Jack photographs weeds, twigs, pond reflections, silhouettes of Robert against the sun with his arms flung out like a scarecrow’s. Sometimes he works in the evenings in his studio at home, drinking tequila sunrises and composing bizarre still lifes with lightbulbs, wine bottles, Tinkertoys, Lucite cubes. He makes arrangements of gourds look like breasts.
On the day Nancy tried to explain to Jack about her need to save Granny’s pictures, a hailstorm interrupted her. It was the only hailstorm she had ever seen in the North, and she had forgotten all about them. Granny always said a hailstorm meant that God was cleaning out his icebox. Nancy stood against a white Masonite wall mounted with a new series of photographs and looked out the window at tulips being smashed. The ice pellets littered the ground like shattered glass. Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the hailstorm was over.
“Pictures didn’t used to be so common,” Nancy said. Jack’s trash can was stuffed with rejected prints, and Robert’s face was crumpled on top. “I want to keep Granny’s pictures as reminders.”
“If you think that will solve anything,” said Jack, squinting at a negative he was holding against the light.
“I want to see if she has one of Nancy Culpepper.”
“That’s you.”
“There was another one. She was a great-great-aunt or something, on my daddy’s side. She had the same name as mine.”
“There’s another one of you?” Jack said with mock disbelief.
“I’m a reincarnation,” she said, playing along.
“There’s nobody else like you. You’re one of a kind.”
Nancy turned away and stared deliberately at Jack’s pictures, which were held up by clear-headed pushpins, like translucent eyes dotting the wall. She examined them one by one, moving methodically down the row—stumps, puffballs, tree roots, close-ups of cat feet.
Nancy first learned about her ancestor on a summer Sunday a few years before, when she took her grandmother to visit the Culpepper graveyard, beside an oak grove off the Paducah highway. The old oaks had spread their limbs until they shaded the entire cemetery, and the tombstones poked through weeds like freak mushrooms. Nancy wandered among the graves, while Granny stayed beside her husband’s gravestone. It had her own name on it too, with a blank space for the date.
Nancy told Jack afterwards that when she saw the stone marked “NANCY CULPEPPER, 1833–1905,” she did a double take. “It was like timelapse photography,” she said. “I mean, I was standing there, looking into the past and the future at the same time. It was weird.”
“She wasn’t kin to me, but she lived down the road,” Granny explained to Nancy. “She was your granddaddy’s aunt.”
“Did she look like me?” Nancy asked.
“I don’t know. She was real old.” Granny touched the stone, puzzled. “I can’t figure why she wasn’t buried with her husband’s people,” she said.
On Saturday, Nancy helps her parents move some of their furniture to the house next door. It is only a short walk, but when the truck is loaded they all ride in it, Nancy sitting between her parents. The truck’s muffler sounds like thunder, and they drive without speaking. Daddy backs up to the porch.
The paint on the house is peeling, and the latch of the storm door is broken. Daddy pulls at the door impatiently, saying, “I sure wish I could burn down these old houses and retire to Arizona.” For as long as Nancy can remember, her father has been sending away for literature on Arizona.
Her mother says, “We’ll never go anywhere. We’ve got our dress tail on a bedpost.”
“What does that mean?” asks Nancy, in surprise.
“Use to, if a storm was coming, people would put a bedpost on a child’s dress tail, to keep him from blowing away. In other words, we’re tied down.”
“That’s funny. I never heard of that.”
“I guess you think we’re just ignorant,” Mom says. “The way we talk.”
“No, I don’t.”
Daddy props the door open, and Nancy helps him ease a mattress over the threshold. Mom apologizes for not being able to lift anything.
“I’m in your way,” she says, stepping off the porch into a dead canna bed.
Nancy stacks boxes in her old room. It seems smaller than she remembered, and the tenants have scarred the woodwork. Mentally, she refurnishes the room—the bed by the window, the desk opposite. The first time Jack came to Kentucky he slept here, while Nancy slept on the couch in the living room. Now Nancy recalls the next day, as they headed west, with Jack accusing her of being dishonest, foolishly trying to protect her parents. “You let them think you’re such a goody-goody, the ideal daughter,” he said. “I’ll bet you wouldn’t tell them if you made less than an A.”
Nancy’s father comes in and runs his hand across the ceiling, gathering up strings of dust. Tugging at a loose piece of door facing, he says to Nancy, “Never trust renters. They won’t take care of a place.”
“What will you do with Granny’s house?”
“Nothing. Not as long as she’s living.”
“Will you rent it out then?”
“No. I won’t go through that again.” He removes his cap and smooths his hair, then puts the cap back on. Leaning against the wall, he talks about the high cost of the nursing home. “I never thought it would come to this,” he says. “I wouldn’t do it if there was any other way.”
“You don’t have any choice,” says Nancy.
“The government will pay you to break up your family,” he says. “If I get like your granny, I want you to just take me out in the woods and shoot me.”
“She told me she wasn’t going,” Nancy says.
“They’ve got a big recreation room for the ones that can get around,” Daddy says. “They’ve even got disco dancing.”
When Daddy laughs, his voice catches, and he has to clear his throat. Nancy laughs with him. “I can just see Granny disco dancing. Are you sure you want me to shoot you? That place sounds like fun.”
They go outside, where Nancy’s mother is cleaning out a patch of weedchoked perennials. “I planted these iris the year we moved,” she says.
“They’re pretty,” says Nancy. “I haven’t seen that color up North.”
Mom stands up and shakes her foot awake. “I sure hope y’all can move down here,” she says. “It’s a shame you have to be so far away. Robert grows so fast I don’t know him.”
“We might someday. I don’t know if we can.”
“Looks like Jack could make good money if he set up a studio in town. Nowadays people want fancy pictures.”
“Even the school pictures cost a fortune,” Daddy says.
“Jack wants to free-lance for publications,” says Nancy. “And there aren’t any here. There’s not even a camera shop within fifty miles.”
“But people want pictures,” Mom says. “They’ve gone back to decorating living rooms with family pictures. In antique frames.”
Daddy smokes a cigarette on the porch, while Nancy circles the house. A beetle has infested the oak trees, causing clusters of leaves to turn brown. Nancy stands on the concrete lid of an old cistern and watches crows fly across a cornfield. In the distance a series of towers slings power lines across a flat sea of soybeans. Her mother is talking about Granny. Nancy thinks of Granny on the telephone, the day of her wedding, innocently asking, “What are you going to cook for your wedding breakfast?” Later, seized with laughter, Nancy told Jack what Granny had said.
“I almost said to her, ‘We usually don’t eat breakfast, we sleep so late!’”
Jack was busy blowing up balloons. When he didn’t laugh, Nancy said, “Isn’t that hilarious? She’s really out of the nineteenth century.”
“You don’t have to make me breakfast,” said Jack.
“In her time, it meant something really big,” Nancy said helplessly. “Don’t you see?”
Now Nancy’s mother is saying, “The way she has to have that milk of magnesia every night, when I know good and well she don’t
need it. She thinks she can’t live without it.”
“What’s wrong with her?” asks Nancy.
“She thinks she’s got a knot in her bowels. But ain’t nothing wrong with her but that head-swimming and arthritis.” Mom jerks a long morning glory vine out of the marigolds. “Hardening of the arteries is what makes her head swim,” she says.
“We better get back and see about her,” Daddy says, but he does not get up immediately. The crows are racing above the power lines.
Later, Nancy spreads a Texaco map of the United States out on Granny’s quilt. “I want to show you where I live,” she says. “Philadelphia’s nearly a thousand miles from here.”
“Reach me my specs,” says Granny, as she struggles to sit up. “How did you get here?”
“Flew. Daddy picked me up at the airport in Paducah.”
“Did you come by the bypass or through town?”
“The bypass,” says Nancy. Nancy shows her where Pennsylvania is on the map. “I flew from Philadelphia to Louisville to Paducah. There’s California. That’s where Robert was born.”
“I haven’t seen a geography since I was twenty years old,” Granny says. She studies the map, running her fingers over it as though she were caressing fine material. “Law, I didn’t know where Floridy was. It’s way down there.”
“I’ve been to Florida,” Nancy says.
Granny lies back, holding her head as if it were a delicate china bowl. In a moment she says, “Tell your mama to thaw me up some of them strawberries I picked.”
“When were you out picking strawberries, Granny?”
“They’re in the freezer of my refrigerator. Back in the back. In a little milk carton.” Granny removes her glasses and waves them in the air.
“Larry was going to come and play with me, but he couldn’t come,” Robert says to Nancy on the telephone that evening. “He had a stomachache.”
“That’s too bad. What did you do today?”
“We went to the Taco Bell and then we went to the woods so Daddy could take pictures of Indian pipes.”
“What are those?”
“I don’t know. Daddy knows.”
“We didn’t find any,” Jack says on the extension. “I think it’s the wrong time of year. How’s Kentucky?”
Nancy tells Jack about helping her parents move. “My bed is gone, so tonight I’ll have to sleep on a couch in the hallway,” she says. “It’s really dreary here in this old house. Everything looks so bare.”
“How’s your grandmother?”
“The same. She’s dead set against that rest home, but what can they do?”
“Do you still want to move down there?” Jack asks.
“I don’t know.”
“I know how we could take the chickens to Kentucky,” says Robert in an excited burst.
“How?”
“We could give them sleeping pills and then put them in the trunk so they’d be quiet.”
“That sounds gruesome,” Jack says.
Nancy tells Robert not to think about moving. There is static on the line. Nancy has trouble hearing Jack. “We’re your family too,” he is saying.
“I didn’t mean to abandon you,” she says.
“Have you seen the pictures yet?”
“No. I’m working up to that.”
“Nancy Culpepper, the original?”
“You bet,” says Nancy, a little too quickly. She hears Robert hang up. “Is Robert O.K.?” she asks through the static.
“Oh, sure.”
“He doesn’t think I moved without him?”
“He’ll be all right.”
“He didn’t tell me goodbye.”
“Don’t worry,” says Jack.
“She’s been after me about those strawberries till I could wring her neck,” says Mom as she and Nancy are getting ready for bed. “She’s talking about some strawberries she put up in nineteen seventy-one. I’ve told her and told her that she eat them strawberries back then, but won’t nothing do but for her to have them strawberries.”
“Give her some others,” Nancy says.
“She’d know the difference. She don’t miss a thing when it comes to what’s hers. But sometimes she’s just as liable to forget her name.”
Mom is trembling, and then she is crying. Nancy pats her mother’s hair, which is gray and wiry and sticks out in sprigs. Wiping her eyes, Mom says, “All the kinfolks will talk. ‘Look what they done to her, poor helpless thing.’ It’ll probably kill her, to move her to that place.”
“When you move back home you can get all your antiques out of the barn,” Nancy says. “You’ll be in your own house again. Won’t that be nice?”
Mom does not answer. She takes some sheets and quilts from a closet and hands them to Nancy. “That couch lays good,” she says.
When Nancy wakes up, the covers are on the floor, and for a moment she does not remember where she is. Her digital watch says 2:43. Then it tells the date. In the darkness she has no sense of distance, and it seems to her that the lighted numerals could be the size of a billboard, only seen from far away.
Jack has told her that this kind of insomnia is a sign of depression, while the other kind—inability to fall asleep at bedtime—is a sign of anxiety. Nancy always thought he had it backwards, but now she thinks he may be right. A flicker of distant sheet lightning exposes the bleak walls with the suddenness of a flashbulb. The angles of the hall seem unfamiliar, and the narrow couch makes Nancy feel small and alone. When Jack and Robert come to Kentucky with her, they all sleep in the living room, and in the early morning Nancy’s parents pass through to get to the bathroom. “We’re just one big happy family,” Daddy announces, to disguise his embarrassment when he awakens them. Now, for some reason, Nancy recalls Jack’s strange still lifes, and she thinks of the black irises and the polished skulls of cattle suspended in the skies of O’Keeffe paintings. The irises are like thunderheads. The night they were married, Nancy and Jack collapsed into bed, falling asleep immediately, their heads swirling. The party was still going on, and friends from New York were staying over. Nancy woke up the next day saying her new name, and feeling that once again, in another way, she had betrayed her parents. “The one time they really thought they knew what I was doing, they didn’t at all,” she told Jack, who was barely awake. The visitors had gone out for the Sunday newspapers, and they brought back doughnuts. They had doughnuts and wine for breakfast. Someone made coffee later.
In the morning, a slow rain blackens the fallen oak branches in the yard. In Granny’s room the curtains are gray with shadows. Nancy places an old photograph album in Granny’s lap. Silently, Granny turns pages of blankfaced babies in long white dresses like wedding gowns. Nancy’s father is a boy in a sailor suit. Men and women in pictures the color of café au lait stand around picnic tables. The immense trees in these settings are shaggy and dark. Granny cannot find Nancy Culpepper in the album. Quickly, she flips past a picture of her husband. Then she almost giggles as she points to a girl. “That’s me.”
“I wouldn’t have recognized you, Granny.”
“Why, it looks just like me.” Granny strokes the picture, as though she were trying to feel the dress. “That was my favorite dress,” she says. “It was brown poplin, with grosgrain ribbon and self-covered buttons. Thirty-two of them. And all those tucks. It took me three weeks to work up that dress.”
Nancy points to the pictures one by one, asking Granny to identify them. Granny does not notice Nancy writing the names in a notebook. Aunt Sass, Uncle Joe, Dove and Pear Culpepper, Hortense Culpepper.
“Hort Culpepper went to Texas,” says Granny. “She had TB.”
“Tell me about that,” Nancy urges her.
“There wasn’t anything to tell. She got homesick for her mammy’s cooking.” Granny closes the album and falls back against her pillows, saying, “All those people are gone.”
While Granny sleeps, Nancy gets a flashlight and opens the closet. The inside is crammed with the accumulation of
decades—yellowed newspapers, boxes of greeting cards, bags of string, and worn-out stockings. Granny’s best dress, a blue bonded knit she has hardly worn, is in plastic wrapping. Nancy pushes the clothing aside and examines the wall. To her right, a metal pipe runs vertically through the closet. Backing up against the dresses, Nancy shines the light on the corner and discovers a large framed picture wedged behind the pipe. By tugging at the frame, she is able to work it gradually through the narrow space between the wall and the pipe. In the picture a man and woman, whose features are sharp and clear, are sitting expectantly on a brocaded love seat. Nancy imagines that this is a wedding portrait.
In the living room, a TV evangelist is urging viewers to call him, tollfree. Mom turns the TV off when Nancy appears with the picture, and Daddy stands up and helps her hold it near a window.
“I think that’s Uncle John!” he says excitedly. “He was my favorite uncle.”
“They’re none of my people,” says Mom, studying the picture through her bifocals.
“He died when I was little, but I think that’s him,” says Daddy. “Him and Aunt Lucy Culpepper.”
“Who was she?” Nancy asks.
“Uncle John’s wife.”
“I figured that,” says Nancy impatiently. “But who was she?”
“I don’t know.” He is still looking at the picture, running his fingers over the man’s face.
Back in Granny’s room, Nancy pulls the string that turns on the ceiling light, so that Granny can examine the picture. Granny shakes her head slowly. “I never saw them folks before in all my life.”
Mom comes in with a dish of strawberries.
“Did I pick these?” Granny asks.
“No. You eat yours about ten years ago,” Mom says.
Granny puts in her teeth and eats the strawberries in slurps, missing her mouth twice. “Let me see them people again,” she says, waving her spoon. Her teeth make the sound of a baby rattle.
Patchwork Page 23
