Ashes (32 page)

“
God rest your Pete’s soul,”
Reba said.

“
Bless you,” Alma said to
her.

Morris glanced at his wristwatch. Thirty
column inches to go, plus he had to knock out a sidebar on a
weekend bluegrass festival. All with the Kelvinator looking over
his shoulder. Kelvin Feeney, Journal-Times editor and all-around
boy wonder, a guy on the come who didn’t care whose backs bricked
the path to that corner office at the corporation’s flagship
paper.

“
So, Alma, when did you
start sewing?” Morris thought of making a pun on “so” and “sew” and
decided to pass.

“
Oh, maybe at the age of
five,” she said. Her eyes stayed focused on the tips of her fingers
as she ran the needle through a scrap of yellow cotton. Laney was
working the scene, twisting the lens to its longest point, zooming
in to get the wrinkled glory of the old woman’s face.

“
Did you learn from your
mother?” Morris asked, scribbling in his notebook. Maybe he could
use some of this in the Great American Novel he’d been working on
since his freshman year, which had been tainted by a professor who
thought Faulkner was the Second Coming and Flannery O’Connor was
the Virgin Mary.

“
She learnt it from me,”
Daisy Eggers said, her eyes like wet bugs behind the curve of her
glasses. Daisy might have been anywhere between eighty and ninety,
her upper lip collapsed as if her dentures were too small. When she
spoke, the grayish tip of her tongue protruded, constantly trying
to keep her upper false teeth in place.

“
Good, we’ll get back to
that.” Morris made a note as Laney’s shutter clicked. “Tell me
about Threads of Hope.”

“
You really need to talk to
Faith about that,” the other Alma said. “She’s the one started it.
We were all sewing anyway, and figured why not get together on
it?”

Reba, who appeared a little less inclined to
defer to their absent leader, said, “Threads of Hope gives blankets
to sick kids in hospitals. Like the Ronald McDonald House and the
Shriner’s Hospital. It’s all about the kids. But you’d best talk to
Faith about that part of it.”

Okay, Morris thought. It’s not Pulitzer
material but at least it has sick kids. Now if I could just work a
cute babe and a puppy into the story, I’d hit the Holy Trinity.

“
Is it local kids, or
someone with a specific type of illness?” Laney asked the obvious
question. She was actually better at that than Morris.

“
Oh, just ones sick any old
way. Faith, she’s a nurse at Mercy Hospital, and she comes in about
once a month and collects them, takes them off. We’ll get a dozen
done on a good morning.” Reba held up the quilt she was working on
and pointed to a scrap of denim. “That come from Doc Watson. You
know, the famous flatpicker.”

Morris had written about Doc a dozen times.
Doc was also up in his golden years, with six Grammys on his trophy
shelf. The musician had tried several times to retire, but every
time he did, someone would launch a festival in his honor and he’d
feel obliged to perform there.

Lillian spoke for the first time since giving
her name. “These scraps have stories in them. They’re like pieces
of people’s lives. And we figure the kids get some of the life out
of those pieces.”

“
And a little hope,” the
other Alma said.

“
Threads of Hope,” Daisy
said, knitting a fishnet-style afghan. Her knitting needles clicked
like chopsticks, pushing and hooking yarn. The janitor came into
the room, and though it was cramped, he managed to sweep the tiny
scraps off the floor without once brushing against Laney. Morris
wrote it all down, and they were back in the office by lunch time.
The ladies had been all smiles by the time they left, speculating
on how many copies of Friday’s edition they were going to buy and
which relatives they would call.

The phone call came shortly after eleven in
the morning. The edition couldn’t have been on the street for more
than an hour, and those who received the paper via home delivery
probably wouldn’t see theirs until late afternoon. Morris dreaded
the post-edition phone calls. The tri-weekly had a low circulation,
but the reading audience was exacting.

“
Journal-Times
news desk,” Morris
answered, in his most aloof voice.

“
Are you Morris
Stanfield?”

“
Yes, ma’am.” It was always
bad when they guessed your name.

“
We have a serious
problem.”

“
Ma’am?” Morris’ finger
edged toward the phone, planning a quick transfer to the
Kelvinator. Serious problems were beyond the capabilities of an ink
whore.

“
Did you write the Threads
of Hope article?”

Sometimes they called to say thanks.
Sometimes, but not often. “About the sewing circle.”

“
Where did you get your
information?”

“
From the
ladies.”

“
The ladies.” She sounded
like a high school English teacher who was upset that a student had
opted for the Cliff Notes during the Hawthorne semester. Her voice
sounded familiar.

“
It was a feature about a
group of friends who get together and sew. A people
feature.”

“
You were supposed to call
me.”

“
Are you Faith Gordon?” He
had meant to call her, really, but between the domestic dispute
that led to a police standoff and the damned bluegrass festival
sidebar, Morris had been forced to slam his story out an hour
before deadline. The Threads of Hope web site had provided some
history on the organization, about how the effort had been started
by a seamstress in Kentucky whose son had been diagnosed with a
brain tumor. A story of courage and perseverance, a true sob story,
fraught with unsung heroes and all that happy bullshit.

“
This is Faith. The ladies
said you would call.”

“
I’m sorry. Deadline caught
me. What’s the problem?” Morris tried to replay the article in his
mind. Often, by the time he finished writing one, it was seared
into his memory until the next pint of whiskey or the next
skull-numbing city council meeting, whichever came first. Writing
was all about remembering, while the rest of Morris’s life was all
about forgetting.

“
The headline,” Faith Gordon
said. “It says ‘Local Women Stitch Blankets For The Needy.’ These
blankets are for any sick child, not just those of economic
difference.”

“
I don’t write the
headlines,” Morris said.

“
But it has your name right
under it.”

“
Yes, ma’am, but the editor
wrote that headline. Perhaps you can speak to him.”

“
It says ‘Local Women Stitch
Blankets For The Needy’ by Morris Stanfield. You’ve done serious
damage to the organization, not to mention insulting the women in
the sewing circle. You should be ashamed.”

“
How did I damage the
organization? I don’t think many people in our readership have even
heard of Threads of Hope.”

“
Exactly. Your callous
disregard for the facts has tainted Threads of Hope for the whole
community. And the ladies . . . poor Alma Potter was in
tears.”

“
I’m really sorry to hear
that,” Morris said. He couldn’t remember if Alma Potter was the
“other Alma” or not.

“
No wonder people no longer
trust the media. If this is any example of how you take the good
intentions of an innocent group and twist it into a sensational
story—”

“
Whoa,” Morris said. “If I
made a factual error, I’d be glad to run a correction. But I took
my information directly from the sewing circle’s own words, with
some Internet research on the parent organization.”

“
You didn’t talk to me,”
Faith said.

Morris at last saw the real problem. Faith
Gordon’s name hadn’t appeared until the third or fourth paragraph.
She obviously felt she was the real story, the tireless organizer
who was practically an entire spool of hope, one who lifted the
entire project on her shoulders and inspired everyone who could
navigate the eye of a needle to great acts of charity.

“
I’ll transfer you to my
editor,” Morris said, and punched the buttons before she could
respond. By leaning back in his chair, he could see out his cubicle
to the glassed-in office of the Kelvinator. Feeney was checking on
stock prices, probably in the middle of an editorial column on the
dubious merits of funding public libraries. Morris waited until the
editor picked up the phone, then turned his attention to his own
computer. He opened his e-mail and found six messages about the
Threads of Hope story. Three were from Faith, reiterating her
displeasure. Two were from Reba, who was concerned about a
misquotation, and the last was from Lillian, who said she thought
the article was good until Faith had told her what was wrong. Now,
Lillian wrote, she was ashamed to have her name associated with
either the Threads of Hope or the Journal-Times, and she was
canceling her subscription “right this second.”

Morris was in the midst of deleting the
messages when the Kelvinator appeared in the mouth of the
cubicle.

“
Morris,” the editor said.
He was ten years younger than Morris, with a personal digital
assistant in his shirt pocket. His eyes moved like greased ball
bearings.

“
Bad headline,
huh?”

“
No, it was problems in your
copy.”

“
What problems?”

“
Faith Gordon has a list.
You can talk to her about them when you see her.”

“
See her?”

“
Write a follow-up. That’s
the only way to fix the mess you’ve made.”

“
There’s no fucking mess. I
didn’t say anything about the blankets being for needy
children.”

“
You must have, or I
wouldn’t have put it in the headline. Anyway, the easiest way to
handle this is to interview Faith. And use a tape recorder this
time, so you won’t misquote her.”

“
But it was just a chummy
little feature—”

“
It’s gotten bigger than
that. I had a call from the Threads of Hope’s national office.
Apparently Faith Gordon has been blowing smoke up their asses,
too.”

“
So let them sue for
libel.”

The Kelvinator tossed a sticky note onto
Morris’ cluttered desk. “Two o’clock today at the church. Polish it
up for Monday’s paper.”

“
Can Laney come with
me?”

“
We already have enough
photos. She has to cover a flower show at the mall.”

Morris crumpled the note as the Kelvinator
returned to his office. He wished there were enough threads to make
a noose. A noose of hopelessness, by which to hang himself before
he had to write another quilt story.

The church sat in a valley and a fog hung
over it, rising from the river that ran beside the road. The church
parking lot was empty. That seemed odd, even for a Friday
afternoon. He thought he was supposed to meet the entire sewing
circle. Maybe he had a solo showdown with the legendary Faith
Gordon. He shuddered, opened the dashboard, and retrieved the pint
of Henry McKenna and a vial of Xanax. Substances that provided his
own threads of hope, or at least stuffed cotton wadding between him
and his anxiety and despair.

He stuck one of the tranquilizers on his
tongue and toasted the stained-glass Jesus. “Here’s to you, Big
Guy.”

Belly warmed, Morris entered the quiet
church. He had been raised Baptist but had recovered quickly, and
his only religious experience since then had been a foray into the
Unitarian church in a half-assed attempt to meet women. Still, the
polished oak of the foyer, the sermon hall with its carefully
arranged pews, and the crushed velvet drapes invoked feelings of
solemnity, as if he were actually in the presence of something
mystical and important. He stepped carefully, afraid to break the
hush.

“
Mr. Stanfield.”

He turned, recognizing the shrill, strident
voice of Faith Gordon. He had expected a beefy, shoulder-heavy
woman with a broad face and hands that could strangle an ox.
Instead, she was diminutive, even pretty in a severe way. Her
cheeks were lined from years of not smiling. She was about Morris’
age but had none of his gray.

Morris attempted a boyish grin, knowing this
was a time to turn on the charm, even if he came off like Clint
Eastwood miscast in a comedy. “Miss Gordon. I’m sorry my story
disappointed you.”

“
It’s not me I’m worried
about. It’s the ladies in the circle. They were so excited about
being in the paper until I told them about your errors.”

“
We can make it
right.”

“
You can never make it
right. The damage is already done. Feelings have been hurt. And
what about the children who received blankets from Threads of Hope?
How will they feel when told they are ‘needy’?”

Morris dropped his grin. He wanted to scream
at her, tell her that a fucking space-filler in the back pages of a
dinky local rag didn’t cause empires to rise or fall, and, truth be
told, didn’t sell a single goddamned car for the dealer whose ad
ran right beside it. A newspaper was fucking fishwrap, a dinosaur
walking in the shadow of the Internet that was too dumb to know it
was going extinct. The only people who’d read the piece of
brainless crap had been the members of the sewing circle.