Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “You’ve got to build your strength up,” Spence says. He didn’t go to the hospital that morning because the man was coming to deliver the fish he had ordered. He stocked the pond with fifty fingerlength catfish and twenty-five crappie and an extra twenty-five two-pound catfish, barely finishing before Cat and Nancy got home with Lila. The girls have left but will be back soon. Lila was mad at him for not coming to the hospital to get her. “Was a ball game on?” she accused him. He feels clumsy and nervous with her at home, as if she must be expecting more than just ordinary life now, after her ordeal.

  Lila has just discovered the state of the refrigerator and she is ready to clean his plow. “You didn’t even touch any of those vegetables I cooked! And I reckon that ham’s ruined.”

  “No, it’s not! We eat on it and Lee took some ham and tater salad and half of a cake. And Nancy and Cat eat some when they were here. There was too much grub—we couldn’t make away with all of it.”

  “Who made this coconut pie?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I love coconut pie better than anything, but that one looks like a tire gone flat.”

  She opens the back door and steps onto the deck.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out here in the sun. I’m glad I’m back here where I can get warm. I’ve been cold as a well-digger’s butt for two weeks.”

  “We could go to Florida,” he says, following her. “Back to the Everglades.”

  “No, I ain’t never going down there again! That’s where I got sick.”

  “The sun was warm there. It dried out my sinuses and I didn’t have any trouble breathing.”

  “It made me dizzy,” she says.

  Abraham jumps onto the deck from the milkhouse roof, landing at Lila’s feet. He immediately rolls over onto his back, curling his paws and looking at her upside down.

  “Well, there’s my youngun!” cries Lila, sitting down in the slatted deck chair. “Come here, baby!”

  The cat jumps into her lap, purring, and she hugs him. He wriggles away and turns circles in her lap, then jumps down again and rolls over.

  “That means he’s happy to see me,” says Lila proudly. “Did you miss me, Abraham? Law, you’ve fallen off. You ain’t nothing but skin and bones.”

  “He’s been busy,” Spence says. “Catching grasshoppers and mice. I see him out in the beans early in the dew, and he comes in looking like a drownded rat.”

  “He loves them mouses, don’t you, Abraham,” Lila baby-talks.

  The night before, Oscar woke Spence up, barking ferociously at something. From the thrilling sounds of the barks, Spence knew Oscar was excited over an animal, not a human intruder. He wondered if it could be the wildcat. As he lay awake, he thought with pleasure about the fish he was going to put in the pond. He remembered that the first time he ever laid eyes on Lila was at her uncle’s pond. She was fishing. Her bare legs were long, like a crane’s. Now he’s nervous about his surprise and longs to tell her about it, but he has to save it.

  Suddenly Lila is down the steps and striding along the driveway. He has to hurry to catch up with her.

  “Where do you think you’re going? You’re not able to be going out for a hike.”

  “I’m going to check on the garden,” she says, picking up speed. “I just want to see it.”

  He walks along with her, her legs working fast—her dancing legs. Abraham trots along with them, his tail a bottle brush sticking straight up. Oscar joins them then, scooting out from his dust hole under the car. When Lila arrived from the hospital, they had to hold him to keep him from jumping on her.

  “Them vines are firing up,” she says.

  Despite the recent rain, the garden is drying up in the midsummer heat. Some of the Kentucky Wonder vines have dried up, and the corn is starting to turn brown, but the field peas are thriving among the corn. Lila plunges into the garden, between the okra and the peppers, and leans over to check a pepper.

  “That one’s ready to pick,” she says, snapping it off. She straightens up and twists off a sharp-pointed okra from a stalk. Suddenly Spence realizes she is yanking up weeds and fishing out dirty, stunted cucumbers from beneath dying vines. She snaps off another fuzzy okra, grabs tomatoes.

  “Check that corn, Spence. I bet it’s hard. It’s overgrown, but the field peas look nice.”

  “What do you think you’re doing!” cries Spence. “You ain’t got no business out here working in the garden.”

  “The girls didn’t do a thing about those beans like I told ’em to.”

  “You don’t have no gloves on! The doctor said you couldn’t handle dirt without gloves. You might get a sore infected and then your arm’ll fall off without those lymph nodes.”

  Lila’s hands are full of vegetables, and she cradles them in her left arm. Beads of sweat have popped out on her forehead. She’s smiling. “Look at that punkin, would you!” she cries, pointing. “That’s going to be the biggest one we ever had! Well, I’ll say!” She lets out a big laugh. “That’s going to be one for Cinderella!”

  Spence stands there, while the sweat on her forehead changes from drops to a moist, smooth layer. Her face is rosy, all the furrows and marks thrusting upward with her smile the way the okra on the stalk reach upward to the sun. Her face is as pretty as freshly plowed ground, and the scar on her neck is like a gully washed out but filling in now. He thinks about the way the soybeans are going to grow those little islands of marijuana, like lacy palm trees waving above the beans, hummocks like those in the Everglades, mounds like breasts. And then he imagines the look on Lila’s face when she catches one of those oversized catfish he has slipped into the pond.

  “These cucumbers is ready for pickling,” Lila says.

  “You sure were gone an awful long time,” Spence says, his lips puckering up. “I thought to my soul you never was going to come home.” He takes some of the vegetables from her. “I’ve got a cucumber that needs pickling,” he says.

  The way she laughs is the moment he has been waiting for. She rares her head back and laughs steadily, her throat working and her eyes flashing. Her cough catches her finally and slows her down, but her face is dancing like pond water in the rain, all unsettled and stirring with aroused possibility.

  1994

  Proper Gypsies

  In London, I kept wondering about everything. I wondered what it meant to be civilized. Over there, I was so self-conscious about being an American—a wayward overseas cousin, crude and immature. I wondered if tea built character, and if “Waterloo” used to be slang for “water closet” and then got shortened to “loo.” Did Princess Di shop on sunny Goodge Street? And why did it take high-heeled sneakers so long to become a fashion—decades after “Good Golly Miss Molly”? I wondered why there was so much music in London. The bands listed in Time Out made it seem there was a new wave, an explosion of revolutionary energy blasting from the forbidding dance clubs of Soho. The names were clever and demanding: the New Fast Automatic Daffodils, the Okey Dokey Stompers, Tea for the Wicked, Bedbugs, Gear Junkies, Frank the Cat, Velcro Fly, Paddy Goes to Holyhead. But the dismal, disheveled teens who passed me on Oxford Street made me think there could be no real music, only squall-pop, coming out of the desperation of the bottom classes. Yet I wondered what rough beast now was slouching toward its birth. I had an open mind.

  However, I wasn’t prepared for what happened in London. I was cut loose—on holiday, as they said in Britain. I had little money and no job to go home to, so this was more of a fling than a vacation. I had abruptly left the guy I was involved with, and now he was on a retreat (on retreat?) at a Trappist monastery. He had immersed himself in Thomas Merton books. Andy was very serious-minded and had high cholesterol. Actually, I believe he found Merton glamorous, but I always remembered the electric fan in India, or wherever, that electrocuted him—an object lesson for transcendental meditators, I thought. I was separated from Jack, my husband. New Age Andy had been my midlife course correction, but no
w he was off to count beads and hoe beans, or whatever the monks do there at Gethsemani. When he was a child, my son saw the dark-robed monks out hoeing in a field, and he called the place a monk farm. I didn’t know what I’d do about Andy. He was virtuous, but he made me restless. I knew I was always trying to fit in and rebel simultaneously. My husband called that the Marie Antoinette paradox.

  I was all alone in London, so in a way I was on a retreat, too. I had a borrowed flat in Bloomsbury for a month. My old college friend Louise worked in London as a government translator, and she was away, translating for a consulate in Italy. Back in the sixties, the summer after our junior year, Louise and I had gone to Europe together— “Europe on $5 a Day.” During that miserable trip, Louise’s mother died back in Jacksonville, and she was already buried by the time the news reached us in Rome. We didn’t know what to do but grimly continue our travels. We ended up in England, and we took a train to the Lake District, where we met some cute guys from Barrow-on-Furness who had never seen an American before.

  Louise’s flat was on a brick-paved mews just off Bloomsbury Avenue. It stood at the street level, and all the flats had window boxes of late-fall blooms. There was no backyard garden—just as well, since I didn’t want to mother plants. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was supposed to be thinking. Or maybe not thinking. I wondered if I should go back to Jack. I didn’t want to rush back automatically, like a boomerang—or a New Fast Automatic Daffodil.

  Two days after my arrival from JFK, I still had my days and nights mixed up. On Sunday, I slept till well past two. After breakfast I went walking, a long way. I walked up Tottenham Court Road, past all the tacky electronics stores, to Regent’s Park. I walked through the park to the zoo. When I got there, the zoo was closing. I decided not to proceed farther into the dim interior of the park but walked back the way I had come, on the wide avenue. The last of the sun threw the bare trees into silhouette.

  As I walked back toward the flat, I kept thinking about Louise. I hadn’t seen her in five years, and we were never really close. She was always following some new career or set of people. She thrived on people and ideas, as if she hoped that any minute someone might come along with a totally new plan that would radically change her life. Her closet was a dull rainbow of business suits, with accessories like scarves and belts and necklaces looped on the hangers and a row of shoes below. Big earrings were stashed in the jacket pockets. There was nothing else in the flat that seemed personal, no knickknacks or collections. She was without hobbies. No stacks of magazines, only some recent issues of Vogue and a lone Time Out. There was nothing to be recycled or postponed. The cupboards had only a few packages of Bovril and tea, and the refrigerator had been thoroughly cleaned out for my arrival. A maid was due each Thursday. I knew no one back home who hired someone to clean. In my neighborhood, in a small city on the edge of the Appalachian Mountains, if you hired somebody to clean or cook or mow, people would figure you had a lot of money and hit you for a loan, or they would gossip.

  Louise’s place was like a lawyer’s reception room. The art on the walls was functional—a few posters from the National Gallery and a nondescript seascape. But in the hallway between the living room and the bedroom was a row of eight-by-ten glossy color photographs of plucked dead turkeys. The photos were framed with thin red metal edges. In the first one the turkey was sitting upright and headless, its legs dangling, in a child’s red rocking chair. In the second, the turkey was sitting in the child’s compartment of a supermarket cart. I could make out the word “Loblaw’s” on the cart, so I knew the photographs were American. In the third, the turkey was lying on a rug by a fireplace, like a pet. In the last, it was buckled into a car seat.

  I longed to show Jack these pictures. He was a photographer, and I knew he would hate them. The pictures were hideous, but funny, too, because the turkeys seemed so humanized. I had a son in college, but Louise had no children and had never married. Was this her creepy vision of children?

  It was almost dark when I reached the flat. A sprinkle of rain had showered the nodding mums in the window box. Clumsily, I unlocked the outer door with an oversized skeleton key and switched on the light in the vestibule. Beyond was a door with a different, more modern key. I opened the second door; then a chill ran all over me. Something was wrong. I could see my duffel bag on the floor. I was sure I had left it in a hall closet. The room was dark except for the vestibule light. Frightened, I darted back out, pulling both doors shut. I jammed the skeleton key into the lock and turned it. At the corner, I looked back, trying to remember if I had left the bedroom curtains parted slightly. Was someone peeking out?

  I walked swiftly to the nearest phone box, a few blocks away, and called the number Louise had left me, a friend of hers in case I needed help. It was an 081 number—too far away to be much use, I thought. A machine answered. At the beep I paused, then hung up.

  I might have been mistaken, I thought. I could be brave and investigate. I walked back—three long blocks of closed bookshops and sandwich bars. It would be embarrassing to call the police and then remember I had left the bag on the floor. I had experienced deceptions of memory before and had a theory about them. I tried hard to think. Louise had assured me, “England is not like the States, Nancy. It’s safe here. We don’t have all those guns.”

  I had some trouble getting the outer door unlocked. I was turning the key the wrong way. I had to try it several times. When I got inside, I fit the other key to the second door, but it pushed open before I could turn the key. It should have locked automatically when I closed it before, but now it was open. I could see my bag there, but I thought it might have traveled six inches forward. Now I realized that the outer door may have been unlocked, too. My courage failed me again. Turning, I fumbled once more with the awkward skeleton key. Then I rushed past the bookstores and the sandwich bars to the call box, where I learned the police was 999, not 911.

  “I think my flat has been broken into,” I said as calmly as I could.

  A friendly female voice took down the information. “Please tell me the address.”

  I gave it to her. “I’m American. I’m visiting. It’s a friend’s flat.” “Right.” The voice paused. The way the English said “Right” was as if they were saying, “Of course. I knew that.” You can’t surprise them.

  “I thought London was supposed to be safe,” I said. “I never expected this.” In my nervousness, I was babbling. Instantly, I realized I had probably insulted the London police for not doing their job.

  “Don’t worry, madam. I’ll send someone straight-away.” She repeated the address and told me to stand on the corner of Bloomsbury Avenue.

  I waited on the corner, my hands in the pockets of my rain parka. People were moving about casually. The scene seemed normal enough, and I was aware that I didn’t believe anything truly calamitous could happen to me. This felt like an out-of-body experience, except that I needed to pee. Soon four policemen rode up in a ridiculous little car. I had heard they didn’t go by the name “bobbies” anymore. (Not P.C.? I had no idea.) Two of them stayed with the car, and two approached me, asking me questions. They took my keys.

  “Stay here, please, madam, while we check out the situation.” The bobby appeared to be about twenty. He was cute, with a dimple. His red hair made me think of Jack when we first met.

  They whipped out their billy sticks and braced themselves at the door. It was a charming scene, I thought, as they entered the flat. I didn’t want to think about what the cops in America would do. In a few minutes, the older of the two bobbies appeared and motioned me inside.

  “Right,” he said. “This is a burglary.”

  Inside, the place was like a jumble sale. All the drawers had been jerked from their havens and spilled out. The kitchen cupboards were closed, but the bedroom was a tornado scene. My clothes were strewn about, and Louise’s pre-accessorized suits lay heaped on the floor, the earrings and necklaces scattered. I was so stunned that I must have seemed str
angely calm. The police might have thought I had staged the whole affair. Louise’s place had been so spare that now with things flung around, it seemed almost homey.

  “Was there a telly?” said the bobby with the red hair.

  It dawned on me that the telly trolley was vacant.

  “Why, yes,” I said, pointing to the trolley. “And there was a radio in the kitchen.”

  “No more,” he said. “Was there a CD player or such?”

  I shook my head no. Louise never listened to music. How could she like languages and not music?

  “The TV, the radio, and about a hundred dollars cash—American dollars,” I told the policeman after I had searched awhile. The cash had been in a zippered compartment of my airline carry-on bag. I had no idea what hidden valuables of Louise’s might have been taken. My traveler’s checks were still in the Guatemalan ditty bag I had hidden in a sweater. The burglars must have been in a rush. I had probably interrupted them. The phone-fax was still on the desk. The turkey pictures were hanging askew.

  The bobbies wrote up a report. They gave me advice. “Get a locksmith right away and have the lock changed,” Bobby the Elder urged.

  Bobby the Younger beckoned me into the vestibule. “You see how they got in? The outside door should have been double-locked. See the brass plate of the letter box? They could poke an instrument through the slot and release the door handle inside. Then it was a simple matter to force the lock on the second door. It could be done with a credit card.”

  “It could have been Gypsies,” Bobby the Elder said. “There’s Gypsies about quite near here.”

  “Be sure to double-lock the outer door,” the Younger reminded me when they left a bit later. He seemed worried about me. I tried to smile. I coveted his helmet.

  Consulting the telephone book, I chose a locksmith named Smith because the name seemed fitting. His ad said, “Pick Smith for your locks.” While I was waiting, I tried to clean up the place. I hid Louise’s kitchen knives behind the pots and pans. I looked for clues. Under a book on the floor, I found a framed photograph of Louise’s parents. They stared up at me as if I had caught them being naughty. Smith came promptly, arriving with a tool kit and a huge sandwich—a filled bap, like a hamburger bun stuffed with potted meat. He set it on the dining table.