Nancy Culpepper (13 page)

“No, I’m not,” says Lila happily. “Just shots and pills for six months, and then they do all the tests again to see if it spread.”

“I told Bill I didn’t think you’d have to have cobalt,” says Glenda.

Bill is a red-faced, deliberate sort of man, a retired farmer. He says defensively, “Well, seems like they want to put everybody through that.”

“I don’t think it spread very much,” Lila says. “I could feel it in those leaders under my arms, but they think they got it all out.” She runs her hand down her arm, which is stiffening up. The physical therapist has been there, instructing her how to work her arm. Lila has to grasp a yardstick, one hand on each end, and slowly raise it above her head, then lower it and swing it from side to side.

Glenda says, “We heard you’re going to be operated on again, Lila.”

Lila nods. “Depends on what they find out with my neck.” She scrapes her fingers down her throat. “The blood ain’t going through good.”

Glenda says brightly, “Bob Barber had
his
veins cleaned out and he said it was like getting new glasses. He could think better after they operated.”

“Are they going to do that test where they shoot you with the dye?” asks Bill.

“Uh-huh. I purely dread it too.”

“They say that really hurts,” Bill says. “They shoot it in your leg and it works its way up to your head and burns.”

“They told me I had to lay real still for eight hours after they do it,” Lila says. “If I turn over it might be dangerous.”

“A clot might go to your brain,” Glenda says.

“How have y’all been?” Lila asks, changing the subject. If Spence were here, he would be furious at them.

“All right, I reckon,” says Glenda. “Bill here has to go in for his checkup—he has sugar—and he has to have tests for that spasmatic colon he’s got.”

Bill, hacking at a cough, says, “I told them I wasn’t going to have that test where you drank that drank again. I had that last year, and my bowels backed up and didn’t move for three months. It made a knot as big as my fist. It stayed there and everything went around it. I liked to died.”

Glenda laughs. “He sure was something to live with while that was going on.”

“Lila, you look like a spring chicken,” says Bill. “Why, your hide won’t hold you when you get home!” He offers to get Cokes for everyone.

“You can get a free drink in the lounge,” Lila says.

After he leaves, Lila says, “I’m so proud to see you, Glenda!”

Glenda was eight and Lila was four when their mother died. Lila has one memory of her: a chubby little woman with dark hair, saying “fried pies” out on a porch, with a dog running up from a field— somewhere Lila could never identify. Her mother was only about twenty-eight when she died, of childbed fever. Glenda, who remembered her better, told Lila once, “She was light-complected and had pretty teeth. She liked to ride horses, and they say that’s why she died. She rode a horse when she shouldn’t have.” The baby died too. Lila had been told it was a girl. Lila’s father left Lila at Uncle Mose’s and disappeared. Glenda went to live with her real daddy and his second wife in a little place down below Wolf Creek.

Lila didn’t see Glenda again until after she married Spence and the war was over. Lila and Spence visited Glenda one Sunday afternoon. They sat on Glenda and Bill’s porch and watched the traffic go by. Lila remembers her happiness that day—Glenda’s daughter, Laura Jean, teaching Nancy how to ride a little red scooter; a dusty driveway; a setting hen; a can of sorghum Bill gave them. She remembers Glenda shooing flies from the apple slices spread out on a screen door to dry in the sun. Glenda was fat. That day she told Lila the baby their mother died with was a boy, not a girl.

“Lila, how are those daughters of yours treating you?” Glenda asks now.

“Oh, they’ve been awful good to me. They’ve been here every minute.” Lila laughs. “They froze my corn the other evening. They should have done it in the morning when the dew’s wet.”

“It won’t be crisp,” Glenda says, nodding. “It’ll be tough.”

“I hope I’m out of here in time to do all the pickles. They’ll draw the line at pickles.”

“Nobody can do dill pickles like you can, Lila. You’ve got a secret recipe, I believe. One of these days I’m going to get you down and mash that recipe out of you.”

“I just do it by guess. Last year I got them too sour. They was sour enough to make a pig squeal!” Lila laughs, then hiccups.

The old woman’s voice booms through the curtain. “Who’s got the he-cups over there?”

“Me,” says Lila. She can’t get comfortable, and the little jolts hurt her incision.

“You’re a-growing,” Mrs. Wright says. “That’s what that means.”

“I hope so,” Lila says, pulling at her gown. “I wish I could grow a new jug.”

“You can’t get no sleep around here to save your neck,” Mrs. Wright says. “They come in here late last night and started burning the house down!”

Lila sees the prisoner trudging past the door, clinging to his uniformed guard. His gown gapes open in the back, exposing his hairy rear end. He shuffles along, his head bent. Lila feels a sudden foreboding of death. This is all there is left to life: lying here in a hospital gown with her breast amputated, watching a bare-butt criminal go by and listening to a nutty old woman griping behind a curtain. Days ago, Lila told herself she was ready to go, that she had made her peace with the world, that she had had a good life and she was grateful. But now she revolts. She doesn’t want to give up. She swings out of bed a little too quickly, and a pain shoots through her arm. But that’s O.K. It will go away.

“Walk me down the hall,” she says to Glenda. “I ain’t ready to die yet.”

12

“You’re not eating for us, Mrs. Wright,” the nurse says disapprovingly. This nurse is the cute one, with the tiny feet. She’s the only nurse who bothers to chat with the old woman.

“She made a little sign on it,” says Lila.

“I like broccoli cooked
done,
” says Mrs. Wright, sitting up against her pillows defiantly and pushing her tray trolley forward. “I like all kinds of greens. I could eat my weight in asparagus. But not raw.”

It’s time for Lila to breathe oxygen. The nurse’s aide hauls the breathing contraption to Lila’s bedside and pulls the curtain between the beds. She aims the blue mask at Lila’s face.

“I believe my lungs is clearing up,” Lila says to her.

“Well, they ought to be if you keep off them cigarettes,” the girl says.

“Woman!” Mrs. Wright booms through the curtain. “I did something for sixty-five years and then quit—and you can too.”

“What’s that—smoking?” asks Lila.

“Naw—chewing tobacco. I started in the first grade, but since I was operated on four days ago I haven’t wanted a chew. Got a bad taste in my mouth.”

Lila can’t reply because she is holding her breath. The girl says, “You’re doing good. Just hold it two more seconds. There.”

Lila says, rubbing her neck, “These veins need oxygen.”

“That smoking was closing them down,” the girl says.

“I’m worried about that test they’re going to run on my neck. They don’t want to operate on both sides at once. They need to keep one vein open to feed the brain in case I have a stroke on the operating table.” The words rush out. Lila can talk to the nurses about her fears, but doctors make her flustered.

“I’m sure they know what’s best for you,” the nurse’s aide says. “Now breathe in again. The test will tell them which way to go.”

“I’m more scared of that test than I am of the operation,” Lila says. She sucks in air, feeling her face go red, her stitches tickling.

As the girl leaves, she rips open the curtain again, and Mrs. Wright says, “I’ll be glad when I get back to my cat.”

“Well, that’s the first I heard you were going to leave the hospital!” says Lila. “I thought you wasn’t aiming to leave here alive.”

Mrs. Wright grumbles and works at her short-tailed gown, which has ridden up. “The doctor didn’t say nothing about going home, but he said something about getting these belly steeples out. I feel like jerking ’em out myself. They put a screw in and some plastic. I had this herny for five or six years, and I was doing just fine with it till they started in bellyaching about it.”

“Is somebody feeding your cat?” Lila misses Abraham. Spence won’t give him enough attention.

Mrs. Wright shakes her head. “I guess she’ll find something. That cat—she’s a beautiful cat. Calico. She has the prettiest face. Where she’s white she’s
white,
and where she’s black she’s
black,
and where she’s red she’s
red!
She ain’t got no tail. When she was a kitten she got in the hay baler and got her tail cut off. And she got her ears snipped off too somehow. She’s crippled up in one paw. But she can catch mice. She catches ’em with one paw and stuffs ’em in her mouth and reaches out and hooks another one. That cat sleeps with me in the house every night in the world!”

“My cat doesn’t come in the house,” Lila says. “Spence never did like cats in the house.”

“I’d tease the menfolks and offer ’em a chaw of tobacco straight out of the tobacco barn. I’d say you ain’t a man if you can’t chew that.” Mrs. Wright laughs, a man’s grunt. “If you chew tobacco, you won’t never have worms. Lands, I ain’t worked tobacco in ten years! That’s how I ruptured myself, lifting a ten-by-twenty-five presser of tobacco.”

“We never raised tobacco. I’ve got corn coming in and my girls don’t know how to do it right.”

“Honey, there ain’t a soul to tend to my garden. I’ve got bell peppers and okry and Kentucky Wonders. Everything will ruin.”

The TV news comes on, and the old woman says, “The politicians send all our money overseas, where all they do is fight and all they ever
will
do is fight.”

The hospital routines are becoming too familiar—the florist’s delivery cart passing by the door, the physical therapist who comes in each morning to help Lila work her arm to keep it from freezing up, the boy who sweeps the floors every afternoon, the night nurse with the cold hands and the way she has of popping the thermometer in Lila’s mouth just as though she were using a dipstick to check the oil level in a car engine. When Lila asked the night nurse about the prisoner, she said, “I don’t know what happened to him, but I sure wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley.”

Lila tries to read recipes in
Family Circle,
but her eyes blur and her glasses don’t help. She would like to read from the Bible in the drawer of the nightstand, but the print is too fine. The preacher is supposed to come by, but he hasn’t.

13

Sitting in the lounge while Lila naps, Spence is surrounded by worried-looking strangers, most of them overweight. Human beings come in such freakish forms, it always surprises him to be in a crowd of them. His nerves are bad. He can’t sit still. Downstairs, he saw a woman in a wheelchair; evidently she was too fat to walk. She was the fattest woman he’d ever seen outside a circus. He works a Coke out of the ice in the cooler and lifts the tab. He takes a long drink and belches. Heartburn. The night before, it woke him up at two-thirty and he couldn’t go back to sleep. His head whirled, catching memories of recent events until he was brought up to date, to the awful present. If Lila didn’t make it through the second operation, her funeral could be as early as next weekend. In the dark, tossing in bed, he imagined her funeral. He couldn’t stop whole scenes from playing in his head, like a TV documentary. The sermon, the flowers, perfunctory conversations with the kinfolks at the funeral home, coming home with his children and solemnly feasting on that food the neighbors brought.

If this is going to be her time, then what he and Lila should do is have a last fling together. But he can’t go in her room and make love to her. He can’t even talk to her or tell her how he feels while she’s lying there in that white-cold bed with the nurses bumbling around the room like doodlebugs working on a cowpile. And now it seems likely that the doctors will get hold of her again, with their knives and scissors, probing violently in another place precious to him—her rugged throat, always tanned and healthy. The surgeons in masks will probably laugh and joke while they work, probably because they’re making so much money. They must feel immense power, like presidents and TV executives. Spence’s stomach turns over as a cloud of cigarette smoke fills the room. Someone switches the TV from a fishing show to the Nashville channel. Spence hates hillbilly music.

Lee and the kids came to see Lila earlier that afternoon. Now Lee joins Spence in the lounge, drinking a Sprite and gazing vacantly at the TV while Jennifer and Greg explore the hospital. Lee always seems tired. He didn’t want to learn farming because he didn’t want to get up at four to milk, but he has to work even harder at his factory job. He owes the bank almost four hundred dollars a month for a squatty little brick ranch house on a hundred-foot lot in town with no trees. It makes Spence sick.

The prisoner enters the lounge with the guard, who walks him around the room as if on an inspection tour. He is huge and young, with short blond hair and freckles. He looks as though he might have been a nice boy who turned bad. His dark eyes somehow don’t fit his physique—a clue, Spence thinks, to why he turned bad. Something about his body isn’t quite right. The sight of him is jarring. The guy has probably known that all his life, and the conflict made him mean. The criminal’s I.V. rolls along with him like an obedient dog on a rope.

“I bet he got stabbed,” Lee says. “All those prisoners want to do is cut on each other when they get the chance.”

Spence says, “When the guard has to go to the bathroom, he chains that guy to the bed. I saw him.”

“He don’t look strong enough to get very far.”

Spence asks, “How does she seem to you?”

“Mom? Oh, she’s bearing up. She almost seems like her old self.” Lee stares at his lap. “I feel terrible that we dragged her to Florida.”

“She worries,” Spence says. “She gets something in her head. Like that deal with you and Cat over the air conditioner.”

“Mom didn’t have anything to do with that.”

Spence rubs his hands against his jeans. “I thought Cat give you that air conditioner.”