Clay's Quilt

Published in 2001, Clay's Quilt is a contemporary fiction novel by Silas House. After four-year-old Clay witnesses his mother's murder, he grows up in a small Appalachian mining town and learns to build a family from the people around him. Clay's Quilt was House's debut novel; he has since authored six more books and three plays. Silas' work also appears in Newsday, The New York Times, and Oxford American, among many others. House is also a music writer and the recipient of three honorary doctorates.

It is the 1990s. Twenty-year-old Clay Sizemore was born in the little town of Free Creek, Kentucky, and he is pretty sure he will die there. He spends his days working at the local coal mine. His nights are spent drinking at the Hilltop Club bar with his best friend, Cake, and bringing home girls for meaningless sex. There is one thing above all else that has shaped Clay's life: when Clay was four years old, his mother, Anneth ("the wildest woman in Crowe County, Kentucky"), was killed before his eyes. His only memory of the horrific event is a reoccurring nightmare of "blood on the snow, blood so thick that it ran slow like syrup and lay in stripes across the whiteness, as if someone had dashed out a bucket of paint."

Since his father had died in the Vietnam War, the orphaned Clay was cared for by his extended family. He grew up in the doublewide trailer of his mother's brother and sister, partying Uncle Gabe and God-fearing Aunt Easter. There is also his beautiful cousin, Dreama, who is like a sister to him, and Uncle Paul, the quilter. When Clay graduated from high school and began working at the coal mine, he moved out of the doublewide to his own apartment only ten miles away. His aunt and uncle treated the event as a tragedy because, in Appalachian culture, loyalty is valued above all else.



Aunt Easter is the lead singer in the Free Creek Pentecostal Church choir and has a gift for seeing the future. Thus, she keeps Clay living with one foot in the church. Clay's other foot, however, enjoys the lively secular scene of Free Creek. The townsfolk love drinking, doing illegal drugs, and dancing to the Hilltop Club's house band—the star singer of which is the wild, cocaine-snorting Evangeline. One night, Evangeline's sister, Alma, sits in with the band. It is quickly apparent to all who hear her that she has a gift for playing the fiddle. Clay falls in love with her, but Alma has her own problems.

Alma is currently separated from Denzel, her abusive husband. She and Evangeline are the daughters of the Mosley Family, Aunt Easter's favorite gospel band. In fact, Evangeline used to be the group's lead singer before she left the church. Alma met her husband in the church, where divorce is forbidden, and because of this, her father wishes for her to go back home to her husband and endure the abuse to save face for the family.

Clay wants to abandon his partying lifestyle and settle down with Alma, but he feels he cannot move forward until he makes peace with his past. He studies a box of his mother's possessions to try to find out who she was, and by extension, who he is. It is revealed that his mother was trying to leave Glenn, her abusive husband. On New Year's Day, she took Clay and fled in a car across an icy mountain pass, but Glenn followed them and killed her, along with the friends that were helping her escape. Glenn later drowned.



As Clay contemplates his mother’s fate and the cycle of violence that seems so prevalent in all their lives, Uncle Paul quietly makes him a quilt from Anneth's old clothes. In Appalachian culture, quilts serve as a family album. A scrap from a Sunday dress, a shirt, a scarf—these pieces of fabric bring their memories to the quilt, creating a memento of a life or a family. It is a meaningful item to Clay.

Meanwhile, Dreama has married her boyfriend, Darry. Soon, she discovers that he is cheating on her, and she divorces him. This leaves her a nineteen-year-old single mother on welfare. Even so, she says she simply had to marry Darry to be happy. In other words, she needed to make her own mistakes to learn and grow as a person.

As Clay and Alma's relationship progresses, she discovers that she is pregnant. Denzel finds out and becomes jealous. He confronts them, and Clay kills him. Alma later gives birth to a girl they name Maggie. In a completion of the journey that he began as a child with Anneth, Clay, Alma, and Maggie cross over the mountain pass of Kentucky to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to begin a new life. Soon, realizing that it is not home, they return to Free Creek and their kin.