Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Granny’s face is flushed and she is breathing heavily. “She was a real little-bitty old thing,” she says in a high, squeaky voice. “She never would talk. Everybody thought she was curious. Plumb curious.”

  “Are you sure it’s her?” Nancy says.

  “If I’m not mistaken.”

  “She don’t remember,” Mother says to Nancy. “Her mind gets confused.”

  Granny removes her teeth and lies back, her bones grinding. Her chest heaves with exhaustion. Nancy sits down in the rocking chair, and as she rocks back and forth she searches the photograph, exploring the features of the young woman, who is wearing an embroidered white dress, and the young man, in a curly beard that starts below his chin, framing his face like a ruffle. The woman looks frightened—of the camera perhaps—but nevertheless her deep-set eyes sparkle like shards of glass. This young woman would be glad to dance to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on her wedding day, Nancy thinks. The man seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far away.

  LYING DOGGO

  Grover Cleveland is growing feeble. His eyes are cloudy, and his muzzle is specked with white hairs. When he scoots along on the hardwood floors, he makes a sound like brushes on drums. He sleeps in front of the woodstove, and when he gets too hot he creeps across the floor.

  When Nancy Culpepper married Jack Cleveland, she felt, in a way, that she was marrying a divorced man with a child. Grover was a young dog then. Jack had gotten him at the humane society shelter. He had picked the shyest, most endearing puppy in a boisterous litter. Later, he told Nancy that someone said he should have chosen an energetic one, because quiet puppies often have something wrong with them. That chance remark bothered Nancy; it could have applied to her as well. But that was years ago. Nancy and Jack are still married, and Grover has lived to be old. Now his arthritis stiffens his legs so that on some days he cannot get up. Jack has been talking of having Grover put to sleep.

  “Why do you say ‘put to sleep’?” their son, Robert, asks. “I know what you mean.” Robert is nine. He is a serious boy, quiet, like Nancy.

  “No reason. It’s just the way people say it.”

  “They don’t say they put people to sleep.”

  “It doesn’t usually happen to people,” Jack says.

  “Don’t you dare take him to the vet unless you let me go along. I don’t want any funny stuff behind my back.”

  “Don’t worry, Robert,” Nancy says.

  Later, in Jack’s studio, while developing photographs of broken snow fences on hillsides, Jack says to Nancy, “There’s a first time for everything, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “Death. I never really knew anybody who died.”

  “You’re forgetting my grandmother.”

  “I didn’t really know your grandmother.” Jack looks down at Grover’s face in the developing fluid. Grover looks like a wolf in the snow on the hill. Jack says, “The only people I ever cared about who died were rock heroes.”

  —

  Jack has been buying special foods for the dog—pork chops and liver, vitamin supplements. All the arthritis literature he has been able to find concerns people, but he says the same rules must apply to all mammals. Until Grover’s hind legs gave way, Jack and Robert took Grover out for long, slow walks through the woods. Recently, a neighbor who keeps Alaskan malamutes stopped Nancy in the Super Duper and inquired about Grover. The neighbor wanted to know which kind of arthritis Grover had—osteo- or rheumatoid? The neighbor said he had rheumatoid and held out knobbed fingers. The doctor told him to avoid zucchini and to drink lots of water. Grover doesn’t like zucchini, Nancy said.

  Jack and Nancy and Robert all deal with Grover outside. It doesn’t help that the temperature is dropping below twenty degrees. It feels even colder because they are conscious of the dog’s difficulty. Nancy holds his head and shoulders while Jack supports his hind legs. Robert holds up Grover’s tail.

  Robert says, “I have an idea.”

  “What, sweetheart?” asks Nancy. In her arms, Grover lurches. Nancy squeezes against him and he whimpers.

  “We could put a diaper on him.”

  “How would we clean him up?”

  “They do that with chimpanzees,” says Jack, “but it must be messy.”

  “You mean I didn’t have an original idea?” Robert cries. “Curses, foiled again!” Robert has been reading comic books about masked villains.

  “There aren’t many original ideas,” Jack says, letting go of Grover. “They just look original when you’re young.” Jack lifts Grover’s hind legs again and grasps him under the stomach. “Let’s try one more time, boy.”

  Grover looks at Nancy, pleading.

  Nancy has been feeling that the dying of Grover marks a milestone in her marriage to Jack, a marriage that has somehow lasted almost fifteen years. She is seized with an irrational dread—that when the dog is gone, Jack will be gone too. Whenever Nancy and Jack are apart—during Nancy’s frequent trips to see her family in Kentucky, or when Jack has gone away “to think”—Grover remains with Jack. Actually, Nancy knew Grover before she knew Jack. When Jack and Nancy were students, in Massachusetts, the dog was a familiar figure around campus. Nancy was drawn to the dog long before she noticed the shaggy-haired student in the sheepskin-lined corduroy jacket who was usually with him. Once, in a seminar on the Federalist period that Nancy was auditing, Grover had walked in, circled the room, and then walked out, as if performing some routine investigation, like the man who sprayed Nancy’s apartment building for silverfish. Grover was a beautiful dog, a German shepherd, gray, dusted with a sooty topcoat. After the seminar, Nancy followed the dog out of the building, and she met Jack then. Eventually, when Nancy and Jack made love in his apartment in Amherst, Grover lay sprawled by the bed, both protective and quietly participatory. Later, they moved into a house in the country, and Nancy felt that she had an instant family. Once, for almost three months, Jack and Grover were gone. Jack left Nancy in California, pregnant and terrified, and went to stay at an Indian reservation in New Mexico. Nancy lived in a room on a street with palm trees. It was winter. It felt like a Kentucky October. She went to a park every day and watched people with their dogs, their children, and tried to comprehend that she was there, alone, a mile from the San Andreas fault, reluctant to return to Kentucky. “We need to decide where we stand with each other,” Jack had said when he left. “Just when I start to think I know where you’re at, you seem to disappear.” Jack always seemed to stand back and watch her, as though he expected her to do something excitingly original. He expected her to be herself, not someone she thought people wanted her to be. That was a twist: he expected the unexpected. While Jack was away, Nancy indulged in crafts projects. At the Free University, she learned batik and macramé. On her own, she learned to crochet. She had never done anything like that before. She threw away her file folders of history notes for the article she had wanted to write. Suddenly, making things with her hands was the only endeavor that made sense. She crocheted a bulky, shapeless sweater in a shell stitch for Jack. She made baby things, using large hooks. She did not realize that such heavy blankets were unsuitable for a baby until she saw Robert—a tiny, warped-looking creature, like one of her clumsily made crafts. When Jack returned, she was in a sprawling adobe hospital, nursing a baby the color of scalded skin. The old song “In My Adobe Hacienda” was going through her head. Jack stood over her behind an unfamiliar beard, grinning in disbelief, stroking the baby as though he were a new pet. Nancy felt she had fooled Jack into thinking she had done something original at last.

  “Grover’s dying to see you,” he said to her. “They wouldn’t let him in here.”

  “I’ll be glad to see Grover,” said Nancy. “I missed him.”

  She had missed, she realized then, his various expressions: the staccato barks of joy, the forceful, menacing barks at strangers, the eerie howls when he heard cat fights at night. />
  —

  Those early years together were confused and dislocated. After leaving graduate school, at the beginning of the seventies, they lived in a number of places—sometimes on the road, with Grover, in a van—but after Robert was born they settled in Pennsylvania. Their life is orderly. Jack is a free-lance photographer, with his own studio at home. Nancy, unable to find a use for her degree in history, returned to school, taking education and administration courses. Now she is assistant principal of a small private elementary school, which Robert attends. Now and then Jack frets about becoming too middle-class. He has become semipolitical about energy, sometimes attending anti–nuclear power rallies. He has been building a sun space for his studio and has been insulating the house. “Retrofitting” is the term he uses for making the house energy-efficient.

  “Insulation is his hobby,” Nancy told an old friend from graduate school, Tom Green, who telephoned unexpectedly one day recently. “He insulates on weekends.”

  “Maybe he’ll turn into a butterfly—he could insulate himself into a cocoon,” said Tom, who Nancy always thought was funny. She had not seen him in ten years. He called to say he was sending a novel he had written—“about all the crazy stuff we did back then.”

  The dog is forcing Nancy to think of how Jack has changed in the years since then. He is losing his hair, but he doesn’t seem concerned. Jack was always fanatical about being honest. He used to be insensitive about his directness. “I’m just being honest,” he would say pleasantly, boyishly, when he hurt people’s feelings. He told Nancy she was uptight, that no one ever knew what she thought, that she should be more expressive. He said she “played games” with people, hiding her feelings behind her coy Southern smile. He is more tolerant now, less judgmental. He used to criticize her for drinking Cokes and eating pastries. He didn’t like her lipstick, and she stopped wearing it. But Nancy has changed too. She is too sophisticated now to eat fried foods and rich pies and cakes, indulging in them only when she goes to Kentucky. She uses makeup now—so sparingly that Jack does not notice. Her cool reserve, her shyness, has changed to cool assurance, with only the slightest shift. Inwardly, she has reorganized. “It’s like retrofitting,” she said to Jack once, but he didn’t notice any irony.

  It wasn’t until two years ago that Nancy learned that he had lied to her when he told her he had been at the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert in 1966, just as she had, only two months before they met. When he confessed his lie, he claimed he had wanted to identify with her and impress her because he thought of her as someone so mysterious and aloof that he could not hold her attention. Nancy, who had in fact been intimidated by Jack’s directness, was troubled to learn about his peculiar deception. It was out of character. She felt a part of her past had been ripped away. More recently, when John Lennon died, Nancy and Jack watched the silent vigil in Central Park on TV and cried in each other’s arms. Everybody that week was saying that they had lost their youth.

  Jack was right. That was the only sort of death they had known.

  —

  Grover lies on his side, stretched out near the fire, his head flat on one ear. His eyes are open, expressionless, and when Nancy speaks to him he doesn’t respond.

  “Come on, Grover!” cries Robert, tugging the dog’s leg. “Are you dead?”

  “Don’t pull at him,” Nancy says.

  “He’s lying doggo,” says Jack.

  “That’s funny,” says Robert. “What does that mean?”

  “Dogs do that in the heat,” Jack explains. “They save energy that way.”

  “But it’s winter,” says Robert. “I’m freezing.” He is wearing a wool pullover and a goose-down vest. Jack has the thermostat set on fifty-five, relying mainly on the woodstove to warm the house.

  “I’m cold too,” says Nancy. “I’ve been freezing since 1965, when I came North.”

  Jack crouches down beside the dog. “Grover, old boy. Please. Just give a little sign.”

  “If you don’t get up, I won’t give you your treat tonight,” says Robert, wagging his finger at Grover.

  “Let him rest,” says Jack, who is twiddling some of Grover’s fur between his fingers.

  “Are you sure he’s not dead?” Robert asks. He runs the zipper of his vest up and down.

  “He’s just pretending,” says Nancy.

  The tip of Grover’s tail twitches, and Jack catches it, the way he might grab at a fluff of milkweed in the air.

  Later, in the kitchen, Jack and Nancy are preparing for a dinner party. Jack is sipping whiskey. The woodstove has been burning all day, and the house is comfortably warm now. In the next room, Robert is lying on the rug in front of the stove with Grover. He is playing with a computer football game and watching Mork and Mindy at the same time. Robert likes to do several things at once, and lately he has included Grover in his multiple activities.

  Jack says, “I think the only thing to do is just feed Grover pork chops and steaks and pet him a lot, and then when we can stand it, take him to the vet and get it over with.”

  “When can we stand it?”

  “If I were in Grover’s shape, I’d just want to be put out of my misery.”

  “Even if you were still conscious and could use your mind?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I couldn’t pull the plug on you,” says Nancy, pointing a carrot at Jack. “You’d have to be screaming in agony.”

  “Would you want me to do it to you?”

  “No. I can see right now that I’d be the type to hang on. I’d be just like my Granny. I think she just clung to life, long after her body was ready to die.”

  “Would you really be like that?”

  “You said once I was just like her—repressed, uptight.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “You’ve been right about me before,” Nancy says, reaching across Jack for a paring knife. “Look, all I mean is that it shouldn’t be a matter of our convenience. If Grover needs assistance, then it’s our problem. We’re responsible.”

  “I’d want to be put out of my misery,” Jack says.

  During that evening, Nancy has the impression that Jack is talking more than usual. He does not notice the food. She has made chicken Marengo and is startled to realize how much it resembles chicken cacciatore, which she served the last time she had the same people over. The recipes are side by side in the cookbook, gradations on a theme. The dinner is for Stewart and Jan, who are going to Italy on a teaching exchange.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t even have made Italian,” Nancy tells them apologetically. “You’ll get enough of that in Italy. And it will be real.”

  Both Stewart and Jan say the chicken Marengo is wonderful. The olives are the right touch, Jan says. Ted and Laurie nod agreement. Jack pours more wine. The sound of a log falling in the woodstove reminds Nancy of the dog in the other room by the stove, and in her mind she stages a scene: finding the dog dead in the middle of the dinner party.

  Afterward, they sit in the living room, with Grover lying there like a log too large for the stove. The guests talk idly. Ted has been sandblasting old paint off a brick fireplace, and Laurie complains about the gritty dust. Jack stokes the fire. The stove, hooked up through the fireplace, looks like a robot from an old science fiction movie. Nancy and Jack used to sit by the fireplace in Massachusetts, stoned, watching the blue frills of the flames, imagining that they were musical notes, visual textures of sounds on the stereo. Nobody they know smokes grass anymore. Now people sit around and talk about investments and proper flue linings. When Jack passes around the Grand Marnier, Nancy says, “In my grandparents’ house years ago, we used to sit by their fireplace. They burned coal. They didn’t call it a fireplace, though. They called it a grate.”

  “Coal burns more efficiently than wood,” Jack says.

  “Coal’s a lot cheaper in this area,” says Ted. “I wish I could switch.”

  “My grandparents had big stone fireplaces in their country house,” says Jan, wh
o comes from Connecticut. “They were so pleasant. I always looked forward to going there. Sometimes in the summer the evenings were cool and we’d have a fire. It was lovely.”

  “I remember being cold,” says Nancy. “It was always very cold, even in the South.”

  “The heat just goes up the chimney in a fireplace,” says Jack.

  Nancy stares at Jack. She says, “I would stand in front of the fire until I was roasted. Then I would turn and roast the other side. In the evenings, my grandparents sat on the hearth and read the Bible. There wasn’t anything lovely about it. They were trying to keep warm. Of course, nobody had heard of insulation.”

  “There goes Nancy, talking about her deprived childhood,” Jack says with a laugh.

  Nancy says, “Jack is so concerned about wasting energy. But when he goes out he never wears a hat.” She looks at Jack. “Don’t you know your body heat just flies out the top of your head? It’s a chimney.”

  Surprised by her tone, she almost breaks into tears.

  —

  It is the following evening, and Jack is flipping through some contact sheets of a series on solar hot-water heaters he is doing for a magazine. Robert sheds his goose-down vest, and he and Grover, on the floor, simultaneously inch away from the fire. Nancy is trying to read the novel written by the friend from Amherst, but the book is boring. She would not have recognized her witty friend from the past in the turgid prose she is reading.

  “It’s a dump on the sixties,” she tells Jack when he asks. “A really cynical look. All the characters are types.”

  “Are we in it?”

  “No. I hope not. I think it’s based on that Phil Baxter who cracked up at that party.”

  Grover raises his head, his eyes alert, and Robert jumps up, saying, “It’s time for Grover’s treat.”

  He shakes a Pet-Tab from a plastic bottle and holds it before Grover’s nose. Grover bangs his tail against the rug as he crunches the pill.