Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [83]
“I want to see if she has one of Nancy Culpepper.”
“That’s you.”
“There was another one. She was a great-great-aunt or something, on my daddy’s side. She had the same name as mine.”
“There’s another one of you?” Jack said with mock disbelief.
“I’m a reincarnation,” she said, playing along.
“There’s nobody else like you. You’re one of a kind.”
Nancy turned away and stared deliberately at Jack’s pictures, which were held up by clear-headed pushpins, like translucent eyes dotting the wall. She examined them one by one, moving methodically down the row—stumps, puffballs, tree roots, close-ups of cat feet.
Nancy first learned about her ancestor on a summer Sunday a few years before, when she took her grandmother to visit the Culpepper graveyard, beside an oak grove off the Paducah highway. The old oaks had spread their limbs until they shaded the entire cemetery, and the tombstones poked through weeds like freak mushrooms. Nancy wandered among the graves, while Granny stayed beside her husband’s gravestone. It had her own name on it too, with a blank space for the date.
Nancy told Jack afterward that when she saw the stone marked “NANCY CULPEPPER, 1833–1905,” she did a double take. “It was like time-lapse photography,” she said. “I mean, I was standing there looking into the past and the future at the same time. It was weird.”
“She wasn’t kin to me, but she lived down the road,” Granny explained to Nancy. “She was your granddaddy’s aunt.”
“Did she look like me?” Nancy asked.
“I don’t know. She was real old.” Granny touched the stone, puzzled. “I can’t figure why she wasn’t buried with her husband’s people,” she said.
—
On Saturday, Nancy helps her parents move some of their furniture to the house next door. It is only a short walk, but when the truck is loaded they all ride in it, Nancy sitting between her parents. The truck’s muffler sounds like thunder, and they drive without speaking. Daddy backs up to the porch.
The paint on the house is peeling, and the latch of the storm door is broken. Daddy pulls at the door impatiently, saying, “I sure wish I could burn down these old houses and retire to Arizona.” For as long as Nancy can remember, her father has been sending away for literature on Arizona.
Her mother says, “We’ll never go anywhere. We’ve got our dress tail on a bedpost.”
“What does that mean?” asks Nancy, in surprise.
“Use to, if a storm was coming, people would put a bedpost on a child’s dress tail, to keep him from blowing away. In other words, we’re tied down.”
“That’s funny. I never heard of that.”
“I guess you think we’re just ignorant,” Mother says. “The way we talk.”
“No, I don’t.”
Daddy props the door open, and Nancy helps him ease a mattress over the threshold. Mother apologizes for not being able to lift anything.
“I’m in your way,” she says, stepping off the porch into a dead canna bed.
Nancy stacks boxes in her old room. It seems smaller than she remembered, and the tenants have scarred the woodwork. Mentally, she refurnishes the room—the bed by the window, the desk opposite. The first time Jack came to Kentucky he slept here, while Nancy slept on the couch in the living room. Now Nancy recalls the next day, as they headed west, with Jack accusing her of being dishonest, foolishly trying to protect her parents. “You let them think you’re such a goody-goody, the ideal daughter,” he said. “I bet you wouldn’t tell them if you made less than an A.”
Nancy’s father comes in and runs his hand across the ceiling, gathering up strings of dust. Tugging at a loose piece of door facing, he says to Nancy, “Never trust renters. They won’t take care of a place.”
“What will you do with Granny’s house?”
“Nothing. Not as long as she’s living.”
“Will you rent it out then?”
“No. I won’t go through that again.” He removes his cap and smooths his hair, then puts the cap back on. Leaning against the wall, he talks about the high cost of the nursing home. “I never thought it would come to this,” he says. “I wouldn’t do it if there was any other way.”