Nancy Culpepper (18 page)

“Don’t you never do that again!” Lila shouted. Her rage against his authority shocked her. She slammed the door and clung to Nancy on the bed, both of them crying until Nancy’s sobs finally subsided into hiccups. Lila bathed the poor legs in Epsom salts, soaking the bruises. When Spence found out, he threatened his father, saying he would leave the farm, leave him without any hands to work it. But Spence was immobilized. There was nowhere to go, no way to get their own land. Lila doesn’t believe Nancy remembers. She always loved her grandfather, and he never hurt her again. But she always clung to Lila for protection. Strangers frightened her, and she would look up at Lila, waiting for her mother to speak for her. Lila felt like an old mother hen holding out her wing. Even now, Nancy’s strange, frightened expressions remind Lila of that incident, and she doesn’t have the heart to bring it up again. She never understood why Amp did that to Nancy. Men, Lila believed, had a secret, awful power. She was always taught not to hang around the men when they got together, when one came to visit and they would talk out at the stable. Rosie cautioned her about that.

A nurse interrupts Lila’s thoughts, bringing her a pill. Lila doesn’t ask what it is. She swallows it with a sip of water. The new roommate is getting some kind of midnight treatment, and she gives out a burst of little pup yelps.

There are loose ends: things Lila can’t get out of her mind. The yellow bushes by the house that would bloom so pretty in the spring, with their sweeping arms. Spence cut them back so he could paint the side of the house and they grew bigger the next year, even more beautiful. Eventually, they died back, and for many years Lila longed to see those bushes again, but they were in the past. As you grow older, you give up things, hand things over to the younger generation. You plant a smaller garden. Instead of accumulating, you start giving away, having a yard sale. But Lila never felt she was growing old, until just a few months ago, when she started getting so tired. When she had babies she never slept. She remembers the years at the factory, when she worked from eight until six and still managed to cook, wash, iron, clean, sew, garden, can, even help with the crops and cows. She never knew when to stop.

When she eloped with Spence, she brought something with her that has lasted to this day—a handful of dried field peas, a special variety that her cousins told her that her mother had raised. Lila kept the peas going in the garden year after year, always saving out some seed. They weren’t brown and ordinary. They were white, plumper than most field peas, and she never saw that kind anywhere else. She always called them “our peas.”

You grow older, you start reversing direction. Old people draw up in a knot like a baby in the womb. Rosie died curled like a grubworm. Tell Nancy about the peas.

Her mind fights the tranquilizer. She’ll fight to the end. I’m stubborn as a Missouri mule, she thinks. I’ll accept things up to a point, and then I won’t budge.

The way her kids turned out. What will happen to her garden. What they will do with her things. She doesn’t care about her things. Junk. She’d rather be outdoors. She never cared about housekeeping.

Playing in her uncle’s creek when she was little . . . meeting Spence down in that creek . . . years later when his tractor got stuck in their own creek, hauling him out with the truck. The way he plows her garden lickety-split, clumsily uprooting the precious new slips. She and Spence have spent a lifetime growing things together.

On the wall, the crucifix goes out like a light and there’s a strange calm in the corridor, like the hush in church before the preacher begins.

19

In the growing morning light, Spence can hear the airplane coming, a little chug like a hummingbird’s surprising motorcycle rumble. He fastened up the calves last night. He hasn’t seen Abraham this morning, but Oscar is on the porch with Spence. The tiny single-engine plane flying along the creek line appears so light Spence is sure a good tail wind could make it do a somerset. He watches as Bill flies up and down the largest field, trailing brownish clouds behind him. The wind is from the south, blowing away from the house, so Spence cannot smell the spray. His head is stuffed up from the air-conditioning in the hospital. The plane lifts above the first tree line, barely missing it, then dips down into the second field. At the back, just before reaching the corn, the plane turns and plows back into its own trails of fumes. If Lila dies from that operation and her funeral is Sunday, he could go up in that plane Monday, and if it crashed he would spare Nancy from having to make a separate trip home for his funeral. He had a bad night.

The telephone is ringing. Spence runs inside and grabs the phone, expecting bad news. He has never gotten over the early association between bad news and the telephone.

“Well, how’s Lila doing?” a shrill-voiced woman asks. She must be someone Lila knows from her trips with the senior citizens. “They said she was having her neck operated on,” the woman continues.

“Yeah. Today—about one o’clock,” Spence says, longing for whole minutes of blissful forgetting.

“Lila was looking bad,” she says.

You old bat, he thinks, wishing the doctors would saw on
her
neck.

He tells the woman, “Lila’s sassing the doctors. Can’t nothing hold her down. She’s raring to get home and do up her pickles.”

“Well, I just wanted to know how she was,” the woman says, hanging up abruptly.

It is past seven o’clock. Spence takes a capsule the doctor prescribed for Lila when she had bronchitis back in the winter. The bottle says, “Take one capsule after supper for breathing.” The steam from his shaving water helps clear his nose. In the refrigerator, tan beads of glistening moisture dot the sinking meringue of the coconut pie. Nancy and Cat didn’t take much of the food. Spence lays four strips of bacon on the bacon rack in the microwave and punches the time buttons. He watches the bacon curl, like time-lapse photography of flowers blooming and dying that he has seen on TV. He stops the oven just before the bell rings. He hates the sound—ping!—like a pebble from a slingshot hitting a hubcap. In the distance, the airplane’s engine is receding. Through the window, Spence sees Abraham on the porch licking orange dust from his fur.

After breakfast, he pauses in the doorway of the spare room to look at some of Lila’s things—a row of old dolls on a quilt. She bought old dolls at yard sales and cleaned them up and sewed clothes for them. She found a porcelain doll head in the junkhouse behind the barn and made a body for it. Lila can take a scrap of anything and work it into something pretty. The day before, while the girls were freezing the corn, he thought he heard her call him, but it was Cat, and he realized that if Lila died he would hear the girls talking and he would catch an echo of her voice in theirs and think it was her.

At the hospital, she says, “I had a hard night. I didn’t sleep a week.” She meant wink. She’s silly from the drugs. “I’m drunker’n a two-tailed tom,” she says, trying to raise her head. After they wheel her away to surgery, Spence strides down the corridor toward the elevator, passing a young woman who says to an older woman, “He wants to get Stevie one of them three-wheelers, but Renée don’t want him to have it.” A man in a hospital gown trudges down the hall alone, wheeling his I.V. and carrying his piss bag in his hands, carefully, like a baby. The prisoner is out walking too, pressing a folded blanket against his stomach, as if he has had surgery again. He is pale and weak, his eyes buried under those brows that jut out like awnings. He looks half dead.

Downstairs, Spence buys a Coke from the machine and sits at a table by a window in a corner of the cafeteria. Coke always settles his stomach, and the Coke acid helps clean his dentures. The window opens onto a little gray enclosed area—a triangle of grass framed by the angles of the two wings of the building. An updraft suddenly catches some trash and begins spinning it up in the air. A plastic bag and a foil potato-chip bag are dancing and circling, battling each other. As they rise in the updraft, they seem like cartoon characters. They seem alive, a young courting couple chasing and pursuing each other, then falling exhausted to the grass before rising up with renewed energy for the chase again. The dance keeps going on for so long Spence sits there, mesmerized.

He loses track of time, and Nancy and Cat find him there.

“Come on, let’s eat,” says Cat. “When I’m nervous, I have to eat.”

Nancy grabs his elbow. “Come on, Dad, they have a lot of food you like. They have corn bread and green beans.”

Nancy and Cat travel through the line, knowing exactly what they are doing. Spence hates cafeterias. There are too many choices. As they approach the cashier, he regards with chagrin what he has taken from the salad bar: corn bread, salad with bacon bits, cottage cheese, pineapple, peppers, shredded cheese, cherry tomatoes, dill pickles, crackers.

They sit at a table near the back of the cafeteria, away from the crowd.

“Do you want some of these tommytoes?” he asks Nancy, shoving the cherry tomatoes at her.

“No. I like those fresh tomatoes from Mom’s garden. We brought her some the other day, with an onion.”

“She saved some of it in a drawer for supper, and you could smell that onion all over the hospital,” says Cat with a laugh. “Hey, there’s Mom’s preacher, Dad.”

Spence spots the preacher from Lila’s church speaking with a man on the far side of the cafeteria.

“Tell me something, Dad,” Nancy says. “I remember the Pentecostals around here never would wear jewelry and makeup. But the PTL Club is Pentecostal, and they decorate themselves like Christmas trees. Why is that?”

“TV commercials,” he says.

“I guess so.”

“That reminds me. I heard a great joke, Dad,” says Cat. “If you scrape off all of Tammy Bakker’s makeup, do you know what’s underneath?”

“What?”

“Jimmy Hoffa.”

Spence can hardly eat. Cat is eating out of nervousness, not missing a bite. Nancy is picking at salad.

“Where do you hear jokes like that, Cat?” asks Nancy. “I never hear jokes.”

Cat shrugs. The preacher is headed their way. He stops at their table and lays his hand on Spence’s shoulder, saying, “I’ve got some sick here to look after, but I want you to call me this evening and tell me how she’s doing.”

“All right,” says Spence, cringing. He hates to use the telephone.

The preacher’s hand is still on Spence’s shoulder, and now the man starts working the muscle. It’s supposed to be a friendly and caring gesture, Spence figures, but it makes him nervous. He has never known a man who caressed anybody’s shoulder that way. Cat and Nancy are staring at the way the preacher is rubbing on Spence’s shoulder.

“I’ll be praying real hard for Mrs. Culpepper,” the preacher says. He is a young fellow who reminds Spence of the Cards’ utility infielder. Spence can’t remember the player’s name.

20

With his children, Spence sits in the second-floor waiting room, a small corner area with a Coke machine and a telephone and a TV. The Cards are playing the Astros, and Lee seems absorbed in the game. Nancy is reading a book. Nancy would probably read a book during a nuclear attack. Cat would reach for food, and Lee would go to sleep. Lee always slept when something was bothering him. He would sleep so long it was like a deep illness.

“Dad, what size bra does Mom wear?” asks Cat, who is filling out a form.

“I don’t know. Big ones.” Five-pound flour sacks.

Nancy says, “When that phone rings, I’m going to jump out of my skin.”

Cat folds the form and picks up a women’s magazine. A red-white-and-blue Fourth of July cake is on the front. She says to Nancy, “Look at this article, ‘How to Warn Your Children About Strangers Without Scaring Them.’ I’m at the point where I’m going to have to trust Krystal to know what goes on. I think she’s smart. I think she knows what goes on.”

In a TV commercial for
Time
magazine, the Pope appears momentarily, holding a strange animal Spence can’t identify. “I didn’t know the Pope was allowed to have pets,” he says.

“He probably needs
some
thing,” says Lee, dragging on his cigarette.

A couple about Spence’s age enter the waiting area and sit down on a vinyl couch. They stare at the TV. The woman’s eyes, with sagging pouches under them, are red from crying. She holds her pocketbook like a lap cat and rubs the material of her skirt nervously. The man, in short sleeves, seems cold. Spence can see the goose pimples on the man’s arms.

“Is Joe Magrane pitching today?” the man asks.

“Yeah. He’s starting,” says Lee, not taking his eyes from the screen.

The man says, “Saint Louis sure goes for those lefties.”

“The Cards wouldn’t know a right-handed pitcher if he knocked ’em in the head,” says Lee.

Jack Clark is up, and he hits a double for the Cards. Spence tries to lose himself in the slow, careful movements of the game. Baseball is the same situations over and over, but no two turn out alike. Like crops and the weather. Life.

When the telephone rings, Cat grabs it. Nancy shuts her book on her thumb and lowers her reading glasses. Spence sees Cat’s intake of breath, then her affirmative nod toward them.

“She’s O.K.,” Cat says, hanging up. “But he thought at first she might have had a slight stroke. When he woke her up, her speech was a little slurred for a minute.”

“Her words are always slurred when she’s sleepy,” Spence says. “That ain’t nothing.”

“Well, he decided she was all right. He wanted to wake her up as soon as he could, just to see if she had any nerve damage.”

“She’s O.K. then,” Nancy says, breaking into a smile. “God, I’m relieved!” She holds her book at arm’s length. “Look how I’m shaking.”

Spence realizes he is shaking too—all the way to his knees.

“Thank God,” says Lee. He jams his cap down on his head and turns toward the elevator. “I have to get back to work,” he says. “I’ll see y’all tonight.”

Lila will be in intensive care that night, and they will have to wait until nine o’clock to see her. They will be allowed to see her for fifteen minutes—no more than two persons at a time. Spence decides to go home for a few hours.