Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [52]
“Isn’t he amazing?” Glenn asks.
“Amazing,” she says. She feels goosebumps on her arms.
The crew tosses small branches into the chipper, which sucks them up like a vacuum cleaner, grinding them instantaneously. The chips fly into the truckbed. When the machine’s noise dies down, the men remove their hard-hats, which have earpieces like the headphones on a stereo.
The young man who was afraid to climb the tree says to Dolores, “Lloyd up yonder, he won’t wear mufflers. He don’t wear a safety shield.”
“Or spikes either,” says Dolores.
Later, when the climber touches ground, his legs bent like a horseman’s, he sits down under a large oak and smokes a cigarette in silence. He is drinking water from a plastic jug. Sweat mats his hair. He seems like a temperamental actor collecting himself offstage after a performance. The other men are cutting the final section of the tree, down to a low stump. Dolores stands on a thin log, waiting for it to roll, balancing herself and remembering how as a little girl she pretended to fly when she jumped off a log. It is twenty minutes to eleven.
“If I had a saw I’d cut down all them little trees,” says Petey, flinging a rope at one of the quince bushes.
“No, you wouldn’t, little buddy,” says Glenn.
“My brother would,” says Petey. “He’d do anything. He ate a cricket.”
Petey lassos a branch of the apple tree. Glenn looks up and sees Dolores. He asks, “Are you going somewhere? You have on your lipstick.”
“I have to go to town.”
“Oh. Well, take your time. I’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do.”
Glenn joins the other men, who are putting their tools in the truck. The yard is scattered with the large limp leaves and pods from the tree. The broad leaves look like hands. Dolores thinks of the way Phil Donahue holds hands with the women in his audience who stand up to ask questions. He clutches them by one hand, half supporting them as they stand nervously before the microphone. It is a steadying, caring grasp. Dolores picks apart one of the green pods to find the hidden bloom. Inside are skinny petals. She counts them as she pinches them off. The men drive away, the climber riding in the chipper truck.
—
As she lies under a paper sheet on a cushioned table, with her breasts flattened, Dolores thinks about the climber and the nonchalant way he took risks, as though to fall would be incidental. For Dolores, the risk is going to the doctor, for fear of his diagnosis. Some part of her still believes that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. The doctor’s name is Dr. Knight, and he has cold hands. Dolores stares into a corner of the room, the way she is told to do when she visits the optometrist. The doctor’s thick glasses, his mint breath, his stethoscope, hover over her. His examination is swift, his fingers drumming her breasts rapidly. Then he presses hard against her nipple.
“It hurts,” says Dolores.
“That’s good. That’s a good sign.”
Dr. Knight does not speak again until she is dressed, sitting before him in his office. The clinic is new, but his office holds more magazines than Dolores remembers ever seeing.
“I waited too long to see about this,” she says apologetically. “I kept thinking it would go away.”
In a tone like an anchorman delivering the news on TV, Dr. Knight says, “You have fibrocystic disease. A thickening of the breast tissue. It’s very common in women your age, especially women who haven’t had children for a long time.”
“Is that cancer?”
“No.”
“Do you have to operate?”
“No. It’s only a thickening of tissue. Sometimes it’s