Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [85]
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“Larry was going to come and play with me, but he couldn’t come,” Robert says to Nancy on the telephone that evening. “He had a stomachache.”
“That’s too bad. What did you do today?”
“We went to the Taco Bell and then we went to the woods so Daddy could take pictures of Indian pipes.”
“What are those?”
“I don’t know. Daddy knows.”
“We didn’t find any,” Jack says on the extension. “I think it’s the wrong time of year. How’s Kentucky?”
Nancy tells Jack about helping her parents move. “My bed is gone, so tonight I’ll have to sleep on a couch in the hallway,” she says. “It’s really dreary here in this old house. Everything looks so bare.”
“How’s your grandmother?”
“The same. She’s dead set against that rest home, but what can they do?”
“Do you still want to move down there?” Jack asks.
“I don’t know.”
“I know how we could take the chickens to Kentucky,” says Robert in an excited burst.
“How?”
“We could give them sleeping pills and then put them in the trunk so they’d be quiet.”
“That sounds gruesome,” Jack says.
Nancy tells Robert not to think about moving. There is static on the line. Nancy has trouble hearing Jack. “We’re your family too,” he is saying.
“I didn’t mean to abandon you,” she says.
“Have you seen the pictures yet?”
“No. I’m working up to that.”
“Nancy Culpepper, the original?”
“You bet,” says Nancy, a little too quickly. She hears Robert hang up. “Is Robert O.K.?” she asks through the static.
“Oh, sure.”
“He doesn’t think I moved without him?”
“He’ll be all right.”
“He didn’t tell me good-bye.”
“Don’t worry,” says Jack.
—
“She’s been after me about those strawberries till I could wring her neck,” says Mother as she and Nancy are getting ready for bed. “She’s talking about some strawberries she put up in nineteen seventy-one. I’ve told her and told her that she eat them strawberries back then, but won’t nothing do but for her to have them strawberries.”
“Give her some others,” Nancy says.
“She’d know the difference. She don’t miss a thing when it comes to what’s hers. But sometimes she’s just as liable to forget her name.”
Mother is trembling, and then she is crying. Nancy pats her mother’s hair, which is gray and wiry and sticks out in sprigs. Wiping her eyes, Mother says, “All the kinfolks will talk. ‘Look what they done to her, poor helpless thing.’ It’ll probably kill her, to move her to that place.”
“When you move back home you can get all your antiques out of the barn,” Nancy says. “You’ll be in your own house again. Won’t that be nice?”
Mother does not answer. She takes some sheets and quilts from a closet and hands them to Nancy. “That couch lays good,” she says.
When Nancy wakes up, the covers are on the floor, and for a moment she does not remember where she is. Her digital watch says 2:43. Then it tells the date. In the darkness she has no sense of distance, and it seems to her that the red numerals could be the size of a billboard, only seen from far away.
Jack has told her that this kind of insomnia is a sign of depression, while the other kind—inability to fall asleep at bedtime—is a sign of anxiety. Nancy always thought he had it backward, but now she thinks he may be right. A flicker of distant sheet lightning exposes the bleak walls with the suddenness of a flashbulb. The angles of the hall seem unfamiliar, and the narrow couch makes Nancy feel small and alone. When Jack and Robert come to Kentucky with her, they all sleep in the living room, and in the early morning Nancy’s parents pass through to get to the bathroom. “We’re just one big happy family,” Daddy announces, to disguise his embarrassment when he awakens them. Now, for some reason, Nancy recalls Jack’s strange still lifes, and she thinks of the black irises and the polished skulls of cattle suspended in the skies of O’Keeffe paintings. The irises are like thunderheads. The night they were married, Nancy and Jack collapsed into bed, falling asleep immediately, their heads swirling. The party was still going on, and friends from New York were staying over. Nancy woke up the next day saying her