Shiloh and Other Stories (16 page)

From the porch steps, she watches the climber saw off a branch. It gets caught in some leaves as it falls, and the men steer the branch down with the rope. Glenn dashes around the yard, pulling at one end of the rope. High in the tree, the climber is hanging in his leather sling.

“He don’t even use spikes,” says Petey. “Gah!”

When the branch reaches the ground, Glenn unties it and tosses it in the driveway near the truck.

Dolores watches the men work until the tip of the trunk is denuded. It sways slightly, like a sailboat ready to come about. The climber steadies himself, adjusts his straps, then swings his right leg over a limb and straddles it.

“He’s going to dehorn that thing,” says Boyce.

“I can’t stand this anymore,” says Dolores.

She telephones Dusty.

“Aren’t you scared?” Dusty asks when Dolores describes what is going on. “Why don’t you come over here where it’s safe?”

“It’s not like you think. This guy’s slicing it off, a piece at a time.” Dolores hears the chain saw pause, then the swish of branches, the shouts of the men. “He looks like a hippie,” she says.

“You don’t see many of them anymore.”

“He chews tobacco too.”

“Is he cute?”

“Not bad. You should come over
here.
”

“I don’t know if I could kiss somebody that chewed tobacco.”
Dusty laughs. “Did I tell you what that high-tone husband of mine says to me?”

“No, what?”

“He said he’ll take me back—on condition.”

“What?”

“If I quit beauty school.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“He thinks he’s got it
over
me,” Dusty says. “He thinks I’m bound to come crawling back to him because I was so bad.”

Dusty’s marriage broke up over a college student Dusty ran around with for a while. Dusty, who was fifteen years older than the boy, thought there was no age problem until he graduated and hitchhiked to California with a backpack.

Dolores says, “Well, wish me luck. I see the doctor at eleven.”

“Girl, I don’t envy you.”

“I can’t eat a thing.”

“You better eat.”

“I ate half a Breakfast Bar.”

“I want you to call me the minute you get back.”

“I will.”

“I’m glad you’re going through with it,” Dusty says. “That specialist is new at the clinic, and this town has needed somebody like that for the longest time.”

Dolores hears the chain saw start and stop. She hears a tree trunk breaking. She says, her voice tightening, “If I die, I want you to look in on Glenn. He won’t be able to take care of himself. He’ll be so helpless and—”

“I’m not listening,” says Dusty. “I won’t let you talk like that.”

—

The work has been going on for two hours. Dolores has watched intermittently as the climber stripped the branches and sectioned the tree. He sat casually in his leather sling, rared back like a woodpecker, sawing with one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. Now that he is lower in the tree, where the trunk is thicker, he has abandoned the use of the rope. He lets the sections fall to the ground. Dolores holds on to Glenn as a large piece splits loose from the tree. The force of the fall strips large patches of the bark off, and the ground actually shakes.

“Isn’t he amazing?” Glenn asks.

“Amazing,” she says. She feels goosebumps on her arms.

The crew tosses small branches into the chipper, which sucks them up like a vacuum cleaner, grinding them instantaneously. The chips fly into the truckbed. When the machine’s noise dies down, the men remove their hard-hats, which have earpieces like the headphones on a stereo.

The young man who was afraid to climb the tree says to Dolores, “Lloyd up yonder, he won’t wear mufflers. He don’t wear a safety shield.”

“Or spikes either,” says Dolores.

Later, when the climber touches ground, his legs bent like a horseman’s, he sits down under a large oak and smokes a cigarette in silence. He is drinking water from a plastic jug. Sweat mats his hair. He seems like a temperamental actor collecting himself offstage after a performance. The other men are cutting the final section of the tree, down to a low stump. Dolores stands on a thin log, waiting for it to roll, balancing herself and remembering how as a little girl she pretended to fly when she jumped off a log. It is twenty minutes to eleven.

“If I had a saw I’d cut down all them little trees,” says Petey, flinging a rope at one of the quince bushes.

“No, you wouldn’t, little buddy,” says Glenn.

“My brother would,” says Petey. “He’d do anything. He ate a cricket.”

Petey lassos a branch of the apple tree. Glenn looks up and sees Dolores. He asks, “Are you going somewhere? You have on your lipstick.”

“I have to go to town.”

“Oh. Well, take your time. I’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do.”

Glenn joins the other men, who are putting their tools in the truck. The yard is scattered with the large limp leaves and pods from the tree. The broad leaves look like hands. Dolores thinks of the way Phil Donahue holds hands with the women in his audience who stand up to ask questions. He clutches them by one hand, half supporting them as they stand nervously before the microphone. It is a steadying, caring grasp. Dolores picks apart one of the green pods to find the hidden bloom. Inside are
skinny petals. She counts them as she pinches them off. The men drive away, the climber riding in the chipper truck.

—

As she lies under a paper sheet on a cushioned table, with her breasts flattened, Dolores thinks about the climber and the nonchalant way he took risks, as though to fall would be incidental. For Dolores, the risk is going to the doctor, for fear of his diagnosis. Some part of her still believes that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. The doctor’s name is Dr. Knight, and he has cold hands. Dolores stares into a corner of the room, the way she is told to do when she visits the optometrist. The doctor’s thick glasses, his mint breath, his stethoscope, hover over her. His examination is swift, his fingers drumming her breasts rapidly. Then he presses hard against her nipple.

“It hurts,” says Dolores.

“That’s good. That’s a good sign.”

Dr. Knight does not speak again until she is dressed, sitting before him in his office. The clinic is new, but his office holds more magazines than Dolores remembers ever seeing.

“I waited too long to see about this,” she says apologetically. “I kept thinking it would go away.”

In a tone like an anchorman delivering the news on TV, Dr. Knight says, “You have fibrocystic disease. A thickening of the breast tissue. It’s very common in women your age, especially women who haven’t had children for a long time.”

“Is that cancer?”

“No.”

“Do you have to operate?”

“No. It’s only a thickening of tissue. Sometimes it’s painful. If it were cancer, it probably wouldn’t hurt.” For several minutes, Dr. Knight explains her disease. Dolores sits on the edge of her chair, but she does not really piece together in her mind what he is saying. She watches the dimple in his chin move in and out, like a tuck in a piece of heavy material. He gives her a pamphlet titled “How to Examine Your Breasts.”

“I won’t prescribe anything now,” Dr. Knight says. “But my recommendation is that you strictly avoid all caffeine. That includes coffee, tea, cola, and chocolate.”

On a prescription pad, he lists the items. At Dolores’s request, he writes down the name of her disease. She folds the list and puts it inside the pamphlet.

The doctor says, “I want to check you again in three months. Maybe I’ll need to order an X-ray. But there’s no need to be alarmed.”

As she drives home, Dolores feels confused, surprised that her sense of relief feels so peculiar. There is nothing momentous in what she has been through. Nothing important has happened that morning. A tree has been cut down; her daughter has cut out a weskit; the doctor has made a routine examination; Dolores has forgotten to make lunch. She stops at a grocery and buys bread, baloney, mustard, and on impulse, a watermelon from Georgia. The doctor’s words linger in her mind. “Fibrocystic disease.” She likes the sound of it. She could talk about this the way Dusty talks about her gall bladder. Dusty has to resist fried chicken; Dolores will have to resist chocolate cake. Somehow, this is a welcome guide for living, something certain—particular and silly. Yet somehow she feels cheated. She wonders what it would take to make a person want to walk with the Lord, a feeling that would be greater than walking on the moon.

At home she trips over the yellow extension cord Glenn has trailed through the kitchen and almost drops the watermelon. Glenn takes the watermelon from her and bends to kiss her. He asks, “Are you still mad at me for cutting down the tree?”

“I wasn’t mad at you,” she says. “I don’t care how many trees you cut down.”

“You sound funny. What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you later.” Dolores nods at Petey, who has followed the watermelon into the house.

Glenn goes outside, and the electric chain saw roars. Dolores slaps sandwiches together. Bread, mustard, baloney. With quick sawing motions, she slices the watermelon and then thrusts a chunk at Petey.

“Here, smarty, feed your face,” she says.

With an energetic twist in her walk, she goes to call Glenn and Boyce in to eat. Her husband is rolling a log into a growing woodpile, a neatly organized grouping, like an abstract sculpture.
Dolores hardly recognizes the leaf-littered yard, the twigs flung everywhere, the pile of wood chips at the end of the driveway, the raw sections of the tree strewn around. Her eyes rest on a familiar quince bush in front of the house. It flowers in the spring, but sometimes in the fall a turn of the weather, or perhaps a rush of desire, will make the bush bloom again, briefly, with a few carmine flowers—scattered, but unmistakably bright.

Since my husband went away to work in Louisville, I have, to my surprise, taken a lover. Stephen went ahead to start his new job and find us a suitable house. I’m to follow later. He works for one of those companies that require frequent transfers, and I agreed to that arrangement in the beginning, but now I do not want to go to Louisville. I do not want to go anywhere.

Larry is our dentist. When I saw him in the post office earlier in the summer, I didn’t recognize him at first, without his smock and drills. But then we exchanged words—“Hot enough for you?” or something like that—and afterward I started to notice his blue Ford Ranger XII passing on the road beyond the fields. We are about the same age, and he grew up in this area, just as I did, but I was away for eight years, pursuing higher learning. I came back to Kentucky three years ago because my parents were in poor health. Now they have moved to Florida, but I have stayed here, wondering why I ever went away.

Soon after I returned, I met Stephen, and we were married within a year. He is one of those Yankees who are moving into this region with increasing frequency, a fact which disturbs the native residents. I would not have called Stephen a Yankee. I’m very much an outsider myself, though I’ve tried to fit in since
I’ve been back. I only say this because I overhear the skeptical and desperate remarks, as though the town were being invaded. The schoolchildren are saying “you guys” now and smoking dope. I can imagine a classroom of bashful country hicks, listening to some new kid blithely talking in a Northern brogue about his year in Europe. Such influences are making people jittery. Most people around here would rather die than leave town, but there are a few here who think Churchill Downs in Louisville would be the grandest place in the world to be. They are dreamers, I could tell them.

“I can’t imagine living on a
street
again,” I said to my husband. I complained for weeks about living with
houses
within view. I need cornfields. When my parents left for Florida, Stephen and I moved into their old farmhouse, to take care of it for them. I love its stateliness, the way it rises up from the fields like a patch of mutant jimsonweeds. I’m fond of the old white wood siding, the sagging outbuildings. But the house will be sold this winter, after the corn is picked, and by then I will have to go to Louisville. I promised my parents I would handle the household auction because I knew my mother could not bear to be involved. She told me many times about a widow who had sold off her belongings and afterward stayed alone in the empty house until she had to be dragged away. Within a year, she died of cancer. Mother said to me, “Heartbreak brings on cancer.” She went away to Florida, leaving everything the way it was, as though she had only gone shopping.

The cats came with the farm. When Stephen and I appeared, the cats gradually moved from the barn to the house. They seem to be my responsibility, like some sins I have committed, like illegitimate children. The cats are Pete, Donald, Roger, Mike, Judy, Brenda, Ellen, and Patsy. Reciting their names for Larry, my lover of three weeks, I feel foolish. Larry had asked, “Can you remember all their names?”

“What kind of question is that?” I ask, reminded of my husband’s new job. Stephen travels to cities throughout the South, demonstrating word-processing machines, fancy typewriters that cost thousands of dollars and can remember what you type. It doesn’t take a brain like that to remember eight cats.

“No two are alike,” I say to Larry helplessly.

We are in the canning kitchen, an airy back porch which I use for the cats. It has a sink where I wash their bowls and cabinets where I keep their food. The canning kitchen was my mother’s pride. There, she processed her green beans twenty minutes in a pressure canner, and her tomato juice fifteen minutes in a water bath. Now my mother lives in a mobile home. In her letters she tells me all the prices of the foods she buys.

From the canning kitchen, Larry and I have a good view of the cornfields. A cross-breeze makes this the coolest and most pleasant place to be. The house is in the center of the cornfields, and a dirt lane leads out to the road, about half a mile away. The cats wander down the fence rows, patroling the borders. I feed them Friskies and vacuum their pillows. I ignore the rabbits they bring me. Larry strokes a cat with one hand and my hair with the other. He says he has never known anyone like me. He calls me Mary Sue instead of Mary. No one has called me Mary Sue since I was a kid.