Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “I’ll tear you a rag,” she said, poking into another cupboard for an old shirt, which she ripped in half. She tore out a sizable swatch and handed it to him, and he touched it, without taking it from her.

  “She’d have done it for you,” she said. “She would have reached where you can’t reach. Where’s it sore?”

  He guided her hand behind his dangling gallus toward the small of his back.

  Pulling up his shirt, she rubbed circles on his back with the liniment-soaked rag, and its strong smell, like turpentine and cloves, washed over him, a fragrance that filled him with Nova’s presence. Her sister’s touch was delicate and steady, not like a person who might suddenly slump to the floor and begin to thrash and drool. He saw how steady she was, how nimble her knuckles.

  She eased his soreness, and they left the kitchen.

  “Thank ye,” he said to Artemisia as she ascended the steps to her garret. In the dark shadow at the top of the stairs he could imagine he saw the ghost of Nova.

  In six months, they announced their betrothal. He believed her fits had slacked off, although he was in the fields most of the day and couldn’t witness her behavior. She seemed to hold an aura of beatitude when she was around him. No one in the household reported any spells. His brother’s wife, Ethel, ran the house, and Artemisia answered to her, until Bealus told Ethel that from now on Artemisia was the lady of the house and everyone would answer to her. Bealus knew the gossip throughout the community of Locust transcended mere talk of Artemisia’s spells. It was that she lived in his house. Nova had known what would happen, and she had told him what to do. Nova was right. The preacher married them in the parlor, in front of the portraits of his parents on the wall. Bealus stood with Artemisia where he had stood with Nova fifteen years before, and where Nova had been laid out so recently, holding a lock of his whiskers tied with a baby ribbon. During the marriage service, Bealus felt a wave of emotion stir through him—like the giggles, but not mirth. Grief. He told himself sternly that it was not appropriate to feel grief on his wedding day. “I do,” he said, his voice husky.

  Artemisia was filled with surprises. Where she once scurried meekly, she began to behave more forthrightly—deliberate and unhurried. She presented him with the choicest samples of fried hen and squirrel, and she prepared hot, bubbling cobblers from the Indian peaches that grew along the creek. And, to his amazement, without any coaxing from him, Artemisia repeated what Nova had done to arouse ripples of pleasure, with the same little flourishes, her tongue alive and slithery on him. He imagined a comfortable swirl of mating snakes—not an unpleasant thought, for he admired snakes. He did not mention snakes to her, though, for he knew she would be frightened. He had grown to appreciate her timidity, so different from Nova, yet he knew she harbored Nova’s capacity for uninhibited delight. She continued to act out her conversations with her sister, and he half-believed she was in communication with her, for her gestures included so many of Nova’s passionate and spontaneous mannerisms.

  “I have something to tell you,” Artemisia told him one day.

  Of course, she meant she was pregnant. He hoped not, for he feared a child inheriting her affliction.

  “We might heir a fortune,” Artemisia told him.

  “What?”

  “I’m an Edwards. Nova and me. We sent in to be heired.”

  “That Edwards thing that Early Otto and them’s so worked up about?”

  She nodded eagerly. “We kept it a secret from you that we sent in.”

  “Do tell,” he said, amazed by this information—so inconsequential, yet such a secret. “Why in the world did you keep it a secret?”

  “We wanted it to be a surprise.” She didn’t reveal that she and Nova had donated so many ill-gotten dollars.

  Artemisia tried to be a good wife; she was agreeable, unlike her sassy sister. She did what Bealus wanted, and she offered him all the pleasures her sister had instructed her in. She wanted to ask an occasional quarter or dollar from him the way Nova had, but shyness forestalled her. She regretted telling him the secret. Once she had told him about the inheritance, he crushed her hopes. He made little of it and shamed her, refusing to reward her.

  Before long, a letter arrived, wanting a dollar, and she did not have it. She fluttered her eyelash against his tender tumescence—a butterfly aquiver. His throbs gave her hope, but later when she worked up the courage to say she could use a dollar for some new ribbons, he said, “You know there’s no dollars to be had. Don’t you know times is hard? Where’s your head living at, pretty little girl?”

  She stewed about the matter. Her mistake had been in offering herself freely from the start. She should have introduced the request for quarters first, before indulging him. She was so used to keeping the secret, that now it was known she felt shame, her nerves agitated. The secret was turned inside out like a snakeskin, as if it had been something inside her, nourishing her, keeping her soul together. She cried inside, wailing, but ever so silently. Bealus did not believe in the inheritance. He did not believe it would ever materialize. “It’s a dream for fools,” he said. She knew it had dawned on him what Nova had done with the money she solicited from him, money he could have used to trade for a cow or a mule, or to buy shoes for his children.

  Artemisia felt her small life enclosed by the split-rail fences of Bealus’s sixty acres. She craved a few things in life, but she had never demanded anything. Now her desires bloomed. She longed not only for a piano but also for some books, and for some silk material to make a dress. She wanted silk that would feel as fine on her skin as her subtle tonguings had been on Bealus’s flesh. Her imagination churned with these little wants, so much removed from the grease can, the slop jar, the iron skillet, the lye soap, the snot-nosed, supercilious children of Nova’s, the patronizing church members who all regarded Artemisia as a freak of nature. Her mind wound around and around, craving a velvet weskit and a feather boa, books to read, paper for writing, a man from a newspaper to talk to her about the world, to bring her news of the world, the world that spun around and around and around.

  Bealus found her among Nova’s dresses in the garret. He had been in the fields from sunup to sundown, and Betsy had brought his dinner at midday. She said Artemisia was lying down, resting. In truth, Betsy had not looked for her but had whipped up the dinner herself and dragged the buckets on a child’s wagon to the fields. That night he found his wife, twisted out of shape, her tongue bitten, the satin dress with which she pillowed her head still damp. He buried his head in her unfurled hair, as if to extract the essence of her gentle caresses in one last draught. He cried until he was hoarse and her hair a soaked mop. In repose, her face was sweet and childlike, drained of desire and insufficiency. He could see more than ever the features of Nova, the shape of Nova’s mouth.

  A few weeks after Artemisia’s funeral, Early Otto brought a letter from the U.S. Postal Service, addressed to Bealus. Bealus sat on a stump beside the road to read it. The letter inquired if he or any members of his household had received any letters regarding inheritance claims. The Postal Service was investigating fraud. There was a form to fill out and a return envelope. After a morning of forking potatoes, Bealus was weary, his heart heavy as a bushel of seed corn. He slid the letter into his pocket. He did not want to answer this query. After all, the two women he had buried might have been right. The inheritance might come. He felt he had no right to put a stop to their hope. He had to honor their dream. Bealus waved to Early Otto, who was sitting in his Model T by the mailbox, his engine hiccupping, waiting, as if Bealus might have something to tell him.

  3

  Nancy rearranged the pillows behind her, wishing she had her microwaveable heat pack to ease the stiffness in her back. As a child, she had slept with a hot brick on cold nights, a brick warmed on the coal stove and then wrapped in newspapers. She clearly recalled the sensation of its warmth, the smell of hot paper. Then the weight of her heritage came rushing through her mind, as if the brick, a straight aim f
rom those two desperate women, had been thrown at her. A shadow of raw grief descended, wrapping scarecrow arms around her, and she wept for the loss of her parents. Like Bealus, her father was cunning and strong and detached, carrying a world in his head. Like Nova, her mother burned with frustration and desire. Nancy cried because she had gone away and had not shared her life with them, except in her imagination.

  She heard the ice machine roaring in the hallway, and a man and woman laughing, and in the parking lot a horn blast.

  The last letter, the one from the U.S. Postal Service, contained a notice of fraud investigation, with several inquiries about the Edwards estate. Included was a return-reply envelope. Evidently Bealus Renfroe had never answered the inquiry—out of embarrassment? Humiliation? Artemisia and Nova had stored the letters in the shoe box—with a stick of dynamite?—for a future generation to pursue the claim. Nancy supposed her grandmother, Nova and Artemisia’s sister, had preserved the letters. Her grandmother saved everything— string, pins, scraps—for the sake of saving, it often appeared, not for any true purpose. It occurred to Nancy that her grandmother was capable of saving a stick of dynamite.

  Nancy saw herself in this group of people, lives that had passed from the earth as hers would too. She felt comforted by the thought of continuity, even if a stick of dynamite could be called an heirloom.

  In her mind’s eye Nancy gazed at a spot of ground behind her grandmother’s house. Inside the old wash house, her mother was feeding print dresses through the wringer of the washing machine. Outside the wash house, Nancy’s grandmother was stirring boiling overalls with a broomstick, while a fire smoldered beneath the iron kettle. Nearby, Nancy, a child, was flinging underwear and washrags onto the thorny, overgrown quince bush to dry. Beyond was the expanse of fields, with a pointillist splotch of Holsteins grazing. And far in the distance, beyond the second tree line, in the corner of the landscape, her father rode his tractor, like a bug crawling on the painting, like Icarus falling unnoticed from the sky.

  Over the following weeks, this image would stay in Nancy’s mind, long after the Culpepper family farm was sold for an industrial park and Nancy and her sister and brother had retreated with the profits.

  2005

  The Prelude

  Nancy was waiting in Windermere for Jack’s train. With its grassy splendor, the Lake District was an ideal place for a marital reconciliation, she thought. She hadn’t seen him in almost a year. He was flying from Boston to Manchester, then catching the train.

  In the ladies’ room at Booth’s, next to the station, she fussed over her hair and her eye makeup in a way she never had when she and Jack started out together, in the sixties, when her hair was long and straight. Now she used hair mousse and eyeliner. She no longer knew how to interpret the face she saw in the mirror.

  If it were 1967 again and she knew what she knew now, how would she behave? She liked to imagine herself as a young woman, going north to begin graduate school, but this time she would be carrying confidence and poise as effortlessly as wheeling ultralight luggage. If she had had a sense of proportion back then, would she have married Jack?

  She bought a fat double-pack of Hobnobs. She remembered how much Jack had liked those oat biscuits when they were in the Lake District together, long ago—rambling amongst sheep and bracken through the Furness Fells. Now she was on a Romantic kick, she had told him on e-mail. She was tracing the footsteps of Coleridge and Wordsworth, trying to capture in her imagination the years 1800–1804, when the two poets were involved in a romantic upheaval in their personal lives. It was not true that Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William had an incestuous love, Nancy thought; Dorothy was surely in love with Coleridge. Samuel Taylor Coleridge—a married man, peripatetic, unhealthy, an excitable genius. But Coleridge was obsessed with another woman. Dorothy, doomed never to know the love of a husband or a child, gathered mosses and made giblet pies and took notes for her brother’s poems. That was the story that kept coming to life in Nancy’s imagination, and once it had sparked in her mind, she couldn’t stop it. When Nancy and Jack were young, pairings and commitments were casual and uncertain, and Nancy even wondered later if she had really been in love with Jack. But the passionate love triangles—and trapezoids—in the Lake District two centuries before seemed desperate.

  Early in their marriage, when Nancy and Jack traveled to England, their passion was unadulterated. After arriving in London, jet-lagged, they collapsed in the afternoon, then awoke at 3 A.M. Not knowing what else to do, they made love, after dropping a shilling into a wall heater, as if it were some kind of condom dispenser. They always thought that their son, Robert, was conceived in England, perhaps on that occasion.

  Or maybe it had been a few days later, here in northern England. Jack had an assignment to photograph cottages. Nancy, who had written a paper on the Romantic imagination for a history course, had brought along an anthology of Romantic poetry. But the poems seemed old-fashioned, with their hyperbole and exclamation points, and she read few of them. Jack was shooting landscapes, and throughout the trip he goofed around trying to sound as if he were from Liverpool, like the Beatles. Nancy had a cold, and she was hungry, but when they arrived in the town of Kendal late on a Sunday, there was no place to eat. They bought Hobnobs and overripe pears from a chemist, who directed her to a preparation on a dusty lower shelf—a fig syrup that was good for colds, an analgesic.

  “It’s a very old remedy,” the chemist said. “We’ve used it for generations.”

  At a bed-and-breakfast on a hillside of houses with long front gardens, Mrs. Lindsay served an elaborate tea, with little sandwiches and biscuits, enough to call dinner. She sat by the fire chatting about her flowers, her youth, her son the stevedore in Cardiff. Nancy sat entranced, her slightly feverish warmth dissolving into a comfortable ease. Mrs. Lindsay was seventy-five—very old, Nancy thought, thinking of her frail, taciturn grandmother in Kentucky.

  Upstairs with Jack, Nancy swigged fig syrup and blew her nose. The syrup made her sleepy, and she slept well in the deep feather bed with piles of fluffy coverlets. At breakfast downstairs, Nancy studied the lace curtains, the flowered wallpaper, the ornate china cupboard, while Jack wrote in his notebook.

  “Did you see Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth lived?” Mrs. Lindsay asked as she poured hot milk into Jack’s coffee.

  “We’re going today,” Nancy said.

  “When I was a wee one in Grasmere I heard the old ones talk about Mr. Wordsworth.”

  “You knew someone who knew Wordsworth!” Nancy was astonished. The Romantic period was ancient history.

  Mrs. Lindsay set the coffeepot on the sideboard. “They remembered him walking over the hills, always walking, with that stick of his,” she said.

  Nancy’s interest in the Romantic poets went dormant after that and didn’t reawaken until the past year, after she and Jack sold their house in Boston and agreed to live apart for a time—until desire reunited them, they said. Alone in the Lake District, Nancy revived the image of Wordsworth and his stick. She carried it with her, supporting her thoughts of the friendship of Coleridge and Wordsworth, as she imagined the pair hiking in the surrounding landscapes. Her mind dwelled on those characters, seizing each clue to their reality. If Wordsworth was a steady walker, Coleridge was an intrepid pioneer trekker, the type of person who today would have written a Lonely Planet guide. In his fight against an opium addiction, he would trot out boldly into the wild, with his broomstick and his green solar spectacles, daring to walk the drug out of his system. On at least one occasion Coleridge hid out in an inn at Kendal, maybe on Mrs. Lindsay’s street. He went to the chemist for his opium, a mixture called Kendal Black Drop. Nancy smiled to herself, remembering now the fig syrup, pushed to the back of the dusty shelf.

  Nimble Jack bounded down from the train. When he saw her, he dropped his blue duffel. Still clutching his camera bag, he jumped up and clicked his heels in the air.

  “I can still do it!” he cried.

&
nbsp; Nancy burst into laughter. She loved the attention he attracted. Her husband—a grown man, a middle-aged man, a kid. His face was a little harder and thinner. Their embrace was long and tight, with embarrassed squeals and awkward endearments.

  “I don’t know how I got along without you,” he said, holding her against the wall of the track shelter.

  “We’re both crazy,” she murmured.

  “What have you been doing up here?”

  “Getting Hobnobs for you,” she said, producing the package.

  He laughed. He probably hadn’t thought of Hobnobs in thirty years, and maybe he didn’t even recognize them, she thought.

  In the taxi, Nancy gestured toward the glistening lake and the gentle green mountains, but Jack was chattering about his flight and his sister Jennifer’s family in Boston. He had a nervous catch in his voice. Then he apologized for that.

  “It’s all right,” Nancy said in a soothing tone. The tone was a bit new for her, she thought. She rather liked it. “We’re going to be fine,” she said.

  “Thank God for e-mail,” Jack said. “How did couples ever work out their differences in the past?”

  “They went walking,” Nancy said.

  “Up here for the walking, are you?” the taxi driver, a woman in Bono sunglasses, asked. She said she was a native and had walked all over. “This is the best place in the world,” she said. “I’ve just been to Spain and walked the Sierra Nevada. Really enjoyed that. But I wouldn’t trade the Lakes.”

  As they neared Ambleside, Jack began to consider the scenery. But the view now was throngs of tourists. Nancy had insisted they did not need a car. Cars were discouraged because of the traffic, she told him. She had been there for a week, walking miles every day, just as Dorothy Wordsworth did before she lost her mind.

  The lobby of the hotel in Grasmere, where Nancy had been staying, was barely large enough for Nancy and Jack to stand together at the counter. Nancy could have afforded a posh hotel, but she had resisted, uneasy about spending her inheritance on luxuries her parents never had.