Nancy Culpepper (17 page)
Nancy leaves, following the path along the upper creek, which feeds the pond. He’s not sure he remembers that day, but he can see Lila riding on top of the load of hay as clearly in his imagination as he could in memory. Lila and the girls in straw hats, Lila in some of his old pants and a long-sleeved shirt with a rip in the sleeve. As the picture grows clearer in his mind, Nancy’s straw hat changes to a cowboy hat, Cat’s dress to a robin’s-egg blue—the same as her car in the driveway now. He smiles, remembering the cowboy hat. He had to hunt all over town to find one Nancy’s size.
He follows the creek line down toward the back fields. In the center of one of the middle fields is a rise with a large, brooding old oak tree surrounded by a thicket of blackberry briers. From the rise, he looks out over his place. This is it. This is all there is in the world—it contains everything there is to know or possess, yet everywhere people are knocking their brains out trying to find something different, something better. His kids all scattered, looking for it. Everyone always wants a way out of something like this, but what he has here is the main thing there is—just the way things grow and die, the way the sun comes up and goes down every day. These are the facts of life. They are so simple they are almost impossible to grasp. It’s like looking up at the stars at night, seeing them strung out like seed corn, sprinkled randomly across the sky. Stars seem simple, even monotonous, because there’s no way to understand them. The ocean was like that too, blank and deep and easy.
Spence moves on. Above, a jet plane flies over, leaving a white scar. At the back of the farm the creek joins another creek, a twisted gully that cuts through several farms before joining Wolf Creek. Oscar has strayed momentarily, but comes rushing up to lap at the water in the creek. The water is very clear, the pebbles shining. It is rarely deeper than Spence’s knees, and in summer it is just patchy puddles, but sometimes Spence has dreams about swimming in this clear, shallow water. He dreams of the knock and dash of waves high as buildings.
The back field holds the ten acres of corn. It’s tall, and the ears are fattening up. Oscar threads his way through the rows of corn, and Spence follows the narrow edge next to the fencerow. He reaches the back line just as Oscar rouses a cottontail, which bounds erratically along the path, then disappears into the blackberry briers. Perplexed, Oscar roots around, then gives up, coming to Spence as if to win approval for his restraint.
“Oscar, you know I don’t want you catching them rabbits.”
In Spence’s opinion, dogs and cats should have amusing, old-fashioned names—Buford, Brutus, Nebuchadnezzar, Abraham. He doesn’t like names like Fluffy and Fifi or names from television, like Mr. T. He knows a man with two Boston bull terriers named Cagney and Lacey. Spence never watches that show because Lacey’s New York accent grates on his nerves.
There they are. It is true. A scattering of marijuana plants, thriving on the fertilizer he used on his corn. The plants grow in amongst the cornstalks of the first three rows, like inseparable companions. He wouldn’t have guessed what pretty plants they are. The lacy leaves are almost tropical, like the vegetation he vaguely recalls from the islands in the Pacific. These plants are strong, with the unmistakable nature of weeds—hardy, tenacious, stubborn.
He counts thirteen of the plants. He suspects Bill knows about them, because it is odd that Bill mentioned the possibility. Bill’s land joins Spence’s on one edge, across the creek. Spence figures that Bill, not the Frost boys, planted them himself and decided to let Spence in on the joke, before Spence either got in trouble or missed out on the harvest. Bill and Spence have always played tricks on each other. Once some puppies showed up at the house. They had been dropped on the road. But Spence recognized the puppies—a litter from Bill’s hound. Spence packed up the puppies in a box and dropped them back at Bill’s house. The next time he saw Bill, the subject of the puppies didn’t come up.
Lila often teased Spence about the way his pranks sometimes backfired—such as the time he got his eyes tested, part of the physical exam he had to take in order to drive the school van. The doctor positioned him in the chair but then left the room and jabbered with another patient about some designer glasses frames for such a long time that Spence grew irritated. He walked over to the eye chart across the room and memorized the last line, the finest print. Later, during the eye examination, Spence reeled off the last line. “That’s amazing,” the eye doctor said. “Read that again.” Spence repeated the line of meaningless letters. “That’s truly amazing,” the eye doctor said. “For a man your age! Now, let’s see you read it backwards.”
A sound in the creek startles him. It’s just a bird squabble. A blue jay soars out of a scaly-bark hickory. Spence gazes back over the field, taking in where he has been.
He can visualize that battle he was in as clearly as if it’s happening now. He was below deck, frantically passing the five-inch shells to the main guns above, and then he could hear the one-point-ones—the dive-bombers were closer, heading for the capital ships. He could hear the antiaircraft guns going faster, sharper, the boom-boom-boom overlaid with bah-bah-bah-bop, then the rat-tat-tat chatter of machine guns. Sailors who had been on duty above deck told him later that radar had picked up six Japanese dive-bombers heading toward the carrier. The fleet shot down three of them, but the other three were closing in on their target. Suddenly several American fighter planes appeared, to finish up the job the ships failed to do. Like sparrows teasing a hawk, the fighters began swirling up and down and over and around each of the bombers. They shot down two of them, but the remaining bomber penetrated the defenses and was closing in on the big ship. The fighters swirled in all directions and then one fighter got on the bomber’s tail, in the right position to shoot it down. The Japanese plane was already swooping toward the carrier, and the American fighter flew straight at him, like a mad bumblebee. Instead of shooting him down, the fighter rammed him from above and behind, just as crazily and fearlessly as the kamikazes nose-dived into the American decks. The explosion sent both planes cartwheeling, on fire, into the sea. It was impossible to believe, the crew said. He flew right up the Jap’s ass. His guns must have jammed. They were sure his guns jammed, and there were just a couple of seconds to go before the enemy plane would have released the bomb. The fighter, in position, made an on-the-spot decision to die, to save the carrier. It was a moment frozen forever. The sailors talked about it all the way to Guam. They knew their ship might have to do something like that. At any moment their captain could whip the ship into the path of a torpedo. They might have to take a torpedo, the same way that fighter rammed the bomber. That’s what they were there for.
Spence was sure the pilot’s name would be in all the books he read later, but he couldn’t find it. He was just another anonymous hero.
18
Her head is clearing and she can turn over now and stir her limbs. She feels warmer. It is night, and a glow from the hall shines on the crucifix, highlighting it like a Christmas display.
The woman in the other bed has four visitors. Her family has paraded past the foot of Lila’s bed all day: kids of all ages, uncles, aunts, parents, in-laws. The smallest child, the patient’s little boy, seems to feel neglected and confused by his mother’s illness. He slams the plastic bedpan on the bathroom floor deliberately, and when he’s scolded he bursts into tears and says everybody’s picking on him. His aunt takes his side. Lila would hate to have to cook for that bunch. They seem helpless without the woman at home to take care of them. They had gone to eat at the Cracker Barrel, reporting back to the sick woman every single thing they ate and how much it cost. Several times they got a laugh out of how the oldest boy spilled iced tea in his pie and ruined it. The little boy’s grandmother said she had to cut up his ham for him and then he refused to eat it. She said she hated to waste ham, hogs were so high. The woman in bed is barely awake after her surgery, and the kinfolks are talking, talking, talking, laughing, telling stories. The noise competes with the television. Lila tries to watch
Family Feud,
but she has
Family Feud
right here, live.
She might die tomorrow.
Spence left soon after they brought her supper—broth and Jell-O and coffee, the same meal she had the night before her mastectomy. She didn’t drink the coffee. When he left, abruptly, she felt so much was left unsaid. Lee and Joy and their children were there, as well as the crowd by the other bed, and Lila knew Spence’s nerves couldn’t bear the commotion for long. She imagined him going home, feeding the calves and the ducks, talking to Oscar, fixing some cereal, maybe eating a tomato, watching TV all evening—mumbling to himself the way he had started doing the last few years. She imagined that routine continuing. Tonight, tomorrow night, more nights, alone, for years.
When Spence’s father died, Lila and Spence had talked about what each would do if the other went first. Spence was only forty then, but he said he had just realized he would die someday, had never believed it before. But Amp was so old. His passing seemed natural. Much later, after Rosie had gone too, and Spence and Lila were alone together for the first time in their marriage, they felt as though they would live forever. They could never imagine one of them without the other.
If Spence went first, her life would change as much as it changed when she was eighteen and married him. She would be afraid to stay on the farm alone, with all the crime spreading out from town into the country these days. But she wouldn’t want to have to move in with Cat or Lee and be a burden to them, the way Rosie was to her. Rosie lived on for twenty years after Amp died, moving in with Spence and Lila toward the end. She was unhappy in their house. She would get up from a nap in the afternoon and eat breakfast, swearing the sun came up at three-thirty that morning. She thought the people on TV were in the room with them. “I want to go home,” she’d say repeatedly, and sometimes she would go back, wandering up to the old house in her gown. But strangers lived in her house; they had rented the place. She gave up her sewing and spent her days playing with scraps of material and pieces of paper, sorting them in boxes like a half-witted child. When she died, Lila found boxes and boxes of nothing but smaller boxes, and plastic bags stuffed with more bags and twist ties. She found strings and a lifetime’s collection of greeting cards. Rosie even saved name tags from Christmas in a hosiery box. To Granny from Catherine. To Granddaddy from Lee.
Lila can’t sleep. Random scenes pass before her eyes. The strong, comfortable smells of cows in the barn waiting to be milked, the steamy air in winter. Gathering in tomatoes before a frost. Sprinkling lime on the potatoes spread out on the ground in a stall of the barn. Laying the onions on screen-door racks above. An electrical storm scattering black tree limbs across the yard. Rosie’s foot clamping down on the step-pedal of her slop bucket. Life has turned out so differently from anything she could have imagined at Uncle Mose’s. The world has changed so much: cars, airplanes, television. She can’t complain. She tries to go along with anything new, but she is afraid that inside she hasn’t changed at all. It still hurts her to see liquor kept in a house where there are children, to see farmers out spreading manure on their fields on Sundays, to see young people fall away from the church.
Her innocence has always embarrassed her. Her children went away and came back with such strange knowledge she can’t fathom. Nancy makes her feel dumb, with that bossy way she’s always had of bringing home new ideas—cholesterol, women’s rights. What Nancy knows is from books, but Cat knows people. She knows instinctively what looks good on her customers and knows how to compliment them. Cat can make people feel beautiful. But Cat would rather spend money on expensive outfits than take the time to sew. Cat is never satisfied. Lila always says, “The more you get, the more you want.” Lila never wanted much. But on Waikiki Beach, she felt thrilled and grateful for the chance to see what was out there. And she thought she would never get enough. She was seeing what Spence saw in the Navy, and maybe seeing what Nancy was looking for when she left home.
Growing into old age toward death is like shifting gears in a car; now she’s going into high gear, plowing out onto one of those inter-states, racing into the future, where all her complicated thoughts that she has never been able to express will be clear and understandable. Her mind cannot grasp these thoughts exactly, but there is something important about movement that she wants to tell. The way corn will shoot up after a rain. The way a baby chicken’s feathers start showing. The way a pair of wrens will worry and worry with a pile of sticks, determined that the place they have chosen is the right one for a nest—the ledge over the door that gets disturbed every morning at milking time, or a pocket in a pair of overalls hanging on the wash line. A baby’s tooth appearing like a shining jewel.
When her children were babies, Lila used to powder their bottoms and then kiss them right between the legs before she pinned on the diapers. They would squeal with pleasure. Nancy saw her do that to Cat and Lee when they were babies, and she was appalled. Lila said, “You don’t see how I can do that, do you?” It was such overwhelming, simple love, there was nothing wrong with it. As they grew bigger and bigger, Lila couldn’t tear herself away from them. She always wanted to pet them, though it embarrassed them. Even now she likes to kiss them on their lips. Lee turns red. Nancy is stiff, Cat more receptive. Cat is more like Lila, with the need to keep hugging her children, touching and holding.
After Spence came home from the Navy and began to build up the dairy again, they were happy, beginning to get a little ahead. One morning Spence had gone into town to deliver the milk and Lila was scrubbing overalls on the washboard out in the wash house. Rosie was adding coal to the fire under the wash kettle. Suddenly they heard Nancy crying indoors. When Lila rushed up the steps to the porch and to the kitchen to see if Nancy had fallen, she found Amp with the razor strop, whipping Nancy on the legs. Lila screamed at him to stop, but he kept on, aiming the strop precisely and fiercely. Nancy was howling, her legs already black with bruises. Like someone rushing into a jump-rope game, Lila ran through the flailing razor strop and snatched up Nancy, fleeing with her to their bedroom. “She climbed up on the table after I told her not to,” Amp explained, following them. “She wouldn’t
mind.
She has to learn to mind.”