Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “Isn’t he amazing?” Glenn asks.

  “Amazing,” she says. She feels goosebumps on her arms.

  The crew tosses small branches into the chipper, which sucks them up like a vacuum cleaner, grinding them instantaneously. The chips fly into the truckbed. When the machine’s noise dies down, the men remove their hard-hats, which have earpieces like the headphones on a stereo.

  The young man who was afraid to climb the tree says to Dolores, “Lloyd up yonder, he won’t wear mufflers. He don’t wear a safety shield.”

  “Or spikes either,” says Dolores.

  Later, when the climber touches ground, his legs bent like a horseman’s, he sits down under a large oak and smokes a cigarette in silence. He is drinking water from a plastic jug. Sweat mats his hair. He seems like a temperamental actor collecting himself offstage after a performance. The other men are cutting the final section of the tree, down to a low stump. Dolores stands on a thin log, waiting for it to roll, balancing herself and remembering how as a little girl she pretended to fly when she jumped off a log. It is twenty minutes to eleven.

  “If I had a saw I’d cut down all them little trees,” says Petey, flinging a rope at one of the quince bushes.

  “No, you wouldn’t, little buddy,” says Glenn.

  “My brother would,” says Petey. “He’d do anything. He ate a cricket.”

  Petey lassos a branch of the apple tree. Glenn looks up and sees Dolores. He asks, “Are you going somewhere? You have on your lipstick.”

  “I have to go to town.”

  “Oh. Well, take your time. I’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do.”

  Glenn joins the other men, who are putting their tools in the truck. The yard is scattered with the large limp leaves and pods from the tree. The broad leaves look like hands. Dolores thinks of the way Phil Donahue holds hands with the women in his audience who stand up to ask questions. He clutches them by one hand, half supporting them as they stand nervously before the microphone. It is a steadying, caring grasp. Dolores picks apart one of the green pods to find the hidden bloom. Inside are skinny petals. She counts them as she pinches them off. The men drive away, the climber riding in the chipper truck.

  —

  As she lies under a paper sheet on a cushioned table, with her breasts flattened, Dolores thinks about the climber and the nonchalant way he took risks, as though to fall would be incidental. For Dolores, the risk is going to the doctor, for fear of his diagnosis. Some part of her still believes that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. The doctor’s name is Dr. Knight, and he has cold hands. Dolores stares into a corner of the room, the way she is told to do when she visits the optometrist. The doctor’s thick glasses, his mint breath, his stethoscope, hover over her. His examination is swift, his fingers drumming her breasts rapidly. Then he presses hard against her nipple.

  “It hurts,” says Dolores.

  “That’s good. That’s a good sign.”

  Dr. Knight does not speak again until she is dressed, sitting before him in his office. The clinic is new, but his office holds more magazines than Dolores remembers ever seeing.

  “I waited too long to see about this,” she says apologetically. “I kept thinking it would go away.”

  In a tone like an anchorman delivering the news on TV, Dr. Knight says, “You have fibrocystic disease. A thickening of the breast tissue. It’s very common in women your age, especially women who haven’t had children for a long time.”

  “Is that cancer?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have to operate?”

  “No. It’s only a thickening of tissue. Sometimes it’s painful. If it were cancer, it probably wouldn’t hurt.” For several minutes, Dr. Knight explains her disease. Dolores sits on the edge of her chair, but she does not really piece together in her mind what he is saying. She watches the dimple in his chin move in and out, like a tuck in a piece of heavy material. He gives her a pamphlet titled “How to Examine Your Breasts.”

  “I won’t prescribe anything now,” Dr. Knight says. “But my recommendation is that you strictly avoid all caffeine. That includes coffee, tea, cola, and chocolate.”

  On a prescription pad, he lists the items. At Dolores’s request, he writes down the name of her disease. She folds the list and puts it inside the pamphlet.

  The doctor says, “I want to check you again in three months. Maybe I’ll need to order an X-ray. But there’s no need to be alarmed.”

  As she drives home, Dolores feels confused, surprised that her sense of relief feels so peculiar. There is nothing momentous in what she has been through. Nothing important has happened that morning. A tree has been cut down; her daughter has cut out a weskit; the doctor has made a routine examination; Dolores has forgotten to make lunch. She stops at a grocery and buys bread, baloney, mustard, and on impulse, a watermelon from Georgia. The doctor’s words linger in her mind. “Fibrocystic disease.” She likes the sound of it. She could talk about this the way Dusty talks about her gall bladder. Dusty has to resist fried chicken; Dolores will have to resist chocolate cake. Somehow, this is a welcome guide for living, something certain—particular and silly. Yet somehow she feels cheated. She wonders what it would take to make a person want to walk with the Lord, a feeling that would be greater than walking on the moon.

  At home she trips over the yellow extension cord Glenn has trailed through the kitchen and almost drops the watermelon. Glenn takes the watermelon from her and bends to kiss her. He asks, “Are you still mad at me for cutting down the tree?”

  “I wasn’t mad at you,” she says. “I don’t care how many trees you cut down.”

  “You sound funny. What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” Dolores nods at Petey, who has followed the watermelon into the house.

  Glenn goes outside, and the electric chain saw roars. Dolores slaps sandwiches together. Bread, mustard, baloney. With quick sawing motions, she slices the watermelon and then thrusts a chunk at Petey.

  “Here, smarty, feed your face,” she says.

  With an energetic twist in her walk, she goes to call Glenn and Boyce in to eat. Her husband is rolling a log into a growing woodpile, a neatly organized grouping, like an abstract sculpture. Dolores hardly recognizes the leaf-littered yard, the twigs flung everywhere, the pile of wood chips at the end of the driveway, the raw sections of the tree strewn around. Her eyes rest on a familiar quince bush in front of the house. It flowers in the spring, but sometimes in the fall a turn of the weather, or perhaps a rush of desire, will make the bush bloom again, briefly, with a few carmine flowers—scattered, but unmistakably bright.

  RESIDENTS AND TRANSIENTS

  Since my husband went away to work in Louisville, I have, to my surprise, taken a lover. Stephen went ahead to start his new job and find us a suitable house. I’m to follow later. He works for one of those companies that require frequent transfers, and I agreed to that arrangement in the beginning, but now I do not want to go to Louisville. I do not want to go anywhere.

  Larry is our dentist. When I saw him in the post office earlier in the summer, I didn’t recognize him at first, without his smock and drills. But then we exchanged words—“Hot enough for you?” or something like that—and afterward I started to notice his blue Ford Ranger XII passing on the road beyond the fields. We are about the same age, and he grew up in this area, just as I did, but I was away for eight years, pursuing higher learning. I came back to Kentucky three years ago because my parents were in poor health. Now they have moved to Florida, but I have stayed here, wondering why I ever went away.

  Soon after I returned, I met Stephen, and we were married within a year. He is one of those Yankees who are moving into this region with increasing frequency, a fact which disturbs the native residents. I would not have called Stephen a Yankee. I’m very much an outsider myself, though I’ve tried to fit in since I’ve been back. I only say this because I overhear the skeptical and desperate remarks, as though the town were being invaded. Th
e schoolchildren are saying “you guys” now and smoking dope. I can imagine a classroom of bashful country hicks, listening to some new kid blithely talking in a Northern brogue about his year in Europe. Such influences are making people jittery. Most people around here would rather die than leave town, but there are a few here who think Churchill Downs in Louisville would be the grandest place in the world to be. They are dreamers, I could tell them.

  “I can’t imagine living on a street again,” I said to my husband. I complained for weeks about living with houses within view. I need cornfields. When my parents left for Florida, Stephen and I moved into their old farmhouse, to take care of it for them. I love its stateliness, the way it rises up from the fields like a patch of mutant jimsonweeds. I’m fond of the old white wood siding, the sagging outbuildings. But the house will be sold this winter, after the corn is picked, and by then I will have to go to Louisville. I promised my parents I would handle the household auction because I knew my mother could not bear to be involved. She told me many times about a widow who had sold off her belongings and afterward stayed alone in the empty house until she had to be dragged away. Within a year, she died of cancer. Mother said to me, “Heartbreak brings on cancer.” She went away to Florida, leaving everything the way it was, as though she had only gone shopping.

  The cats came with the farm. When Stephen and I appeared, the cats gradually moved from the barn to the house. They seem to be my responsibility, like some sins I have committed, like illegitimate children. The cats are Pete, Donald, Roger, Mike, Judy, Brenda, Ellen, and Patsy. Reciting their names for Larry, my lover of three weeks, I feel foolish. Larry had asked, “Can you remember all their names?”

  “What kind of question is that?” I ask, reminded of my husband’s new job. Stephen travels to cities throughout the South, demonstrating word-processing machines, fancy typewriters that cost thousands of dollars and can remember what you type. It doesn’t take a brain like that to remember eight cats.

  “No two are alike,” I say to Larry helplessly.

  We are in the canning kitchen, an airy back porch which I use for the cats. It has a sink where I wash their bowls and cabinets where I keep their food. The canning kitchen was my mother’s pride. There, she processed her green beans twenty minutes in a pressure canner, and her tomato juice fifteen minutes in a water bath. Now my mother lives in a mobile home. In her letters she tells me all the prices of the foods she buys.

  From the canning kitchen, Larry and I have a good view of the cornfields. A cross-breeze makes this the coolest and most pleasant place to be. The house is in the center of the cornfields, and a dirt lane leads out to the road, about half a mile away. The cats wander down the fence rows, patroling the borders. I feed them Friskies and vacuum their pillows. I ignore the rabbits they bring me. Larry strokes a cat with one hand and my hair with the other. He says he has never known anyone like me. He calls me Mary Sue instead of Mary. No one has called me Mary Sue since I was a kid.

  Larry started coming out to the house soon after I had a six-month checkup. I can’t remember what signals passed between us, but it was suddenly appropriate that he drop by. When I saw his truck out on the road that day, I knew it would turn up my lane. The truck has a chrome streak on it that makes it look like a rocket, and on the doors it has flames painted.

  “I brought you some ice cream,” he said.

  “I didn’t know dentists made house calls. What kind of ice cream is it?”

  “I thought you’d like choc-o-mint.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I know you have a sweet tooth.”

  “You’re just trying to give me cavities, so you can charge me thirty dollars a tooth.”

  I opened the screen door to get dishes. One cat went in and another went out. The changing of the guard. Larry and I sat on the porch and ate ice cream and watched crows in the corn. The corn had shot up after a recent rain.

  “You shouldn’t go to Louisville,” said Larry. “This part of Kentucky is the prettiest. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

  “I never used to think that. Boy, I couldn’t wait to get out!” The ice cream was thrillingly cold. I wondered if Larry envied me. Compared to him, I was a world traveler. I had lived in a commune in Aspen, backpacked through the Rockies, and worked on the National Limited as one of the first female porters. When Larry was in high school, he was known as a hell-raiser, so the whole town was amazed when he became a dentist, married, and settled down. Now he was divorced.

  Larry and I sat on the porch for an interminable time on that sultry day, each waiting for some external sign—a sudden shift in the weather, a sound, an event of some kind—to bring our bodies together. Finally, it was something I said about my new filling. He leaped up to look in my mouth.

  “You should have let me take X-rays,” he said.

  “I told you I don’t believe in all that radiation.”

  “The amount is teensy,” said Larry, holding my jaw. A mouth is a word processor, I thought suddenly, as I tried to speak.

  “Besides,” he said, “I always use the lead apron to catch any fragmentation.”

  “What are you talking about?” I cried, jerking loose. I imagined splintering X-rays zinging around the room. Larry patted me on the knee.

  “I should put on some music,” I said. He followed me inside.

  —

  Stephen is on the phone. It is 3:00 P.M. and I am eating supper—pork and beans, cottage cheese and dill pickles. My routines are cockeyed since he left.

  “I found us a house!” he says excitedly. His voice is so familiar I can almost see him, and I realize that I miss him. “I want you to come up here this weekend and take a look at it,” he says.

  “Do I have to?” My mouth is full of pork and beans.

  “I can’t buy it unless you see it first.”

  “I don’t care what it looks like.”

  “Sure you do. But you’ll like it. It’s a three-bedroom brick with a two-car garage, finished basement, dining alcove, patio—”

  “Does it have a canning kitchen?” I want to know.

  Stephen laughs. “No, but it has a rec room.”

  I quake at the thought of a rec room. I tell Stephen, “I know this is crazy, but I think we’ll have to set up a kennel in back for the cats, to keep them out of traffic.”

  I tell Stephen about the New Jersey veterinarian I saw on a talk show who keeps an African lioness, an ocelot, and three margays in his yard in the suburbs. They all have the run of his house. “Cats aren’t that hard to get along with,” the vet said.

  “Aren’t you carrying this a little far?” Stephen asks, sounding worried. He doesn’t suspect how far I might be carrying things. I have managed to swallow the last trace of the food, as if it were guilt.

  “What do you think?” I ask abruptly.

  “I don’t know what to think,” he says.

  I fall silent. I am holding Ellen, the cat who had a vaginal infection not long ago. The vet X-rayed her and found she was pregnant. She lost the kittens, because of the X-ray, but the miscarriage was incomplete, and she developed a rare infection called pyometra and had to be spayed. I wrote every detail of this to my parents, thinking they would care, but they did not mention it in their letters. Their minds are on the condominium they are planning to buy when this farm is sold. Now Stephen is talking about our investments and telling me things to do at the bank. When we buy a house, we will have to get a complicated mortgage.

  “The thing about owning real estate outright,” he says, “is that one’s assets aren’t liquid.”

  “Daddy always taught me to avoid debt.”

  “That’s not the way it works anymore.”

  “He’s going to pay cash for his condo.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  Not long ago, Stephen and I sat before an investment counselor, who told us, without cracking a smile, “You want to select an investment posture that will maximize your potential.” I had him confused wit
h a marriage counselor, some kind of weird sex therapist. Now I think of water streaming in the dentist’s bowl. When I was a child, the water in a dentist’s bowl ran continuously. Larry’s bowl has a shut-off button to save water. Stephen is talking about flexibility and fluid assets. It occurs to me that wordprocessing, all one word, is also a runny sound. How many billion words a day could one of Stephen’s machines process without forgetting? How many pecks of pickled peppers can Peter Piper pick? You don’t pick pickled peppers, I want to say to Stephen defiantly, as if he has asked this question. Peppers can’t be pickled till after they’re picked, I want to say, as if I have a point to make.

  —

  Larry is here almost daily. He comes over after he finishes overhauling mouths for the day. I tease him about this peculiarity of his profession. Sometimes I pretend to be afraid of him. I won’t let him near my mouth. I clamp my teeth shut and grin widely, fighting off imaginary drills. Larry is gap-toothed. He should have had braces, I say. Too late now, he says. Cats march up and down the bed purring while we are in it. Larry does not seem to notice. I’m accustomed to the cats. Cats, I’m aware, like to be involved in anything that’s going on. Pete has a hobby of chasing butterflies. When he loses sight of one, he searches the air, wailing pathetically, as though abandoned. Brenda plays with paper clips. She likes the way she can hook a paper clip so simply with one claw. She attacks spiders in the same way. Their legs draw up and she drops them.

  I see Larry watching the cats, but he rarely comments on them. Today he notices Brenda’s odd eyes. One is blue and one is yellow. I show him her paper clip trick. We are in the canning kitchen and the daylight is fading.

  “Do you want another drink?” asks Larry.