Shiloh and Other Stories (8 page)

We left our suitcases in a ditch and started walking, expecting to meet Daddy on the way.

My mother said, “You don’t remember this, but when you was two years old I went to Jackson, Tennessee, for two weeks to see Mozelle and Boone—back before Boone was called overseas?—and when I come back the bus driver let me off here and I come walking down the road to the house carrying my suitcase. You was playing in the yard and you saw me walk up and you didn’t recognize me. For the longest time, you didn’t know who I was. I never
will
forget how funny you looked.”

“They won’t recognize us,” I said solemnly. “Daddy and Johnny.”

As we got to the top of the hill, we could see that our little white house was still there. The tin roof of the barn was barely visible through the tall oak trees.

Sandra’s maternal grandmother died of childbed fever at the age of twenty-six. Mama was four. After Sandra was born, Mama developed an infection but was afraid to see the doctor. It would go away, she insisted. The infection disappeared, but a few years later inexplicable pains pierced her like needles. Blushing with shame, and regretting her choice of polka-dotted panties, she learned the worst. It was lucky they caught it in time, the doctor said. During the operation, Mama was semiconscious, with a spinal anesthetic, and she could hear the surgeons discussing a basketball game. Through blurred eyes, she could see a red expanse below her waist. It resembled the Red Sea parting, she said.

Sandra grows vegetables and counts her cats. It is late summer and her woodpile is low. She should find time to insulate the attic and to fix the leak in the basement. Her husband is gone. Jerry is in Louisville, working at a K Mart. Sandra has stayed behind, reluctant to spend her weekends with him watching go-go dancers in smoky bars. In the garden, Sandra loads a bucket with tomatoes and picks some dill, a cucumber, a handful of beans. The dead bird is on a stump, untouched since yesterday. When she rescued the bird from the cat, it seemed only stunned, and
she put it on a table out on the porch, to let it recover. The bird had a spotted breast, a pink throat, and black-and-gray wings—a flicker, she thought. Its curved beak reminded her of Heckle and Jeckle. A while later, it tried to flap its wings, while gasping and contorting its body, and she decided to put it outside. As she opened the door, the dog rushed out eagerly ahead of her, and the bird died in her hand. Its head went limp.

Sandra never dusts. Only now, with her mother and grandmother coming to visit, does she notice that cobwebs are strung across corners of the ceiling in the living room. Later, with a perverse delight, she sees a fly go by, actually trailing a wisp of cat hair and dust. Her grandmother always told her to dust under her bed, so the dust bunnies would not multiply and take over, as she would say, like wandering Jew among the flowers.

Grandmother Stamper is her father’s mother. Mama is bringing her all the way from Paducah to see where Sandra is living now. They aren’t going to tell Grandmother about the separation. Mama insisted about that. Mama has never told Grandmother about her own hysterectomy. She will not even smoke in front of Grandmother Stamper. For twenty-five years, Mama has sneaked smokes whenever her mother-in-law is around.

Stamper is not Grandmother’s most familiar name. After Sandra’s grandfather, Bob Turnbow, died, Grandmother moved to Paducah, and later she married Joe Stamper, who owned a shoe-store there. Now she lives in a small apartment on a city street, and—as she likes to say, laughing—has more shoes than she has places to go. Sandra’s grandfather had a slow, wasting illness—Parkinson’s disease. For five years, Grandmother waited on him, feeding him with a spoon, changing the bed, and trying her best to look after their dying farm. Sandra remembers a thin, twisted man, his face shaking, saying, “She’s a good woman. She lights up the fires in the sky.”

—

“I declare, Sandy Lee, you have moved plumb out into the wilderness,” says Grandmother.

In her white pants suit, Sandra’s grandmother looks like a waitress. The dog pokes at her crotch as she picks her way down the stone path to the porch. Sandra has not mowed in three
weeks. The mower is broken, and there are little bushes of ragweed all over the yard.

“See how beautiful it is,” says Mama. “It’s just as pretty as a picture.” She waves at a hillside of wild apple trees and weeds, with a patch of woods at the top. A long-haired calico cat sits under an overgrown lilac bush, also admiring the view.

“You need you some goats on that hill,” says Grandmother.

Sandra tells them about the raccoon she saw as she came home one night. At first, she thought it was a porcupine. It was very large, with slow, methodical movements. She followed it as far as she could with her headlights. It climbed a bank with grasping little hands. It occurs to Sandra that porcupines have quills like those thin pencils
Time
magazine sends with its subscription offers.

“Did you ever find out what went with your little white cat?” Mama asks as they go inside.

“No. I think maybe he got shot,” Sandra says. “There’s been somebody shooting people’s cats around here ever since spring.” The screen door bangs behind her.

The oven is not dependable, and supper is delayed. Grandmother is restless, walking around the kitchen, pretending not to see the dirty linoleum, the rusty, splotched sink, the peeling wallpaper. She puzzles over the bunches of dill and parsley hanging in the window. Mama has explained about the night shift and overtime, but when Sandra sees Grandmother examining the row of outdoor shoes on the porch and, later, the hunting rifle on the wall, she realizes that Grandmother is looking for Jerry. Jerry took his hunting boots with him, and Sandra has a feeling he may come back for the rifle soon.

It’s the cats’ suppertime, and they sing a chorus at Sandra’s feet. She talks to them and gives them chicken broth and Cat Chow. She goes outside to shoo in the ducks for the night, but tonight they will not leave the pond. She will have to return later. If the ducks are not shut in their pen, the fox may kill them, one by one, in a fit—amazed at how easy it is. A bat circles above the barn. The ducks are splashing. A bird Sandra can’t identify calls a mournful good night.

“Those silly ducks wouldn’t come in,” she says, setting the
table. Her mother and grandmother stand around and watch her with starved looks.

“I’m collecting duck expressions,” she goes on. “ ‘Lucky duck,’ ‘duck your head,’ ‘set your ducks in a row,’ ‘a sitting duck.’ I see where they all come from now.”

“Have a rubber duck,” says Mama. “Or a duck fit.”

“Duck soup,” says Grandmother.

“Duck soup?” Sandra says. “What does that mean?”

“It means something is real easy,” says Grandmother. “Easy as pie.”

“It was an old picture show too,” Mama says. “The name of the show was
Duck Soup
.”

They eat on the porch, and the moths come visiting, flapping against the screen. A few mosquitoes squeeze through and whine about their heads. Grandmother’s fork jerks; the corn slips from her hand. Sandra notices that her dishes don’t match. Mama and Grandmother exclaim over the meal, praising the tomatoes, the fresh corn. Grandmother takes another piece of chicken. “It has such a crispy crust!” she says.

Sandra will not admit the chicken is crisp. It is not even brown, she says to herself.

“How did you do that?” Grandmother wants to know.

“I boiled it first. It’s faster.”

“I never heard of doing it that way,” Grandmother says.

“You’ll have to try that, Ethel,” says Mama.

Sandra flips a bug off her plate.

Her grandmother sneezes. “It’s the ragweed,” she says apologetically. “It’s the time of the year for it. Doesn’t it make you sneeze?”

“No,” says Sandra.

“It never used to do you that way,” Mama says.

“I know,” says Grandmother. “I helped hay many a time when I was young. I can’t remember it bothering me none.”

The dog is barking. Sandra calls him into the house. He wants to greet the visitors, but she tells him to go to his bed, under the divan, and he obeys.

Sandra sits down at the table again and presses Grandmother to talk about the past, to tell about the farm Sandra can barely
remember. She recalls the dizzying porch swing, a dog with a bushy tail, the daisy-edged field of corn, and a litter of squirming kittens like a deep pile of mated socks in a drawer. She wants to know about the trees. She remembers the fruit trees and the gigantic walnuts, with their sweeping arms and their hard, green balls that sometimes hit her on the head. She also remembers the day the trees came down.

“The peaches made such a mess on the grass you couldn’t walk,” her grandmother explains. “And there were so many cherries I couldn’t pick them all. I had three peach trees taken down and one cherry tree.”

“That was when your granddaddy was so bad,” Mama says to Sandra. “She had to watch him night and day and turn him ever’ so often. He didn’t even know who she was.”

“I just couldn’t have all those in the yard anymore,” says Grandmother. “I couldn’t keep up with them. But the walnut trees were the worst. Those squirrels would get the nuts and roll them all over the porch and sometimes I’d step on one and fall down. Them old squirrels would snarl at me and chatter. Law me.”

“Bessie Grissom had a tree taken down last week,” says Mama. “She thought it would fall on the house, it was so old. A tornado might set down.”

“How much did she have to pay?” asks Grandmother.

“A hundred dollars.”

“When I had all them walnut trees taken down back then, it cost me sixty dollars. That just goes to show you.”

Sandra serves instant butterscotch pudding for dessert. Grandmother eats greedily, telling Sandra that butterscotch is her favorite. She clashes her spoon as she cleans the dish. Sandra does not eat any dessert. She is thinking how she would like to have a bourbon-and-Coke. She might conceal it in a coffee cup. But she would not be able to explain why she was drinking coffee at night.

After supper, when Grandmother is in the bathroom, Mama says she will wash the dishes, but Sandra refuses.

“Do you hear anything from Jerry?” Mama asks.

Sandra shrugs. “No. He’d better not waltz back in here. I’m
through waiting on him.” In a sharp whisper, she says, “I don’t know how long I can keep up that night-shift lie.”

“But she’s been through so much,” Mama says. “She thinks the world of you, Sandra.”

“I know.”

“She thinks Jerry hung the moon.”

“I tell you, if he so much as walks through that door—”

“I love those cosmos you planted,” Mama says. “They’re the prettiest I’ve ever seen. I’d give anything if I could get mine to do like that.”

“They’re volunteers. I didn’t do a thing.”

“You didn’t?”

“I didn’t thin them either. I just hated to thin them.”

“I know what you mean,” says Mama. “It always broke my heart to thin corn. But you learn.”

——

A movie,
That’s Entertainment!
, is on TV. Sandra stands in the doorway to watch Fred Astaire dancing with Eleanor Powell, who is as loose as a rag doll. She is wearing a little-girl dress with squared shoulders.

“Fred Astaire is the limberest thing I ever saw,” says Mama.

“I remember his sister Adele,” says Grandmother. “She could really dance.”

“Her name was Estelle,” says Mama.

“Estelle Astaire?” says Sandra. For some reason, she remembers a girl she knew in grade school named Sandy Beach.

Sandra makes tomato sauce, and they offer to help, but she tells them to relax and watch the movie. As she scalds tomatoes and presses hot pulp through a food mill, she listens to the singing and tap-dancing from the next room. She comes to the doorway to watch Gene Kelly do his famous “Singin’ in the Rain” number. His suit is soaked, and he jumps into puddles with both feet, like a child. A policeman scowls at his antics. Grandmother laughs. When the sauce boils down, Sandra pours it into bowls to cool. She sees bowls of blood lined up on the counter. Sandra watches Esther Williams dive through a ring of fire and splash in the center of a star formed by women, with spread legs, lying on their backs in the water.

During a commercial, Sandra asks her mother if she wants to come to the barn with her, to help with the ducks. The dog bounds out the door with them, happy at this unexpected excursion. Out in the yard, Mama lights a cigarette.

“Finally!” Mama says with a sigh. “That feels good.”

Two cats, Blackie and Bubbles, join them. Sandra wonders if Bubbles remembers the mole she caught yesterday. The mole had a star-shaped nose, which Bubbles ate first, like a delicacy.

The ducks are not in the barn, and Sandra and her mother walk down a narrow path through the weeds to the pond. The pond is quiet as they approach. Then they can make out patches of white on the dark water. The ducks hear them and begin diving, fleeing to the far shore in panic.

“There’s no way to drive ducks in from a pond,” Mama says.

“Sometimes they just take a notion to stay out here all night,” says Sandra.

They stand side by side at the edge of the pond while Mama smokes. The sounds of evening are at their fullest now, and lightning bugs wink frantically. Sometimes Sandra has heard foxes at night, their menacing yaps echoing on the hillside. Once, she saw three fox pups playing in the full moon, like dancers in a spotlight. And just last week she heard a baby screaming in terror. It was the sound of a wildcat—a thrill she listens for every night now. It occurs to her that she would not mind if the wildcat took her ducks. They are her offering.

Mama throws her cigarette in the pond, and a duck splashes. The night is peaceful, and Sandra thinks of the thousands of large golden garden spiders hidden in the field. In the early morning the dew shines on their trampolines, and she can imagine bouncing with an excited spring from web to web, all the way up the hill to the woods.

For several weeks now, Louise Milsap has been painting pictures of watermelons. The first one she tried looked like a dark-green basketball floating on an algae-covered pond. Too much green, she realized. She began varying the backgrounds, and sometimes now she throws in unusual decorative objects—a few candles, a soap dish, a pair of wire pliers. She tried including other fruits, but the size of the melons among apples and grapes made them appear odd and unnatural. When she saw a photograph of a cornucopia in a magazine, she imagined a huge watermelon stuck in its mouth.