Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Bill laughs. “I set out about twenty slips, back in the cornfield. I had twenty acres in corn last year, so I strewed ’em out.” He flings his arm toward his south fields. “These things grow like weeds, but you need to water ’em good. They need a lot of water the first two weeks. After that, they just grow like burdock. They do better if you sucker ’em. At the end of the summer, when they started turning, I cut the stalks off and packed ’em to the barn in a gunnysack and cured ’em. Then I put ’em in a big bed sheet and rolled it with a rolling pin and pounded the stalks good. I didn’t want to take a chance on losing a smidgen of that leaf. Then I took the stalks out and packaged up the leaves in those little plastic zipper bags. And I took ’em up to the truck stop in Newton and sold ’em to a fellow I know. Them suckers brought twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Gah!” says Spence, his mouth open.

  “A thousand bucks apiece, Spence.” He shook the coffee can. “Look at these babies,” he says gleefully. “My millions.”

  “Pretty soon you’ll be sowing an acre of this stuff and then you’ll get caught.”

  “Hell, Spence, I ain’t talking acres. This is the small farmer you’re talking to. I ain’t no goddamn corporation.”

  Spence turns to go, and Bill says, “I figure there ain’t nothing wrong with it. I don’t sell it to kids.”

  “Yeah, but you sold it to truckers, and then they get out on the road, high on dope.”

  “Nah! They take it home. It ain’t like tobacco, Spence. You don’t smoke it all the time. You wait till you’re setting around watching television or something.”

  “Sounds like you know what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m just being a good farmer, Spence. Knowing my product. Now I’m ahead on my payments and I’ve got that airplane that can pull in the cash.”

  “Then I reckon you can give me a cut rate.”

  Bill grins. “For you, Spence, good buddy. I’ll come early in the morning if it ain’t windy. Better fasten up your calves tonight.” He returns the coffee can to the cabinet under the TV. Jokingly, he says, “Why don’t we go sow some of these seeds up along the railroad track?”

  “I don’t have time to get involved in organized crime,” Spence says with a grin.

  “You know what, Spence? You ought to go take a walk back to your back fencerow and see what’s growing there.”

  “Why?”

  “Those boys on the old Folsom place are liable to be growing something on your side of the line and you not know it. And then if the law was to find out—why, it’s on your property, not theirs.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Spence says, alarmed. “You reckon?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past ’em. They’ve got that new truck and I didn’t see soybeans doing that good last year, and they’ve got that combine to pay for and they had a new pond bulldozed. They’re really turning it on over there.”

  The Frost brothers—a bachelor and a widower—bought out the old Folsom farm, the property behind Spence’s, but they don’t know how to farm it. They came from down in Mississippi and aren’t used to Kentucky soil. Lila was upset with them once for running over her petunias when they came to bring some firewood from a dead post-oak tree they had sawed down on the fence line. Spence was surprised they had let him have the wood.

  As Spence opens his car door, Bill calls after him, “Let me take you up for a ride in the airplane, Spence.”

  “I don’t even like to ride in your truck with you, Bill. You’re too reckless.”

  “Got to live dangerously, Spence!”

  “Well, you seem to be doing that. You’ll get cancer breathing them bug-killer fumes.”

  “Oh, go up with me sometime just for a ride. We don’t have to spray when we go. I’ll show you what your place looks like from the air.”

  Spence starts up his Rabbit. He would like to fly. He wishes he could just get in that flimsy little plane and fly off somewhere.

  17

  Spence hates the familiar smells, the cold temperature, the sounds of the scurrying nurses. The sight of the old people being led for their walks down the corridor bothers him most. They clutch pillows to hold their insides in.

  That morning Lila had the test she dreaded, and now she has to lie quietly all day, without turning or raising her legs. “It wasn’t as bad as they said it would be,” she says when Spence comes in. “It felt warm in my head, like it was going to blow up, but it didn’t hurt that awful much.”

  “All that worry for nothing,” he says, squeezing her hand. “That’s the way you always do. You listen to them old women talk.”

  “The doctor says he wants to operate on the left side.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow about one o’clock.” Her new roommate is staggering out the door with a nurse. “She had her gall bladder takened out,” Lila explains to Spence.

  “Where’s the girls?”

  “Cat had to go to work and Nancy’s gone to see about the garden. Didn’t you pass her on the road?”

  “I didn’t notice.” Nancy has been driving Lila’s car, even though the muffler is growing louder.

  “All those machines they’ve got in the basement for the tests—it was the space age down there! I felt like I was on television, with all those gadgets they used.” Lila shivers. “I’m taking cold. They tried to tell me they keep it cold to keep the germs down, but I always take cold when my neck gets chilled.”

  Her hand works away from his and grabs at the air. “Reach me some water,” she says.

  He pours water from her water jug into a paper cup and holds it close to her face. She can’t raise her head and he has to bend the flexineck straw and aim it at her mouth. This is the extent of his ability to deal with the sick.

  She says, “If I don’t make it, I don’t want to be stuck in that mausoleum. A truck could come along and bust that thing open.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Spence says with a grin. “We’ll put you back in the field where you can keep an eye on the corn crop.”

  She starts to laugh and is stopped by her cough. A pretty but snaggletoothed nurse materializes beside the bed. “How are we doing?” she asks.

  “We’re doing fine,” says Spence.

  “Let me sleep,” Lila says. “I’ve had enough torture for one day.”

  “Honey, I just have to check one thing,” the nurse says.

  “Won’t y’all ever leave me alone?”

  “You’re being so good we just don’t want to let you go home,” says the nurse cheerfully. “We’re just trying to keep you here ’cause we like you so much. Sir, would you step outside?”

  Spence waits in the hall, lost in a memory of Lila feeding a calf formula from a bucket with a nipple. The cow, Honey Bunch, had calved down near the creek, below the pond. When Spence brought the calf to the barn, the cow tagged along, nudging his elbow, making soft noises. The next day, Lila noticed her returning to the creek, confused. Lila followed her and found a second calf there, nestled beneath a hickory tree on the creek bank, too weak to follow its mother to the house. Lila said the cow had strained her milk by running back to the creek, trying to nurse both calves. Patiently, Lila hand-fed the calves and talked to them, even getting up in the night to go to the barn to tend them. She would do the same with wild rabbits, kittens, anything. Spence feels helpless. What if he had to feed her? Change her bed?

  The surgeon arrives, in his green garb. Spence is relieved that Cat and Nancy aren’t there to pounce on him.

  “We have the results of the angiogram,” the doctor says, glancing at his clipboard. “She’s sixty percent blocked on the left side and forty percent on the other one. My recommendation is to open up that artery on the left side and pull out that plaque, and then see how she does. I don’t want to do them both at once because of her weakened condition. And there’s a chance she’ll do so well she won’t need the other one done.”

  The thought of opening an artery makes Spence picture skinning a sn
ake. He tries to think of what to ask. “She complained about that dizziness down in Florida,” he says.

  “The blood flow was impaired,” the doctor says. He has a complexion like canned wienies and seems as delicate as a woman. He says, “We have to be careful removing the plaque, because if a fragment gets into the bloodstream it could flow to the brain and cause damage. And of course the angiogram doesn’t show us everything. It doesn’t show if there’s blockage around her heart, for example.”

  Nancy and Cat would have thrown questions at him about her heart, but Spence doesn’t want to ask about that. He says goodbye to the doctor, sees that Lila is trying to sleep, and leaves the hospital, glad to be out in the hot July sun. He spends the afternoon running errands—picking up bulk feed from the feed mill, paying the electric bill, gassing up his Rabbit. He has that coupon for the free tune-up, but the line at the gas station is too long, and he’d rather do it himself anyway.

  When he gets home, Nancy is there, bringing a bucket of cucumbers and tomatoes from the garden. She’s in shorts and a T-shirt, looking sixteen. He remembers her at that age, sitting on the corn planter behind him as he drove the tractor. She complained because she got so bored, sitting there all day in order to close up the seed bins at the end of each row while he turned the tractor. As they worked, she kept coming up with schemes for mechanical inventions to eliminate her job. “You’re just not paying attention,” he insisted to her. “There’s everything here if you just notice.” Weeds, the patterns of the rows, the language of the birds overhead, moisture levels inside the soil the harrow turned up. He felt free on his tractor. He could ride a tractor from now to the end of the world, rejoicing in the pleasure of his independence.

  Now Nancy sets the bucket under a shade tree and he tells her what the doctor said.

  “I know,” she says, pulling her long bangs out of her eyes. “I talked to him before I left.”

  “The test wasn’t as bad as she expected.”

  “No. She was scared of it, but it wasn’t bad.”

  Indoors, he changes clothes and puts on his boots. He can’t get used to keeping his clothes in the bedroom, instead of near the door, where they were handy.

  “Where are you going?” she asks when he goes out again.

  “Back in the field.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  They walk down the lane to the pond, Oscar bounding ahead, then occasionally racing back. Abraham follows them, his fluffy tail held high. At the pond, the ducks swim away from Oscar. Spence stoops to pet Abraham’s head, but he slinks away from him and leaps into the soybeans after a grasshopper. The grasshoppers are jumping among the beans like giddy children on trampolines.

  “Mom really loves that cat,” says Nancy, who is playing with a sprig of dried grass, trying to get Abraham interested.

  Spence says, “Do you know what old Cousin Dulcie said to Lila?”

  “No, what?”

  “She told Lila about some woman who had that operation and then went home and died.”

  “Dulcie has the sensitivity of a turnip.”

  Spence nods. “Do you think she’s too weak to go through with another operation?”

  “I don’t know. She was always so strong it’s hard to tell.”

  “Oscar!” Spence calls. The dog is onto a trail, his nose to the ground. “Oscar, don’t you go scaring up them rabbits.”

  Nancy says, “Mom doesn’t want us to think she’s not strong and positive. It’s her maternal instinct. She can’t stop protecting us, even when she has been violated in the worst way—” She breaks off, as if she thinks Spence might not understand her words. He’s embarrassed. She tosses the sprig of grass toward the pond and the ducks look up. “Is the water O.K. now?” she asks.

  When the tobacco warehouse up on the highway caught fire last fall, the blackened, tar-stained water from the fire hoses ran down into the creek and emptied into the pond. The water was hot, and the heat killed the fish. The tobacco company official who investigated assured them the tar was harmless and offered them two thousand dollars compensation. It was twice as much money as they had invested bulldozing and stocking the pond, so they had to accept it, but Spence and Lila grieved, seeing the fish floating in the water, then massing on the bank. They had to bury them.

  “It seems all right now,” he says. “When it happened, the frogs was as thick as them grasshoppers on the beans out here. So all the frogs died, and all the fish. I even found a big mud turtle in with all them fish.”

  “Did you have the water tested?”

  He shakes his head no. “It’s O.K. There’s a runoff, and the water keeps running in from the creek.”

  He can feel Nancy tense up, wanting to lecture him on how he should have sued. But Spence doesn’t trust lawyers any more than he trusts the company officials. The two thousand was a good deal. Kicking at a shampoo bottle that has washed out of the creek, he says, “She’s worried herself sick over first one thing and then another. The pond and losing them fish. And she worries about Cat being by herself at night and what it’s doing to the kids. And then that business with Cat and Lee.”

  “I think Cat’s sorry about that,” Nancy says.

  “Have you talked to her about it?”

  “Not much.”

  “Have you seen Lee?”

  “A couple of times, but we didn’t talk about it. Cat was mad at Lee for taking Mom to Florida when she wasn’t feeling well.”

  I can’t live without Lila, Spence thinks suddenly. Somewhere from the depths of his memory sprouts an old scene of her milking a cow named Turnipseed. The flies were bad. Lila tied Turnipseed’s tail to the stanchion to keep it from switching her in the face as she milked. He can even remember the polka-dotted dress she was wearing on that particular day. There she is, sitting on the milk stool, splotches of lime on her heavy brown shoes. When the cows were all milked and turned out, she scraped the manure off the floor and scattered lime all over the concrete. That scene happened thousands of times; it is strange that one stands out—Turnipseed’s tail, the spots on her shoes like the dots on the dress.

  “What’s going to happen to this farm?” Nancy is asking.

  Spence is struck by how old he is, so old even his children are aging. “I’ll leave it for you kids to fight over,” he says. “I can’t keep up this place much longer—I’m about give out. I can’t keep the gullies filled up. The whole farm’s going to wash away if I don’t keep at it.”

  “It’ll become a subdivision like that monstrosity down the road,” Nancy says. “It makes me sad that we can’t carry it on.”

  “Well, we had two strikes against us,” Spence says. “Starting out with two girls.” He grins at her, imagining Nancy as a farm wife instead of an adventurer.

  “Why didn’t you teach Lee how to farm?” she asks. “It’s a shame he has to work such long hours at that factory.”

  “He makes a better living at what he’s doing than he ever would on a farm these days.”

  “It still would have been good for him to know,” Nancy argues.

  Back when she was in college, she would have argued the opposite. He remembers a time when she tried to persuade them to move to town and open a grocery store.

  “I always made good, and we never had to do without,” Spence says. “But nowadays a young couple would have to borrow too much to start out. There wouldn’t be a living in it anymore—not in a place this size.”

  They head down the lane into the creek below the pond. A gap in the bank is stopped up with layers of rusted car parts, old bedsprings, chair frames—all filled in with piles of leaves. An enamel coffeepot and some rubber tubing have washed out of the trash. Oscar paddles in the creek, slopping his big paws through the shallow puddles. Nancy skips across on some flat rocks and Spence strides right through the mud and gravel. On the other side, Nancy stops and turns to face Spence.

  “Daddy, do you remember one day when we rode the hay wagon across the creek? You were driving the tractor an
d Mom and I rode on top of the hay all the way back to the house.”

  Spence shook his head. “We did that every year.”

  “It felt like riding an elephant when the wagon bobbed down into the creek. Granny sent back our dinner at noon and we ate on the creek bank at the back field. She sent fried chicken and biscuits and ham and those white peas I like and slaw and sliced tomatoes and onions and a jug of iced tea.”

  “How do you remember all that?”

  “I don’t know. I just remember being happy that day.”

  A car horn sounds in the driveway, across the field. “That’s Cat,” Nancy says. “We’ve got to do corn again.” But she doesn’t leave immediately. She says, “That day Mom was so pretty. It was before she got worn down taking care of Granny. I thought then that she’d live forever.” Nancy, suddenly fighting back tears, says, “When I was little, I don’t think it ever once occurred to me that I might lose one of you.”

  Spence is too choked up to speak. Nancy crosses the flat rocks again, her shoe sinking into some soft gravel, and when she reaches the other side, she says, “Cat came back here that day with the hired hand and the dinner, and she rode back with us. I remember that now. We found a bird’s nest in a cedar tree, and down in the creek we saw some footprints of a raccoon. Cat tore her dress on the fence and cried. That was the summer you bought me a cowboy hat.”

  Nancy leaves, following the path along the upper creek, which feeds the pond. He’s not sure he remembers that day, but he can see Lila riding on top of the load of hay as clearly in his imagination as he could in memory. Lila and the girls in straw hats, Lila in some of his old pants and a long-sleeved shirt with a rip in the sleeve. As the picture grows clearer in his mind, Nancy’s straw hat changes to a cowboy hat, Cat’s dress to a robin’s-egg blue—the same as her car in the driveway now. He smiles, remembering the cowboy hat. He had to hunt all over town to find one Nancy’s size.

  He follows the creek line down toward the back fields. In the center of one of the middle fields is a rise with a large, brooding old oak tree surrounded by a thicket of blackberry briers. From the rise, he looks out over his place. This is it. This is all there is in the world—it contains everything there is to know or possess, yet everywhere people are knocking their brains out trying to find something different, something better. His kids all scattered, looking for it. Everyone always wants a way out of something like this, but what he has here is the main thing there is—just the way things grow and die, the way the sun comes up and goes down every day. These are the facts of life. They are so simple they are almost impossible to grasp. It’s like looking up at the stars at night, seeing them strung out like seed corn, sprinkled randomly across the sky. Stars seem simple, even monotonous, because there’s no way to understand them. The ocean was like that too, blank and deep and easy.