Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [80]
Later he asked, “But what about the fish in the pond?”
“I don’t know,” said Nancy. “I guess we’ll have to rent a U-Haul.”
When Nancy arrives at her parents’ farm in western Kentucky, her mother says, “Your daddy and me’s both got inner ear and nerves. And we couldn’t lift Granny, or anything, if we had to all of a sudden.”
“The flu settled in my ears,” Daddy says, cocking his head at an angle.
“Mine’s still popping,” says Mother.
In a few days they plan to move Granny, and they will return to their own house, which they have been renting out. For nine years, they have lived next door, in Granny’s house, in order to care for her. There Mother has had to cook on an ancient gas range, with her mother-in-law hovering over her, supervising. Granny used only lye soap on dishes, and it was five years before Nancy’s mother defied her and bought some Joy. By then, Granny was confined to her bed, crippled with arthritis. Now she is ninety-three.
“You didn’t have to come back,” Daddy says to Nancy at the dinner table. “We could manage.”
“I want to help you move,” Nancy says. “And I want to make sure Granny’s pictures don’t get lost. Nobody cares about them but me, and I’m afraid somebody will throw them away.”
Nancy wants to find out if Granny has a picture of a great-great-aunt named Nancy Culpepper. No one in the family seems to know anything about her, but Nancy is excited by the thought of an ancestor with the same name as hers. Since she found out about her, Nancy has been going by her maiden name, but she has given up trying to explain this to her mother, who persists in addressing letters to “Mr. and Mrs. Jack Cleveland.”
“There’s some pictures hid behind Granny’s closet wall,” Daddy tells Nancy. “When we hooked up the coal-oil stove through the fireplace a few years ago, they got walled in.”
“That’s ridiculous! Why would you do that?”
“They were in the way.” He stands up and puts on his cap, preparing to go out to feed his calves.
“Will Granny care if I tear the wall down?” Nancy asks, joking.
Daddy laughs, acting as though he understood, but Nancy knows he is pretending. He seems tired, and his billed cap looks absurdly small perched on his head.
—
When Nancy and Jack were married, years ago, in Massachusetts, Nancy did not want her parents to come to the wedding. She urged them not to make the long trip. “It’s no big deal,” she told them on the telephone. “It’ll last ten minutes. We’re not even going on a honeymoon right away, because we both have exams Monday.”
Nancy was in graduate school, and Jack was finishing his B.A. For almost a year they had been renting a large old house on a lake. The house had a field-rock fireplace with a heart-shaped stone centered above the mantel. Jack, who was studying design, thought the heart was tasteless, and he covered it with a Peter Max poster.
At the ceremony, Jack’s dog, Grover, was present, and instead of organ music, a stereo played Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was 1967. Nancy was astonished by the minister’s white robe and his beard and by the fact that he chain-smoked. The preachers she remembered from childhood would have called him a heathen, she thought. Most of the wedding pictures, taken by a friend of Jack’s, turned out to be trick photography—blurred faces and double exposures.
The party afterward lasted all night. Jack blew up two hundred balloons and kept the fire going. They drank too much wine-and-7Up punch. Guests went in and out, popping balloons with cigarettes, taking walks by the lake. Everyone was looking for the northern lights, which were supposed to be visible that evening. Holding on to Jack, Nancy searched the murky sky, feeling that the two of them were lone travelers on the edge of some outer-space adventure. At the same time, she kept thinking of her parents at home, probably watching Gunsmoke.
“I saw them once,” Jack said. “They were fantastic.”
“What was it like?”
“Shower curtains.”
“Really? That’s amazing.”
“Luminescent shower curtains.”
“I’m shivering,” Nancy said. The sky was blank.
“Let’s go in. It’s too cloudy