Mom was saying, “I wanted to make a Christmas tablecloth out of red checks with green fringe. You wouldn’t think knit would do for a tablecloth, but Hattie Smoot has the prettiest one.”
“You can do incredible things with knit,” said Jim with sudden enthusiasm. The shirt Mom had made him was bonded knit.
“Who’s Hattie Smoot?” asked Laura Jean. She was caressing the back of Jim’s neck, as though soothing his nerves.
Carolyn laughed when her mother began telling Jim and Laura Jean about Hattie Smoot’s operation. Jim listened attentively, leaning forward with his elbows on the table, and asked eager questions, his eyes as alert as Pappy’s.
“Is she telling a joke?” Cheryl asked Carolyn.
“No. I’m not laughing at you, Mom,” Carolyn said, touching her mother’s hand. She felt relieved that the anticipation of Christmas had ended. Still laughing, she said, “Pour me some of that Rebel Yell, Jim. It’s about time.”
“I’m with you,” Jim said, jumping up.
In the kitchen, Carolyn located a clean spoon while Jim washed some cups. Carolyn couldn’t find the cup Mom had left in the refrigerator. As she took out the carton of boiled custard, Jim said, “It must be a very difficult day for you.”
Carolyn was startled. His tone was unexpectedly kind, genuine. She was struck suddenly by what he must know about her, because of his intimacy with her sister. She knew nothing about him. When he smiled, she saw a gold cap on a molar, shining like a Christmas ornament. She managed to say, “It can’t be any picnic for you either. Kent didn’t want to put up with us.”
“Too bad he couldn’t get gas.”
“I don’t think he wanted to get gas.”
“Then you’re better off without him.” When Jim looked at her, Carolyn felt that he must be examining her resemblances to Laura Jean. He said, “I think your family’s great.”
Carolyn laughed nervously. “We’re hard on you. God, you’re brave to come down here like this.”
“Well, Laura Jean’s worth it.”
They took the boiled custard and cups into the dining room. As Carolyn sat down, her nephew Jonathan begged her to tell what was in the gift left under the tree.
“I can’t tell,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I’m saving it till next year, in case I draw some man’s name.”
“I hope it’s mine,” said Jonathan.
Jim stirred bourbon into three cups of boiled custard, then gave one to Carolyn and one to Laura Jean. The others had declined. Then he leaned back in his chair—more relaxed now—and squeezed Laura Jean’s hand. Carolyn wondered what they said to each other when they were alone in St. Louis. She knew with certainty that they would not be economical with words, like the monks in the story. She longed to be with them, to hear what they would say. She noticed her mother picking at a hangnail, quietly ignoring the bourbon. Looking at the bottle’s gift box, which showed an old-fashioned scene, children on sleds in the snow, Carolyn thought of Kent’s boat again. She felt she was in that snowy scene now with Laura Jean and Jim, sailing in Kent’s boat into the winter breeze, into falling snow. She thought of how silent it was out on the lake, as though the whiteness of the snow were the absence of sound.
“Cheers!” she said to Jim, lifting her cup.
THE CLIMBER
The former astronaut claims that walking on the moon was nothing, compared to walking with Jesus. Walking with Jesus is forever, but the moon visit was just three days. The preacher emcee, trailing the long cord of his microphone, moves with slow-motion bounces, as though trying to get the feel of the astronaut’s walk on the moon. The preacher has on a pink plaid jacket, and because the TV color isn’t tuned properly, his face is the same bright shade.
Dolores has the Christian channel on only for the music. She likes to think she is impervious to evangelists. She usually laughs at the way they talk so urgently, even happily, about the end of the world. But today the show sends a chill through her. After the astronaut leaves, a missions specialist describes the “gap of unbelief” that can only be bridged by Jesus Christ. The gap of unbelief sounds threatening, like the missile gap.
“Quit it, Petey. You’re giving me the heebie-jeebies,” Dolores says. She refrains from kicking at the little boy from down the street, who is underfoot. She is arranging dogwood blossoms in a vase and Petey is repeating “Fuzzy Duck” in a monotone. Petey is nine, and he wears a strange little sweatsuit with the arms and legs cut off and the edges hanging in shreds.
“Jesus is a vampire,” says Petey.
“Where’d you get that idea?”
“My brother said so.”
“How does he know?”
“He studied it. In a book.”
“I’ve heard a lot of things, but I never heard that.”
Petey slams the door and charges down the driveway on his bicycle, making hot-rod sounds. He rides an old bicycle with a banana seat, a hand-me-down from his older brother, who is in jail for breaking into an insurance agency and stealing three calculators. In Dolores’s opinion, their mother is an alcoholic who lets her kids run wild.
Petey has been hanging around this morning to see the tree cut down. A tree service is coming to saw down the tall tulip tree near the corner of the house. Dolores’s husband, Glenn, is having the tree cut down to make room for a workshop he plans to build. He has been stripping furniture, and he wants to begin making picnic tables to sell. But the tree cutting was scheduled for an inopportune time. It confuses Dolores. Later in the morning, she has an appointment with a gynecologist, and she is frightened. When the doctor she saw at the clinic two days earlier examined the lump in her breast, he advised seeing a specialist immediately. The lump has been there for several months, and it seems to change shape and move around. Dolores kept thinking it would go away. Then, after her friend Dusty Bivens urged her to see a doctor, Dolores became alarmed. Dusty had read an article in Ladies’ Home Journal about breast examinations. Dusty keeps up with medical news. She has had a D & C, a hysterectomy, and a gall bladder attack. She has to avoid spicy and greasy foods. Dolores has noticed that whenever women get together, they talk about diseases. Men never do. This is probably why Dolores is hesitant to tell Glenn about seeing the doctor. She has not mentioned the lump to him, the way sometimes women don’t tell their husbands they are pregnant until it has been confirmed by a doctor. They save the news for a special time. This is a scene Dolores has frequently seen in the movies, but she never knew anyone who did that. She had always told Glenn when she suspected she was pregnant. Now their three children are grown and married.
Of course, Glenn would be perfectly reasonable, pointing out the way Dusty tends to overreact. Once, when an earthquake was predicted for western Kentucky, where they live, Dusty went on an impromptu vacation with her children. They went to a dude ranch in Arizona, and Dusty took her new set of Teflon II pans with her. Dusty has a fearful nature, but she often does bold things, like taking off for the dude ranch, or enrolling in beauty school at the age of thirty-seven. She has even had an affair.
—
Near the house are three oaks, two maples, and an ash tree. The tulip tree, at the southeast corner, is the tallest, probably over eighty feet high. It is filled with plump green buds, resembling the pods in a movie about body snatchers Dolores saw on TV. Earlier in the week, when Jerry McClain from Jerry’s Tree Service said he would have to bring his climber out to bring the tree down, Dolores thought he was referring to some sort of machine, like a cherry picker.
“He means a guy who climbs trees,” Glenn explained to her later.
“I thought you sawed a tree down at the bottom.”
“No. It might fall on the house. They have to cut it down in sections and let ’em down on ropes.”
“Do you really have to cut it down?”
“Even if it wasn’t for the workshop, we’re lucky a twister hasn’t knocked that tree down on us.”
“But your timing’s way off,” s
aid Dolores. “That tree’s about to bloom. Can’t you even let it get through with its blooming?”
—
Now Glenn is in the front yard with his father, Boyce Mullins, waiting for the tree crew to arrive. Boyce had tried to dissuade Glenn from hiring the expensive tree service, but Glenn hadn’t listened. Dolores turns the volume of the TV up. A trio of sexy girls is singing a disco spiritual, “I’ve Never Had Love Like This Before.” There are no words to the song beyond the title, which they sing repeatedly. Dolores turns on the leftover breakfast coffee. She considers calling Dusty, but it is too early. Dusty has night classes in Paducah, and she sleeps late.
Dolores takes a cup of coffee to the front porch and offers it to her father-in-law.
“I reckon you’re here to put your two cents’ worth in, Boyce,” she says, handing him the mug.
“Did you put sugar in it?”
“I stuck my finger in it. That sweetened it. Of course I put sugar in it. You think after all these years I don’t know how you take it?”
“My son here thinks he’s got to pay a fancy price to hire experts,” says Boyce, tasting his coffee.
“We’ve been round and round on this,” Glenn says to Dolores.
“I’d help out, but my herny’s too bad,” Boyce says. Boyce wears a truss and walks oddly—holding in the device that holds him in.
“It’s O.K.,” says Glenn. “These guys know what they’re doing.”
“You wouldn’t need them experts. Me and you could bring that thing down.”
“We should have done it years ago,” says Glenn. “The roots are eating into the foundation.”
“I never heard you complain about that tree before,” says Dolores.
Glenn laughs in a way that embarrasses her, as though he were apologizing to his father for his wife’s sentimentality. The night before, when she couldn’t sleep, Glenn asked her why she had been so touchy recently.
“Maybe you’re going through the change,” he suggested.
“How is that possible?” she wanted to know. “I’m not but forty-one.”
“My sister-in-law’s cousin went through it at the age of twenty-eight. Nobody could stand to be around her.”
“That makes her a freak,” said Dolores. “I’m not going through any change. Besides, the change comes later nowadays than it used to.”
Glenn fell asleep soon after, and he did not know that Dolores lay there and cried until she could feel the tears run down on her breasts.
—
Petey turns in the driveway on his bicycle, racing just ahead of the tree service truck.
“That kid’s just begging for trouble,” Dolores says.
Two men are in the truck, and two others follow in a van. The word JERRY’S on the door of the truck is painted in fancy lettering, with the Y drawn as a tree, its branches and roots curving around the name.
One of the men wears a T-shirt that says CELESTIAL SEASONINGS, MORNING THUNDER. He hunkers against a maple tree and pokes sprigs of Chattanooga Chew Chew into his mouth.
“That’s the climber,” Glenn says to Dolores.
The other men begin unloading equipment—shiny red chain saws, orange hard-hats, long poles with forked ends. While Glenn talks to the men, Dolores crosses the yard to watch the climber. He takes one look up the tulip tree, gauging its height, then begins to shinny up. He has a coil of rope and a leather harness with him. He has long hair and a bristly mustache.
“He’s climbing without spikes,” one of the men says to Dolores.
“He climbs like a monkey, sure as you’re born,” says Boyce, with an admiring whistle.
“You just wish you could get up there with him,” says Dolores.
“Don’t I, though?” says Boyce, grinning. “Remember the time me and my brother Emmett cut down that dead pine? That thing split in two and we thought it was coming after us both. We run ever which of a way.” Boyce laughs in little gasps.
The climber is high in the branches, near the top of the tree. The leaves jiggle and dance. Then he lets down a rope and hauls up a chain saw, which bumps against the trunk as it ascends. Dolores can see elbows sticking out of the leaves, and she glimpses the climber’s T-shirt, a bright red and blue, a stranded kite. She has a crick in her neck from looking up.
Dolores warns Petey to get his bike out of the driveway. “It’ll get smashed.” She adds, “So will you if you don’t watch out.”
Petey bares his teeth, pretending he has fangs. “I’m the baby Jesus,” he says.
“And I’m the devil,” says Dolores.
A sound splits the air. The climber has begun to saw. A small branch floats down through the leaves. It is tied to the rope.
“Kindling wood,” says Boyce.
“We’ll put it all in the chipper,” says Jerry McClain, the man in charge of the crew.
Glenn is helping the crew with the rope, and Boyce has settled down in an aluminum folding chair under a maple tree. He is relaxing with his cigar, just as though he has come to watch the trotters at the fair.
“He’s a free-lance climber,” one of the crew members says to Dolores. “I would have done it, but I saw that tree and said, ‘No, sir.’ That tree’s something else. You couldn’t get me up that sucker. You never know what poplars will do, that high. They’re funny trees.”
The telephone is ringing in the kitchen, and Dolores runs inside to snatch it up on the fourth ring. It is Tammy, her newly married daughter, calling to ask about a weskit she is cutting out.
“I lost part of the pattern,” Tammy says. “And I have to cut the facings out by guess. Do you cut them on the bias?”
“I don’t know what weskit you’re talking about.”
“You made me one with rickrack once, remember?”
“There’s this guy up a tree and he’s all the way to the top—that tulip tree? Glenn’s got some men out here and they’re cutting the tree down. I can’t think straight.”
“Which tree? I don’t know trees by name.”
“The one at the corner of the house.”
“Oh. Well, I’ll let you go if you’re busy. I wanted to get this thing together before Jimmy comes in for dinner.”
“Cut it on the bias,” says Dolores impulsively. Her daughter calls her every day, to ask something obvious.
After hanging up, Dolores pours herself some coffee. She looks in the refrigerator at a chicken carcass and half a meat loaf. It occurs to her that Boyce and Glenn might like some cake and iced tea later, but she does not have time to bake a cake before her appointment. She does not know what kind to make anyway. She puts in a load of wash, but she doesn’t have enough dirty clothes for a full load, so she sets the water level at low. She straightened up the house earlier, as if preparing for company. Now there is nothing to do. Her mother always said worriers made the best housekeepers. The Oak Ridge Boys are singing “Elvira” on the radio. The Oak Ridge Boys used to be a gospel quartet when Dolores was a child. Now, inexplicably, they are a group of young men with blow-dried hair, singing country-rock songs about love.
From the porch steps, she watches the climber saw off a branch. It gets caught in some leaves as it falls, and the men steer the branch down with the rope. Glenn dashes around the yard, pulling at one end of the rope. High in the tree, the climber is hanging in his leather sling.
“He don’t even use spikes,” says Petey. “Gah!”
When the branch reaches the ground, Glenn unties it and tosses it in the driveway near the truck.
Dolores watches the men work until the tip of the trunk is denuded. It sways slightly, like a sailboat ready to come about. The climber steadies himself, adjusts his straps, then swings his right leg over a limb and straddles it.
“He’s going to dehorn that thing,” says Boyce.
“I can’t stand this anymore,” says Dolores.
She telephones Dusty.
“Aren’t you scared?” Dusty asks when Dolores describes what is going on. “Why don’t you come over here where
it’s safe?”
“It’s not like you think. This guy’s slicing it off, a piece at a time.” Dolores hears the chain saw pause, then the swish of branches, the shouts of the men. “He looks like a hippie,” she says.
“You don’t see many of them anymore.”
“He chews tobacco too.”
“Is he cute?”
“Not bad. You should come over here.”
“I don’t know if I could kiss somebody that chewed tobacco.” Dusty laughs. “Did I tell you what that high-tone husband of mine says to me?”
“No, what?”
“He said he’ll take me back—on condition.”
“What?”
“If I quit beauty school.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“He thinks he’s got it over me,” Dusty says. “He thinks I’m bound to come crawling back to him because I was so bad.”
Dusty’s marriage broke up over a college student Dusty ran around with for a while. Dusty, who was fifteen years older than the boy, thought there was no age problem until he graduated and hitchhiked to California with a backpack.
Dolores says, “Well, wish me luck. I see the doctor at eleven.”
“Girl, I don’t envy you.”
“I can’t eat a thing.”
“You better eat.”
“I ate half a Breakfast Bar.”
“I want you to call me the minute you get back.”
“I will.”
“I’m glad you’re going through with it,” Dusty says. “That specialist is new at the clinic, and this town has needed somebody like that for the longest time.”
Dolores hears the chain saw start and stop. She hears a tree trunk breaking. She says, her voice tightening, “If I die, I want you to look in on Glenn. He won’t be able to take care of himself. He’ll be so helpless and—”
“I’m not listening,” says Dusty. “I won’t let you talk like that.”
—
The work has been going on for two hours. Dolores has watched intermittently as the climber stripped the branches and sectioned the tree. He sat casually in his leather sling, rared back like a woodpecker, sawing with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. Now that he is lower in the tree, where the trunk is thicker, he has abandoned the use of the rope. He lets the sections fall to the ground. Dolores holds on to Glenn as a large piece splits loose from the tree. The force of the fall strips large patches of the bark off, and the ground actually shakes.
Shiloh and Other Stories Page 12
