Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [3]
“One of these days, Mama,” Norma Jean says impatiently.
Mabel is talking about Shiloh, Tennessee. For the past few years, she has been urging Leroy and Norma Jean to visit the Civil War battleground there. Mabel went there on her honeymoon—the only real trip she ever took. Her husband died of a perforated ulcer when Norma Jean was ten, but Mabel, who was accepted into the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1975, is still preoccupied with going back to Shiloh.
“I’ve been to kingdom come and back in that truck out yonder,” Leroy says to Mabel, “but we never yet set foot in that battleground. Ain’t that something? How did I miss it?”
“It’s not even that far,” Mabel says.
After Mabel leaves, Norma Jean reads to Leroy from a list she has made. “Things you could do,” she announces. “You could get a job as a guard at Union Carbide, where they’d let you set on a stool. You could get on at the lumberyard. You could do a little carpenter work, if you want to build so bad. You could—”
“I can’t do something where I’d have to stand up all day.”
“You ought to try standing up all day behind a cosmetics counter. It’s amazing that I have strong feet, coming from two parents that never had strong feet at all.” At the moment Norma Jean is holding on to the kitchen counter, raising her knees one at a time as she talks. She is wearing two-pound ankle weights.
“Don’t worry,” says Leroy. “I’ll do something.”
“You could truck calves to slaughter for somebody. You wouldn’t have to drive any big old truck for that.”
“I’m going to build you this house,” says Leroy. “I want to make you a real home.”
“I don’t want to live in any log cabin.”
“It’s not a cabin. It’s a house.”
“I don’t care. It looks like a cabin.”
“You and me together could lift those logs. It’s just like lifting weights.”
Norma Jean doesn’t answer. Under her breath, she is counting. Now she is marching through the kitchen. She is doing goose steps.
—
Before his accident, when Leroy came home he used to stay in the house with Norma Jean, watching TV in bed and playing cards. She would cook fried chicken, picnic ham, chocolate pie—all his favorites. Now he is home alone much of the time. In the mornings, Norma Jean disappears, leaving a cooling place in the bed. She eats a cereal called Body Buddies, and she leaves the bowl on the table, with the soggy tan balls floating in a milk puddle. He sees things about Norma Jean that he never realized before. When she chops onions, she stares off into a corner, as if she can’t bear to look. She puts on her house slippers almost precisely at nine o’clock every evening and nudges her jogging shoes under the couch. She saves bread heels for the birds. Leroy watches the birds at the feeder. He notices the peculiar way goldfinches fly past the window. They close their wings, then fall, then spread their wings to catch and lift themselves. He wonders if they close their eyes when they fall. Norma Jean closes her eyes when they are in bed. She wants the lights turned out. Even then, he is sure she closes her eyes.
He goes for long drives around town. He tends to drive a car rather carelessly. Power steering and an automatic shift make a car feel so small and inconsequential that his body is hardly involved in the driving process. His injured leg stretches out comfortably. Once or twice he has almost hit something, but even the prospect of an accident seems minor in a car. He cruises the new subdivisions, feeling like a criminal rehearsing for a robbery. Norma Jean is probably right about a log house being inappropriate here in the new subdivisions. All the houses look grand and complicated. They depress him.
One day when Leroy comes home from a drive he finds Norma Jean in tears. She is in the kitchen making a potato and mushroom-soup casserole, with grated-cheese topping. She is crying because her mother caught her smoking.
“I didn’t hear her coming. I was standing here puffing away pretty as you please,” Norma Jean says, wiping her eyes.
“I knew it would happen sooner