Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [79]
“Y’all are going to kill yourselves,” Waldeen says, calling across the graveyard.
Joe tells C. W. to shape up. “We’ve got work to do,” he says.
Joe looks over at Waldeen and mouths something. “I love you”? She suddenly remembers a Ku Klux Klansman she saw on TV. He was being arrested at a demonstration, and as he was led away in handcuffs, he spoke to someone off-camera, ending with a solemn message, “I love you.” He was acting for the camera, as if to say, “Look what a nice guy I am.” He gave Waldeen the creeps. That could have been Joe Murdock, Waldeen thinks. Not Joe McClain. Maybe she is beginning to get them straight in her mind. They have different ways of trying to get through to her.
Waldeen and Betty play several hands of hearts and drink more beer. Betty is clumsy with the cards and loses three hands in a row. Waldeen cannot keep her mind on the cards either. She wins accidentally. She can’t concentrate because of the graves, and Joe standing there saying “I love you.” If she marries Joe, and doesn’t get divorced again, they will be buried here together. She picks out a likely spot and imagines the headstone and the green carpet and the brown leaves that will someday cover the twin mounds. Joe and C. W. are bringing leaves to the center of the graveyard and piling them on the place she has chosen. Waldeen feels peculiar, as if the burial plot, not a diamond ring, symbolizes the promise of marriage. But there is something comforting about the thought, which she tries to explain to Betty.
“Ooh, that’s gross,” says Betty. She slaps down a heart and takes the trick.
Waldeen shuffles the cards for a long time. The pile of leaves is growing dramatically. Joe and C. W. have each claimed a side of the graveyard, and they are racing. It occurs to Waldeen that she has spent half her life watching guys named Joe show off for her. Once, when Waldeen was fourteen, she went out onto the lake with Joe Suiter in a rented pedal boat. When Waldeen sees him at the bank, where he works, she always remembers the pedal boat and how they stayed out on the silver-blue lake all afternoon, ignoring the people waving them in from the shore. When they finally returned, Joe owed ten dollars in overtime on the boat, so he worked Saturdays, mowing yards, to pay for their spree. Only recently in the bank, when they laughed together over the memory, he told her that it was worth it, for it was one of the great adventures of his life, going out in a pedal boat with Waldeen, with nothing but the lake and time.
Betty is saying, “We could have a nice bonfire and a wienie roast—what are you doing?”
Waldeen has pulled her shoes off. Then she is taking a long, running start, like a pole vaulter, and then with a flying leap she lands in the immense pile of leaves, up to her elbows. Leaves are flying and everyone is standing around her, forming a stern circle, and Holly, with her book closed on her fist, is saying, “Don’t you know anything?”
NANCY CULPEPPER
When Nancy received her parents’ letter saying they were moving her grandmother to a nursing home, she said to her husband, “I really should go help them out. And I’ve got to save Granny’s photographs. They might get lost.” Jack did not try to discourage her, and she left for Kentucky soon after the letter came.
Nancy has been vaguely wanting to move to Kentucky, and she has persuaded Jack to think about relocating his photography business. They live in the country, near a small town an hour’s drive from Philadelphia. Their son, Robert, who is eight, has fits when they talk about moving. He does not want to leave his room or his playmates. Once, he asked, “What about our chickens?”
“They have chickens in Kentucky,” Nancy explained. “Don’t worry. We’re not going yet.”