Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  10

  Lila feels the arteries in her neck throbbing, heavy with blood trying to reach her brain. Nancy claimed the blood vessels were stopped up with bacon grease. The bacon that comes with the hospital breakfast is usually burned, and Lila still has no appetite, but she tries to eat because it is wrong to waste food. She hasn’t smoked. The thought of cigarettes makes her gag.

  She doesn’t believe the cancer has spread. She can’t feel it anywhere. The doctor said the knot was only the size of a lima bean. She is self-conscious about the emptiness on her right front. The bandage itches, and the drainage tube irritates her. The tube coils out of the wound and connects to the plastic drainage bottle taped to her stomach, close to her shaved groin. She does not know why they had to shave her there. With the bottle flapping as she walks down the hall, she imagines that this is what a man’s balls must be like. She pulls at the hospital gown, filling it out with air so she won’t appear so lopsided. With the drainage bottle and her flattened chest, she might have had a sex-change operation. Her mind still seems cloudy at times, and then sometimes all the recent events come at her in a rush. She probably shouldn’t have gone to Florida. She recalls Cat saying, “Lee and Daddy never should have taken you to the Everglades when it was off-season—ninety-eight degrees and wall-to-wall mosquitoes.” Lila told Cat, “That cloud of mosquitoes was purely black!”

  Losing her breast feels something like giving birth. Part of her that used to bulge out is now vacant, the familiar growth gone. It’s an empty sensation, but not exceptionally painful. Now that she has been thinking about it, it seems natural, after all, that disease should attack her there, that she should be most vulnerable there. Probably she strained her breasts; they were too large; and she has had so much mastitis. It makes sense. When Lee was born, she was tired and overworked. During the winter she had been working at the clothing factory, and that summer she made several premature trips to the hospital, returning home empty-handed. It was frustrating, and when Lee was finally born, the other children stood beside her hospital bed accusingly, as if she had done something peculiar for her age. She was only thirty-two, but seeing Nancy, who was already twelve, made her feel old. Nancy pleaded, “Come home soon, because nobody will do what I say and I hate to cook.” They didn’t tell Lila until later about the scare with Cathy—as she was called then. She wasn’t called Cat until that movie Cat Ballou. Cathy had disappeared, and they didn’t find her for over two hours. She was walking down the railroad tracks, her face stained purple—probably from eating poisonous pokeberries. She was sick all night.

  After Lila came home from the hospital with the baby, he cried so much at night that Spence started sleeping on his parents’ screened-in porch. Lila realized Lee was hungry for solid food. She began feeding him baby food, as well as cow’s milk in a bottle. For the only time in her life, Lila could barely manage. Vegetables from the garden were coming in, the blackberries were ripe, and Cat was still so little she had to be watched every minute. Nancy was becoming difficult— moody and resentful of her chores. She played loud music on the radio. Lila got no sleep those first few months. But a few years later, they bought their first television, and an unexpected harmony filled the house. They gathered in the living room with a dishpan full of popcorn. Their favorite show was I Love Lucy. When Lucy broke into one of her childish bawls, Lee would pucker up and pretend to bawl too. “A great sense of humor for a kid,” Nancy said. Lila recalled long winter nights at Uncle Mose’s, when there was no entertainment to work by. There was only the bickering of her older cousins over the ironing and sewing, with Uncle Mose in his rocking chair, reading the Bible and farting, seemingly at will. Behind his back, they called him Old Whistlebritches.

  Nancy is waving a large envelope in Lila’s face. “Mom, I have something wonderful to show you. Jack just sent some new pictures of Robert.”

  “He’s going to be a lady-killer,” Cat says. “Nancy, I wish you’d brought him with you!”

  “Oh, let me get my glasses,” says Lila eagerly. She doesn’t see her oldest grandchild often, but in the pictures Nancy frequently sends, Lila has watched him grow, like that kitten in the television commercial who changes into a grown cat in just a few seconds.

  Nancy, removing the pictures from the envelope, says, “Jack sent them Federal Express to me at Cat’s. He sent them last night and they got here this morning.”

  “I can’t get over that,” says Cat. “Anymore, everything’s so fast.” Lila adjusts her glasses and examines the pictures as Nancy hands them to her one by one. They are large black-and-white pictures on thick paper, unlike the little snapshots the drugstore develops.

  “He’s filled out a lot,” Lila says. “He don’t look like a starved chicken anymore.”

  Robert seems confident and grown. In one picture, he’s holding something, maybe keys, and in his sunglasses he’s in a playful pose, pretending he’s somebody famous. He’s in dark pants and a T-shirt with faint writing on it.

  “Isn’t he darling?” Cat says. “I could just eat him up.”

  “He’s about five-ten now,” says Nancy. “Look at this one.”

  “That’s my favorite,” Cat says. “He looks like Daddy.”

  “Why, he does!” Lila studies the picture closely. She can see Spence hiding there—the firm lines of the jaw, the clenched teeth, the concealed beginning of a grin. Spence wasn’t much older than Robert is now when she first saw him. He was riding a mule down Wolf Creek Road. His mother had cut his hair, causing his cowlick to shoot up like a tuft of grass on top of a stump, but it only accentuated his good looks. Lila gets tickled and laughs at Robert’s hair. “I sure didn’t know he had a cowlick,” she says.

  “It’s not a cowlick. It’s spiked,” Nancy explains. “It’s what kids do to their hair these days.”

  “Robert has your eyes,” Lila says, noticing the dark glint in Nancy’s eyes. “I always said he had your eyes.”

  Lila remembers the time Lee cut his foot on the jagged edge of a rusted coffee can that had been opened by one of those old-timey can openers. Lila knew from Nancy’s scared eyes as she ran toward the house with Lee in her arms that something terrible had happened, even before she saw the blood from Lee’s foot.

  “And now for the prize.” Nancy is hiding the last picture against her chest. “This is Robert at the end of the school year. They didn’t have a prom. They had what they call a ‘superlative.’ It’s an honors thing, where they celebrate their achievements.”

  “I can’t believe this,” says Cat as Nancy turns the picture face forward.

  Robert, in a tuxedo, is standing against a doorway next to a pretty girl in a long dress with a ruffle around the neck. Both of them have that wild hair, standing up as if electrified.

  “He’s girlfriending already!” Lila cries. “Law, that hair.”

  “Her name is Amy,” says Nancy. “Her mother is our accountant.”

  “I bet all the girls are crazy about him,” says Cat. “Look at that sexy grin.”

  Nancy says, “They’re just friends, or so I’m told. Amy’s dress is pink, and he has a pink cummerbund to match.”

  “Everything is pink now,” says Cat.

  “Why don’t Jack ever take anything in color?” Lila asks. “I have to use my imagination.”

  “I guess that’s the idea,” says Nancy. She laughs. “Jack didn’t want to send this picture earlier, but I guess he changed his mind. He thought you might have a fit over the hair.”

  Smiling, Lila lays her glasses on the nightstand. “Well, I’m mighty proud,” she says. “You sure did put out a fine youngun, and stayed married—for how long now?”

  “It was twenty years ago today—”

  “Today?”

  “No, not today. That’s a song allusion. Eighteen years.”

  “That’s a record,” Cat says in a flat tone.

  Lila realizes the sadness in Cat’s voice. She is certain Cat could have patched it up with Dan. Quickly, Lila says, with deep pr
ide, “All of my children have given me some mighty fine grandchildren.”

  “Krystal and Scott both asked about you on the phone, Mom,” Cat says. “Krystal hates it in Hopkinsville and wants to come home.”

  Nancy gathers up the photographs, promising to leave them for Lila to look at again later.

  “Y’all don’t have to be here every minute,” Lila insists to Cat and Nancy.

  “We’re here because we care about you,” says Cat.

  “Well, you’re showing it,” Lila says. A sudden swell of emotion rises in her throat. The tugging sensation of nursing them as babies is as clear as yesterday. Nancy liked to bite. Cat was always hungry. Nancy wasn’t weaned until she was two and a half. Rosie would say, “You’re giving that youngun too much peezootie.” That was a word of Rosie’s Lila never heard anyone else use.

  “Is there anything you want us to do?” Nancy asks.

  With a little catch in her voice, Lila says, “There’s something I wanted you to promise me. I didn’t get to say it before.”

  They listen, like a pair of young cats fixed on a squirrel. Lila says, without her voice breaking, “I want you to take care of your daddy if something happens to me. He won’t be able to take care of hisself.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll take care of him.” Cat caresses Lila’s hand, picking at a cuticle where nail polish has smeared.

  Lila says, “I don’t want to be buried in that Spring Valley mausoleum. It’s on the side of the road on a curve, and a truck could come along and bust it open.”

  “Don’t think that way!” Nancy says.

  Cat leans forward to give Lila a hug. “We’d never leave you by the side of the road. You know that.”

  “I wouldn’t have found that knot if it hadn’t been for you. In the old days, people didn’t get breast cancer. Or they didn’t know they had it. They just got sick and died.”

  “Well, science can do amazing things nowadays,” Nancy says. “And the chemotherapy is going to work.”

  “You just don’t realize how far we’ve come,” says Lila, squeezing Nancy’s hand.

  “Yes, I do. I would have died at age ten of pneumonia if it hadn’t been for penicillin.”

  Nancy always has an answer. But she seems not to realize she had survived pneumonia another time, when she was two. That was before penicillin. The memory jolts Lila.

  “Times are better now,” she insists to her daughters. “You don’t know how good you’ve got it.”

  Nowadays, Lila thinks, young people expect to have everything right at the start. House and car, washer and dryer. They’re not patient. When she worked at the clothing factory, she earned enough money to make life a little easier. In the few years she worked there, she bought a steam iron, an electric mixer, an electric stove, a set of steak knives, a dinette set. Spence never wanted her to go to work, but after Nancy started to school, and before Cat and Lee came along, the factory was hiring. Excitedly, Lila applied for the job, wearing a suit she had made. The hiring man admired her sewing and gave her the job. She sat at a large machine, stitching in collars or cuffing pants. She put on weight, sitting long hours on the high stool, but her arms grew strong from pushing and pulling the heavy suit material through her machine. The oiled wood floors were sticky with clumps of thread, and the air was stifling, despite the overhead fans. She carried her dinner—pimiento or tuna-fish sandwiches, with the lettuce wrapped separately; and sometimes a tomato, and salt and pepper folded in little pieces of waxed paper. She usually carried cake or cookies. On her breaks and lunch period, it was a deep pleasure to drink a cold, slippery bottle of Coca-Cola from the large cooler in the hallway. Lila loved the people, the talk that went on above the noise. She bragged on her child and listened to others brag on theirs; they swapped pictures and stories. The woman at the machine next to hers had asthma attacks from the wool dust in the air, and they had to carry her outside occasionally. A man working at the end of her row always entertained the hands with songs popular on the radio. She can still hear him singing “Slow Boat to China.” Recently someone told her he had left his wife and died of a brain tumor in Arizona, alone. Another woman was always called “Miss Gregory” instead of her first name because she always dressed so elegantly for such rough work. They would say, “Miss Gregory sets on a pillow sewing a fine seam.” Lila felt that way too, proud and alive. It was piecework, and sometimes she could make nearly ninety cents an hour, she was so fast.

  Later, Cat has gone down the hall to the bathroom and Nancy is reading. Lila is telling Mrs. Wright she doesn’t think her cancer has spread, when Cat returns, excited. “Did you see that prisoner on this floor? There’s a guy with a guard from the state penitentiary. He’s two rooms down the hall. He looks really sick, like he couldn’t crawl an inch even if he tried to escape.”

  Lila shudders. “I hope that guard don’t fall asleep. That’s all I need, to be held hostage in the hospital!”

  Mrs. Wright says, “It won’t make me one bit of difference.”

  11

  On Sunday Lila’s half-sister, Glenda, and her husband, Bill, stop by the hospital with a basket of artificial violets. It has a little ceramic rabbit in it, nibbling at the leaves. Lila is wearing her good blue gown and a bed jacket. Cat put Lila’s makeup on her that morning and fixed her hair. Lila’s scalp itches, but she doesn’t want to wash her hair for fear of catching cold.

  “Well, Lila, are you going to have to have cobalt?” Glenda asks. Glenda is overweight, with baby-fine light hair that used to be a pretty blond.

  “No, I’m not,” says Lila happily. “Just shots and pills for six months, and then they do all the tests again to see if it spread.”

  “I told Bill I didn’t think you’d have to have cobalt,” says Glenda.

  Bill is a red-faced, deliberate sort of man, a retired farmer. He says defensively, “Well, seems like they want to put everybody through that.”

  “I don’t think it spread very much,” Lila says. “I could feel it in those leaders under my arms, but they think they got it all out.” She runs her hand down her arm, which is stiffening up. The physical therapist has been there, instructing her how to work her arm. Lila has to grasp a yardstick, one hand on each end, and slowly raise it above her head, then lower it and swing it from side to side.

  Glenda says, “We heard you’re going to be operated on again, Lila.”

  Lila nods. “Depends on what they find out with my neck.” She scrapes her fingers down her throat. “The blood ain’t going through good.”

  Glenda says brightly, “Bob Barber had his veins cleaned out and he said it was like getting new glasses. He could think better after they operated.”

  “Are they going to do that test where they shoot you with the dye?” asks Bill.

  “Uh-huh. I purely dread it too.”

  “They say that really hurts,” Bill says. “They shoot it in your leg and it works its way up to your head and burns.”

  “They told me I had to lay real still for eight hours after they do it,” Lila says. “If I turn over it might be dangerous.”

  “A clot might go to your brain,” Glenda says.

  “How have y’all been?” Lila asks, changing the subject. If Spence were here, he would be furious at them.

  “All right, I reckon,” says Glenda. “Bill here has to go in for his checkup—he has sugar—and he has to have tests for that spasmatic colon he’s got.”

  Bill, hacking at a cough, says, “I told them I wasn’t going to have that test where you drank that drank again. I had that last year, and my bowels backed up and didn’t move for three months. It made a knot as big as my fist. It stayed there and everything went around it. I liked to died.”

  Glenda laughs. “He sure was something to live with while that was going on.”

  “Lila, you look like a spring chicken,” says Bill. “Why, your hide won’t hold you when you get home!” He offers to get Cokes for everyone.

  “You can get a free drink in the lounge,”
Lila says.

  After he leaves, Lila says, “I’m so proud to see you, Glenda!”

  Glenda was eight and Lila was four when their mother died. Lila has one memory of her: a chubby little woman with dark hair, saying “fried pies” out on a porch, with a dog running up from a field— somewhere Lila could never identify. Her mother was only about twenty-eight when she died, of childbed fever. Glenda, who remembered her better, told Lila once, “She was light-complected and had pretty teeth. She liked to ride horses, and they say that’s why she died. She rode a horse when she shouldn’t have.” The baby died too. Lila had been told it was a girl. Lila’s father left Lila at Uncle Mose’s and disappeared. Glenda went to live with her real daddy and his second wife in a little place down below Wolf Creek.

  Lila didn’t see Glenda again until after she married Spence and the war was over. Lila and Spence visited Glenda one Sunday afternoon. They sat on Glenda and Bill’s porch and watched the traffic go by. Lila remembers her happiness that day—Glenda’s daughter, Laura Jean, teaching Nancy how to ride a little red scooter; a dusty driveway; a setting hen; a can of sorghum Bill gave them. She remembers Glenda shooing flies from the apple slices spread out on a screen door to dry in the sun. Glenda was fat. That day she told Lila the baby their mother died with was a boy, not a girl.

  “Lila, how are those daughters of yours treating you?” Glenda asks now.

  “Oh, they’ve been awful good to me. They’ve been here every minute.” Lila laughs. “They froze my corn the other evening. They should have done it in the morning when the dew’s wet.”

  “It won’t be crisp,” Glenda says, nodding. “It’ll be tough.”

  “I hope I’m out of here in time to do all the pickles. They’ll draw the line at pickles.”