Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [7]
“We have started all over again,” says Norma Jean. “And this is how it turned out.”
“What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Is this one of those women’s lib things?” Leroy asks.
“Don’t be funny.”
The cemetery, a green slope dotted with white markers, looks like a subdivision site. Leroy is trying to comprehend that his marriage is breaking up, but for some reason he is wondering about white slabs in a graveyard.
“Everything was fine till Mama caught me smoking,” says Norma Jean, standing up. “That set something off.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She won’t leave me alone—you won’t leave me alone.” Norma Jean seems to be crying, but she is looking away from him. “I feel eighteen again. I can’t face that all over again.” She starts walking away. “No, it wasn’t fine. I don’t know what I’m saying. Forget it.”
Leroy takes a lungful of smoke and closes his eyes as Norma Jean’s words sink in. He tries to focus on the fact that thirty-five hundred soldiers died on the grounds around him. He can only think of that war as a board game with plastic soldiers. Leroy almost smiles, as he compares the Confederates’ daring attack on the Union camps and Virgil Mathis’s raid on the bowling alley. General Grant, drunk and furious, shoved the Southerners back to Corinth, where Mabel and Jet Beasley were married years later, when Mabel was still thin and good-looking. The next day, Mabel and Jet visited the battleground, and then Norma Jean was born, and then she married Leroy and they had a baby, which they lost, and now Leroy and Norma Jean are here at the same battleground. Leroy knows he is leaving out a lot. He is leaving out the insides of history. History was always just names and dates to him. It occurs to him that building a house out of logs is similarly empty—too simple. And the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him. Now he sees that building a log house is the dumbest idea he could have had. It was clumsy of him to think Norma Jean would want a log house. It was a crazy idea. He’ll have to think of something else, quickly. He will wad the blueprints into tight balls and fling them into the lake. Then he’ll get moving again. He opens his eyes. Norma Jean has moved away and is walking through the cemetery, following a serpentine brick path.
Leroy gets up to follow his wife, but his good leg is asleep and his bad leg still hurts him. Norma Jean is far away, walking rapidly toward the bluff by the river, and he tries to hobble toward her. Some children run past him, screaming noisily. Norma Jean has reached the bluff, and she is looking out over the Tennessee River. Now she turns toward Leroy and waves her arms. Is she beckoning to him? She seems to be doing an exercise for her chest muscles. The sky is unusually pale—the color of the dust ruffle Mabel made for their bed.
THE ROOKERS
Mary Lou Skaggs runs errands for her husband. She hauls lumber, delivers bookshelves, even makes a special trip to town just to exchange flathead screws. Mack will occasionally go out to measure people’s kitchens for the cabinets and countertops he makes, but he gets uncomfortable if he has to be away long. And the highway makes him nervous. Increasingly, he stays at home, working in his shop in the basement. They live on a main road between two small Kentucky towns, and the shop sign has been torn down by teenagers so many times that Mack has given up trying to keep it repaired. Mary Lou feels that Mack never charges enough for his work, but she has always helped out—keeping the books, canning and sewing, as well as periodically working for H&R Block—and they have managed to send their youngest child to college. The two older daughters are married, with homes nearby, but Judy is a freshman at Murray State. After she left, Mack became so involved with some experimental woodworking projects that Mary Lou thought he had almost failed to notice that the children had all gone.
For some neighbors, Mack made a dinette booth out of a church pew salvaged from an abandoned