Her parents were gone. Their farm was gone. She was herself. It was the twenty-first century.
Heavy rain hit at lunchtime, but by afternoon it eased and the sky brightened slightly. They walked to Easedale, past Goody Bridge. The rain-swollen stream was rushing and high under the bridge. They walked along a boardwalk with the water lapping at the edges, then crossed a sheep pasture to the rocky trail that ascended the mountain. Tall granite fences, the ancient work of farmers and shepherds, made hard lines up the mountain. The rock steps of the path were carefully laid, now worn smooth by generations of walkers. The ascent up to Sour Milk Gill was not difficult.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Nancy asked Jack.
“I’m O.K. Fine. Couldn’t be better.”
“Maybe we should have trekking poles,” Nancy said, indicating a young couple with backpacks who were descending at a fast clamber, their metal-tipped poles clicking rapidly against the stones.
“I knew I should have brought a cane,” Jack joked.
“We’re not old,” Nancy said.
They walked steadily for about a mile, Nancy following Jack’s lead. They paused just before a steep ascent and drank some water. Nancy stood on a large, smooth rectangular stone that served as a small bridge over a streamlet. As she gazed across at the waterfall, she thought she glimpsed her own image, outsized, with a halo, in the mist above the water. She felt she was in one of Coleridge’s “luminous clouds.” The sudden sensation faded as she said all this aloud to Jack. “The poets called it a ‘glory,’ ” she explained. “It’s accidental, not something that can be forced. It just swoops in, like a bright-feathered bird landing inside your head.”
“I’ve read about that,” Jack said. “It’s caused by a tiny seizure in the brain.”
“Well, then, I’m having a tiny seizure.”
The path veered close to the tumble of the waterfall, which was known long ago as Churn Milk Force. Nancy, watching the crash and spray of water, suddenly felt a rare burst of anger as she pictured the days lined up ahead, days that could descend into a dark tedium. Churning through her mind was an intolerable parade of flash-card images—a hospital corridor, a shrunken body, falling hair, a coffin. She would not be able to endure it.
“Stand still. I want to take your picture.” Jack lifted his camera and pointed it at her. “I like the way your hair seems to be in motion.”
He fiddled with his lenses, paused to let a hiker past, and began snapping.
“What are you thinking?” he said, shielding his camera in its case.
She hesitated, unzipping her jacket partway. She heard a sheep bleat. “I was remembering when we were in the Lake District before,” she said. “In Kendal. Remember Mrs. Lindsay and how when she was small, the old people would tell about seeing Wordsworth walking around with his walking stick? Just think—we knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Wordsworth! I’ve never forgotten that.”
“Only three degrees of separation.”
“Isn’t that amazing?”
“That’s important to you?”
She heard the judgment in his voice. The “so what.” But she sped along.
“Don’t you remember Mrs. Lindsay? I’ll never forget her.”
“Vaguely.”
“I counted forty-eight dishes and pieces of silverware on her breakfast table.”
“What a thing to remember,” Jack said. “You amaze me.”
“Our minds are different.”
He nodded, then zipped his camera into its pack. He moved away from the path and sat down on a large rock, his hand gesturing for her to sit beside him.
“I’ve done a lot of thinking in the past year,” he said.
“Me too.”
“We weren’t paying attention to each other—for a long time.”
“I know.”
“Because our minds are so different,” he said. “I get it now.”
“We knew that.”
“I know, but we were so busy going in different directions, we just didn’t make time. You were always doing your puzzles—I mean your scholarly studies.”
“Same thing.”
“And I was translating everything into some formal meaning.” He sighed. “What the hell am I trying to say?”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I just mean that the tracks stopped crossing. And we forgot to say hello.”
“It’s pretty typical,” Nancy said, then laughed. “I hate that. I hate to be typical.”
“Let me tell you something that happened,” Jack said, reaching for her hand. “I was in New Hampshire. Robert and I went to Franconia Notch. And I was overcome with a memory of when we went there years ago. Franconia Notch wasn’t at all the way I remembered it.”
“You and I were together there with Grover.”
“Grover.” Jack seemed about to blink out a tear. Grover had been his most beloved dog. “I remembered how we played hide-and-seek in the Flume. Grover and I hid from you. We had such a great time hiding from you. All those big boulders down there.”
“The Flume was so narrow and dark,” Nancy said. “And I remember a man gave me a hint—where you were hiding. I must have seemed lost. But I found you.”
“God, that was such a great memory.” Jack put his head in his hands. “And then I realized that all this time I’ve been hiding from you.”
Nancy put her arm around him. “But it is a good memory. And Grover was at our wedding!”
“Life was grand then,” he said.
“It was very heaven.” Quickly she added, “Wordsworth.”
At the top of the waterfall, the scene opened to the tarn, the small mountain lake leaking down the side of the mountain. The lake’s surface was shiny and smooth, the reflections of the surrounding mountains sharp. Except for the half dozen hikers in view, there was no sign of the modern world. The mountains—erratic brown-and-gray walls—rimmed the setting.
“This is incredible,” Jack said. His camera case dangled from its strap, as if at a loss for pictures, as Nancy was at a loss for words.
“Dorothy and William walked up here at night,” she said presently. “They walked everywhere at night. Even in the winter. In the snow and rain.”
“I hope they had Gore-Tex,” said Jack.
As Nancy pulled Hobnobs from her pack, explosive sounds burst from above—a pair of jet fighters blasting through the sky above the tarn.
Jack scrambled for his camera. But the jets were gone.
The trickle of the river was loud through the open window.
“Let’s call Robert,” Nancy said.
“Good idea,” Jack said, glancing at his watch. “He should be home now.”
Robert and Robin were at the house in the White Mountains where Jack’s family spent summers. Robert did research at Dart-mouth in molecular biology, and he had already published a paper of some significance on cell signaling.
After Jack dialed a long series of numbers from his telephone card, Nancy took the phone. Robert answered on the second ring. Hearing her son’s voice filled her with an anxious pleasure. She sensed that whenever she talked to him she turned into a slightly different Nancy, seeing herself as he saw her. Now she turned into a giddy grandmother, silly, talking to her son.
“Robin wants to keep her job,” Robert was saying. “She can work at home.”
“I hope you’re happy,” Nancy said. “I hope this is what you wanted.” She wondered if they were still in love after two years of cohabitation.
“Dad told me some news too,” he said.
“Oh?” Nancy sensed Robert’s hesitation.
“He said you were getting back together.”
“Did he know that?”
“You’d better ask him.”
The coming together again seemed easy, she thought. Perhaps Jack’s good news and bad news had canceled each other out, leaving them in limbo. While Jack spoke with Robert, Nancy examined her face in the bathroom mirror. More and more, she resembled he
r mother. This used to frighten her, but she had come to find the recognition pleasant. She would say a quiet hello. Now, as she gazed into her reflection, she could remember the stages of her growth in photographs—the tentative baby-faced first-grader; the saucy high-schooler; the college adventurer, with her brows darkened and thickened, her lipstick lustrous, her hair briefly beehived; her unadorned sixties personality (the “natural look,” it was called); the thinner, more angular face as her son grew up and she weathered. She could see all her faces morphed together, each peeking out of the other, the guises through which she had acted out the scenes of her history. And, too, she saw her mother’s turned-up nose and scared eyes; and her father’s square jaw; and her grandmother’s sagging jowls. She imagined other unknown faces of ancestors, and she saw her son, his mouth and warm coloring. And somewhere in her face was her grandchild.
She heard Jack winding up his talk with Robert. Again, she remembered that first trip to the Lake District with Jack, at Mrs. Lindsay’s in Kendal. When Coleridge returned to England in 1806 from a long escape to Malta, he didn’t want to see his wife. He had gone to Malta to forget a woman he loved—not his wife, and not Dorothy. He returned to England after two years, intending to ask for an official separation from his wife, but he couldn’t bring himself to go home to the Lake District. He remained in London for months. And then when he did go, he delayed the reunion even further by stopping at an inn in nearby Kendal. After he invited Wordsworth to supper, people heard he was back. His family and friends rushed forth to see him, because he had been gone for two years, and they loved him. But he was afraid, afraid to go home.
Nancy could see him reaching far back on the dusty shelf for his opium mix. Kendal Black Drop. The words beat on her ears.
That evening after dinner, Nancy and Jack walked down Stock Lane to look at the stars. They wandered out into the soccer field. Tiny Grasmere was sleeping, but a faint stream of music and laughter seemed to emanate from the mountains, or maybe the moon. The moon was hornéd, as it was in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The hornéd moon, an image Dorothy had contributed.
Coleridge often walked the fourteen miles from Keswick to Grasmere to visit Dorothy and William. In her journal, Dorothy wrote that she and Coleridge took this very walk, along Stock Lane. They walked from the cottage to the church in the moonlight. She wrote of lingering in the garden later with Coleridge, after the others had gone to bed. To Nancy, the spare notations resonated with desire.
Nancy and Jack stood in the soccer field, gazing up into the night sky. Nancy’s mind was busily adjusting the details from Dorothy’s journal to this spot. She felt the sorrow of separation and unrequited love and romantic obsession—all of life’s romance blowing like a cyclone through those lives two centuries ago, when they were innocent of time.
“I don’t think I could live this far from a city,” Jack said. “But I like this climate. I don’t have any sinus trouble here.”
“Good.”
“What about your guys?”
“What?”
“The poets. Any sinus trouble?”
“Coleridge had to breathe through his mouth.” She laughed. “But his worst trouble was his digestion.” She paused, trying to remember one of his descriptions. She said, “He wrote in a letter that he had been bathing in the sea and it made him sick. He said, ‘My triumphant Tripes cataracted most Niagara-ishly.’ ” She spoke slowly, to get the syllables right.
He laughed. “Your pals are starting to be real to me.”
She squeezed his hand. “They’re here, like ghosts.” She could feel them, young people struggling with the future.
The air was damp but not biting. They crossed the road to Dove Cottage. The windows were dark. Nancy imagined Coleridge stopping there in the rain, wanting solace and comfort from his friends; arriving late, past midnight, he was wet and anxious after his long tramp over Mount Helvellyn in the rain. Probably he needed to spew out all his ideas and affections—the treasure trove of a young genius, thrust forth like a hostess gift. His was a mind that never stopped whirling and somersaulting. Nancy imagined the stone floor in the front room, wet with the rain Coleridge brought in, and the urgent glee of his voice slamming the walls and the low ceiling. A man whose voice was music.
In the dark, by the garden gate, Nancy and Jack huddled together, his arm tight on her shoulders. He had come across the ocean for her.
“I missed you,” she said. “I want you back.”
“I want you back,” he said. “But where? Where will we live?”
“I don’t know. Where can we live?”
About the Author
BOBBIE ANN MASON is the author of An Atomic Romance, In Country, Clear Springs, and Shiloh and Other Stories. She is the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, two Southern Book Awards, and numerous other prizes, including the O. Henry and the Pushcart. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky.
Also by Bobbie Ann Mason
FICTION
An Atomic Romance
Shiloh and Other Stories
In Country
Spence + Lila
Love Life
Feather Crowns
Midnight Magic
Zigzagging Down a Wild Trial
NONFICTION
Nabokov’s Garden
The Girl Sleuth
Clear Springs
Elvis Presley
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Bobbie Ann Mason
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“Nancy Culpepper” was first published in The New Yorker in 1980. “Blue Country” was published and syndicated by Fiction Network. Copyright © 1985 by Bobbie Ann Mason. “Proper Gypsies” was first published in The Southern Review in 1995.
“Lying Doggo” was published in Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason, published by Harper & Row. Copyright © 1982 by Bobbie Ann Mason. Spence + Lila by Bobbie Ann Mason was published by Harper & Row in 1988; Ecco Press edition 1998. Copyright © 1988 by Bobbie Ann Mason.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Mason, Bobbie Ann.
Nancy Culpepper: stories / Bobbie Ann Mason.
p. cm.
Contents: Nancy Culpepper—Blue country—Lying doggo—
Spence + Lila—Proper Gypsies—The heirs—The prelude.
1. Kentucky—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Women—
Kentucky—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction, American. I. Title.
PS3563.A7877N36 2006
813’.54—dc22 2005541241
www.atrandom.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43151-6
v3.0
Nancy Culpepper Page 24
