Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “No.”

  “You’re getting one anyway.”

  We are drinking Bloody Marys, made with my mother’s canned tomato juice. There are rows of jars in the basement. She would be mortified to know what I am doing, in her house, with her tomato juice.

  Larry brings me a drink and a soggy grilled cheese sandwich.

  “You’d think a dentist would make something dainty and precise,” I say. “Jello molds, maybe, the way you make false teeth.”

  We laugh. He thinks I am being funny.

  The other day he took me up in a single-engine Cessna. We circled west Kentucky, looking at the land, and when we flew over the farm I felt I was in a creaky hay wagon, skimming just above the fields. I thought of the Dylan Thomas poem with the dream about the birds flying along with the stacks of hay. I could see eighty acres of corn and pasture, neat green squares. I am nearly thirty years old. I have two men, eight cats, no cavities. One day I was counting the cats and I absentmindedly counted myself.

  Larry and I are playing Monopoly in the parlor, which is full of doilies and trinkets on whatnots. Every day I notice something that I must save for my mother. I’m sure Larry wishes we were at his house, a modern brick home in a good section of town, five doors down from a U.S. congressman. Larry gets up from the card table and mixes another Bloody Mary for me. I’ve been buying hotels left and right, against the advice of my investment counselor. I own all the utilities. I shuffle my paper money and it feels like dried corn shucks. I wonder if there is a new board game involving money market funds.

  “When my grandmother was alive, my father used to bury her savings in the yard, in order to avoid inheritance taxes,” I say as Larry hands me the drink.

  He laughs. He always laughs, whatever I say. His lips are like parentheses, enclosing compliments.

  “In the last ten years of her life she saved ten thousand dollars from her social security checks.”

  “That’s incredible.” He looks doubtful, as though I have made up a story to amuse him. “Maybe there’s still money buried in your yard.”

  “Maybe. My grandmother was very frugal. She wouldn’t let go of anything.”

  “Some people are like that.”

  Larry wears a cloudy expression of love. Everything about me that I find dreary he finds intriguing. He moves his silvery token (a flatiron) around the board so carefully, like a child learning to cross the street. Outside, a cat is yowling. I do not recognize it as one of mine. There is nothing so mournful as the yowling of a homeless cat. When a stray appears, the cats sit around, fascinated, while it eats, and then later, just when it starts to feel secure, they gang up on it and chase it away.

  “This place is full of junk that no one could throw away,” I say distractedly. I have just been sent to jail. I’m thinking of the boxes in the attic, the rusted tools in the barn. In a cabinet in the canning kitchen I found some Bag Balm, antiseptic salve to soften cows’ udders. Once I used teat extenders to feed a sick kitten. The cows are gone, but I feel their presence like ghosts. “I’ve been reading up on cats,” I say suddenly. The vodka is making me plunge into something I know I cannot explain. “I don’t want you to think I’m this crazy cat freak with a mattress full of money.”

  “Of course I don’t.” Larry lands on Virginia Avenue and proceeds to negotiate a complicated transaction.

  “In the wild, there are two kinds of cat populations,” I tell him when he finishes his move. “Residents and transients. Some stay put, in their fixed home ranges, and others are on the move. They don’t have real homes. Everybody always thought that the ones who establish the territories are the most successful—like the capitalists who get ahold of Park Place.” (I’m eyeing my opportunities on the board.) “They are the strongest, while the transients are the bums, the losers.”

  “Is that right? I didn’t know that.” Larry looks genuinely surprised. I think he is surprised at how far the subject itself extends. He is such a specialist. Teeth.

  I continue bravely. “The thing is—this is what the scientists are wondering about now—it may be that the transients are the superior ones after all, with the greatest curiosity and most intelligence. They can’t decide.”

  “That’s interesting.” The Bloody Marys are making Larry seem very satisfied. He is the most relaxed man I’ve ever known. “None of that is true of domestic cats,” Larry is saying. “They’re all screwed up.”

  “I bet somewhere there are some who are footloose and fancy free,” I say, not believing it. I buy two houses on Park Place and almost go broke. I think of living in Louisville. Stephen said the house he wants to buy is not far from Iroquois Park. I’m reminded of Indians. When certain Indians got tired of living in a place—when they used up the soil, or the garbage pile got too high—they moved on to the next place.

  —

  It is a hot summer night, and Larry and I are driving back from Paducah. We went out to eat and then we saw a movie. We are rather careless about being seen together in public. Before we left the house, I brushed my teeth twice and used dental floss. On the way, Larry told me of a patient who was a hemophiliac and couldn’t floss. Working on his teeth was very risky.

  We ate at a place where you choose your food from pictures on a wall, then wait at a numbered table for the food to appear. On another wall was a framed arrangement of farm tools against red felt. Other objects—saw handles, scythes, pulleys—were mounted on wood like fish trophies. I could hardly eat for looking at the tools. I was wondering what my father’s old tit-cups and dehorning shears would look like on the wall of a restaurant. Larry was unusually quiet during the meal. His reticence exaggerated his customary gentleness. He even ate french fries cautiously.

  On the way home, the air is rushing through the truck. My elbow is propped in the window, feeling the cooling air like water. I think of the pickup truck as a train, swishing through the night.

  Larry says then, “Do you want me to stop coming out to see you?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “I don’t have to be an Einstein to tell that you’re bored with me.”

  “I don’t know. I still don’t want to go to Louisville, though.”

  “I don’t want you to go. I wish you would just stay here and we would be together.”

  “I wish it could be that way,” I say, trembling slightly. “I wish that was right.”

  We round a curve. The night is black. The yellow line in the road is faded. In the other lane I suddenly see a rabbit move. It is hopping in place, the way runners will run in place. Its forelegs are frantically working, but its rear end has been smashed and it cannot get out of the road.

  By the time we reach home I have become hysterical. Larry has his arms around me, trying to soothe me, but I cannot speak intelligibly and I push him away. In my mind, the rabbit is a tape loop that crowds out everything else.

  Inside the house, the phone rings and Larry answers. I can tell from his expression that it is Stephen calling. It was crazy to let Larry answer the phone. I was not thinking. I will have to swear on a stack of cats that nothing is going on. When Larry hands me the phone I am incoherent. Stephen is saying something nonchalant, with a sly question in his voice. Sitting on the floor, I’m rubbing my feet vigorously. “Listen,” I say in a tone of great urgency. “I’m coming to Louisville—to see that house. There’s this guy here who’ll give me a ride in his truck—”

  Stephen is annoyed with me. He seems not to have heard what I said, for he is launching into a speech about my anxiety.

  “Those attachments to a place are so provincial,” he says.

  “People live all their lives in one place,” I argue frantically. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “You’ve got to be flexible,” he says breezily. “That kind of romantic emotion is just like flag-waving. It leads to nationalism, fascism—you name it; the very worst kinds of instincts. Listen, Mary, you’ve got to be more open to the way things are.”

  Stephen is processi
ng words. He makes me think of liquidity, investment postures. I see him floppy as a Raggedy Andy, loose as a goose. I see what I am shredding in my hand as I listen. It is Monopoly money.

  After I hang up, I rush outside. Larry is discreetly staying behind. Standing in the porch light, I listen to katydids announce the harvest. It is the kind of night, mellow and languid, when you can hear corn growing. I see a cat’s flaming eyes coming up the lane to the house. One eye is green and one is red, like a traffic light. It is Brenda, my odd-eyed cat. Her blue eye shines red and her yellow eye shines green. In a moment I realize that I am waiting for the light to change.

  THE RETREAT

  Georgeann has put off packing for the annual church retreat. “There’s plenty of time,” she tells Shelby when he bugs her about it. “I can’t do things that far ahead.”

  “Don’t you want to go?” he asks her one evening. “You used to love to go.”

  “I wish they’d do something different just once. Something besides pray and yak at each other.” Georgeann is basting facings on a child’s choir robe, and she looks at him testily as she bites off a thread.

  Shelby says, “You’ve been looking peaked lately. I believe you’ve got low blood.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “I think you better get a checkup before we go. Call Dr. Armstrong in the morning.”

  When Georgeann married Shelby Pickett, her mother warned her about the disadvantages of marrying a preacher. Reformed juvenile delinquents are always the worst kind of preachers, her mother said—just like former drug addicts in their zealousness. Shelby was never that bad, though. In high school, when Georgeann first knew him, he was on probation for stealing four cases of Sun-Drop Cola and a ham from Kroger’s. There was something charismatic about him even then, although he frightened her at first with his gloomy countenance—a sort of James Dean brooding—and his tendency to contradict whatever the teachers said. But she admired the way he argued so smoothly and professionally in debate class. He always had a smart answer that left his opponent speechless. He was the type of person who could get away with anything. Georgeann thought he seemed a little dangerous—he was always staring people down, as though he held a deep grudge—but when she started going out with him, at the end of her senior year, she was surprised to discover how serious he was. He had spent a month studying the life of Winston Churchill. It wasn’t even a class assignment. No one she knew would have thought of doing that. When the date of the senior prom approached, Shelby said he couldn’t take her because he didn’t believe in dancing. Georgeann suspected that he was just embarrassed and shy. On a Friday night, when her parents were away at the movies, she put on a Kinks album and tried to get him to loosen up, to get in shape for the prom. It was then that he told her of his ambition to be a preacher. Georgeann was so moved by his sense of atonement and his commitment to the calling—he had received the call while hauling hay for an uncle—that she knew she would marry him. On the night of the prom, they went instead to the Burger King, and he showed her the literature on the seminary while she ate a Double Whopper and french fries.

  The ministry is not a full-time calling, Georgeann discovered. The pay is too low. While Shelby attended seminary, he also went to night school to learn a trade, and Georgeann supported him by working at Kroger’s—the same one her husband had robbed. Georgeann had wanted to go to college, but they were never able to afford for her to go.

  Now they have two children, Tamara and Jason. During the week, Shelby is an electrician, working out of his van. In ten years of marriage, they have served in three different churches. Shelby dislikes the rotation system and longs for a church he can call his own. He says he wants to grow with a church, so that he knows the people and doesn’t have to preach only the funerals of strangers. He wants to perform the marriages of people he knew as children. Shelby lives by many little rules, some of which come out of nowhere. For instance, for years he has rubbed baking soda onto his gums after brushing his teeth, but he cannot remember who taught him to do this, or exactly why. Shelby comes from a broken home, so he wants things to last. But the small country churches in western Kentucky are dying, as people move to town or simply lose interest in the church. The membership at the Grace United Methodist Church is seventy-five, but attendance varies between thirty and seventy. The day it snowed this past winter, only three people came. Shelby was so depressed afterward that he couldn’t eat Sunday dinner. He was particularly upset because he had prepared a special sermon aimed at Hoyt Jenkins, who somebody said had begun drinking, but Hoyt did not appear. Shelby had to deliver the sermon anyway, on the evils of alcohol, to old Mr. and Mrs. Elbert Flood and Miss Addie Stone, the president of the WCTU chapter.

  “Even the best people need a little reinforcement,” Shelby said halfheartedly to Georgeann.

  She said, “Why didn’t you just save that sermon? You work yourself half to death. With only three people there, you could have just talked to them, like a conversation. You didn’t have to waste a big sermon like that.”

  “The church isn’t for just a conversation,” said Shelby.

  The music was interesting that snowy day. Georgeann plays the piano at church. As she played, she listened to the voices singing—Shelby booming out like Bert Parks; the weak, shaky voices of the Floods; and Miss Stone, with a surprisingly clear and pretty little voice. She sounded like a folk singer. Georgeann wanted to hear more, so she abruptly switched hymns and played “Joy to the World,” which she knew the Floods would have trouble with. Miss Stone sang out, high above Shelby’s voice. Later, Shelby was annoyed that Georgeann changed the program because he liked the church bulletins that she typed and mimeographed each week for the Sunday service to be an accurate record of what went on that day. Georgeann made corrections in the bulletin and filed it away in Shelby’s study. She penciled in a note: “Three people showed up.” She even listed their names. Writing this, Georgeann felt peculiar, as though a gear had shifted inside her.

  Even then, back in the winter, Shelby had been looking forward to the retreat, talking about it like a little boy anticipating summer camp.

  —

  Georgeann has been feeling disoriented. She can’t think about the packing for the retreat. She’s not finished with the choir robes for Jason and Tamara, who sing in the youth choir. On the Sunday before the retreat, Georgeann realizes that it is communion Sunday and she has forgotten to buy grape juice. She has to race into town at the last minute. It is overpriced at the Kwik-Pik, but that is the only place open on Sunday. Waiting in line, she discovers that she still has hair clips in her hair. As she stands there, she watches two teenage boys—in their everyday jeans and poplin jackets—playing an electronic video game. One boy is pressing buttons, his fingers working rapidly and a look of rapture on his face. The other boy is watching and murmuring “Gah!” Georgeann holds her hand out automatically for the change when the salesgirl rings up the grape juice. She stands by the door a few minutes, watching the boys. The machine makes tom-tom sounds, and blips fly across the TV screen. When she gets to the church, she is so nervous that she sloshes the grape juice while pouring it into the tray of tiny communion glasses. Two of the glasses are missing because she broke them last month while washing them after communion service. She has forgotten to order replacements. Shelby will notice, but she will say that it doesn’t matter, because there won’t be that many people at church anyway.

  “You spilled some,” says Tamara.

  “You forgot to let us have some,” Jason says, taking one of the tiny glasses and holding it out. Tamara takes one of the glasses too. This is something they do every communion Sunday.

  “I’m in a hurry,” says Georgeann. “This isn’t a tea party.”

  They are still holding the glasses out for her.

  “Do you want one too?” Jason asks.

  “No. I don’t have time.”

  Both children look disappointed, but they drink the sip of grape juice, and Tamara ta
kes the glasses to wash them.

  “Hurry,” says Georgeann.

  Shelby doesn’t mention the missing glasses. But over Sunday dinner, they quarrel about her going to a funeral he has to preach that afternoon. Georgeann insists that she is not going.

  “Who is he?” Tamara wants to know.

  Shelby says, “No one you know. Hush.”

  Jason says, “I’ll go with you. I like to go to funerals.”

  “I’m not going,” says Georgeann. “They give me nightmares, and I didn’t even know the guy.”

  Shelby glares at her icily for talking like this in front of the children. He agrees to go alone and promises Jason he can go to the next one. Today the children are going to Georgeann’s sister’s to play with their cousins. “You don’t want to disappoint Jeff and Lisa, do you?” Shelby asks Jason.

  As he is getting ready to leave, Shelby asks Georgeann, “Is there something about the way I preach funerals that bothers you?”

  “No. Your preaching’s fine. I like the weddings. And the piano and everything. But just count me out when it comes to funerals.” Georgeann suddenly bangs a skillet in the sink. “Why do I have to tell you that ten times a year?”

  They quarrel infrequently, but after they do, Georgeann always does something spiteful. Today, while Shelby and the kids are away, she cleans out the henhouse. It gives her pleasure to put on her jeans and shovel manure in a cart. She wheels it to the garden, not caring who sees. People drive by and she waves. There’s the preacher’s wife cleaning out her henhouse on Sunday, they are probably saying. Georgeann puts down new straw in the henhouse and gathers the eggs. She sees a hen looking droopy in a corner. “Perk up,” she says. “You look like you’ve got low blood.” After she finishes with the chore, she sits down to read the Sunday papers, feeling relieved that she is alone and can relax. She gets very sleepy, but in a few minutes she has to get up and change clothes. She is getting itchy under the waistband, probably from chicken mites.