Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [84]
“You don’t have any choice,” says Nancy.
“The government will pay you to break up your family,” he says. “If I get like your granny, I want you to just take me out in the woods and shoot me.”
“She told me she wasn’t going,” Nancy says.
“They’ve got a big recreation room for the ones that can get around,” Daddy says. “They’ve even got disco dancing.”
When Daddy laughs, his voice catches, and he has to clear his throat. Nancy laughs with him. “I can just see Granny disco dancing. Are you sure you want me to shoot you? That place sounds like fun.”
They go outside, where Nancy’s mother is cleaning out a patch of weed-choked perennials. “I planted these iris the year we moved,” she says.
“They’re pretty,” says Nancy. “I haven’t seen that color up North.”
Mother stands up and shakes her foot awake. “I sure hope y’all can move down here,” she says. “It’s a shame you have to be so far away. Robert grows so fast I don’t know him.”
“We might someday. I don’t know if we can.”
“Looks like Jack could make good money if he set up a studio in town. Nowadays people want fancy pictures.”
“Even the school pictures cost a fortune,” Daddy says.
“Jack wants to free-lance for publications,” says Nancy. “And there aren’t any here. There’s not even a camera shop within fifty miles.”
“But people want pictures,” Mother says. “They’ve gone back to decorating living rooms with family pictures. In antique frames.”
Daddy smokes a cigarette on the porch, while Nancy circles the house. A beetle has infested the oak trees, causing clusters of leaves to turn brown. Nancy stands on the concrete lid of an old cistern and watches crows fly across a cornfield. In the distance a series of towers slings power lines across a flat sea of soybeans. Her mother is talking about Granny. Nancy thinks of Granny on the telephone, the day of her wedding, innocently asking, “What are you going to cook for your wedding breakfast?” Later, seized with laughter, Nancy told Jack what Granny had said.
“I almost said to her, ‘We usually don’t eat breakfast, we sleep so late!’ ”
Jack was busy blowing up balloons. When he didn’t laugh, Nancy said, “Isn’t that hilarious? She’s really out of the nineteenth century.”
“You don’t have to make me breakfast,” said Jack.
“In her time, it meant something really big,” Nancy said helplessly. “Don’t you see?”
Now Nancy’s mother is saying, “The way she has to have that milk of magnesia every night, when I know good and well she don’t need it. She thinks she can’t live without it.”
“What’s wrong with her?” asks Nancy.
“She thinks she’s got a knot in her bowels. But ain’t nothing wrong with her but that head-swimming and arthritis.” Mother jerks a long morning glory vine out of the marigolds. “Hardening of the arteries is what makes her head swim,” she says.
“We better get back and see about her,” Daddy says, but he does not get up immediately. The crows are racing above the power lines.
Later, Nancy spreads a Texaco map of the United States out on Granny’s quilt. “I want to show you where I live,” she says. “Philadelphia’s nearly a thousand miles from here.”
“Reach me my specs,” says Granny, as she struggles to sit up. “How did you get here?”
“Flew. Daddy picked me up at the airport in Paducah.”
“Did you come by the bypass or through town?”
“The bypass,” says Nancy. Nancy shows her where Pennsylvania is on the map. “I flew from Philadelphia to Louisville to Paducah. There’s California. That’s where Robert was born.”
“I haven’t seen a geography since I was twenty years old,” Granny says. She studies the map, running her fingers over it as though she were caressing fine material. “Law, I didn’t know where Floridy was. It’s way down there.”
“I’ve been to Florida,” Nancy says.
Granny lies back, holding her head as if it were a delicate china bowl. In a moment she says, “Tell your mama to thaw me up some of them strawberries I picked.”
“When were you out picking strawberries, Granny?”
“They’re in the freezer of my refrigerator. Back in the back. In a little milk carton.” Granny removes her glasses and waves them in the