“Where does it hurt?” my aunt cried, grabbing at Mama.
Mama was too much in pain to speak. Her face was distorted, her sharp-pointed lips stretched out like a slingshot. My aunt helped her to the bathroom, and a short while later, my aunt and uncle flew away with her in a taxi. Mama had straightened up enough to say that the pain had subsided, but she looked scared, and the blood had drained from her face. I said nothing to her, not even good-bye.
Betsy Lou, left alone with me, said, “I hope she hasn’t got polio.”
“Only children get polio,” I said, trembling. “She don’t have polio.”
The telephone rang, and Betsy Lou chattered excitedly, telling one of her boyfriends what had happened. Alone and frightened, I sat on the porch, hugging a fat pile of newspapers and gazing at the street. I could see Sharon Belletieri, skating a block away with two other girls. She was wearing a blue playsuit. She and her friends reminded me of those privileged children in the Peanut Gallery on Howdy Doody.
To keep from thinking, I began searching the newspaper for something to put in Aunt Mozelle’s scrapbook, but at first nothing seemed so horrible as what had just happened. Some babies had turned blue from a diaper dye, but that story didn’t impress me. Then I found an item about a haunted house, and my heart began to race. A priest claimed that mysterious disturbances in a house in Wisconsin were the work of an angelic spirit watching over an eight-year-old boy. Cryptic messages were found on bits of paper in the boy’s room. The spirit manifestation had occurred fifteen times. I found my aunt’s scissors and cut out the story.
Within two hours, my aunt and uncle returned, with broad smiles on their faces, but I knew they were pretending.
“She’s just fine,” said Aunt Mozelle. “We’ll take you to see her afterwhile, but right now they gave her something to make her sleep and take away the pain.”
“She’ll get to come home in the morning,” said my uncle.
He had brought ice cream, and while he went to the kitchen to dish it out, I showed my aunt the clipping I had found. I helped her put it in her scrapbook.
“Life sure is strange,” I said.
“Didn’t I tell you?” she said. “Now, don’t you worry about your mama, hon. She’s going to be all right.”
—
Later that day, my aunt and uncle stood in the corridor of the hospital while I visited my mother. The hospital was large and gray and steaming with the heat. Mama lay against a mound of pillows, smiling weakly.
“I’m the one that showed out,” she said, looking ashamed. She took my hand and made me sit on the bed next to her. “You were going to have a little brother or sister,” she said. “But I was mistaken.”
“What happened to it?”
“I lost it. That happens sometimes.”
When I looked at her blankly, she tried to explain that there wasn’t really a baby, as there was when she had Johnny two years before.
She said, “You know how sometimes one or two of the chicken eggs don’t hatch? The baby chick just won’t take hold. That’s what happened.”
It occurred to me to ask what the baby’s name would have been.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m trying to tell you there wasn’t really a baby. I didn’t know about it, anyway.”
“You didn’t even know there was a baby?”
“No. I didn’t know about it till I lost it.”
She tried to laugh, but she was weak, and she seemed as confused as I was. She squeezed my hand and closed her eyes for a moment. Then she said, “Boone says the buses will start up this week. You could go with your aunt to Detroit and see the big buildings.”
“Without you?”
“The doctor said I should rest up before we go back. But you go ahead. Mozelle will take you.” She smiled at me sleepily. “I wanted to go so bad—just to see those big fancy store windows. And I wanted to see your face when you saw the city.”
—
That evening, Toast of the Town was on television, and then Fred Waring, and Garroway at Large. I was lost among the screen phantoms—the magic acts, puppets, jokes, clowns, dancers, singers, wisecracking announcers. My aunt and uncle laughed uproariously. Uncle Boone was drinking beer, something I had not seen him do, and the room stank with the smoke of his Old Golds. Now and then I was aware of all of us sitting there together, laughing in the dim light from the television, while my mother was in the hospital. Even Betsy Lou was watching with us. Later, I went to the guest room and sat on the large bed, trying to concentrate on finishing the Fab jingle.
Here’s to a fabulous life with Fab
There’s no soap scum to make wash drab
Your clothes get cleaner—whiter, too—
I heard my aunt calling to me excitedly. I was missing something on the television screen. I had left because the news was on.
“Pictures of Detroit!” she cried. “Come quick. You can see the big buildings.”
I raced into the living room in time to see some faint, dark shapes, hiding behind the snow, like a forest in winter, and then the image faded into the snow.
“Mozelle can take you into Detroit in a day or two,” my uncle said. “The buses is starting up again.”
“I don’t want to go,” I said.
“You don’t want to miss the chance,” said my aunt.
“Yes, I do.”
That night, alone in the pine-and-cedar room, I saw everything clearly, like the sharpened images that floated on the television screen. My mother had said an egg didn’t hatch, but I knew better. The reds had stolen the baby. They took things. They were after my aunt’s copper-bottomed pans. They stole the butter. They wanted my uncle’s job. They were invisible, like the guardian angel, although they might wear disguises. You didn’t know who might be a red. You never knew when you might lose a baby that you didn’t know you had. I understood it all. I hadn’t trusted my guardian angel, and so he had failed to protect me. During the night, I hit upon a last line to the Fab jingle, but when I awoke I saw how silly and inappropriate it was. It was going over and over in my mind: Red soap makes the world go round.
—
On the bus home a few days later, I slept with my head in my mother’s lap, and she dozed with her head propped against my seat back. She was no longer sick, but we were both tired and we swayed, unresisting, with the rhythms of the bus. When the bus stopped in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at midnight, I suddenly woke up, and at the sight of an unfamiliar place, I felt—with a new surge of clarity—the mystery of travel, the vastness of the world, the strangeness of life. My own life was a curiosity, an item for a scrapbook. I wondered what my mother would tell my father about the baby she had lost. She had been holding me tightly against her stomach as though she feared she might lose me too.
I had refused to let them take me into Detroit. At the bus station, Aunt Mozelle had hugged me and said, “Maybe next time you come we can go to Detroit.”
“If there is a next time,” Mama said. “This may be her only chance, but she had to be contrary.”
“I didn’t want to miss Wax Wackies and Judy Splinters,” I said, protesting.
“We’ll have a car next time you come,” said my uncle. “If they don’t fire everybody,” he added with a laugh.
“If that happens, y’all can always come back to Kentucky and help us get a crop out,” Mama told him.
The next afternoon, we got off the bus on the highway at the intersection with our road. Our house was half a mile away. The bus driver got our suitcases out of the bus for us, and then drove on down the highway. My father was supposed to meet us, but he was not there.
“I better not carry this suitcase,” said Mama. “My insides might drop.”
We left our suitcases in a ditch and started walking, expecting to meet Daddy on the way.
My mother said, “You don’t remember this, but when you was two years old I went to Jackson, Tennessee, for two weeks to see Mozelle and Boone—back before Boone was called overseas?—and w
hen I come back the bus driver let me off here and I come walking down the road to the house carrying my suitcase. You was playing in the yard and you saw me walk up and you didn’t recognize me. For the longest time, you didn’t know who I was. I never will forget how funny you looked.”
“They won’t recognize us,” I said solemnly. “Daddy and Johnny.”
As we got to the top of the hill, we could see that our little white house was still there. The tin roof of the barn was barely visible through the tall oak trees.
OFFERINGS
Sandra’s maternal grandmother died of childbed fever at the age of twenty-six. Mama was four. After Sandra was born, Mama developed an infection but was afraid to see the doctor. It would go away, she insisted. The infection disappeared, but a few years later inexplicable pains pierced her like needles. Blushing with shame, and regretting her choice of polka-dotted panties, she learned the worst. It was lucky they caught it in time, the doctor said. During the operation, Mama was semiconscious, with a spinal anesthetic, and she could hear the surgeons discussing a basketball game. Through blurred eyes, she could see a red expanse below her waist. It resembled the Red Sea parting, she said.
Sandra grows vegetables and counts her cats. It is late summer and her woodpile is low. She should find time to insulate the attic and to fix the leak in the basement. Her husband is gone. Jerry is in Louisville, working at a K Mart. Sandra has stayed behind, reluctant to spend her weekends with him watching go-go dancers in smoky bars. In the garden, Sandra loads a bucket with tomatoes and picks some dill, a cucumber, a handful of beans. The dead bird is on a stump, untouched since yesterday. When she rescued the bird from the cat, it seemed only stunned, and she put it on a table out on the porch, to let it recover. The bird had a spotted breast, a pink throat, and black-and-gray wings—a flicker, she thought. Its curved beak reminded her of Heckle and Jeckle. A while later, it tried to flap its wings, while gasping and contorting its body, and she decided to put it outside. As she opened the door, the dog rushed out eagerly ahead of her, and the bird died in her hand. Its head went limp.
Sandra never dusts. Only now, with her mother and grandmother coming to visit, does she notice that cobwebs are strung across corners of the ceiling in the living room. Later, with a perverse delight, she sees a fly go by, actually trailing a wisp of cat hair and dust. Her grandmother always told her to dust under her bed, so the dust bunnies would not multiply and take over, as she would say, like wandering Jew among the flowers.
Grandmother Stamper is her father’s mother. Mama is bringing her all the way from Paducah to see where Sandra is living now. They aren’t going to tell Grandmother about the separation. Mama insisted about that. Mama has never told Grandmother about her own hysterectomy. She will not even smoke in front of Grandmother Stamper. For twenty-five years, Mama has sneaked smokes whenever her mother-in-law is around.
Stamper is not Grandmother’s most familiar name. After Sandra’s grandfather, Bob Turnbow, died, Grandmother moved to Paducah, and later she married Joe Stamper, who owned a shoe-store there. Now she lives in a small apartment on a city street, and—as she likes to say, laughing—has more shoes than she has places to go. Sandra’s grandfather had a slow, wasting illness—Parkinson’s disease. For five years, Grandmother waited on him, feeding him with a spoon, changing the bed, and trying her best to look after their dying farm. Sandra remembers a thin, twisted man, his face shaking, saying, “She’s a good woman. She lights up the fires in the sky.”
—
“I declare, Sandy Lee, you have moved plumb out into the wilderness,” says Grandmother.
In her white pants suit, Sandra’s grandmother looks like a waitress. The dog pokes at her crotch as she picks her way down the stone path to the porch. Sandra has not mowed in three weeks. The mower is broken, and there are little bushes of ragweed all over the yard.
“See how beautiful it is,” says Mama. “It’s just as pretty as a picture.” She waves at a hillside of wild apple trees and weeds, with a patch of woods at the top. A long-haired calico cat sits under an overgrown lilac bush, also admiring the view.
“You need you some goats on that hill,” says Grandmother.
Sandra tells them about the raccoon she saw as she came home one night. At first, she thought it was a porcupine. It was very large, with slow, methodical movements. She followed it as far as she could with her headlights. It climbed a bank with grasping little hands. It occurs to Sandra that porcupines have quills like those thin pencils Time magazine sends with its subscription offers.
“Did you ever find out what went with your little white cat?” Mama asks as they go inside.
“No. I think maybe he got shot,” Sandra says. “There’s been somebody shooting people’s cats around here ever since spring.” The screen door bangs behind her.
The oven is not dependable, and supper is delayed. Grandmother is restless, walking around the kitchen, pretending not to see the dirty linoleum, the rusty, splotched sink, the peeling wallpaper. She puzzles over the bunches of dill and parsley hanging in the window. Mama has explained about the night shift and overtime, but when Sandra sees Grandmother examining the row of outdoor shoes on the porch and, later, the hunting rifle on the wall, she realizes that Grandmother is looking for Jerry. Jerry took his hunting boots with him, and Sandra has a feeling he may come back for the rifle soon.
It’s the cats’ suppertime, and they sing a chorus at Sandra’s feet. She talks to them and gives them chicken broth and Cat Chow. She goes outside to shoo in the ducks for the night, but tonight they will not leave the pond. She will have to return later. If the ducks are not shut in their pen, the fox may kill them, one by one, in a fit—amazed at how easy it is. A bat circles above the barn. The ducks are splashing. A bird Sandra can’t identify calls a mournful good night.
“Those silly ducks wouldn’t come in,” she says, setting the table. Her mother and grandmother stand around and watch her with starved looks.
“I’m collecting duck expressions,” she goes on. “ ‘Lucky duck,’ ‘duck your head,’ ‘set your ducks in a row,’ ‘a sitting duck.’ I see where they all come from now.”
“Have a rubber duck,” says Mama. “Or a duck fit.”
“Duck soup,” says Grandmother.
“Duck soup?” Sandra says. “What does that mean?”
“It means something is real easy,” says Grandmother. “Easy as pie.”
“It was an old picture show too,” Mama says. “The name of the show was Duck Soup.”
They eat on the porch, and the moths come visiting, flapping against the screen. A few mosquitoes squeeze through and whine about their heads. Grandmother’s fork jerks; the corn slips from her hand. Sandra notices that her dishes don’t match. Mama and Grandmother exclaim over the meal, praising the tomatoes, the fresh corn. Grandmother takes another piece of chicken. “It has such a crispy crust!” she says.
Sandra will not admit the chicken is crisp. It is not even brown, she says to herself.
“How did you do that?” Grandmother wants to know.
“I boiled it first. It’s faster.”
“I never heard of doing it that way,” Grandmother says.
“You’ll have to try that, Ethel,” says Mama.
Sandra flips a bug off her plate.
Her grandmother sneezes. “It’s the ragweed,” she says apologetically. “It’s the time of the year for it. Doesn’t it make you sneeze?”
“No,” says Sandra.
“It never used to do you that way,” Mama says.
“I know,” says Grandmother. “I helped hay many a time when I was young. I can’t remember it bothering me none.”
The dog is barking. Sandra calls him into the house. He wants to greet the visitors, but she tells him to go to his bed, under the divan, and he obeys.
Sandra sits down at the table again and presses Grandmother to talk about the past, to tell about the farm Sandra can barely remember. She recalls the dizzying porch swing, a dog wit
h a bushy tail, the daisy-edged field of corn, and a litter of squirming kittens like a deep pile of mated socks in a drawer. She wants to know about the trees. She remembers the fruit trees and the gigantic walnuts, with their sweeping arms and their hard, green balls that sometimes hit her on the head. She also remembers the day the trees came down.
“The peaches made such a mess on the grass you couldn’t walk,” her grandmother explains. “And there were so many cherries I couldn’t pick them all. I had three peach trees taken down and one cherry tree.”
“That was when your granddaddy was so bad,” Mama says to Sandra. “She had to watch him night and day and turn him ever’ so often. He didn’t even know who she was.”
“I just couldn’t have all those in the yard anymore,” says Grandmother. “I couldn’t keep up with them. But the walnut trees were the worst. Those squirrels would get the nuts and roll them all over the porch and sometimes I’d step on one and fall down. Them old squirrels would snarl at me and chatter. Law me.”
“Bessie Grissom had a tree taken down last week,” says Mama. “She thought it would fall on the house, it was so old. A tornado might set down.”
“How much did she have to pay?” asks Grandmother.
“A hundred dollars.”
“When I had all them walnut trees taken down back then, it cost me sixty dollars. That just goes to show you.”
Sandra serves instant butterscotch pudding for dessert. Grandmother eats greedily, telling Sandra that butterscotch is her favorite. She clashes her spoon as she cleans the dish. Sandra does not eat any dessert. She is thinking how she would like to have a bourbon-and-Coke. She might conceal it in a coffee cup. But she would not be able to explain why she was drinking coffee at night.
After supper, when Grandmother is in the bathroom, Mama says she will wash the dishes, but Sandra refuses.
“Do you hear anything from Jerry?” Mama asks.
Sandra shrugs. “No. He’d better not waltz back in here. I’m through waiting on him.” In a sharp whisper, she says, “I don’t know how long I can keep up that night-shift lie.”
Shiloh and Other Stories Page 6
