Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [63]
“Your preaching’s up-to-date,” says Georgeann. “You’re more up-to-date than a lot of those old-timey preachers who haven’t even been to seminary.” Georgeann is aware that she sounds too perky.
“You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? This little church is falling off so bad they’re probably going to close it down and reassign me to Deep Springs.”
“Well, you’ve been expecting that for a long time, haven’t you?”
“It’s awful,” Shelby says. “These people depend on this church. They don’t want to travel all the way to Deep Springs. Besides, everybody wants their own home church.” He reaches across Georgeann and turns out the light.
The next day, after Shelby finishes wiring a house, he consults with a veterinarian about chicken mites. When he comes home, he tells Georgeann that in the veterinarian’s opinion, the brown speck was a chicken mite. “The vet just laughed at that doctor,” Shelby says. “He said the mites would leave of their own accord. They’re looking for chickens, not people.”
“Should I wash all these clothes or not? I’m half finished.”
“I don’t itch anymore, do you?”
Shelby has brought home a can of roost paint, a chemical to kill chicken mites. Georgeann takes the roost paint to the henhouse and applies it to the roosts. It smells like fumes from a paper mill and almost makes her gag. When she finishes, she gathers eggs, and then sees that the sick hen has flopped outside again and can’t get up on her feet. Georgeann carries the chicken into the henhouse and sets her down by the food. She examines the chicken’s feathers. Suddenly she notices that the chicken is covered with moving specks. Georgeann backs out of the henhouse and looks at her hands in the sunlight. The specks are swarming all over her hands. She watches them head up her arms, spinning crazily, disappearing on her.
—
The retreat is at a lodge at Kentucky Lake. In the mornings, a hundred people eat a country ham breakfast on picnic tables, out of doors by the lake. The dew is still on the grass. Now and then a speedboat races by, drowning out conversation. Georgeann wears a badge with her name on it and BACK TO BASICS, the theme of the gathering, in Gothic lettering. After the first day, Shelby’s spirit seems renewed. He talks and laughs with old acquaintances, and during social hour, he seems cheerful and relaxed. At the workshops and lectures, he takes notes like mad on his yellow legal paper, which he carries on a clipboard. He already has fifty ideas for new sermons, he tells Georgeann happily. He looks handsome in his clean suit. She has begun to see him as someone remote, like a meter reader. Georgeann thinks: He is not the same person who once stole a ham.
On the second day, she skips silent prayers after breakfast and stays in the room watching Phil Donahue. Donahue is interviewing parents of murdered children; the parents have organized to support each other in their grief. There is an organization for everything, Georgeann realizes. When Shelby comes in before the noon meal, she is asleep and the farm market report is blaring from the TV. As she wakes up, he turns off the TV. Shelby is a kind and good man, she says to herself. He still thinks she has low blood. He wants to bring her food on a tray, but Georgeann refuses.
“I’m alive,” she says. “There’s a workshop this afternoon I want to go to. On marriage. Do you want to go to that one?”
“No, I can’t make that one,” says Shelby, consulting his schedule. “I have to attend The Changing Role of the Country Pastor.”
“It will probably be just women,” says Georgeann. “You wouldn’t enjoy it.” When he looks at her oddly, she says, “I mean the one on marriage.”
Shelby winks at her. “Take notes for me.”
The workshop concerns Christian marriage. A woman leading the workshop describes seven kinds of intimacy, and eleven women volunteer their opinions. Seven of the women present are ministers’ wives.