Shiloh and Other Stories - Bobbie Ann Mason [86]
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In the morning, a slow rain blackens the fallen oak branches in the yard. In Granny’s room the curtains are gray with shadows. Nancy places an old photograph album in Granny’s lap. Silently, Granny turns pages of blank-faced babies in long white dresses like wedding gowns. Nancy’s father is a boy in a sailor suit. Men and women in pictures the color of café au lait stand around picnic tables. The immense trees in these settings are shaggy and dark. Granny cannot find Nancy Culpepper in the album. Quickly, she flips past a picture of her husband. Then she almost giggles as she points to a girl. “That’s me.”
“I wouldn’t have recognized you, Granny.”
“Why, it looks just like me.” Granny strokes the picture, as though she were trying to feel the dress. “That was my favorite dress,” she says. “It was brown poplin, with grosgrain ribbon and self-covered buttons. Thirty-two of them. And all those tucks. It took me three weeks to work up that dress.”
Nancy points to the pictures one by one, asking Granny to identify them. Granny does not notice Nancy writing the names in a notebook. Aunt Sass, Uncle Joe, Dove and Pear Culpepper, Hortense Culpepper.
“Hort Culpepper went to Texas,” says Granny. “She had TB.”
“Tell me about that,” Nancy urges her.
“There wasn’t anything to tell. She got homesick for her mammy’s cooking.” Granny closes the album and falls back against her pillows, saying, “All those people are gone.”
While Granny sleeps, Nancy gets a flashlight and opens the closet. The inside is crammed with the accumulation of decades—yellowed newspapers, boxes of greeting cards, bags of string, and worn-out stockings. Granny’s best dress, a blue bonded knit she has hardly worn, is in plastic wrapping. Nancy pushes the clothing aside and examines the wall. To her right, a metal pipe runs vertically through the closet. Backing up against the dresses, Nancy shines the light on the corner and discovers a large framed picture wedged behind the pipe. By tugging at the frame, she is able to work it gradually through the narrow space between the wall and the pipe. In the picture a man and woman, whose features are sharp and clear, are sitting expectantly on a brocaded love seat. Nancy imagines that this is a wedding portrait.
In the living room, a TV evangelist is urging viewers to call him, toll free. Mother turns the TV off when Nancy appears with the picture, and Daddy stands up and helps her hold it near a window.
“I think that’s Uncle John!” he says excitedly. “He was my favorite uncle.”
“They’re none of my people,” says Mother, studying the picture through her bifocals.
“He died when I was little, but I think that’s him,” says Daddy. “Him and Aunt Lucy Culpepper.”
“Who was she?” Nancy asks.
“Uncle John’s wife.”
“I figured that,” says Nancy impatiently. “But who was she?”
“I don’t know.” He is still looking at the picture, running his fingers over the man’s face.
Back in Granny’s room, Nancy pulls the string that turns on the ceiling light, so that Granny can examine the picture. Granny shakes her head slowly. “I never saw them folks before in all my life.”
Mother comes in with a dish of strawberries.
“Did I pick these?” Granny asks.
“No. You eat yours about ten years ago,” Mother says.
Granny puts in her teeth and eats the strawberries in slurps, missing her mouth twice. “Let me see them people again,” she says, waving her spoon. Her teeth make the sound of a baby rattle.
“Nancy Hollins,” says Granny. “She was a Culpepper.”
“That’s Nancy Culpepper?” cries Nancy.
“That’s not Nancy Culpepper,” Mother says. “That woman’s got a rat in her hair. They wasn’t in style back when Nancy Culpepper was alive.”
Granny’s face is flushed and she is breathing heavily.