Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

“Now I want you to keep all them pictures in this,” she tells Tammy. “Here, squirt,” she says to Davey. “Here’s something else for me to pick up.”

  The children take the presents wordlessly, examining them. Tammy turns the pages and pokes her fingers into the picture pockets. Davey rips the plastic wrapper off the sweater and holds it up. “It fits!” he says.

  Davey turns on the television and Tammy sits on the divan, turning the empty pages of the picture album.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” says Linda to Cleo.

  “I’m just keeping up with the times,” Cleo says. “Spend, spend, spend.”

  “Nothing wrong with keeping up with the times,” says Linda.

  “I see you are. With all that old-timey stuff you’re collecting. Explain that.”

  “Everybody’s going back to old-timey stuff. Furniture like yours is out of style.”

  “Then maybe one day it’ll be antique. If I live that long.” Cleo pokes the dusting broom at the ceiling.

  “We’re getting on your nerves,” says Linda. “We’re going to be getting out before long.”

  “I hope you mean going back home where you belong. Not that I mean to kick you out. You know what I mean.”

  “We’re going back home, all right,” Linda says. “This is the big night—I’m going to meet Bob at Kenlake. I’m going to have it out with him. I can’t wait.” She wipes the rocker with a rag and turns it right side up. “There, I think that’s enough. What a job. If I could just find a twin to it. Tammy, turn that radio down; you’re bothering Grandma.”

  Cleo has to sit down. She is out of breath. The broom falls to the floor as she sinks onto the divan. “I’m not sixteen anymore,” she says. “I give out too quick.”

  “Mama, there’s not a thing wrong with you. You just don’t do anything with yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at you; you’re still a young woman. You could go to school, make a nurse or something. That Mrs. Smith over yonder is sixty-eight and flies an airplane. By herself too.”

  “I can see me doing that.” Cleo clutches a needlepoint pillow. Tammy and Davey are arguing, sounding like wild Indians, but the racket is losing its definition around her. She finds it hard to pick out individual sounds. It is just a racket, something like a prolonged, steady snore—with lots of tuneful snorts and snuffles and puffs. Jake used to snore like that, but she could always tug the covers or kick at him gently and he would stop.

  “Rita Jean said I was in the prime of life,” says Cleo.

  “Rita Jean should talk. Look at her. She petted that cat to death, if you ask me. And I never heard anything so ridiculous as her not wanting to go out West when she had the chance! I’d be gone in a minute!”

  “People can’t just have everything they want, all the time,” Cleo says.

  “I’m not mad at you, Mama. But people don’t have to do what they don’t want to as much now as they used to.”

  “I should know that,” Cleo says. “It’s all over television. You make me feel awful.”

  “I don’t mean to. It’s for your own good.”

  Prissy-Tail jumps up on the divan and Cleo grabs her. She squirms up onto Cleo’s shoulder.

  “You sure are lucky, Prissy-Tail, that you don’t have to worry,” Cleo says.

  Linda pulls the rocker through the doorway into the living room. It scrapes the paint on the door facing.

  —

  Cleo is behind on supper. She is making a blackberry cobbler and she is confused about the timing. The children’s favorite show comes on before supper is ready. They take their plates into the living room. Mork and Mindy is the one thing Tammy and Davey agree on. Cleo fills her plate and watches it with them. It isn’t one of her regular stories, and it seems strange to her. Mork is from outer space and drinks through his finger. Otherwise, he is like a human being. Cleo finds his nonstop wisecracks hard to follow. Also, he wears galluses and sleeps hanging upside down. Jake used to wear galluses, Cleo thinks suddenly. Mork lives with Mindy, but Davey and Tammy seem to think nothing of it. Cleo is pleased that they eat the hamburger casserole without complaining. During the commercial she gets them large helpings of hot blackberry cobbler.

  In the light she sees that Tammy is wearing blue eye shadow. “It makes you look holler-eyed,” Cleo tells her, but Tammy shrugs.

  When Tammy and Davey are asleep, Cleo gets out her family picture album. It has few pictures, compared to the way people take pictures nowadays, she thinks. The little black corners are coming loose, and some of the pictures are lying at crazy angles. She tries to put them back in place, knowing they won’t stay. She looks through the pictures of her parents’ wedding trip to Biloxi. Her parents look so young. Her mother looks like Linda in the picture. She is wearing a long baggy dress in style at the time. Cleo’s father is a slim, dark-haired man in the picture. He is smiling. He always smiled. Cleo’s parents are both dead. She turns the pages to her own honeymoon pictures. One, in which she and Jake look like children, was taken by a stranger in front of the Jefferson Davis monument. She looks carefully at Jake’s face, realizing that the memory of the snapshots is more real than the memory of his actual face. As she turns the pages she sees herself and Jake get slightly older. A picture of Linda shows a stubborn child with bangs.

  Cleo looks at a picture of Jake on the tractor. He is grinning into the sun. That was Jake when he was happy. He was a quiet man. Cleo studies a picture taken the year he died, and she wonders suddenly if Jake had ever cheated on her. He could have that time he went to the state fair, she thinks. When he returned he acted strangely, bringing back a red ribbon he had won, and talking in a peculiar way about the future of the family farm. Jake would never forgive her for selling the farm. It was surely her way of cheating on him, she thinks uncomfortably, but she never would have thought of divorcing him, just as she has not been able later to think of remarrying.

  On the last pages of the album she sees a surprise, a picture she does not recognize at first. It is dim figures on a television screen. Then she remembers. Tammy took pictures of Charlie’s Angels the night Linda missed it.

  “Here, Mama, that’s you.” Tammy had pointed to the dark-haired actress, whose face was no bigger than a pencil eraser and hard to make out.

  “Just give me her money and I’ll do without her looks,” Linda had replied.

  Tammy has put this picture in Cleo’s family album. Cleo cannot think why Tammy would do this. Then she sees on the next page that Tammy has also put in the picture she took of Cleo. The picture is the last one in the scrapbook. Again, Cleo sees herself, looking scared and old.

  —

  “The roof fell in,” Cleo tells Rita Jean the next day. “Linda says she’s not going back to Bob. She says she wants a separation and he’s agreed to move out. Them children will be packed from pillar to post. I didn’t sleep a wink all night last night.”

  Cleo is at Rita Jean’s. Cleo has driven over, skipping the Today show and her morning phone conversation. Now she feels more comfortable at Rita Jean’s than at home. The house is brightly decorated with handmade objects. Rita belongs to a mail-order craft club which sends a kit every month. She has made a new embroidered wall hanging of an Arizona sunset. Cleo admires it and says, as she gazes at a whipstitch, “What I don’t understand is how my daughter can carry on like she does. She chirps like a bird!”

  “I just don’t know,” says Rita Jean. “Don’t look at this mess,” she says as she leads Cleo to the back room, where Dexter is sleeping in a box. “The vet said there’s not a thing wrong with him. He’s just wearing out. He said keep him warm, have food for him whenever he wants it, and pet him and talk to him. It might be that I kept him in too long and he’s just pined away. Do you think that was right, to keep him in like that all this time?”

  “If you had let him out he would have just got run over,” says Cleo. She strokes Dexter and he stirs slightly. His fur is dull and thin.

  “I’ll ju
st have to accept it,” says Rita Jean.

  “Maybe it will be good for you,” says Cleo, more harshly than she intends. “I’ve about decided there’s no use trying to hang on to anything. You just lose it all in the end. You might as well just not care.”

  “Don’t talk that way, Cleo.”

  “I must be getting old.” Cleo laughs. “I’m saying what I think more. Or younger, one. Old people and children—they always say what they think.”

  Over coffee, Cleo talks Rita Jean into going to trade day at the stockyard.

  “Linda said we’ve got to get out, keep up with the times,” Cleo says. “Just what I need—more junk. But it’s the style.”

  “Maybe it will take our minds off of everything,” says Rita Jean, getting her scarf.

  Most of the traders at the stockyard are farmers who trade in secondhand goods on the side. Cleo is shocked to realize this, though she knows nobody can make a living on a farm these days. She recognizes some of the farmers, behind their folding tables of dusty old objects. Even at the time of Jake’s death, feeding the cows was costing almost as much as the milk brought. She cannot imagine Jake in a camper, peddling some old junk from the barn. That would kill him if the heart attack hadn’t.

  Cleo and Rita Jean drift from table to table, touching Depression glass, crystal goblets, cracked china, cast-off egg beaters and mixers, rusted farm implements, and greasy wooden boxes stuffed with buttons and papers.

  “I never saw so much old stuff,” says Cleo.

  “Look at this,” says Rita Jean, pointing to a box of plastic jump ropes. “These aren’t old.”

  They look at hand-tooled leather belts and billfolds, made by prisoners. And paintings of bright scenes on black velvet—bullfights and skylines and sunsets. A man in a cowboy hat displays the paintings from a fancy camper called a Sports Coach.

  “He must have come from far away,” says Rita Jean.

  “I used to have a set of these.” Cleo holds a tiny crystal salt shaker, without the pepper. There is a syrup holder to match.

  “You could spend all day here,” says Rita Jean, looking around like a lost child.

  Cleo doesn’t hear her. All of a sudden her blood is rushing to her head and her stomach is churning. She is looking at a miniature Early American whatnot, right in front of her. It is imitation mahogany. She holds it, touching it, turning it, amazed.

  “If it had been a snake it would have bit me!” cries Cleo, astonished. But Rita Jean is intent on examining a set of enamel canisters with cat decals on them and doesn’t notice.

  The whatnot cannot be the same one. Cleo cannot remember what happened to the little whatnot that sat on the dresser, the box in which Jake kept his stamps, his receipts, and his bankbook.

  This whatnot has a door held in place by a wooden button, and on the top, like books on a shelf, is a series of tiny boxes, with sliding covers like match boxes. The little boxes have names: Book Plates, Mending Tape, Gummed Patches, Rubber Bands, Gummed Labels, Mailing Labels. There are pictures on the spines of the boxes, together forming a scene—an old-fashioned train running through a meadow past a river, with black smoke trailing across three of the boxes and meeting a distant mountain. A steamboat is in the background. The curved track extends from the first box to the last. The scene is faded green and yellow, and there are lacy ferns and a tree in the foreground. The boxes are a simple picture puzzle to put in order. Cleo’s children played with the puzzle when they were small, but her grandchildren were never interested in it. It cannot be the very same whatnot, she thinks.

  “I’m going to buy this!” Cleo says.

  “That’s high,” says Rita Jean, fingering the price sticker. The whatnot is three dollars.

  Cleo looks at the train. Two of the pictures are out of order, and she rearranges them so that the caboose is at the end. For a moment she can see the train gliding silently through the pleasant scene, as quietly as someone dreaming, and she can imagine her family aboard the train as it crosses a fertile valley—like the place down by the creek that Jake loved—on its way out West. On the train, her well-behaved sons and their children are looking out the windows, and Linda and Bob are driving the train, guiding the cowcatcher down the track, while Tammy and Davey patiently count telephone poles and watch the passing scenery. Cleo is following unafraid in the caboose, as the train passes through the golden meadow and they all wave at the future and smile perfect smiles.

  DRAWING NAMES

  On Christmas Day, Carolyn Sisson went early to her parents’ house to help her mother with the dinner. Carolyn had been divorced two years before, and last Christmas, coming alone, she felt uncomfortable. This year she had invited her lover, Kent Ballard, to join the family gathering. She had even brought him a present to put under the tree, so he wouldn’t feel left out. Kent was planning to drive over from Kentucky Lake by noon. He had gone there to inspect his boat because of an ice storm earlier in the week. He felt compelled to visit his boat on the holiday, Carolyn thought, as if it were a sad old relative in a retirement home.

  “We’re having baked ham instead of turkey,” Mom said. “Your daddy never did like ham baked, but whoever heard of fried ham on Christmas? We have that all year round and I’m burnt out on it.”

  “I love baked ham,” said Carolyn.

  “Does Kent like it baked?”

  “I’m sure he does.” Carolyn placed her gifts under the tree. The number of packages seemed unusually small.

  “It don’t seem like Christmas with drawed names,” said Mom.

  “Your star’s about to fall off.” Carolyn straightened the silver ornament at the tip of the tree.

  “I didn’t decorate as much as I wanted to. I’m slowing down. Getting old, I guess.” Mom had not combed her hair and she was wearing a workshirt and tennis shoes.

  “You always try to do too much on Christmas, Mom.”

  Carolyn knew the agreement to draw names had bothered her mother. But the four daughters were grown, and two had children. Sixteen people were expected today. Carolyn herself could not afford to buy fifteen presents on her salary as a clerk at J. C. Penney’s, and her parents’ small farm had not been profitable in years.

  Carolyn’s father appeared in the kitchen and he hugged her so tightly she squealed in protest.

  “That’s all I can afford this year,” he said, laughing.

  As he took a piece of candy from a dish on the counter, Carolyn teased him. “You’d better watch your calories today.”

  “Oh, not on Christmas!”

  It made Carolyn sad to see her handsome father getting older. He was a shy man, awkward with his daughters, and Carolyn knew he had been deeply disappointed over her failed marriage, although he had never said so. Now he asked, “Who bought these ‘toes’?”

  He would no longer say “nigger toes,” the old name for the chocolate-covered creams.

  “Hattie Smoot brought those over,” said Mom. “I made a pants suit for her last week,” she said to Carolyn. “The one that had stomach bypass?”

  “When PeeWee McClain had that, it didn’t work and they had to fix him back like he was,” said Dad. He offered Carolyn a piece of candy, but she shook her head no.

  Mom said, “I made Hattie a dress back last spring for her boy’s graduation, and she couldn’t even find a pattern big enough. I had to ’low a foot. But after that bypass, she’s down to a size twenty.”

  “I think we’ll all need a stomach bypass after we eat this feast you’re fixing,” said Carolyn.

  “Where’s Kent?” Dad asked abruptly.

  “He went to see about his boat. He said he’d be here.”

  Carolyn looked at the clock. She felt uneasy about inviting Kent. Everyone would be scrutinizing him, as if he were some new character on a soap opera. Kent, who drove a truck for the Kentucky Loose-Leaf Floor, was a part-time student at Murray State. He was majoring in accounting. When Carolyn started going with him early in the summer, they went sailing on his boat, which had “Joyce�
�� painted on it. Later he painted over the name, insisting he didn’t love Joyce anymore—she was a dietician who was always criticizing what he ate—but he had never said he loved Carolyn. She did not know if she loved him. Each seemed to be waiting for the other to say it first.

  While Carolyn helped her mother in the kitchen, Dad went to get her grandfather, her mother’s father. Pappy, who had been disabled by a stroke, was cared for by a live-in housekeeper who had gone home to her own family for the day. Carolyn diced apples and pears for fruit salad while her mother shaped sweet potato balls with marshmallow centers and rolled them in crushed cornflakes. On TV in the living room, Days of Our Lives was beginning, but the Christmas tree blocked their view of the television set.

  “Whose name did you draw, Mom?” Carolyn asked, as she began seeding the grapes.

  “Jim’s.”

  “You put Jim’s name in the hat?”

  Mom nodded. Jim Walsh was the man Carolyn’s youngest sister, Laura Jean, was living with in St. Louis. Laura Jean was going to an interior decorating school, and Jim was a textiles salesman she had met in a class. “I made him a shirt,” Mom said.

  “I’m surprised at you.”

  “Well, what was I to do?”

  “I’m just surprised.” Carolyn ate a grape and spit out the seeds. “Emily Post says the couple should be offered the same room when they visit.”

  “You know we’d never stand for that. I don’t think your dad’s ever got over her stacking up with that guy.”

  “You mean shacking up.”

  “Same thing.” Mom dropped the potato masher, and the metal rattled on the floor. “Oh, I’m in such a tizzy,” she said.

  —

  As the family began to arrive, the noise of the TV played against the greetings, the slam of the storm door, the outside wind rushing in. Carolyn’s older sisters, Peggy and Iris, with their husbands and children, were arriving all at once, and suddenly the house seemed small. Peggy’s children Stevie and Cheryl, without even removing their jackets, became involved in a basketball game on TV. In his lap, Stevie had a Merlin electronic toy, which beeped randomly. Iris and Ray’s children, Deedee and Jonathan, went outside to look for cats.