Shiloh and Other Stories (26 page)

“I wouldn’t have recognized you, Granny.”

“Why, it looks just
like
me.” Granny strokes the picture, as though she were trying to feel the dress. “That was my favorite dress,” she says. “It was brown poplin, with grosgrain ribbon and self-covered buttons. Thirty-two of them. And all those tucks. It took me three weeks to work up that dress.”

Nancy points to the pictures one by one, asking Granny to identify them. Granny does not notice Nancy writing the names in a notebook. Aunt Sass, Uncle Joe, Dove and Pear Culpepper, Hortense Culpepper.

“Hort Culpepper went to Texas,” says Granny. “She had TB.”

“Tell me about that,” Nancy urges her.

“There wasn’t anything to tell. She got homesick for her mammy’s cooking.” Granny closes the album and falls back against her pillows, saying, “All those people are gone.”

While Granny sleeps, Nancy gets a flashlight and opens the closet. The inside is crammed with the accumulation of decades—yellowed newspapers, boxes of greeting cards, bags of string, and worn-out stockings. Granny’s best dress, a blue bonded knit she has hardly worn, is in plastic wrapping. Nancy pushes the clothing aside and examines the wall. To her right, a metal pipe runs vertically through the closet. Backing up against the dresses, Nancy shines the light on the corner and discovers a large framed picture wedged behind the pipe. By tugging at the frame, she is able to work it gradually through the narrow space between the wall and the pipe. In the picture a man and woman, whose features are sharp and clear, are sitting expectantly on a brocaded love seat. Nancy imagines that this is a wedding portrait.

In the living room, a TV evangelist is urging viewers to call him, toll free. Mother turns the TV off when Nancy appears with the picture, and Daddy stands up and helps her hold it near a window.

“I think that’s Uncle John!” he says excitedly. “He was my favorite uncle.”

“They’re none of my people,” says Mother, studying the picture through her bifocals.

“He died when I was little, but I think that’s him,” says Daddy. “Him and Aunt Lucy Culpepper.”

“Who was she?” Nancy asks.

“Uncle John’s wife.”

“I figured that,” says Nancy impatiently. “But who
was
she?”

“I don’t know.” He is still looking at the picture, running his fingers over the man’s face.

Back in Granny’s room, Nancy pulls the string that turns on the ceiling light, so that Granny can examine the picture. Granny shakes her head slowly. “I never saw them folks before in all my life.”

Mother comes in with a dish of strawberries.

“Did I pick these?” Granny asks.

“No. You eat yours about ten years ago,” Mother says.

Granny puts in her teeth and eats the strawberries in slurps, missing her mouth twice. “Let me see them people again,” she says, waving her spoon. Her teeth make the sound of a baby rattle.

“Nancy Hollins,” says Granny. “She was a Culpepper.”

“That’s Nancy Culpepper?” cries Nancy.

“
That’s
not Nancy Culpepper,” Mother says. “That woman’s got a rat in her hair. They wasn’t in style back when Nancy Culpepper was alive.”

Granny’s face is flushed and she is breathing heavily. “She was a real little-bitty old thing,” she says in a high, squeaky voice. “She never would talk. Everybody thought she was curious. Plumb curious.”

“Are you sure it’s her?” Nancy says.

“If I’m not mistaken.”

“She don’t remember,” Mother says to Nancy. “Her mind gets confused.”

Granny removes her teeth and lies back, her bones grinding. Her chest heaves with exhaustion. Nancy sits down in the rocking chair, and as she rocks back and forth she searches the
photograph, exploring the features of the young woman, who is wearing an embroidered white dress, and the young man, in a curly beard that starts below his chin, framing his face like a ruffle. The woman looks frightened—of the camera perhaps—but nevertheless her deep-set eyes sparkle like shards of glass. This young woman would be glad to dance to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on her wedding day, Nancy thinks. The man seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far away.

Grover Cleveland is growing feeble. His eyes are cloudy, and his muzzle is specked with white hairs. When he scoots along on the hardwood floors, he makes a sound like brushes on drums. He sleeps in front of the woodstove, and when he gets too hot he creeps across the floor.

When Nancy Culpepper married Jack Cleveland, she felt, in a way, that she was marrying a divorced man with a child. Grover was a young dog then. Jack had gotten him at the humane society shelter. He had picked the shyest, most endearing puppy in a boisterous litter. Later, he told Nancy that someone said he should have chosen an energetic one, because quiet puppies often have something wrong with them. That chance remark bothered Nancy; it could have applied to her as well. But that was years ago. Nancy and Jack are still married, and Grover has lived to be old. Now his arthritis stiffens his legs so that on some days he cannot get up. Jack has been talking of having Grover put to sleep.

“Why do you say ‘put to sleep’?” their son, Robert, asks. “I know what you mean.” Robert is nine. He is a serious boy, quiet, like Nancy.

“No reason. It’s just the way people say it.”

“They don’t say they put
people
to sleep.”

“It doesn’t usually happen to people,” Jack says.

“Don’t you dare take him to the vet unless you let me go along. I don’t want any funny stuff behind my back.”

“Don’t worry, Robert,” Nancy says.

Later, in Jack’s studio, while developing photographs of broken snow fences on hillsides, Jack says to Nancy, “There’s a first time for everything, I guess.”

“What?”

“Death. I never really knew anybody who died.”

“You’re forgetting my grandmother.”

“I didn’t really know your grandmother.” Jack looks down at Grover’s face in the developing fluid. Grover looks like a wolf in the snow on the hill. Jack says, “The only people I ever cared about who died were rock heroes.”

—

Jack has been buying special foods for the dog—pork chops and liver, vitamin supplements. All the arthritis literature he has been able to find concerns people, but he says the same rules must apply to all mammals. Until Grover’s hind legs gave way, Jack and Robert took Grover out for long, slow walks through the woods. Recently, a neighbor who keeps Alaskan malamutes stopped Nancy in the Super Duper and inquired about Grover. The neighbor wanted to know which kind of arthritis Grover had—osteo- or rheumatoid? The neighbor said he had rheumatoid and held out knobbed fingers. The doctor told him to avoid zucchini and to drink lots of water. Grover doesn’t like zucchini, Nancy said.

Jack and Nancy and Robert all deal with Grover outside. It doesn’t help that the temperature is dropping below twenty degrees. It feels even colder because they are conscious of the dog’s difficulty. Nancy holds his head and shoulders while Jack supports his hind legs. Robert holds up Grover’s tail.

Robert says, “I have an idea.”

“What, sweetheart?” asks Nancy. In her arms, Grover lurches. Nancy squeezes against him and he whimpers.

“We could put a diaper on him.”

“How would we clean him up?”

“They do that with chimpanzees,” says Jack, “but it must be messy.”

“You mean I didn’t have an original idea?” Robert cries. “Curses, foiled again!” Robert has been reading comic books about masked villains.

“There aren’t many original ideas,” Jack says, letting go of Grover. “They just look original when you’re young.” Jack lifts Grover’s hind legs again and grasps him under the stomach. “Let’s try one more time, boy.”

Grover looks at Nancy, pleading.

Nancy has been feeling that the dying of Grover marks a milestone in her marriage to Jack, a marriage that has somehow lasted almost fifteen years. She is seized with an irrational dread—that when the dog is gone, Jack will be gone too. Whenever Nancy and Jack are apart—during Nancy’s frequent trips to see her family in Kentucky, or when Jack has gone away “to think”—Grover remains with Jack. Actually, Nancy knew Grover before she knew Jack. When Jack and Nancy were students, in Massachusetts, the dog was a familiar figure around campus. Nancy was drawn to the dog long before she noticed the shaggy-haired student in the sheepskin-lined corduroy jacket who was usually with him. Once, in a seminar on the Federalist period that Nancy was auditing, Grover had walked in, circled the room, and then walked out, as if performing some routine investigation, like the man who sprayed Nancy’s apartment building for silverfish. Grover was a beautiful dog, a German shepherd, gray, dusted with a sooty topcoat. After the seminar, Nancy followed the dog out of the building, and she met Jack then. Eventually, when Nancy and Jack made love in his apartment in Amherst, Grover lay sprawled by the bed, both protective and quietly participatory. Later, they moved into a house in the country, and Nancy felt that she had an instant family. Once, for almost three months, Jack and Grover were gone. Jack left Nancy in California, pregnant and terrified, and went to stay at an Indian reservation in New Mexico. Nancy lived in a room on a street with palm trees. It was winter. It felt like a Kentucky October. She went to a park every day and watched people with their dogs, their children, and tried to comprehend that she was
there, alone, a mile from the San Andreas fault, reluctant to return to Kentucky. “We need to decide where we stand with each other,” Jack had said when he left. “Just when I start to think I know where you’re at, you seem to disappear.” Jack always seemed to stand back and watch her, as though he expected her to do something excitingly original. He expected her to be herself, not someone she thought people wanted her to be. That was a twist: he expected the unexpected. While Jack was away, Nancy indulged in crafts projects. At the Free University, she learned batik and macramé. On her own, she learned to crochet. She had never done anything like that before. She threw away her file folders of history notes for the article she had wanted to write. Suddenly, making things with her hands was the only endeavor that made sense. She crocheted a bulky, shapeless sweater in a shell stitch for Jack. She made baby things, using large hooks. She did not realize that such heavy blankets were unsuitable for a baby until she saw Robert—a tiny, warped-looking creature, like one of her clumsily made crafts. When Jack returned, she was in a sprawling adobe hospital, nursing a baby the color of scalded skin. The old song “In My Adobe Hacienda” was going through her head. Jack stood over her behind an unfamiliar beard, grinning in disbelief, stroking the baby as though he were a new pet. Nancy felt she had fooled Jack into thinking she had done something original at last.

“Grover’s dying to see you,” he said to her. “They wouldn’t let him in here.”

“I’ll be glad to see Grover,” said Nancy. “I missed him.”

She had missed, she realized then, his various expressions: the staccato barks of joy, the forceful, menacing barks at strangers, the eerie howls when he heard cat fights at night.

—

Those early years together were confused and dislocated. After leaving graduate school, at the beginning of the seventies, they lived in a number of places—sometimes on the road, with Grover, in a van—but after Robert was born they settled in Pennsylvania. Their life is orderly. Jack is a free-lance photographer, with his own studio at home. Nancy, unable to find a use for her degree in history, returned to school, taking education
and administration courses. Now she is assistant principal of a small private elementary school, which Robert attends. Now and then Jack frets about becoming too middle-class. He has become semipolitical about energy, sometimes attending anti–nuclear power rallies. He has been building a sun space for his studio and has been insulating the house. “Retrofitting” is the term he uses for making the house energy-efficient.

“Insulation is his hobby,” Nancy told an old friend from graduate school, Tom Green, who telephoned unexpectedly one day recently. “He insulates on weekends.”

“Maybe he’ll turn into a butterfly—he could insulate himself into a cocoon,” said Tom, who Nancy always thought was funny. She had not seen him in ten years. He called to say he was sending a novel he had written—“about all the crazy stuff we did back then.”

The dog is forcing Nancy to think of how Jack has changed in the years since then. He is losing his hair, but he doesn’t seem concerned. Jack was always fanatical about being honest. He used to be insensitive about his directness. “I’m just being honest,” he would say pleasantly, boyishly, when he hurt people’s feelings. He told Nancy she was uptight, that no one ever knew what she thought, that she should be more expressive. He said she “played games” with people, hiding her feelings behind her coy Southern smile. He is more tolerant now, less judgmental. He used to criticize her for drinking Cokes and eating pastries. He didn’t like her lipstick, and she stopped wearing it. But Nancy has changed too. She is too sophisticated now to eat fried foods and rich pies and cakes, indulging in them only when she goes to Kentucky. She uses makeup now—so sparingly that Jack does not notice. Her cool reserve, her shyness, has changed to cool assurance, with only the slightest shift. Inwardly, she has reorganized. “It’s like retrofitting,” she said to Jack once, but he didn’t notice any irony.

It wasn’t until two years ago that Nancy learned that he had lied to her when he told her he had been at the Beatles’ Shea Stadium concert in 1966, just as she had, only two months before they met. When he confessed his lie, he claimed he had wanted to identify with her and impress her because he thought of her
as someone so mysterious and aloof that he could not hold her attention. Nancy, who had in fact been intimidated by Jack’s directness, was troubled to learn about his peculiar deception. It was out of character. She felt a part of her past had been ripped away. More recently, when John Lennon died, Nancy and Jack watched the silent vigil in Central Park on TV and cried in each other’s arms. Everybody that week was saying that they had lost their youth.