“In some ways, a woman prefers a man who wanders,” says Norma Jean. “That sounds crazy, I know.”
“You’re not crazy.”
Leroy remembers to drink from his Coke. Then he says, “Yes, you are crazy. You and me could start all over again. Right back at the beginning.”
“We have started all over again,” says Norma Jean. “And this is how it turned out.”
“What did I do wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Is this one of those women’s lib things?” Leroy asks.
“Don’t be funny.”
The cemetery, a green slope dotted with white markers, looks like a subdivision site. Leroy is trying to comprehend that his marriage is breaking up, but for some reason he is wondering about white slabs in a graveyard.
“Everything was fine till Mama caught me smoking,” says Norma Jean, standing up. “That set something off.”
“What are you talking about?”
“She won’t leave me alone—you won’t leave me alone.” Norma Jean seems to be crying, but she is looking away from him. “I feel eighteen again. I can’t face that all over again.” She starts walking away. “No, it wasn’t fine. I don’t know what I’m saying. Forget it.”
Leroy takes a lungful of smoke and closes his eyes as Norma Jean’s words sink in. He tries to focus on the fact that thirty-five hundred soldiers died on the grounds around him. He can only think of that war as a board game with plastic soldiers. Leroy almost smiles, as he compares the Confederates’ daring attack on the Union camps and Virgil Mathis’s raid on the bowling alley. General Grant, drunk and furious, shoved the Southerners back to Corinth, where Mabel and Jet Beasley were married years later, when Mabel was still thin and good-looking. The next day, Mabel and Jet visited the battleground, and then Norma Jean was born, and then she married Leroy and they had a baby, which they lost, and now Leroy and Norma Jean are here at the same battleground. Leroy knows he is leaving out a lot. He is leaving out the insides of history. History was always just names and dates to him. It occurs to him that building a house out of logs is similarly empty—too simple. And the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him. Now he sees that building a log house is the dumbest idea he could have had. It was clumsy of him to think Norma Jean would want a log house. It was a crazy idea. He’ll have to think of something else, quickly. He will wad the blueprints into tight balls and fling them into the lake. Then he’ll get moving again. He opens his eyes. Norma Jean has moved away and is walking through the cemetery, following a serpentine brick path.
Leroy gets up to follow his wife, but his good leg is asleep and his bad leg still hurts him. Norma Jean is far away, walking rapidly toward the bluff by the river, and he tries to hobble toward her. Some children run past him, screaming noisily. Norma Jean has reached the bluff, and she is looking out over the Tennessee River. Now she turns toward Leroy and waves her arms. Is she beckoning to him? She seems to be doing an exercise for her chest muscles. The sky is unusually pale—the color of the dust ruffle Mabel made for their bed.
Third Monday
FROM Shiloh and Other Stories (1982)
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 chair. 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?”
He was Buddy Landon, and he tried to sell her a hunting dog. He seemed perfectly serious. Did she want a Coonhound or a bird dog? The thing wrong with bird dogs was that they liked to run so much they often strayed, he said. He recommended the Georgia redbone hound for intelligence and patience. “The redbone can jump and tree, but he doesn’t bark too much,” he said. “He don’t cry wolf on you, and he’s a good lighter.”
“What do I need a coon dog for?” said Ruby, wishing he had a good answer.
“You must
be after a bird dog then,” he said. “Do you prefer hunting ducks or wild geese? I had some hounds that led me on a wild-goose chase one time after an old wildcat. That thing led us over half of Kentucky. That sucker never would climb a tree! He wore my dogs out.” He whooped and clapped his hands.
There were eight empty dog crates in the back of his pickup, and he had chained the dogs to a line between two trees. Ruby approached them cautiously, and they all leaped into the air before their chains jerked them back.
“That little beagle there’s the best in the field,” Buddy said to a man in a blue cap who had sidled up beside them.
“What kind of voice has he got?” the man said.
“It’s music to your ears!”
“I don’t need a rabbit dog,” the man said. “I don’t even have any rabbits left in my fields. I need me a good coon dog.”
“This black-and-tan’s ambitious,” said Buddy, patting a black spot on a dog’s head. The spot was like a little beanie. “His mama and daddy were both ambitious, and he’s ambitious. This dog won’t run trash.”
“What’s trash?” Ruby asked.
“Skunk. Possum,” Buddy explained.
“I’ve only knowed two women in my life that I could get out coon hunting,” the man in the blue cap said.
“This lady claims she wants a bird dog, but I think I can make a coon hunter out of her,” said Buddy, grinning at Ruby.
The man walked away, hunched over a cigarette he was lighting, and Buddy Landon started to sing “You Ain’t Nothin’ But A Hound Dog.” He said to Ruby, “I could have been Elvis Presley. But thank God I wasn’t. Look what happened to him. Got fat and died.” He sang, “‘Crying all the time. You ain’t never caught a rabbit … ’ I love dogs. But I tell you one thing. I’d never let a dog in the house. You know why? It would get too tame and forget its job. Don’t forget, a dog is a dog.”
Buddy took Ruby by the elbow and steered her through the fairgrounds, guiding her past tables of old plastic toys and kitchen utensils. “Junk,” he said. He bought Ruby a Coke in a can, and then he bought some sweet corn from a farmer. “I’m going to have me some roastin’ ears tonight,” he said.
“I hear your dogs calling for you,” said Ruby, listening to the distant bugle voices of the beagles.
“They love me. Stick around and you’ll love me too.”
“What makes you think you’re so cute?” said Ruby. “What makes you think I need a dog?”
He answered her questions with a flirtatious grin. His belt had a large silver buckle, with a floppy-eared dog’s head engraved on it. His hands were thick and strong, with margins of dirt under his large, flat nails. Ruby liked his mustache and the way his chin and the bill of his cap seemed to yearn toward each other.
“How much do you want for that speckled hound dog?” she asked him.
He brought the sweet corn and some steaks to her house that evening. By then, the shucks on the corn were wilting. Ruby grilled the steaks and boiled the ears of corn while Buddy unloaded the dogs from his pickup. He tied them to her clothesline and fed and watered them. The pickup truck in Ruby’s driveway seemed as startling as the sight of the “Action News” TV van would have been. She hoped her neighbors would notice. She could have a man there if she wanted to.
After supper, Buddy gave the dogs the leftover bones and steak fat. Leaping and snapping, they snatched at the scraps, but Buddy snarled back at them and made them cringe. “You have to let them know who’s boss,” he called to Ruby, who was looking on admiringly from the back porch. It was like watching a group of people playing “May I?”
Later, Buddy brought his sleeping roll in from the truck and settled in the living room, and Ruby did not resist when he came into her bedroom and said he couldn’t sleep. She thought her timing was appropriate; she had recently bought a double bed. They talked until late in the night, and he told her hunting stories, still pretending that she was interested in acquiring a hunting dog. She pretended she was, too, and asked him dozens of questions. He said he traded things—anything he could make a nickel from: retreaded tires, cars, old milk cans and cream separators. He was fond of the dogs he raised and trained, but it did not hurt him to sell them. There were always more dogs.
“Loving a dog is like trying to love the Mississippi River,” he said. “It’s constantly shifting and changing color and sound and course, but it’s just the same old river.”
Suddenly he asked Ruby, “Didn’t you ever get married?”
“No.”
“Don’t it bother you?”
“No. What of it?” She wondered if he thought she was a lesbian.
He said, “You’re too pretty and nice. I can’t believe you never married.”
“All the men around here are ignorant,” she said. “I never wanted to marry any of them. Were you ever married?”
“Yeah. Once or twice is all. I didn’t take to it.”
Later, in the hospital, on Sodium Pentothal, Ruby realized that she had about a hundred pictures of Clint Eastwood, her favorite actor, and none of Buddy. His indistinct face wavered in her memory as she rolled down a corridor on a narrow bed. He didn’t have a picture of her, either. In a drawer somewhere she had a handful of prints of her high school graduation picture, taken years ago. Ruby Jane MacPherson in a beehive and a Peter Pan collar. She should remember to give him one for his billfold someday. She felt cautious around Buddy, she realized, the way she did in high school, when it had seemed so important to keep so many things hidden from boys. “Don’t let your brother find your sanitary things,” she could hear her mother saying.
In the recovery room, she slowly awoke at the end of a long dream, to blurred sounds and bright lights—gold and silver flashes moving past like fish—and a pain in her chest that she at first thought was a large bird with a hooked beak suckling her breast. The problem, she kept thinking, was that she was lying down, when in order to nurse the creature properly, she ought to sit up. The mound of bandages mystified her.
“We didn’t have to take very much,” a nurse said. “The doctor didn’t have to go way up under your arm.”
Someone was squeezing her hand. She heard her mother telling someone, “They think they got it all.”
A strange fat woman with orange hair was holding her hand. “You’re just fine, sugar,” she said.
When Ruby began meeting Buddy at the fairgrounds on Third Mondays, he always seemed to have a new set of dogs. One morning he traded two pocket knives for a black-and-tan coonhound with limp ears and starstruck eyes. By afternoon, he had made a profit of ten dollars, and the dog had shifted owners again without even getting a meal from Buddy. After a few months, Ruby lost track of all the different dogs. In a way, she realized, their identities did flow together like a river. She thought often of Buddy’s remark about the Mississippi River. He was like the river. She didn’t even have an address for him, but he always showed up on Third Mondays and spent the night at her house. If he’d had a profitable day, he would take her to the Burger Chef or McDonald’s. He never did the usual things, such as carry out her trash or open the truck door for her. If she were a smoker, he probably wouldn’t light her cigarette.
Ruby liked his distance. He didn’t act possessive. He called her up from Tennessee once to tell her he had bought a dog and named it Ruby. Then he sold the dog before he got back to town. When it was Ruby’s birthday, he made nothing of that, but on another day at the fairgrounds he bought her a bracelet of Mexican silver from a wrinkled old black woman in a baseball cap who called everybody “darling.” Her name was Gladys. Ruby loved the way Buddy got along with Gladys, teasing her about being his girlfriend.
“Me and Gladys go ’way back,” he said, embracing the old woman flamboyantly.
“Don’t believe anything this old boy tells you,” said Gladys with a grin.
“Don’t say I never gave you nothing,” Buddy said to Ruby as he paid for the bracelet. He didn’t fasten the bracelet on her wrist for her, just as he never
opened the truck door for her.
The bracelet cost only three dollars, and Ruby wondered if it was authentic. “What’s Mexican silver anyway?” she asked.
“It’s good,” he said. “Gladys wouldn’t cheat me.”
Later, Ruby kept thinking of the old woman. Her merchandise was set out on the tailgate of her station wagon—odds and ends of carnival glass, some costume jewelry, and six Barbie dolls. On the ground she had several crates of banties and guineas and pigeons. Their intermingled coos and chirps made Ruby wonder if Gladys slept in her station wagon listening to the music of her birds, the way Buddy slept in his truck with his dogs.
The last time he’d come to town—the week before her operation—Ruby traveled with him to a place over in the Ozarks to buy some pit bull terriers. They drove several hours on interstates, and Buddy rambled on excitedly about the new dogs, as though there were something he could discover about the nature of dogs by owning a pit bull terrier. Ruby, who had traveled little, was intensely interested in the scenery, but she said, “If these are mountains, then I’m disappointed.”
“You ought to see the Rockies,” said Buddy knowingly. “Talk about mountains.”
At a little grocery store, they asked for directions, and Buddy swigged on a Dr Pepper. Ruby had a Coke and a bag of pork rinds. Buddy paced around nervously outside, then unexpectedly slammed his drink bottle in the tilted crate of empties with such force that several bottles fell out and broke. At that moment, Ruby knew she probably was irrevocably in love with him, but she was afraid it was only because she needed someone. She wanted to love him for better reasons. She knew about the knot in her breast and had already scheduled the mammogram, but she didn’t want to tell him. Her body made her angry, interfering that way, like a nosy neighbor.
They drove up a winding mountain road that changed to gravel, then to dirt. A bearded man without a shirt emerged from a house trailer and showed them a dozen dogs pacing in makeshift kennel runs. Ruby talked to the dogs while Buddy and the man hunkered down together under a persimmon tree. The dogs were squat and broad-shouldered, with squinty eyes. They were the same kind of dog the Little Rascals had had in the movies. They hurled themselves against the shaky wire, and Ruby told them to hush. They looked at her with cocked heads. When Buddy finally crated up four dogs, the owner looked as though he would cry.
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