Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “But how would you know if it was?”

  “They can tell.” Sabrina stares at him and then laughs. “Through science.”

  In the early winter, the lake is deserted. The beaches are washed clean, and the water is clear and gray. Now and then, as they walk by the water, they hear a gunshot from the Land Between the Lakes wilderness area. “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” is going through Edwin’s head, and he wishes he could throw the Oklahoma! sound track in the lake, as easily as Laura Combs threw the Plasmatics out the window of the bus. He has an idea that after the play, Sabrina is going to feel a letdown too great for him to deal with.

  When Sabrina makes a comment about the “artistic intention” of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Edwin says, “Do you know what Janis Joplin said?”

  “No—what?” Sabrina stubs the toe of her jogging shoe in the sand.

  “Janis Joplin said, ‘I don’t write songs. I just make ’em up.’ I thought that was clever.”

  “That’s funny, I guess.”

  “She said she was going to her high school reunion in Port Arthur, Texas. She said, ‘I’m going to laugh a lot. They laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state.’ ”

  “You sound like you’ve got that memorized,” Sabrina says, looking at the sky.

  “I saw it on TV one night when you were gone, an old tape of a Dick Cavett show. It seemed worth remembering.” Edwin rests his arm around Sabrina’s waist, as thin as a post. He says, “I see a lot of things on TV, when you’re not there.”

  Wild ducks are landing on the water, scooting in like water skiers. Sabrina seems impressed by them. They stand there until the last one lands.

  Edwin says, “I bet you can’t even remember Janis Joplin. You’re just a young girl, Sabrina. Oklahoma! will seem silly to you one of these days.”

  Sabrina hugs his arm. “That don’t matter.” She breaks into laughter. “You’re cute when you’re being serious.”

  Edwin grabs her hand and jerks her toward him. “Look, Sabrina. I was never serious before in my life. I’m just now, at this point in my life—this week—getting to be serious.” His words scare him, and he adds with a grin that stretches his dimple, “I’m serious about you.”

  “I know that,” she says. She is leading the way along the water, through the trees, pulling him by the hand. “But you never believe how much I care about you,” she says, drawing him to her. “I think we get along real good. That’s why I wish you’d marry me instead of just stringing me along.”

  Edwin gasps like a swimmer surfacing. It is very cold on the beach. Another duck skis onto the water.

  —

  Oklahoma! has a four-night run, with one matinee. Edwin goes to the play three times, surprised that he enjoys it. Sabrina’s lines come off differently each time, and each evening she discusses the impression she made. Edwin tells her that she is the prettiest woman in the cast, and that her lines are cute. He wants to marry Sabrina, although he hasn’t yet said he would. He wishes he could buy her a speedboat for a wedding present. She wants him to get a better-paying job, and she has ideas about a honeymoon cottage at the lake. It feels odd that Sabrina has proposed to him. He thinks of her as a liberated woman. The play is old-fashioned and phony. The love scenes between Jeff and Sue are comically stilted, resembling none of the passion and intrigue that Sabrina has reported. She compared them to Bogart and Bacall, but Edwin can’t remember if she meant Jeff and Sue’s roles or their actual affair. How did Sabrina know about Bogart and Bacall?

  At the cast party, at Jeff’s house, Jeff and Sue are publicly affectionate, getting away with it by playing their Laurey and Curly roles, but eventually Jeff’s wife, who has made ham, potato salad, chiffon cakes, eggnog, and cranberry punch for sixty people, suddenly disappears from the party. Jeff whizzes off in his Camaro to find her. Sabrina whispers to Edwin, “Look how Sue’s pretending nothing’s happened. She’s flirting with the guy who played Jud Fry.” Sabrina, so excited that she bounces around on her tiptoes, is impressed by Jeff’s house, which has wicker furniture and rose plush carpets.

  Edwin drinks too much cranberry punch at the party, and most of the time he sits on a wicker love seat watching Sabrina flit around the room, beaming with the joy of her success. She is out of costume, wearing a sweatshirt with a rainbow on the front and pots of gold on her breasts. He realizes how proud he is of her. Her complexion is as smooth as a white mushroom, and she has crinkled her hair by braiding and unbraiding it. He watches her join some of the cast members around the piano to sing songs from the play, as though they cannot bear it that the play has ended. Sabrina seems to belong with them, these theatre people. Edwin knows they are not really theatre people. They are only local merchants putting on a play in their spare time. But Edwin is just a bus driver. He should get a better job so that he can send Sabrina to college, but he knows that he has to take care of his passengers. Their faces have become as familiar to him as the sound track of Oklahoma! He can practically hear Freddie Johnson shouting out her TV shows: “Popeye on! Dukes on!” He sees Sabrina looking at him lovingly. The singers shout, “Oklahoma, O.K.!”

  Sabrina brings him a plastic glass of cranberry punch and sits with him on the love seat, holding his hand. She says, “Jim definitely said I should take a drama course at Murray State next semester. He was real encouraging. He said, ‘Why not be in the play and take a course or two?’ I could drive back and forth, don’t you think?”

  “Why not? You can have anything you want.” Edwin plays with her hand.

  “Jeff took two courses at Murray and look how good he was. Didn’t you think he was good? I loved that cute way he went into that dance.”

  Edwin is a little drunk. He finds himself telling Sabrina about how he plays disc jockey on the bus, and he confesses to her his shame about the way he sounded off about his golden-oldie format. His mind is reeling and the topic sounds trivial, compared to Sabrina’s future.

  “Why don’t you play a new-wave format?” she asks him. “It’s what everybody listens to.” She nods at the stereo, which is playing “(You’re Living in Your Own) Private Idaho,” by the B-52s, a song Edwin has often heard on the radio late at night when Sabrina is unwinding, moving into his arms. The music is violent and mindless, with a fast beat like a crazed parent abusing a child, thrashing it senseless.

  “I don’t know,” Edwin says. “I shouldn’t have said that to Lou Murphy. It bothers me.”

  “She don’t know the difference,” Sabrina says, patting his head. “It’s ridiculous to make a big thing out of it. Words are so arbitrary, and people don’t say what they mean half the time anyway.”

  “You should talk, Miss Oklahoma!” Edwin laughs, spurting a little punch on the love seat. “You and your two lines!”

  “They’re just lines,” she says, smiling up at him and poking her finger into his dimple.

  —

  Some of Edwin’s passengers bring him Christmas presents, badly wrapped, with tags that say his name in wobbly writing. Edwin puts the presents in a drawer, where Sabrina finds them.

  “Aren’t you going to open them?” she asks. “I’d be dying to know what was inside.”

  “I will eventually. Leave them there.” Edwin knows what is in them without opening them. There is a bottle of shaving cologne, a tie (he never wears a tie), and three boxes of chocolate-covered cherries (he peeked in one, and the others are exactly the same shape). The presents are so pathetic Edwin could cry. He cannot bring himself to tell Sabrina what happened on the bus.

  On the bus, the day before Christmas break, Ray Watson had a seizure. During that week, Edwin had been playing more Dylan and even some Stones. No Christmas music, except the Elvis album as usual for Ray. And then, almost unthinkingly, following Sabrina’s advice, Edwin shifted formats. It seemed a logical course, as natural as Sabrina’s herbal cosmetics, her mushroom complexion. It started with a revival of The Doors—Jim Morrison singing “Light My Fire,” a song that was so long it carried
them from the feed mill on one side of town to the rendering plant on the other. The passengers loved the way it stretched out, and some shook their heads and stomped their feet. As Edwin realized later, the whole bus was in a frenzy, and he should have known he was leading the passengers toward disaster, but the music seemed so appropriate. The Doors were a bridge from the past to the present, spanning those empty years—his marriages, the turbulence of the times—and connecting his youth solidly with the present. That day Edwin taped more songs from the radio—Adam and the Ants, Squeeze, the B-52s, the Psychedelic Furs, the Flying Lizards, Frankie and the Knockouts—and he made a point of replacing the Plasmatics tape for Lou Murphy. The new-wave format was a hit. Edwin believed the passengers understood what was happening. The frantic beat was a perfect expression of their aimlessness and frustration. Edwin had the impression that his passengers were growing, expanding, like the corn in Oklahoma!, like his own awareness. The new format went on for two days before Ray had his seizure. Edwin did not know exactly what happened, and it was possible Laura Combs had shoved Ray into the aisle. Edwin was in an awkward place on the highway, and he had to shoot across a bridge and over a hill before he could find a good place to stop. Everyone on the bus was making an odd noise, gasping or clapping, some imitating Ray’s convulsions. Freddie Johnson was saying, “Popeye on! Dukes on!” Ray was on the floor, gagging, with his head thrown back, and twitching like someone being electrocuted. Laura Combs stood hunched in her seat, her mouth open in speechless terror, pointing her finger at Edwin. During the commotion, the Flying Lizards were chanting tonelessly, “I’m going to take my problems to the United Nations; there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”

  Edwin followed all the emergency steps he had learned. He loosened Ray’s clothing, slapped his cheeks, turned him on his side. Ray’s skin was the color of the Hershey bars the man with the clubfoot collected. Edwin recalled grimly the first-aid book’s ironic assurance that facial coloring was not important in cases of seizure. On the way to the hospital, Edwin clicked in a Donovan cassette. To steady himself, he sang along under his breath. “I’m just wild about saffron,” he sang. It was a tune as carefree and lyrical as a field of daffodils. The passengers were screaming. All the way to the hospital, Edwin heard their screams, long and drawn out, orchestrated together into an accusing wail—eerie and supernatural.

  Edwin’s supervisors commended him for his quick thinking in handling Ray and getting him to the hospital, and everyone he has seen at the center has congratulated him. Ray’s mother sent him an uncooked fruitcake made with graham cracker crumbs and marshmallows. She wrote a poignant note, thanking him for saving her son from swallowing his tongue. Edwin keeps thinking: what he did was no big deal; you can’t swallow your tongue anyway; and it was Edwin’s own fault that Ray had a seizure. He does not feel like a hero. He feels almost embarrassed.

  Sabrina seems incapable of embarrassment. She is full of hope, like the Christmas season. Oklahoma! was only the beginning for her. She has a new job at McDonald’s and a good part in Life with Father. She plans to commute to Murray State next semester to take a drama class and a course in Western Civilization that she needs to fulfill a requirement. She seems to assume that Edwin will marry her. He finds it funny that it is up to him to say yes. When she says she will keep her own name, Edwin wonders what the point is.

  “My parents would just love it if we got married,” Sabrina explains. “For them, it’s worse for me to live in sin than to be involved with an older man.”

  “I didn’t think I was really older,” says Edwin. “But now I know it. I feel like I’ve had a developmental disability and it suddenly went away. Something like if Freddie Johnson learned to read. That’s how I feel.”

  “I never thought of you as backward. Laid back is what I said.” Sabrina laughs at her joke. “I’m sure you’re going to impress Mom and Dad.”

  Tomorrow she is going to her parents’ farm, thirty miles away, for the Christmas holidays, and she has invited Edwin to go with her. He does not want to disappoint her. He does not want to go through Christmas without her. She has arranged her Christmas cards on a red string between the living room and the kitchen. She is making cookies, and Edwin has a feeling she is adding something strange to them. Her pale, fine hair is falling down in her face. Flour streaks her jeans.

  “Let me show you something,” Edwin says, bringing out a drugstore envelope of pictures. “One of my passengers, Merle Cope, gave me these.”

  “Which one is he? The one with the fits?”

  “No. The one that claps all the time. He lives with a lot of sisters and brothers down in Langley’s Bottom. It’s a case of incest. The whole family’s backward—your word. He’s forty-seven and goes around with this big smile on his face, clapping.” Edwin demonstrates.

  He pins the pictures on Sabrina’s Christmas card line with tiny red and green clothespins. “Look at these and tell me what you think.”

  Sabrina squints, going down the row of pictures. Her hands are covered with flour and she holds them in front of her, the way she learned from her actor friends to hold an invisible baby.

  The pictures are black-and-white snapshots: fried eggs on cracked plates, an oilclothed kitchen table, a bottle of tomato ketchup, a fence post, a rusted tractor seat sitting on a stump, a corncrib, a sagging door, a toilet bowl, a cow, and finally, a horse’s rear end.

  “I can’t look,” says Sabrina. “These are disgusting.”

  “I think they’re arty.”

  Sabrina laughs. She points to the pictures one by one, getting flour on some of them. Then she gets the giggles and can’t stop. “Can you imagine what the developers thought when they saw that horse’s ass?” she gasps. Her laughter goes on and on, then subsides with a little whimper. She goes back to the cookies. While she cuts out the cookies, Edwin takes the pictures down and puts them in the envelope. He hides the envelope in the drawer with the Christmas presents. Sabrina sets the cookie sheet in the oven and washes her hands.

  Edwin asks, “How long do those cookies take?”

  “Twelve minutes. Why?”

  “Let me show you something else—in case you ever need to know it. The CPR technique—that’s cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  Sabrina looks annoyed. “I’d rather do the Heimlich maneuver,” she says. “Besides, you’ve practiced CPR on me a hundred times.”

  “I’m not practicing. I don’t have to anymore. I’m beyond that.” Edwin notices Sabrina’s puzzled face. The thought of her fennel toothpaste, which makes her breath smell like licorice, fills him with something like nostalgia, as though she is already only a memory. He says, “I just want you to feel what it would be like. Come on.” He leads her to the couch and sets her down. Her hands are still moist. He says, “Now just pretend. Bend over like this. Just pretend you have the biggest pain, right here, right in your chest, right there.”

  “Like this?” Sabrina is doubled over, her hair falling to her knees and her fists knotted between her breasts.

  “Yes. Right in your heart.”

  THIRD MONDAY

  Ruby watches Linda exclaiming over a bib, then a terry cloth sleeper. It is an amazing baby shower because Linda is thirty-seven and unmarried. Ruby admires that. Linda even refused to marry the baby’s father, a man from out of town who had promised to get Linda a laundromat franchise. It turned out that he didn’t own any laundromats; he was only trying to impress her. Linda doesn’t know where he is now. Maybe Nashville.

  Linda smiles at a large bakery cake with pink decorations and the message, WELCOME, HOLLY. “I’m glad I know it’s going to be a girl,” she says. “But in a way it’s like knowing ahead of time what you’re going to get for Christmas.”

  “The twentieth century’s taking all the mysteries out of life,” says Ruby breezily.

  Ruby is as much a guest of honor here as Linda is. Betty Lewis brings Ruby’s cake and ice cream to her and makes sure she has a comfortable ch
air. Ever since Ruby had a radical mastectomy, Betty and Linda and the other women on her bowling team have been awed by her. They praise her bravery and her sense of humor. Just before she had the operation, they suddenly brimmed over with inspiring tales about women who had had successful mastectomies. They reminded her about Betty Ford and Happy Rockefeller. Happy … Everyone is happy now. Linda looks happy because Nancy Featherstone has taken all the ribbons from the presents and threaded them through holes in a paper plate to fashion a funny bridal bouquet. Nancy, who is artistic, explains that this is a tradition at showers. Linda is pleased. She twirls the bouquet, and the ends of the ribbons dangle like tentacles on a jellyfish.

  After Ruby found the lump in her breast, the doctor recommended a mammogram. In an X-ray room, she hugged a Styrofoam basketball hanging from a metal cone and stared at the two lights overhead. The technician, a frail man in plaid pants and a smock, flipped a switch and left the room. The machine hummed. He took several X-rays, like a photographer shooting various poses of a model, and used his hands to measure distances, as one would to determine the height of a horse. “My guidelight is out,” he explained. Ruby lay on her back with her breasts flattened out, and the technician slid an X-ray plate into the drawer beneath the table. He tilted her hip and propped it against a cushion. “I have to repeat that last one,” he said. “The angle was wrong.” He told her not to breathe. The machine buzzed and shook. After she was dressed, he showed her the X-rays, which were printed on Xerox paper. Ruby looked for the lump in the squiggly lines, which resembled a rainfall map in a geography book. The outline of her breast was lovely—a lilting, soft curve. The technician would not comment on what he saw in the pictures. “Let the radiologist interpret them,” he said with a peculiar smile. “He’s our chief tea-leaf reader.” Ruby told the women in her bowling club that she had had her breasts Xeroxed.

  —

  The man she cares about does not know. She has been out of the hospital for a week, and in ten days he will be in town again. She wonders whether he will be disgusted and treat her as though she has been raped, his property violated. According to an article she read, this is what to expect. But Buddy is not that kind of man, and she is not his property. She sees him only once a month. He could have a wife somewhere, or other girlfriends, but she doesn’t believe that. He promised to take her home with him the next time he comes to western Kentucky. He lives far away, in East Tennessee, and he travels the flea-market circuit, trading hunting dogs and pocket knives. She met him at the fairgrounds at Third Monday—the flea market held the third Monday of each month. Ruby had first gone there on a day off from work with Janice Leggett to look for some Depression glass to match Janice’s sugar bowl. Ruby lingered in the fringe of trees near the highway, the oak grove where hundreds of dogs were whining and barking, while Janice wandered ahead to the tables of figurines and old dishes. Ruby intended to catch up with Janice shortly, but she became absorbed in the dogs. Their mournful eyes and pitiful yelps made her sad. When she was a child, her dog had been accidentally locked in the corncrib and died of heat exhaustion. She was aware of a man watching her watching the dogs. He wore a billed cap that shaded his sharp eyes like an awning. His blue jacket said HEART VALLEY COON CLUB on the back in gold-embroidered stitching. His red shirt had pearl snaps, and his jeans were creased, as though a woman had ironed them. He grabbed Ruby’s arm suddenly and said, “What are you staring at, little lady! Have you got something treed?”