Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [2]
“Where do you get this stuff?” asks Leroy. “From your pappy?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Stevie says. He is slit-eyed and skinny. “What else you got?”
“What you interested in?”
“Nothing special. Just wondered.”
Leroy used to take speed on the road. Now he has to go slowly. He needs to be mellow. He leans back against the car and says, “I’m aiming to build me a log house, soon as I get time. My wife, though, I don’t think she likes the idea.”
“Well, let me know when you want me again,” Stevie says. He has a cigarette in his cupped palm, as though sheltering it from the wind. He takes a long drag, then stomps it on the asphalt and slouches away.
Stevie’s father was two years ahead of Leroy in high school. Leroy is thirty-four. He married Norma Jean when they were both eighteen, and their child Randy was born a few months later, but he died at the age of four months and three days. He would be about Stevie’s age now. Norma Jean and Leroy were at the drive-in, watching a double feature (Dr. Strangelove and Lover Come Back), and the baby was sleeping in the back seat. When the first movie ended, the baby was dead. It was the sudden infant death syndrome. Leroy remembers handing Randy to a nurse at the emergency room, as though he were offering her a large doll as a present. A dead baby feels like a sack of flour. “It just happens sometimes,” said the doctor, in what Leroy always recalls as a nonchalant tone. Leroy can hardly remember the child anymore, but he still sees vividly a scene from Dr. Strangelove in which the President of the United States was talking in a folksy voice on the hot line to the Soviet premier about the bomber accidentally headed toward Russia. He was in the War Room, and the world map was lit up. Leroy remembers Norma Jean standing catatonically beside him in the hospital and himself thinking: Who is this strange girl? He had forgotten who she was. Now scientists are saying that crib death is caused by a virus. Nobody knows anything, Leroy thinks. The answers are always changing.
When Leroy gets home from the shopping center, Norma Jean’s mother, Mabel Beasley, is there. Until this year, Leroy has not realized how much time she spends with Norma Jean. When she visits, she inspects the closets and then the plants, informing Norma Jean when a plant is droopy or yellow. Mabel calls the plants “flowers,” although there are never any blooms. She always notices if Norma Jean’s laundry is piling up. Mabel is a short, overweight woman whose tight, brown-dyed curls look more like a wig than the actual wig she sometimes wears. Today she has brought Norma Jean an off-white dust ruffle she made for the bed; Mabel works in a custom-upholstery shop.
“This is the tenth one I made this year,” Mabel says. “I got started and couldn’t stop.”
“It’s real pretty,” says Norma Jean.
“Now we can hide things under the bed,” says Leroy, who gets along with his mother-in-law primarily by joking with her. Mabel has never really forgiven him for disgracing her by getting Norma Jean pregnant. When the baby died, she said that fate was mocking her.
“What’s that thing?” Mabel says to Leroy in a loud voice, pointing to a tangle of yarn on a piece of canvas.
Leroy holds it up for Mabel to see. “It’s my needlepoint,” he explains. “This is a Star Trek pillow cover.”
“That’s what a woman would do,” says Mabel. “Great day in the morning!”
“All the big football players on TV do it,” he says.
“Why, Leroy, you’re always trying to fool me. I don’t believe you for one minute. You don’t know what to do with yourself—that’s the whole trouble. Sewing!”
“I’m aiming to build us a log house,” says Leroy. “Soon as my plans come.”
“Like heck you are,” says Norma Jean. She takes Leroy’s needlepoint and shoves it into a drawer. “You have to find a job first. Nobody can afford to build now anyway.”
Mabel straightens her girdle and says, “I still think before you