy winter road that took the lives of Clarindy Wishom's family melted into spring-wet blacktop shaded by yellow-green leaves before the three small coffins and one large one were lowered into the ground at Beulah Hill Cemetery. But as Easter passed and summer came on, the church ladies worried about Miss Clarindy's frame of mind.
“All alone in that big house, just rattling like a pea in a can,” one would say.
“Hasn't got rid of their things, either. It must be just awful, seeing those little toys every day.”
Everyone agreed something had to be done. But nobody was pleased with who did it.
Clarindy sat watching the front walk, as she always did this time of afternoon. It often took her until almost four to realize that Lila and Evan weren't coming home from school and that Michelle hadn't just taken a long nap.
Most evenings, she went to the kitchen, stared listlessly at the frozen dinners and covered-dish casseroles, watching the frost sparkle among the lumps of hamburger or chopped potatoes or pies. She'd frozen a lot of stuff from the wake and she wasn't even sure it'd be good five months later.
The doorbell startled her out of her watching. She used the coat-rack mirror to pat down her hair in a gesture so automatic, she would probably do it when the Judgement
Trump sounded.
The sight of Oholah Jenkins on her doorstep, a bundle in her hands, shocked Clarindy into motion. Oholah Jenkins never went calling. Nor would most have received her if she had. Although she sat in the third pew, her cane planted solidly between her feet, every Sunday at Pisgah Baptist Church, common gossip still called her a witch.
Even Clarindy knew that more than one love-struck teen girl visited Oholah's back door for a charm, only to come back again in a couple months for a drink to ward off the
effects of the last charm.
But even the shock could only keep her moving so long. She stood in the door and stared. She stared so long Miss Oholah gave her The Glare, a semi-legendary look that had been known to quell troublemakers in church at every age from toddlers up to their graying grandfathers.
“Clarindy Wishom, you never had any manners,” Miss Oholah stared. “It's about to rain.”
Clarindy shook herself. “I'm sorry, ma'am. Please, come in.” She realized as she looked around the room that she hadn't dusted or vacuumed in ages or replaced the burned out bulbs in the lamps. As Oholah seated herself on the sofa, Clarindy hurried to the kitchen.
There was no cake or pie or even cookies to offer her guest. She was out of tea, too. She couldn't remember the last time she'd shopped. Or eaten for that matter. She found a lone can of soda in the back of the fridge and took it to the front room.
“Can I off you a drink, Miss Oholah?”
The old woman shook her head. “Looks like you need it more, daughter. I came because you need something more.” She untied the bundle, spreading it over the sofa. “You need to grieve and continue instead of being stuck in your shock like a fat turtle in a garbage pail. That's why I'm here.”
Clarindy sat down on the other end of the sofa and looked into the bundle. Cloth, lots of cloth, most of it black or gray, lay in neatly folded smaller bundles. She
didn't understand.
“We're going to make a graveyard quilt. It's an old mountain mourning custom, been out of fashion for a hundred and fifty years, but my family always made them. Seemed to help the women-folk move along life's path. You got no mother or aunty or grandmother or sister to teach you and help you do this. So, get your sewing box and some paper, Clarindy, and we'll start this.”
“A quilt?” Clarindy's laugh shocked her with its bitter anger. “You think a quilt will help anything?”
“Tain't just a quilt, daughter. It's a record of your people. It's a way for you to feel the pain and let it go instead of cuddling it close in like it was a teddy bear. Pain is a bear, right enough, but it will eat your heart and your life and you as well, like a grizzly bear.”
Oholah took out an old-fashioned snapshot book. She offered it over. “These are graveyard quilts. Take a look. Think. Is there a pattern you wanted to make but
never did?”
Clarindy looked at the pictures. All the quilts had a central square fenced off from the rest of the pattern and a path that ran to the border. Little black six-sided coffins bearing embroidered names and dates lay within the center and more coffins with names but no dates were tacked to the border of each quilt, all awaiting more deaths.
She shivered and handed the book back to Oholah. “That's morbid.”
“And you sitting here in the dark, not eating, waiting for children who aren't coming home from school ever again, ain't?” Oholah snapped, her famous temper peeking through.
Clarindy just looked at her, blank and aching.
“Well-a-day.” Oholah sorted the fabric into stacks by color and size of print. “We'll get you through this, Clarindy, just you watch.”
Clarindy sat in her big chair, not paying attention to the television. She had always hated embroidering and the satin stitch of the graveyard fence was coming slowly.
Black on light gray. At least she'd gotten some blues and violets in among the grays and blacks of the churn-dash squares. Oholah was right, she did feel better. She'd been to the store and to church this week and last week too. She'd cleaned some. She still slept too many hours and caught herself listening for Everett and the children. She still felt like she was moving through a fog. But at least she didn't feel like there were weights on her ankles and wrists anymore. She suspected the weight where her heart should be might never go away.
She stitched another picket and then turned off the tv. It was late, she should get the babies to bed. She stopped the thought. Maybe next week, she would bundle up the kids' clothes to go to Goodwill.
Seventeen churn dash squares, eighteen plain black ones. She'd had a busy month. Oholah Jenkins came over on Tuesdays and Thursdays to sit and sew and talk.
Clarindy stacked the quilt squares neatly and went to bed. She dreamed of her family. The sewing made her feel closer even as she let them go, but in the dreams she was with them again. The children laughed and played in the summer sunshine as she and Everett cuddled on a blanket and watched.
She woke with tears on her face. Instead of getting up, she took two sleeping pills and went back to bed. Maybe she could find her way back to the dream.
The coffins were the hardest, as she had known they would be. She stitched her grandparents' first, letting the good memories ease her into the work. Baking cookies for Christmas, riding the lawn tractor, hanging laundry and planting petunias. Long sunlit afternoons on the porch swing, steaks on the grill, cutting asparagus and rhubarb. She appliquéd the coffins into the graveyard in the center of the quilt, remembering the funerals.
Everett's coffin came next. She tried thinking of the good things. Their first date for ice cream and how he'd gotten it on his nose. Their wedding day. Buying the house. She cried the whole time as she embroidered and could not bring herself to appliqué it on. She pinned it where she wanted it and went to bed.
She dreamed of Everett all night long.
Clarindy's alarm went off at eight and she dragged out of bed. As she passed the quilt, draped over the arm of her favorite chair, she noticed it didn't look right. Everett's
coffin was no longer in the graveyard. The pin lay on the floor and the coffin itself had been basted back onto the border.
She'd think about it after she had her tea. Or not.
It was easier just to pin it back and start on Lila's coffin. Her tears had all been spent. She stitched dry-eyed, remembering little things like the dress she had crocheted for Lila's fourth birthday and the all A report card the girl had brought home days before her death. “Lila Marie Wishom,” she embroidered and the dates. “Even Lee Wishom” came next, along with memories of his first Christmas, when he'd been just big enough to rip into the wrapping paper like his big sister, but more interested in
teething on the boxes.
The tears came again with baby Michelle's. Her tiny girl, so soft, who hadn't even lost that sweet baby smell yet. Not even walking. She clutched the quilt and cried, rocking
and pretending she could feel the downy head against her cheek and smell the baby wash.
Oholah would come tomorrow. There would be time to sew the coffins down then. Clarindy went back to bed for the rest of the day.
The pins had popped their heads again and the coffins were out of the graveyard and back on the border when she took it back up with Oholah the next afternoon.
She'd showered and eaten and even checked her mail. Once again, she thanked Everett silently for setting up the automated bill-paying out of their account. The insurance
settlement had been enough that her day to day expenses would be no worry for the next five years. Maybe in five years, she'd feel normal again and able to work.
“Miss Oholah, the coffin patches keep moving.”
Oholah nodded. “Happens that way sometimes. Specially when the living don't want to let go of the dead. The dead can hang around, you know, waiting and watching what used to be their lives.”
Clarindy looked at her in shock. “Really?”
Oholah nodded and stitched on one of the pickets. “Oh indeed. One of my little playmates was run over by a car when we were wee things. She never seemed to learn
she was dead. We played together many evenings, until my Mama caught wind of it and prayed over her to send her on to heaven. I never quite forgave Mama for taking my friend away like that, but I was really getting too big to be playing tag at twilight time.”
Clarindy set her lips in a hard line. “Ain't been praying much lately. I just don't feel God around like I used to. I reckon He abandoned me about the day of the wreck.”
Oholah made the sign of the Evil Eye. “Clarindy Wishom, you can be as rude as you like to me, but don't you be rude to God.”
“Why? Isn't He big enough to take it? You, an ordinary woman, can tolerate it, but the all-powerful King of the Universe can't?”
Oholah muttered a fast prayer and turned her shawl inside out to ward off the bad luck. “You just sew, missy. You'll feel bad enough about blasphemy later, so I won't
add to it.” She looked up, her old gray eyes the color of ice. “Do you want me to send your people on? Tain't good for them to just hover and watch. That's why you're still bitter in your grief. They're too close and you can feel them. There's no getting them back, you know.”
“I know,” said Clarindy. She got the coffins stitched down. Oholah had given her a lot to think about.
Clarindy and Oholah finished the quilt top before July. Oholah gave her directions on how to pin it all together for the quilting part. They set up Oholah's quilting frame and set to work. The coffins had stayed in the graveyard after she'd sewed them down.
Clarindy kept her conversation light, much lighter than she felt. She had been talking to Everett and the children nightly. Her prayers had changed. She talked to her dead instead of God. They answered her better. Everett came to her at night and lay beside her. She could smell his aftershave and the smell of him, warm and male, in her bed.
She slept better.
Oholah had taken to carrying a small mirror with her on a chain. “You're haunted, Clarindy. And since it's by your choice, nothing I can do will change it. But I don't aim to be taking ghosts home.” She still came twice a week and they quilted all the long hot summer, to the soft hum of the central air and “Turkey in the Straw” playing from the passing ice cream truck.
The quilt lay, finished, across the hanger. Clarindy had moved her grandmother's oil painting and her mother's hideous macramé owl made in '73, in preparation to hang it. She ran one finger over all the black coffins basted to the border. No one would embroider her death date on the one that bore her name and then sew it down. She was the last of her family.
She took the quilt from the frame and laid it atop her bed. Something in the back of her mind told her it was a bad idea. But Everett's voice told her she needed to sleep
under it, just once. Yes, sleep, dream of her lost family and be with them once more in her dreams.
Clarindy snuggled down under the graveyard quilt. She'd hang it in the morning.
“Mama, teach me to embroider,” Lila begged.
Clarindy smiled and picked up a black coffin-shaped patch as big as her hand. “Just like this, little one.” She used the white chalk to draw an L on the coffin and threaded Lila's needle.
“Can we do this all the time?” Lila turned a neat outline stitch around the letter.
“Of course, we can, punkin.”
Lila threw soft warm arms around Clarindy's neck. “We miss you and want to come home.”
Clarindy woke in tears, an unusual thing these days. The clock showed midnight. She knew what she had to do.
She turned on the light and went to get her seam ripper. The four little black coffins had been quilted down in a curving pattern that Miss Oholah called Baptist Fans. Clarindy thought it looked like sunrise across the graveyard. She had to be done by sunrise.
She ripped out the quilting stitches that held Everett's coffin. Then she took the appliqué stitches. Once the coffin was free, she ripped the final date from the patch
and basted it back to the edge, next to her own. She took the children's from the graveyard and erased their deaths.
Let Miss Oholah fuss. She didn't care. It was obscene. Eight years, six and one. Those dates shouldn't be carved on any stone or written in any family Bible or sewn into a death quilt like this.
Clarindy wadded the quilt into a ball and threw it into a corner of the sofa. She was done with mourning. She was done with grief.
She sat in her big chair, her Bible on her lap, and waited. Her fingers flipped the pages, but finally came to rest in First Corinthians. She glanced down to see one had
alighted on chapter fifteen, verse twenty. “But now Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” She smiled and waited.
At three, the front door scraped open.