Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [10]
“Oh, he’s so lonesome with all the girls gone that he’s acting peculiar.”
Disturbed and excited, Mary Lou burns the bacon while she’s telling Mack about the call. Mack seems surprised that Ed is still with the same woman.
“How did she get him wrapped around her little finger? Ed would never even stay in one place long enough to get a crop out.”
Mary Lou shoves Mack’s plate in front of him. “I thought to my soul he was dead. When he went out there, he looked terrible. He thought he had TB. But it was just like him not to write or call or say boo.”
“Ed always was wild. I bet he was drunk.”
Mary Lou sits down to eat. Cautiously, she says, “He wants us to come out and see him.”
“Why can’t he come here?”
“He’s got a family now. He’s tied down.”
Mack flips through the Old Farmer’s Almanac as he eats.
Mary Lou says, “We could go out there. We’re not tied down.”
Mack fastens his finger on a page. “What if Judy wanted to come home? She’d have to stay here by herself.”
“You beat all I’ve ever seen, Mack.” Mary Lou smears jelly on her toast and eats a bite. She says, “Ed said he just got to thinking how he wanted to hear from home. He said Christmas was coming up and—you want to know something, Mack? Ed was on my mind all one day last week. And then he calls, just like that. I must have had a premonition. What does the Farmer’s Almanac say to that?”
Mack points to a weather chart. “It says here we’re due for a mild winter—no snow hardly a-tall. But I don’t believe it. I believe we’re going to have snow before Christmas.”
Mack sounds so serious. He sounds like the President delivering a somber message on the economy. Mary Lou doesn’t know what to think.
—
The next evening at Clausie’s house, the Rookers are elated over Mary Lou’s news, but she doesn’t go into details about her brother’s bad reputation.
“It sounded just like him,” she says. “His voice was just as clear.”
Clausie urges Mary Lou to persuade Mack to go to California.
“Oh, we could never afford it,” says Mary Lou. “I’m afraid to even bring it up.”
“It’s awful far,” says Thelma. “My oldest girl’s daughter went out in May of seventy-three. She left the day school was out.”
“Did he say what he was doing?” Edda asks Mary Lou.
“He said he just built him a house and didn’t have anything he wanted to put in it but a washer and dryer. Mack’s making fun of me for carrying on so, but he never liked Ed anyway. Ed was always a little wild.”
For refreshments, Clausie has made lemon chiffon cake and boiled custard. Mary Lou loves being at Clausie’s. Her house is like her chiffon cakes, all soft surfaces and pleasant colors, and she has a new factory-waxed Congoleum floor in her kitchen, patterned after a brick wall.
When Clausie clears away the dishes, she pats Mary Lou’s hand and says, “Well, maybe your brother will come back home, if you all can’t go out. Sounds like his mind’s on his family now.”
“You and Mack need to go more,” says Edda.
“You ought to get Mack out square-dancing!” says Clausie, who belongs to a square-dancing club.
Mary Lou has to laugh, that idea is so farfetched.
“My fiftieth wedding anniversary would have been day before yesterday,” says Thelma, whose husband had died the year before.
“It’s too bad Otis couldn’t have lived just a little longer,” says Clausie sympathetically.
“He bought us eight grave plots. Otis wanted me and him to have plenty of room.”
The widows compare prices of caskets.
“Law, I wouldn’t want to be cremated the way some of them are doing now,” says Edda. “To save space.”
“Me neither,” says Clausie with a whoop. “Did y’all see one of them Russians on television while back? At his funeral there was this horse and buggy pulling the body, and instead of a casket there was this little-bitty vase propped up there. It was real odd looking.”
“The very idea!” cries Edda. “Keeping somebody in a vase on the mantel. Somebody might use it for a ashtray.”
Clausie and Edda and Thelma are all laughing. Mary Lou shuffles the cards distractedly, the way Mack