Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Their room was unheated and they had a hard winter. Nancy caught cold after cold, and Lila huddled her close in the bed, under the weight of half a dozen quilts. She was afraid of rolling over on her, the way a sow sometimes mashed her pigs. One night Lila woke up and found Nancy uncovered, wet and shivering. After that, the cold went into pneumonia. Lila wanted to take her to the doctor, but Amp protested, “Why, he would charge! We can doctor her.” Rosie baked onions in ashes and squeezed the juice into a spoon and fed it to her. At night Lila warmed the bed with heated bricks wrapped in newspaper, and she hardly slept, making sure she kept the child covered up; in the daytime she made a bed for her in a box close to the fireplace. She wrapped her chest in greased rags. One frightening night, when Lila prayed so hard she was almost screaming, Nancy’s fever finally broke, and gradually her breathing improved. Over the following weeks, as Nancy grew stronger, Lila kept talking to her, singing and reading Spence’s letters aloud, trying to find new meaning and hope in each one. Finally, there was a warm spell, when the north wind didn’t blow through the cracks around the windows of their room. The yellow bushes in front of the house put out some blooms, and some geese flew over.

  Uneasily, Lila and Rosie sat by the fire and pieced quilt blocks, tuning in the war news on the radio at intervals. Their shared silent worry about Spence gradually drew them together, and eventually Lila loved Spence’s parents as though they were her own. That spring, during a fierce electrical storm, they gathered in Amp and Rosie’s bedroom and wrapped feather bolsters around themselves. Amp said lightning wouldn’t strike feathers. “Did you ever see a chicken get hit by lightning?” Rosie asked.

  Suddenly Lila’s daughters are there, rushing to hug her. They’re smiling too much. Nancy’s eyes have that deep, private look Lila has often seen in them. She drops her backpack and tote bag on the bed and buries her head on Lila’s shoulder. Lila’s face is full of Nancy’s hair, smelling faintly of shampoo. Nancy always washed her hair too much. Lila was forever warning Nancy not to go outside with a wet head or she would catch cold, but Nancy wouldn’t listen, determined to do things her own way.

  Cat smells like perfume, maybe the scent of irises. Lila rarely gets hugs from her, even though they are closer in some ways, because she hasn’t moved away like Nancy and her comings and goings aren’t such big events. Cat came running home in tears when she began having trouble with Dan, but Nancy never mentions anything wrong in her life. Nancy analyzes everything closely, passing judgment on it, the way her grandmother would have examined someone’s quilt— studying and evaluating the stitching for evenness and smallness. Nancy would never make a quilt, though. But Cat would.

  “My plane got fog-delayed in Boston,” Nancy says, pulling back from Lila. “And instead of landing in Nashville, we flew all the way to Birmingham and then back to Nashville. How are you feeling, Mom?”

  “Well, I ain’t ready to go out and pick cotton,” says Lila. “But you didn’t have to come all this way.”

  “I wanted to come.”

  Cat says, “I ate lunch twice while I was waiting for the plane. And read two whole magazines from cover to cover. And watched people. I saw a lot of weirdos.”

  Nancy plops on the side of the bed. “When Cat’s nervous she eats, and when I’m nervous I can’t eat.”

  Cat, her car keys still in her hand, has on a long skirt with a flounce, from the boutique where she works. Nancy dresses like a boy most of the time and has worn the same belt on her bluejeans for years, but Cat has always been a fashion plate. In high school she was Miss Sorghum at a festival. Cat used to get exasperated with Nancy and say she didn’t want to be seen in public with her, but she’s finally given up on her sister. Cat always said, “Be fancy, Nancy!”

  The girls run through a million questions they want to ask the doctor, but Lila cannot remember what she wants to ask. She meant to tell the doctor yesterday about her mastitis and to ask whether it causes cancer. The main thing is the cost. Cat assured her everything would be covered, but Lila doesn’t believe insurance covers everything. She heard that if it was cancer, it wouldn’t be covered. Now Cat is investigating the drawers and closets in the room, checking things. Cat has always been particular. She’s a fine housekeeper, something Lila never had time to be. Cat won dozens of ribbons in 4-H.

  “Look what I hatched out,” Lila says proudly to the nurse who comes in to take her temperature. “My little girls.”

  “They don’t look a thing alike,” the nurse says, then glances at her watch.

  After the nurse removes the thermometer and leaves, Nancy says, “Robert wanted me to tell you he misses you and he’s sorry he couldn’t come.”

  Lila smiles. Her grandson is a thoughtful boy, always sending her cards on Mother’s Day and her birthday.

  “Jack too,” Nancy says.

  “Jack’s awful good to let you come traipsing down here.”

  Nancy flinches in protest. “He didn’t let me! He had nothing to do with it. You’re my mom and I came to see you.”

  The bed is loaded with Nancy’s things, blue pouches with zipper pockets. Lila thrives on such confusion. She teases Nancy, “I swear, with all that stuff you tote around you’re just like old Aunt Hattie Cross. Aunt Hattie always carried her wash pan and her toothbrush everywhere she went. We kidded her about packing her potty around. We’d say she brushed her teeth in her pot.”

  “I’ve got my toothbrush right here—somewhere,” Nancy says, grinning. “I didn’t bring my pot, though.”

  “Well, you can use mine,” Lila says with a laugh. “There’s one in the bathroom with my name on it!”

  She tousles Nancy’s hair lovingly. Lila’s children are all grown, with their own families. This is what life comes down to, she realizes—replacing your own life with new ones. It’s just like raising a crop. Somehow, this makes her think of prize-winning vegetables at the fair. It always made her sad to see the largest and prettiest vegetables on display. The best tomatoes and corn and broccoli sat there and ruined just so people could look at them.

  “Lee was here,” Lila says. “He said he’d talk to you, Cat, but it was up to you. I wish y’all would stop fussing over that air conditioner.”

  “It wasn’t the air conditioner. It was that dumb three-wheeler!” Cat says angrily. “He never should have let Scott ride it. He was too little, and he didn’t have a helmet. Those things are dangerous!”

  “Where are Scott and Krystal?” Lila asks, shifting the subject.

  “With Dan. They went to Hopkinsville yesterday to stay two weeks with him. I thought you knew that.”

  “No.” Lila is puzzled. She says, “I can’t keep things straight anymore. I thought Lee was mad at you over that air conditioner you gave him. I didn’t know it was the three-wheeler.”

  Cat pats Lila’s hair. “Let’s don’t worry about this stuff, O.K.?” Nancy says, “The main thing right now is you.”

  “I think they’re going to take this breast off,” Lila says, placing her hand under her right breast.

  “You’ve always been so proud of those,” Cat says, reaching to touch the top of Lila’s breast lightly.

  “My big jugs,” Lila says, smiling. “I raised three younguns on these. I guess they’re give out now.” She can’t say what she feels— that the last thing she would have expected was to be attacked by disease in the very place she felt strongest. It seemed to suggest some basic failing, like the rotten core of a dying tree.

  Nancy rests her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Is all this too fast?” she asks.

  “Well, I have to get it done.”

  “It’s up to you—if you feel it’s going too far, or if you want to wait.” Nancy removes her hand to smooth her hair. Lila spots a gray hair on Nancy’s head and almost bursts into tears.

  “No, I want to get it over with.”

  “We hate to see you pushed around,” Cat says. “They’re your breasts, and if they’re worth more to you than all this—”

  “It�
��s your decision,” says Nancy.

  “I know what you mean,” says Lila, cradling her breasts like babies. “But they ain’t worth more than living.”

  “I think it’s going to be all right, Mom,” says Nancy, taking Lila’s hand. “The lump isn’t big and you found it early.”

  “I wouldn’t have found it if it hadn’t been for Cat.” Lila starts to cry. “Don’t y’all stare at me. I don’t like to be stared at.”

  The old woman in the other bed, behind a curtain, yells at a nurse, “You can just take that thing and ram it up your butt.”

  Cat and Nancy start snickering. “I’ll be like that tomorrow!” says Lila, laughing back her tears. “Oh, me!”

  3

  Spence can’t sleep. With the frenzied urgency of a hunting dog, Oscar is barking at an animal out in the field. Spence wonders if it could be the wildcat that had screamed out by the barn one night. Wildcats scavenged at the dump beyond the industrial park, and a man had shot one there not long ago. Spence was heartsick when he heard about that. Some people would shoot anything, just to see how it killed. Last year, he saw, for perhaps ten seconds, a wildcat at the pond. It was small and scrawny, with a short, black-tipped tail and long, tufted ears. It disappeared into the scrub along the creek.

  He jams pillows under his neck. They are soft like her breasts, but he doesn’t want to let himself think about her body. She has been looking bad for a long time, losing weight, not eating. She kept making excuses, saying she wasn’t hungry, or that she was more active than usual. In early June, when they were in Florida, she was sick. They went with Lee and his wife, Joy, and the kids, all crammed in Lee’s station wagon. It was the wrong season. When Lee planned the trip, they didn’t think about the season because they could only go in the summer, after Joy finished the school year. She teaches the second grade. In Florida, the temperature was already in the high nineties. They stayed in a cabin at Flamingo, the southernmost point on the U.S. mainland. When they entered the cabin, clouds of mosquitoes swarmed in through the door with them. Afterwards, they laughed at the way they had frantically slapped at the insects and sprayed each other down with insect repellent. It reminded Spence of spraying cows for flies. After they wiped out the mosquito invasion, he and Lee sat in the air-conditioning and watched TV while Lila and Joy cooked supper. The children, Jennifer and Greg, scratched their bites until they were raw. Through the night mosquitoes whined only occasionally, and then the next day the hot sun burned them off. Spence loved the heat. As they rode along the main highway, he told Lila, “I wouldn’t mind having a job mowing the shoulders along the road down here.”

  It was his first real trip since he was in the Navy. He was surprised at how much he loved the swamp. On a lookout point, they gazed out over the endless sea of saw grass. It was studded with little rises, like islands. The Indians called them hummocks. He felt free. The sun blazed down on them, and he thought he could live there always. Lee kept apologizing for bringing them to Florida in the wrong season. Most of the migrating birds had gone north. In the winter, thousands of herons and egrets and storks and ibises gathered in the Everglades, but in the late spring the swamp was bare, with only a few birds, and the alligator hole was quiet, the alligators lying still like rotting logs in the murky water. Once, they spotted an alligator crossing the road, sluggish and lizard-like. They saw a blue racer. And several long-necked white birds. A few blue herons.

  Lila didn’t like Florida. Earlier in the trip, when she started having the dizzy spells and the numbness in her arm, they took her to a hospital in Orlando. The doctor—who charged sixty-five dollars for an emergency-room visit and spent only five minutes with Lila—said she had an irritated nerve and suggested she go to her own doctor when she returned home. They spent two miserable days at Disney World— the purpose of the whole trip, for the kids. Spence didn’t care for it. He wanted to see snakes and birds and alligators, so Lee drove them on down to the Everglades. They had insisted Lila didn’t have to go, but she said she didn’t mind, that she felt better. But when they explored the trails, she stayed in the car, with the air conditioner blowing, and smoked and napped, while Spence and the others explored the boardwalk trails through the swamps. He was fascinated by the mahogany hummocks, and he read all the plaques that told about the wildlife. He liked to imagine when the Indians lived there in the swamp, venturing from hummock to hummock in their canoes, exploring. Back in the stuffy, smoky car, she was quiet and her face was pale, but she said she was all right. “It’s the heat,” she said. “I’m hotter than a she-wolf in a pepper patch!”

  Those dizzy spells turned out to be little strokes—TIAs, the doctor in Paducah called them. The blood wasn’t feeding to her brain. Now Spence shudders in the night, imagining a scene in Florida—Lila having a major stroke on one of those lonely trails. The nearest hospital was fifty miles away, and they would not have known how to find it. If something had happened to her then, he would have been to blame.

  Dawn is creeping under the shades. The sheets are wadded, the quilt is lying on the rug, the cat scratching at the back door. Lila is crazy about the cat, Abraham. Spence has never seen her so crazy about a cat, the way she baby-talks to him. The morning after Spence heard that wildcat, Abraham’s fur was ruffled, as though something had been chewing on him and rolling him in the dirt. Abraham has long hair and is spotted like a Guernsey. Stiff and aching, Spence gets up and watches the sun rise over the soybean fields. Oscar is out there, walking slowly, sniffing close to the ground.

  While CNN blares out the latest on Iran-Iraq, Iran-contra, Nicaragua, South Africa, something in Idaho, Spence makes breakfast in the microwave. He watches the strips of bacon curl up and ooze grease down the ridges of the bacon rack. When the bacon is done, he makes scrambled eggs. He sets the dish in for twenty-five seconds, then stirs the eggs with a fork and cooks them for twentyfive more seconds. Spence bought the microwave so he could fix his meals while Lila was away on her trips with the senior citizens. She has been to Hawaii, the Badlands, Savannah and New Orleans.

  He bought the microwave at a flea market, almost new. At first, he set it on top of the refrigerator, but Lila couldn’t reach it. So he found a wobbly metal table at a sale and set the oven on it next to the kitchen table. The first time he tried the microwave, he cracked an egg in a dish and the egg exploded in the oven with a sound like a shotgun. He learned to punch the yolk with a fork to let the pressure out. “Crazy thing,” Lila said on the telephone to one of her friends. “He never reads the directions to anything.” The oven came with an incomplete set of instructions, and he had to learn how to use it by trial and error. Once, he exploded a potato, for fun.

  After eating, he and Oscar head for the barn to feed the calves, five little Holsteins he is raising for beef in a pasture between the barn and the woods. The fencing is makeshift—boards and an electric wire.

  “Oscar, you sure are smart,” Spence says. “You learned about that electric fence in one easy lesson.”

  Oscar wags his tail. The calves flick flies with their tails. They amble forward, rubbing each other and gazing at Spence with liquid eyes the texture and size of fried eggs. A horrifying image flashes through his mind—jabbing their eyes with a fork. Once he tried raising a veal calf, and every time he remembers it he hates himself. The little thing stayed in the dark stall alone, and whenever Spence came to bottle-feed him, the calf cried. When after only a few weeks Spence took him to the slaughterhouse, the calf couldn’t stand up. The meat was tender and pale. He and Lila couldn’t talk about it. The packages languished in the freezer, and by the time she cooked the last ones, the meat had lost its freshness.

  He steadies himself against the barn door for a moment, then enters the barn, the calves following. He distributes cups of feed into the troughs, and the calves dig their heads in. He fastens their necks to the stanchions, and while they feed he talks to them.

  “Sunflower,” he says. “You’re too skinny. Whoa, there, Mudpuddle. Watch what you’re d
oing, Dexter. Delbert. Boss Hogg, don’t get crazy now.”

  Always, when Spence feeds his calves, he goes through their names.

  4

  Lila says, “They sure don’t let you get lonesome here—all the traipsing in and out they do at all hours.”

  Cat and Nancy are hovering over the bed, staring at her with an unnatural sort of eagerness. “Did you sleep?” Cat asks.

  “Off and on,” says Lila. She tries to sit up against the pillow, but she feels woozy from this morning’s medicine. “That coffee last night made me jumpy, but they give me some pills and a shot.”

  Nancy says, “That’s outrageous! There was no good reason to give you coffee. You should have refused it.”

  Cat’s earrings dangle in Lila’s face. Lila’s mind feels fuzzy, far away. She is afraid the operating room will be cold.

  “Are you scared?” Nancy asks, holding Lila’s hand.

  “They work you over too much for you to be scared. I haven’t had time to think.” Lila squeezes Nancy’s hand and reaches for Cat’s. “You girls are being good to me,” she says. “I sure am lucky.”

  “Well, we care about you,” Cat says.

  “You’re going to be just fine, Mom,” says Nancy. “You’re tough.”

  “I guess I better say goodbye to my jug,” Lila says, laughing and looking down at herself. “If Spence don’t hurry on here, he’s going to miss his chance.”

  Just then Spence appears, still in short sleeves. Yesterday she tried to tell him to wear long sleeves, but he wouldn’t listen to her. After giving Nancy a hug, he steps back and eyes her up and down to see how much older she seems.

  “You look poor as a snake,” he says. “Why didn’t you bring Robert?”