Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Bill and Imogene, no longer talking, meandered throughout Georgia, through tiny towns that looked to Bill as though they hadn’t changed since 1940. The grocery stores had front porches. Georgia still had Burma-Shave signs. Bill almost ran onto the shoulder trying to read one.

  YOUR HUSBAND

  MISBEHAVE

  GRUNT AND GRUMBLE

  RANT AND RAVE

  SHOOT THE BRUTE SOME

  BURMA-SHAVE

  There was a word missing. The signs were faded and rotting.

  Between Plains and the Florida border, Bill counted five dead animals—a possum, a groundhog, a cat, a dog, and one unidentifiable mass of hide and gristle. He tried to slow down.

  They stopped at a camp on the border, and Bill filled up the water tank. The camper was dusty but still looked brand-new. Imogene checked to see if anything was broken.

  “I don’t see why this gas stove don’t explode,” she said. “All this shaking in this heat. They say not to take a gas can in your car.”

  “A camper is different,” Bill said.

  They walked around the campground. A lot of vehicles had motorcycles strapped onto them, and some people had already cranked up their motorcycles. The noise bothered Bill, but he liked to see the bikes take off, disappearing behind a swirl of dust.

  Bill stopped to pet a friendly collie.

  “That’s Ishmael,” said the girl who held the collie by a leash. “He’s so friendly I never have any trouble meeting people. I meet lots of guys that way! People do that with dogs, you know?”

  “You’re a good boy,” said Bill, patting the dog. “Nice boy.”

  Ishmael licked Bill’s hand and then tried to sniff up Imogene’s dress.

  “Ishmael, don’t be so obnoxious. He’s always this friendly,” the girl said apologetically. She had on a halter top and shorts. Her legs were smooth and brown, with golden hairs on her thighs.

  “He loves dogs,” said Imogene. “He can’t stand to be without a dog. Or a cow or something! We sold all our cows and everything and here we are. Our whole farm’s tied up in this.” She waved at the camper.

  “Wow, that’s nice. That must have cost a fortune,” the girl said, shading her eyes as she looked at the camper.

  “Where are you headed?” Bill asked, with unusual politeness, which embarrassed him slightly.

  “Oh, I was on the Coast, but it got to be a drag, so now I’m on my way to Atlanta, where I think I know this guy. I met him out in L.A. and he said if I was ever in Atlanta, to look him up. I hope he remembers me.”

  The girl said her name was Stephanie. Bill thought she might be college age. He wasn’t sure. She looked very young to be traveling around alone. He thought of Sissy, his youngest daughter. Sissy had come home from San Francisco finally and had lived to tell the tale, though there was not much she would say about it.

  “See, Ishmael is number one,” Stephanie was saying. “If a guy can’t take my dog, then I’m going to leave, right?” She looked up at Bill, as if for approval. Bill patted Ishmael, and the dog licked Bill’s hand again.

  “I got a ride with this guy who customizes rec-v’s,” Stephanie went on. She pointed to a beige van with designs of blue and red fish painted on the side. “See, people buy them stripped and he outfits them. He’s supposed to be back any minute. He’s checking out a deal.” She looked around the campground. “See his license plate,” she said. “KOOL-II. Isn’t that cute? Here, look inside.”

  Bill and Imogene peered inside the van. It was lined with shag rug. In the back, crosswise, was a king-sized bed with a leopard-skin cover. The ceiling was shag carpeting too, white, with a red heart positioned above the bed.

  “There’s not a kitchen in it,” said Imogene.

  “Just a refrigerator, and a bar,” said Stephanie. “Isn’t it something? This interior just blows me away.”

  She let Ishmael inside the van and took his leash off. Ishmael hopped onto the bed and stretched his paws out. The bed seemed to ripple with the dog’s movements.

  “It’s a water bed,” Stephanie said with a laugh.

  “We’ve been tied down on a farm all this time,” said Imogene.

  “We’re going to travel around till we get it out of our system,” said Bill, again feeling embarrassed to be telling the girl things about himself.

  “That’s really sweet,” said Stephanie, pulling at her halter. “Wow, that’s really sweet. Here I travel around and don’t think anything about it, but I bet you’ve been waiting all these years!”

  “You come and eat some supper with us,” Imogene said. “You don’t have a kitchen.”

  “Oh, no, thanks. I better wait for this guy. We were going to check out the McDonald’s up on the highway. I’m sort of waiting around for him, see? Hey, thanks anyway.”

  Stephanie waved good-bye and wished them luck.

  “We’ll need it,” said Imogene.

  After supper Imogene and Bill sat in their folding chairs outside and watched the lights come on in the campers. It was still hot and they swatted at giant mosquitoes.

  “I gave my antique preserve stand to Sissy,” said Imogene. “She won’t appreciate it.”

  Bill was quiet. He was listening to the sounds, the TV sets and radios all blending together. He watched a blond-headed boy enter the KOOL-II van.

  “Can you just imagine the trouble that girl has been in?” said Imogene thoughtfully. “I believe she was one of those runaways they talk about.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You never know, with people you meet, out.”

  Bill watched as the blond-headed boy emerged from the van and headed toward the shower building. Bill liked the way the boy walked, with his towel slung over his shoulder. He had hair like a girl’s, and a short beard. The boy walked along so freely, as though he had nothing on his mind except that van with the red heart on the ceiling. Bill thought uncomfortably of how he had once promised Imogene that they would see the world, but they never had. He always knew it was a failure of courage. After the war he had rushed back home. He hated himself for the way he had stayed at home all that time.

  Later, Imogene started crying. Bill was trying to watch Charlie’s Angels, and he tried to pretend he didn’t notice. In a few minutes she stopped. Then after a commercial she started again.

  “Years ago,” Imogene said, wiping her face, “when I took your mama to the doctor—when she had just moved in with us and I took her for a checkup?—I went in to talk to the doctor and he said to me, ‘How are you?’ and I said, ‘I didn’t come to see the doctor, I brought her,’ and he said, ‘I know, but how are you?’ He said to me, ‘She’ll kill you! I’ve seen it before, and she’ll kill you. You think they won’t be much trouble and it’s best, but mark my words, you may not see it now, but she’ll take it out of you. She could destroy you. You could end up being a wreck.’ He said, ‘Now I’m not a psychiatrist’—or whatever they call them—‘but I’ve seen it too many times. I’m just warning you.’ I read about this woman that lived with her son and daughter-in-law and lived to be a hundred and three! Nobody ought to live that long!”

  “Are you finished?” Imogene had interrupted a particularly exciting scene in Charlie’s Angels. Bill didn’t say anything and the program finished. Imogene made him nervous, bringing up the past. If she was going to do that, they might as well have stayed at home. Bill didn’t know what to say. Imogene got a washrag and wiped her face. Her face was puffed up and red.

  “I’ve been working up to say all that, what I just said,” she went on later. “I get these headaches and I’ve got this hurtin’. And I can’t taste.”

  “It’s all in your mind,” said Bill, teasing her gently. “You’ve been listening to too many old women talk.”

  “I get all sulled up,” Imogene said. “Just some little something will bring it on. It wouldn’t matter if we were here or in China or Kalamazoo.”

  “You just have to have something to bellyache about,” Bill said. He would have to t
ry to humor her.

  “She was your mama,” Imogene continued. “And I’m the one that took care of her all that time, keeping her house, putting up her canning, putting out her wash, and then waiting on her when she got down. And you never lifted a finger. You couldn’t be around old people, you said; it give you the heebie-jeebies. Well, listen, buster, your time’s a-coming and who’s going to wait on you? You can stick me in a rest home, for all I care. And another thing, you don’t see Miz Lillian living at the White House.”

  Bill felt sick. “You would go to a rest home and leave me by myself?” he asked, with a little whine.

  “I’ve a good mind to,” she said. She measured an inch off her index finger. “I like about this much from it,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t do me that way, would you? Who would cook?”

  “You can eat junk.”

  “I bought you this pretty playhouse. You don’t want to leave me in it all by myself, do you?” He tousled her hair. “You’re not any fun anymore. Always got to tune up and cry over some little something.”

  “I can’t help it.” She put her head in a pillow. “Don’t tease me.”

  Awkwardly, Bill put his arms around her.

  “You don’t make over me anymore,” she said.

  “You just wait till we get to the ocean,” Bill said, petting her. He felt like a fool. The muscles in his arms were so rigid he thought they were going to pop. His mouth was dry.

  That night Bill slept fitfully. He could not get used to a foam rubber mattress. He had a nightmare in which his mother and Imogene sat in rocking chairs on either side of him, having a contest to see who could rock the longest. Bill’s job was to keep score, but they kept on rocking. His kids gathered around, mocking him, wanting to know the score. The steady, swinging, endless rocking was making him feel seasick. He woke up almost crying out, but awake he could not understand why the rocking chairs frightened him so. He told himself he was an idiot and eventually he calmed himself down by thinking pleasant thoughts about Stephanie and the blond-headed boy. He imagined what they were doing in the van with the red heart on the ceiling. Later, he dreamed that he had a job driving a van across the country. He wore a uniform, with a cowboy hat that said KOOL-II on the front. He drove the van at top speed and when he got to the ocean he boarded a ferry, which turned out to be a destroyer. The destroyer zoomed across the ocean. Imogene did not show up in the dream at all.

  When he woke up he looked at her sleeping, with her mouth open and a soft little snore coming out. He recalled the time in the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville when he watched her sleep for a full hour, wanting to remember her face while he was overseas. Then she had awakened, saying, “I knew somebody was watching me. I dreamed it. You liked to stared a hole through me.” They had not been married long, and they had stayed awake most of the night, holding each other.

  Now Imogene’s face was fat and lined, but he could still see her young face clearly. Her hair was gray and cut in short, curly layers. Each curl was distinctly separate, like the coils of a new pad of steel wool.

  Bill bent down close to her and bellowed, “Rise and shine!” Then he sang, “You’re an angel, lighting up the morning.” Imogene woke up and glared at him.

  “I can’t wait to show you the ocean,” said Bill. He pulled on his clothes and slapped his cap on his head. He looked out the window to see if KOOL-II had left. He had.

  “KOOL-II’s done gone,” Bill said.

  “She was a nice girl,” said Imogene, getting up. “But taking up with that boy like that, I just don’t know. There’s so much meanness going on.”

  She put water and bacon strips on the stove and started dressing. Bill turned on the portable television. The Today show was in Minnesota. Jane Pauley was having breakfast with a farmer, who said that in fact it was possible to make a living as a dairy farmer these days.

  “You have to like cows first,” he said. He said he didn’t name his cows anymore. He gave them numbers, “like social security numbers,” the man said, laughing.

  “How could you keep a cow without a name?” asked Bill. “How would you talk to it?”

  “He’s a big-dude farmer,” said Imogene. “He couldn’t remember all their names, he’s got so many.”

  The farmer’s wife claimed she was not a working wife, but Jane Pauley pointed out that the woman worked all the time making butter and cheese, dressing chickens, raising children, and so forth.

  “That’s fun work,” she replied.

  “If it don’t kill you,” said Imogene.

  One of the farmer’s seven children said he would be going to college. This day and age you had to be a businessman to be in agriculture. There was a lot his father couldn’t teach him about the farm.

  “Can you see us on TV, having breakfast and talking?” asked Imogene.

  “Shoot,” said Bill. “I’d be embarrassed to death. I’d go crawl in a hole.”

  The show switched to the original Little House on the Prairie, also in Minnesota. Tom Brokaw was interviewing Mike Landon. Mike Landon was telling how back then everybody lived mainly in one small room and they were forced to live together, to cooperate, to work together. You couldn’t hide. Nowadays a kid could be off in his room and have a drug problem for six months and nobody would know. That couldn’t have happened in the nineteenth century, Mike Landon said.

  “Bet he lives in a mansion,” said Bill, who was pacing the floor. “How does he explain that?”

  Mike Landon said it didn’t depend on the number of rooms, as long as you can communicate. His kids don’t watch TV during the week, he said, except for Little House on the Prairie. “Or I give them a beating!” He laughed.

  Bill grew more and more restless as they drove down into Florida. He kept an eye on the left side of the horizon so that he could catch that first glimpse of the ocean. He was afraid it might appear any second and he might miss it. He hardly noticed the changing terrain and the tourist signs.

  “I thought I saw orange trees,” Imogene said.

  Imogene had stopped flinching every time a car passed, and she seemed to be in a better mood, Bill thought.

  “I can’t wait to show you the ocean,” he said for the tenth time.

  “Some folks is happy just to stay home,” she said. “But that farmer on television—he had money. He could retire to Florida and still have something to show for all his years.”

  After bypassing Jacksonville, Bill headed for a campground. He still could not see the ocean.

  “Whoa!” cried Imogene suddenly. “What’s the matter with you? You scared the wadding out of me. You nearly run into that truck.”

  “That truck was half a mile down the road! Keep your britches on. We’re almost there.”

  As they drove into the campground, which had a swimming pool but no trees, Imogene said, “You can tell this is Florida. Old folks everywhere.”

  Bill liked it better at the other places, with the dogs and the younger people. He didn’t see any dogs here. They passed a man struggling along on a metal walker.

  “I hope we don’t get like that,” said Imogene.

  After selecting and paying for their parking place, they drove to the ocean, a couple of miles away. Bill’s first sight of it was like something seen through a keyhole. Then it grew larger and larger.

  “Is this what you brought me here to see?” said Imogene, as they examined the Atlantic from their high perches in the camper. “It all looks the same.”

  Bill was silent as they got out and locked the van. He dropped his keys in the sand, he was so nervous. They walked down a narrow pathway to the beach, and Bill kept wanting to break into a run, but Imogene was too slow. They walked down the beach together, now and then stopping while Bill faced the ocean. He kept his arm around Imogene’s waist, in case she stumbled in the sand. She had on her straw wedgies.

  Bill stopped her then and they stood still for a long while. Bill’s eyes roved over the rolling sea. It was the same water, carried around
by time, that he had sailed, but it was bluer than he remembered. He remembered the feeling of looking out over that expanse, fearing the sound of the Japanese planes, taking comfort at the sight of the big battleship and its family of destroyers. He had seen a kamikaze dive into a destroyer. The explosion was like a silent movie that played in his head endlessly, like reruns of McHale’s Navy.

  “How long will you be?” asked Imogene. “I need to find me some shade.”

  “I’ll be along directly,” said Bill, gazing out at battleships and destroyers riding on the horizon. He could not tell if they were coming or going, or whose they were.

  GRAVEYARD DAY

  Waldeen’s daughter Holly, swinging her legs from the kitchen stool, lectures her mother on natural foods. Holly is ten and too skinny.

  Waldeen says, “I’ll have to give your teacher a talking-to. She’s put notions in your head. You’ve got to have meat to grow.”

  Waldeen is tenderizing liver, beating it with the edge of a saucer. Her daughter insists that she is a vegetarian. If Holly had said Rosicrucian, it would have sounded just as strange to Waldeen. Holly wants to eat peanuts, soyburgers, and yogurt. Waldeen is sure this new fixation has something to do with Holly’s father, Joe Murdock, although Holly rarely mentions him. After Waldeen and Joe were divorced last September, Joe moved to Arizona and got a construction job. Joe sends Holly letters occasionally, but Holly won’t let Waldeen see them. At Christmas he sent her a copper Indian bracelet with unusual marks on it. It is Indian language, Holly tells her. Waldeen sees Holly polishing the bracelet while she is watching TV.