Nancy Culpepper (11 page)

The house she grew up in had a sort of unfinished feeling to it. Some of the rooms upstairs were bare wood walls, with the studs showing, and the family itself felt unfinished. It shot off in different directions—in-laws, cousins, widows, a cousin with an illegitimate child, an aunt whose husband had abandoned her. Uncle Mose took in strays like Lila, anybody with a pair of hands to help him work his tobacco, but Lila always felt she was just an extra mouth to feed. When she married Spence and moved in with his parents, she felt out of place. Their house was dark and filled with silences. Rosie even shelled beans with great concentration, as if chatter would be inefficient. Lila tried to fit in, as she had learned to do in a large household of grownups, but when Amp and Rosie stepped on her feelings, or made her feel unworthy because she didn’t know how to do things their way, there were no aunts or cousins to run to. At Uncle Mose’s, in that big clumsy bunch, she was the youngest, and she had to play by herself. She tied doll bonnets on cats and packed them, squirming, from place to place. A cat drowned in the cistern once. The men drained the cistern, and her cousin Dulcie, who bossed everybody, made Lila descend a ladder into that dark pit to get the dead cat. “You’re so crazy about cats, you’re the right one to send,” Dulcie said in a practical tone. Lila brought the cat up in her arms, slimy and already rotting, and for a long time after that the water wasn’t fit to drink, but they washed in it. Even now, whenever Lila sees a dead cat she recalls that cat in the cistern.

As Lila is waking up, later in the afternoon, Nancy appears with a cup of coffee, and the old woman says to her, “You’ll be high, wide and handsome about eleven o’clock tonight if you drink that.”

“How are you doing, Mrs. Wright?” Nancy asks.

“I’m still swelled, but he looked at it and said I was doing good. But I’m not.”

“Did you eat your lunch?”

“No. That hospital food ain’t fitten to eat—no seasoning.”

“You didn’t touch a bite,” Lila reminds her sleepily. “So how do you know it wasn’t any good?”

“I could tell by looking.” Mrs. Wright heaves her heavy blue-and-white legs over the edge of the bed and faces the window. “Nobody’ll ever talk me into going in the hospital again.”

Nancy sets her coffee on the night table and clasps Lila’s hand. Lila feels strength flowing into her arm from her daughter, and she holds Nancy’s hand tightly.

“Do you want me to read to you?” Nancy asks. “Cat had to go to work. She said she’d be back at six.”

“No, that’s all right. I couldn’t keep my mind on it.”

“How do you feel?”

“There’s too much commotion going on here to think,” Lila says. She pulls at the front of her gown.

Nancy touches the limp curls that droop onto her mother’s forehead. “I think it looks very promising,” Nancy says. “They caught it early and they can do wonders nowadays.”

A nurse, appearing suddenly, closes the curtain partition between the two beds. “Mrs. Culpepper? We need to check your dressing.”

The nurse shoos Nancy out and pulls another curtain around the bed. She pokes at the bandage and peels it back. Lila doesn’t want to look, but she glimpses a brown spot. She wonders if they saved her nipple. Cat mentioned earlier that if they saved her nipple they could rebuild her breast. The brown spot is far off center.

9

The way doctors throw their forty-dollar words around like weapons is infuriating. Spence knows big words, plenty of them. He prefers not to use his vocabulary in conversation, though, for fear of sounding pretentious. Using the right simple words at the right time requires courage enough. At times there is no way on earth he can say what he feels.

He knows what he
wants
to say, and he imagines saying it to Lila, but it takes guts to admit guilt and wrong, to express sorrow, to lavish loving feelings on someone. If only he could, he would say, “Lila, you and me have been together a long time, and we’ve been through a lot together.” He laughs to himself. How phony that would be. It sounds like something on television. He has never said those things because he would feel as though he were speaking lines. Real love requires something else, something deeper. And sometimes a feeling just goes without saying.

Show her you love her, they say. Doesn’t he show her? Everything he does is for her, even when he goes his own way and she is powerless to stop him—like the time he drove the tractor across the creek after it had washed out and she was afraid the tractor would turn over. As he headed out through the field to the creek, she called and called, but he wouldn’t stop. He has always teased her about her habit of worrying herself sick over nothing. Teasing rattles her, but it would be out of character for him to behave any other way, and she would respect him less.

He could say to Lila, “It’s all right. Your breast isn’t your life. You can live without it, and I’ll accept that.” More lines. He has to show her another way, letting her know indirectly how much he still loves her. “Our love will never die.” Words are so inadequate. Phony. Nobody he knows says things like that anyway. People either lie to be nice or they say what they think. The girls used to accuse Spence of being cruel when he spoke his mind, but that is not true. He is just honest. He hates hypocrites.

The morning after her operation, when he came in so late, afraid to see her, she was sitting up in bed, gabbing with a nurse as if nothing had happened. “Where in the world have you been?” she said to him accusingly. “I thought you’d forgot about me.” She had on lipstick, and her hair was pretty, the color of straw. Later, he helped her walk down the corridor, pulling her I.V. along like a child’s wagon, and she joked with him about her lost breast. She said, “I didn’t realize how you depend on your jugs for balance. I feel all whopper-jawed! And I have to go around holding the other one up till I can wear a brassiere.” Spence told her he could rig her up a sling, like the one he fashioned for a hound dog once when she had an open wound on the bottom of her paw.

When they made a turn at the end of the hallway, Lila suddenly asked him, “Why do you think this happened to me?”

“No reason. Things just happen. What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It just don’t seem right.”

Spence wanders through the house now, seeing her things. The collection of dolls she laboriously sewed clothes for, the knickknacks she bought at yard sales, her closet stuffed with pants suits and flowered dresses she made for herself, the rack of quilts she spent so many winters constructing. A casserole she made for him is still in the refrigerator, as well as a ham and bowls of green beans and stock peas. Neighbors brought Spence an odd assortment of dishes—coconut pie, lima beans cooked with macaroni, stewed tomatoes, green Jell-O streaked with shredded cabbage. Spence doesn’t eat much in the evenings because food at night gives him heartburn, and he is at the hospital during the day, so the food is spoiling. It is depressing. If it were Lila’s funeral, the same people would bring the same food.

He is walking to the pond with Oscar, escaping the chaos in the house. Nancy and Cat have come to clean, and they’re rearranging everything. They moved his outdoor clothes out of the living room— his boots, his jackets, the manure-stained pants he wore for feeding the animals. Lila always let him keep the clothes by the door, where they were handy, but Nancy and Cat dumped them all—including his boots and bootjack—in a corner of the bedroom. “Honestly, Daddy,” said Cat in exasperation. She handed him a slop bucket to take to the ducks.

“What do you think, Oscar?” he says aloud. At that moment, Oscar sees the ducks and bounds forward merrily. Oscar is a small gray dog with shaggy hair down in his eyes. “Get back here. Don’t chase them ducks!” Spence shouts. On the pond bank, the ducks skitter ahead of Oscar and splash into the water. Oscar tests the water, then gets distracted by a grasshopper. Spence empties the slop bucket on the bank—rotting lettuce and blackening radishes and rubbery break beans from the vegetable crisper that Cat cleaned out. The ducks paddle to the bank and dart their bills furtively at the garbage. Oscar has gone down into the creek. Spence scans the pond bank for the hoofprints of deer. Recently he saw three deer crossing the field to the pond—a doe and two young ones. Spence has never shot a deer and does not plan to.

From a rise near the pond Spence surveys the ocean of soybeans, with the dips and waves in the front fields and the stripe of corn edging the back ten. The farm has seventy-three acres. He remembers his father teaching him how to figure while they worked the fields. Pappy drilled him in the multiplication table as they cultivated the rows of corn with a mule. When Spence was eight, he realized that when he was thirty-three Pappy would be sixty-six, twice his age. Now Spence is almost sixty-six himself. His father has been dead for twenty-five years. Spence is glad Pappy did not live to see the milk cows sold off.

A grasshopper shoots through the air. The soybeans are thick with them. With no-till beans, he had to use a weed-killer a week after planting, and he suspects that it killed a certain weed the grasshoppers liked, so they are eating the new bean leaves instead. Bill Belton will have to spray soon. Besides the cropduster plane, Bill is deeply in debt for a combine and a planter. Spence has never gone into debt, but he knows a couple of farmers who have lost their land after over-borrowing. When he took a part-time job, driving a van during the school year for the high school, he was able to get medical benefits, which will help now with Lila’s illness. But he worries about whether it is enough. He might have to cash in his certificate of deposit, which doesn’t mature until October. In his worst moments, he can imagine losing his farm to doctors.

On the edge of the field, he steps across a ridge of dirt pushed up by a tractor tire. A few stray soybeans perch on the top, and the tire print beside it is dry like a scar. He thinks of the furrow the doctors may cut in Lila’s neck.

When he was looking at her things, he ran across a postcard she had written him from Savannah. It showed a picture of a lighthouse. When he got home from the Navy, she seemed stronger, tougher, and he felt weaker, torn apart. After the Navy, Spence never wanted to travel again. Home was like that lighthouse. At night on the ocean, the exploding artillery shells kept him awake. The seasickness was worse below deck. Swinging in his hammock, slamming against metal walls and poles, he wanted to die. The sounds down there were magnified—whistles, loudspeakers, the big thumps bombs made hitting water, feet running on deck, metal doors clanging shut. It was deafening. He never saw any of the battles. He knew when there was a battle because the lights turned red. He threw up on a five-inch shell on its way up to the gun turret. He never knew if the shells he touched found their way to the heart of an enemy craft. Up on deck, it was calmer: the fighter planes coming and going from the flattop; the big ship protected in the huddle like a queen bee. It felt better out on deck, because he could see what was going on. He was where the weather was. The fighters landing on the carrier reminded him of snake doctors floating through the air, alighting on a weed, flitting off. A snake doctor touched down on his bare arm once when he was a child and left a blister as large as a nickel. In his nightmares out on the sea, the kamikazes made blisters on the deck of the destroyer and the ship exploded with fire. After he came home, he still couldn’t sleep. He stayed up late and read about the battles, wanting to find out about the big battle he was in, but he couldn’t find many books about the Pacific. Most of them were about Germany. He could see the battle in his mind’s eye, from what he heard afterwards, but there wasn’t enough information in the books. He wanted to know how his destroyer fit in the larger picture, a whole world at war. He had so many questions about the Japanese, the islands, the atom bomb. He wanted to know every detail of what happened, how it happened, why. But the more he read, the more confusing it became, the larger it grew. He couldn’t keep up the reading at night because he always had to get up so early to milk, and after that he faced a long day in the fields. Eventually, his eyes went bad and reading gave him terrible headaches. “Forget about that war,” Lila told him. “It’s over.”

Last night he had a nightmare about Godzilla invading his soybeans. Now he imagines his fields barren and swampy, like the Everglades. He has heard that when the big earthquake expected in the Mississippi River Valley hits, everything for miles will turn to liquid clay.

By the time Spence returns to the house, the girls have finished cleaning, and now they are freezing corn. Nancy is cutting corn off the cob, and Cat stirs corn in a skillet on the stove. Cookie pans spread with cooked corn are cooling in front of the air conditioner. The kitchen is steamy. Freezer bags litter the table.

“Ain’t it too late in the day to pick corn?” he asks.

“We couldn’t wait till tomorrow. It’s getting too old,” Cat says.

Nancy cuts the corn off the cob the way her mother taught her to do it years ago—first halfway through the kernels, then all the way, then scraping the cob for the juice. It has been years since Nancy has done this, and there is a frown on her face.

“Mom took the news about the chemotherapy real well,” says Cat.

“She’s more scared than she admits,” Nancy says.

“She’s really brave,” Cat says. “But she’s being extra brave for us.”

“I’d go to pieces,” Nancy says, viciously scraping the cob with the knife.

“I hope she stays off the cigarettes,” Cat says.

“The cigarette tax is going up,” Nancy says. “Reagan will just send the money to the contras.”

Trying to stay busy, Spence collects the trash from the basement and starts burning it in the trash barrel behind the old milkhouse. The cloud of black smoke blows south, toward the smokestack of the industrial park. Spence likes that—he’s sending the park a message, like Indians with smoke signals. Suddenly Nancy, the corn knife still in her hand, is standing there yelling at him.

“You’re not supposed to burn those plastic Coke bottles!”

“But how am I going to get rid of them?”