Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [61]
When Shelby comes in, with the children, she is asleep on the couch. They tiptoe around her and she pretends to sleep on. “Sunday is a day of rest,” Shelby is saying to the children. “For everybody but preachers, that is.” Shelby turns off the radio.
“Not for me,” says Jason. “That’s my day to play catch with Jeff.”
When Georgeann gets up, Shelby gives her a hug, one of his proper Sunday embraces. She apologizes for not going with him. “How was the funeral?”
“The usual. You don’t really want to know, do you?”
“No.”
—
Georgeann plans for the retreat. She makes a doctor’s appointment for Wednesday. She takes Shelby’s suits to the cleaners. She visits some shut-ins she neglected to see on Sunday. She arranges with her mother to keep Tamara and Jason. Although her mother still believes Georgeann married unwisely, she now promotes the sanctity of the union. “Marriage is forever, but a preacher’s marriage is longer than that,” she says.
Today, Georgeann’s mother sounds as though she is making excuses for Shelby. She knows very well that Georgeann is unhappy, but she says, “I never gave him much credit at first, but Lord knows he’s ambitious. I’ll say that for him. And practical. He knew he had to learn a trade so he could support himself in his dedication to the church.”
“You make him sound like a junkie supporting a habit.”
Georgeann’s mother laughs uproariously. “It’s the same thing! The same thing.” She is a stout, good-looking woman who loves to drink at parties. She and Shelby have never had much to say to each other, and Georgeann gets very sad whenever she realizes how her mother treats her marriage like a joke. It isn’t fair.
—
When Georgeann feeds the chickens, she notices the sick hen is unable to get up on its feet. Its comb is turning black. She picks it up and sets it in the henhouse. She puts some mash in a Crisco can and sets it in front of the chicken. It pecks indifferently at the mash. Georgeann goes to the house and finds a margarine tub and fills it with water. There is nothing to do for a sick chicken, except to let it die. Or kill it to keep disease from spreading to the others. She won’t tell Shelby the chicken is sick, because Shelby will get the ax and chop its head off. Shelby isn’t being cruel. He believes in the necessities of things.
Shelby will have a substitute in church next Sunday, while he is at the retreat, but he has his sermon ready for the following Sunday. On Tuesday evening, Georgeann types it for him. He writes in longhand on yellow legal pads, the way Nixon wrote his memoirs, and after ten years Georgeann has finally mastered his corkscrew handwriting. The sermon is on sex education in the schools. When Georgeann comes to a word she doesn’t know, she goes downstairs.
“There’s no such word as ‘pucelage,’ ” she says to Shelby, who is at the kitchen table, trying to fix a gun-shaped hair dryer. Parts are scattered all over the table.
“Sure there is,” he says. “Pucelage means virginity.”
“Why didn’t you say so! Nobody will know what it means.”
“But it’s just the word I want.”
“And what about this word in the next paragraph? ‘Matures-cent’? Are you kidding?”
“Now don’t start in on how I’m making fun of you because you haven’t been to college,” Shelby says.
Georgeann doesn’t answer. She goes back to the study and continues typing. Something pinches her on the stomach. She raises her blouse and scratches a bite. She sees a tiny brown speck scurrying across her flesh. Fascinated, she catches it by moistening a fingertip. It drowns in her saliva. She puts it on a scrap of yellow legal paper and folds it up. Something to show the doctor. Maybe the doctor will let her look at it under a microscope.
The next day, Georgeann goes to the doctor, taking the speck with her. “I started getting these bites after I cleaned out the henhouse,” she tells the nurse. “And I’ve been handling a sick chicken.”
The nurse scrapes the speck onto a slide and instructs Georgeann to get undressed and put on a paper robe so that it opens in the back. Georgeann piles