Shiloh and Other Stories (3 page)

—

“Your name means ‘the king,’ ” Norma Jean says to Leroy that evening. He is trying to get her to go to Shiloh, and she is reading a book about another century.

“Well, I reckon I ought to be right proud.”

“I guess so.”

“Am I still king around here?”

Norma Jean flexes her biceps and feels them for hardness. “I’m not fooling around with anybody, if that’s what you mean,” she says.

“Would you tell me if you were?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does
your
name mean?”

“It was Marilyn Monroe’s real name.”

“No kidding!”

“Norma comes from the Normans. They were invaders,” she says. She closes her book and looks hard at Leroy. “I’ll go to Shiloh with you if you’ll stop staring at me.”

—

On Sunday, Norma Jean packs a picnic and they go to Shiloh. To Leroy’s relief, Mabel says she does not want to come with them. Norma Jean drives, and Leroy, sitting beside her, feels like some boring hitchhiker she has picked up. He tries some conversation, but she answers him in monosyllables. At Shiloh, she drives aimlessly through the park, past bluffs and trails and steep ravines. Shiloh is an immense place, and Leroy cannot see it as a battleground. It is not what he expected. He thought it would look like a golf course. Monuments are everywhere, showing through the thick clusters of trees. Norma Jean passes the log cabin Mabel mentioned. It is surrounded by tourists looking for bullet holes.

“That’s not the kind of log house I’ve got in mind,” says Leroy apologetically.

“I know
that.
”

“This is a pretty place. Your mama was right.”

“It’s O.K.,” says Norma Jean. “Well, we’ve seen it. I hope she’s satisfied.”

They burst out laughing together.

At the park museum, a movie on Shiloh is shown every half hour, but they decide that they don’t want to see it. They buy a souvenir Confederate flag for Mabel, and then they find a picnic spot near the cemetery. Norma Jean has brought a picnic cooler, with pimiento sandwiches, soft drinks, and Yodels. Leroy eats a sandwich and then smokes a joint, hiding it behind the picnic cooler. Norma Jean has quit smoking altogether. She is picking cake crumbs from the cellophane wrapper, like a fussy bird.

Leroy says, “So the boys in gray ended up in Corinth. The Union soldiers zapped ’em finally. April 7, 1862.”

They both know that he doesn’t know any history. He is just
talking about some of the historical plaques they have read. He feels awkward, like a boy on a date with an older girl. They are still just making conversation.

“Corinth is where Mama eloped to,” says Norma Jean.

They sit in silence and stare at the cemetery for the Union dead and, beyond, at a tall cluster of trees. Campers are parked nearby, bumper to bumper, and small children in bright clothing are cavorting and squealing. Norma Jean wads up the cake wrapper and squeezes it tightly in her hand. Without looking at Leroy, she says, “I want to leave you.”

Leroy takes a bottle of Coke out of the cooler and flips off the cap. He holds the bottle poised near his mouth but cannot remember to take a drink. Finally he says, “No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I won’t let you.”

“You can’t stop me.”

“Don’t do me that way.”

Leroy knows Norma Jean will have her own way. “Didn’t I promise to be home from now on?” he says.

“In some ways, a woman prefers a man who wanders,” says Norma Jean. “That sounds crazy, I know.”

“You’re not crazy.”

Leroy remembers to drink from his Coke. Then he says, “Yes, you
are
crazy. You and me could start all over again. Right back at the beginning.”

“We
have
started all over again,” says Norma Jean. “And this is how it turned out.”

“What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Is this one of those women’s lib things?” Leroy asks.

“Don’t be funny.”

The cemetery, a green slope dotted with white markers, looks like a subdivision site. Leroy is trying to comprehend that his marriage is breaking up, but for some reason he is wondering about white slabs in a graveyard.

“Everything was fine till Mama caught me smoking,” says Norma Jean, standing up. “That set something off.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She won’t leave me alone
—you
won’t leave me alone.” Norma Jean seems to be crying, but she is looking away from him. “I feel eighteen again. I can’t face that all over again.” She starts walking away. “No, it
wasn’t
fine. I don’t know what I’m saying. Forget it.”

Leroy takes a lungful of smoke and closes his eyes as Norma Jean’s words sink in. He tries to focus on the fact that thirty-five hundred soldiers died on the grounds around him. He can only think of that war as a board game with plastic soldiers. Leroy almost smiles, as he compares the Confederates’ daring attack on the Union camps and Virgil Mathis’s raid on the bowling alley. General Grant, drunk and furious, shoved the Southerners back to Corinth, where Mabel and Jet Beasley were married years later, when Mabel was still thin and good-looking. The next day, Mabel and Jet visited the battleground, and then Norma Jean was born, and then she married Leroy and they had a baby, which they lost, and now Leroy and Norma Jean are here at the same battleground. Leroy knows he is leaving out a lot. He is leaving out the insides of history. History was always just names and dates to him. It occurs to him that building a house out of logs is similarly empty—too simple. And the real inner workings of a marriage, like most of history, have escaped him. Now he sees that building a log house is the dumbest idea he could have had. It was clumsy of him to think Norma Jean would want a log house. It was a crazy idea. He’ll have to think of something else, quickly. He will wad the blueprints into tight balls and fling them into the lake. Then he’ll get moving again. He opens his eyes. Norma Jean has moved away and is walking through the cemetery, following a serpentine brick path.

Leroy gets up to follow his wife, but his good leg is asleep and his bad leg still hurts him. Norma Jean is far away, walking rapidly toward the bluff by the river, and he tries to hobble toward her. Some children run past him, screaming noisily. Norma Jean has reached the bluff, and she is looking out over the Tennessee River. Now she turns toward Leroy and waves her arms. Is she beckoning to him? She seems to be doing an exercise for her chest muscles. The sky is unusually pale—the color of the dust ruffle Mabel made for their bed.

Mary Lou Skaggs runs errands for her husband. She hauls lumber, delivers bookshelves, even makes a special trip to town just to exchange flathead screws. Mack will occasionally go out to measure people’s kitchens for the cabinets and countertops he makes, but he gets uncomfortable if he has to be away long. And the highway makes him nervous. Increasingly, he stays at home, working in his shop in the basement. They live on a main road between two small Kentucky towns, and the shop sign has been torn down by teenagers so many times that Mack has given up trying to keep it repaired. Mary Lou feels that Mack never charges enough for his work, but she has always helped out—keeping the books, canning and sewing, as well as periodically working for H&R Block—and they have managed to send their youngest child to college. The two older daughters are married, with homes nearby, but Judy is a freshman at Murray State. After she left, Mack became so involved with some experimental woodworking projects that Mary Lou thought he had almost failed to notice that the children had all gone.

For some neighbors, Mack made a dinette booth out of a church pew salvaged from an abandoned country church. The
sanding took days. “I’m sanding off layers of hypocrisy,” Mack said.

“You sound like that guy that used to stand out on the corner and yell when church let out on Sunday,” said Mary Lou. “ ‘Here come the hyps,’ he’d say.”

“Who was that?”

“Oh, just some guy in town. That was years ago. He led a crusade against fluoride too.”

“Fluoride’s O.K. It hardens the teeth.”

For their twenty-fifth anniversary, Mack made Mary Lou a round card table from scrap pine, with an old sprocket from a bulldozer as a base. It was connected to the table with a length of lead pipe. “It didn’t cost a thing,” Mack said. “Just imagination.”

The tabletop, a mosaic of wood scraps, was like a crazy quilt, Mary Lou thought. It was heavily varnished with polyurethane, making a slick surface. Mack had spray-painted the sprocket black.

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“No, you don’t. I can tell you don’t.”

“It’s real pretty.”

“It’s not something you would buy in a store,” Mack said apologetically.

Mary Lou had never seen a table like it. Automatically, she counted the oddly shaped pieces Mack had fit together for the top. Twenty-one. It seemed that Mack was trying to put together the years of their marriage into a convincing whole and this was as far as he got. Mary Lou is concerned about Mack. He seems embarrassed that they are alone in the house now for the first time in years. When Judy fails to come home on weekends, he paces around restlessly. He has even started reading books and magazines, as if he can somehow keep up with Judy and her studies. Lately he has become obsessed with the weather. He likes to compare the weather with the predictions in the
Old Farmer’s Almanac
. He likes it when the
Almanac
is wrong. Anyone else would be rooting for the
Almanac
to be right.

When the women Mary Lou plays Rook with come over,
Mack stays in the den watching TV, hardly emerging to say hello. Thelma Crandall, Clausie Dowdy, and Edda Griffin—the Rookers, Mary Lou calls them—are all much older than Mary Lou, and they are all widows. Mack and Mary Lou married young, and even though they have three grown daughters, they are only in their late forties. Mack says it is unhealthy for her to socialize with senior citizens, but Mary Lou doesn’t believe him. It does her good to have some friends.

Mary Lou shows off the new card table when the women arrive one evening. They all come in separate cars, not trusting each other’s driving.

“It’s set on a bulldozer sprocket,” Mary Lou explains.

“How did Mack come up with such an idea?” asks Clausie, admiring the table.

Thelma, the oldest of the group, is reluctant to sit at the table, for fear she will catch her foot in one of the holes at the base.

“Couldn’t you cover up the bottom of that table with a rug or something?” asks Edda. “We might catch our feet.”

Mary Lou finds an old afghan and drapes it around the bulldozer sprocket, tamping it down carefully in the holes. She gets along with old people, and she feels exhilarated when she is playing cards with her friends. “They tickle me,” she told Mack once. “Old people are liable to say anything.” Mack said old people gave him the creeps, the way they talked about diseases.

Mary Lou keeps a list of whose turn it is to deal, because they often lose track. When they deal the cards on the new table, the cards shoot across the slick surface. This evening they discuss curtain material, Edda’s granddaughter’s ovary infection, a place that appeared on Thelma’s arm, and the way the climate has changed. All three of the widows live in nice houses in town. When Mary Lou goes to their houses to play Rook, she is impressed by their shag rugs, their matching sets of furniture, their neat kitchens. Their walls are filled with pictures of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Mary Lou’s pictures are scattered around in drawers, and her kitchen is always a mess.

“They’re beating the socks off of us,” Mary Lou tells Mack when he watches the game for a moment. Mary Lou is teamed
up with Thelma. “I had the bird—that was the only trump I had.”

“I haven’t had it a time,” says Clausie, a peppy little woman with a trim figure.

“I put thirty in the widow and they caught it,” Thelma tells Mack.

“The rook’s a sign of bad luck,” Mack says. “A rook ain’t nothing but a crow.”

When he returns to the football game he is watching on TV, Edda says with a laugh, “Did y’all hear what Erma Bombeck said? She said any man who watches more than a hundred and sixty-eight football games in one year ought to be declared legally dead.”

They all laugh in little bursts and spasms, but Mary Lou says defensively, “Mack doesn’t watch that much football. He just watches it because it’s on. Usually he has his nose stuck in a book.”

“I used to read,” says Clausie. “But I got out of the habit.”

Later, Mary Lou complains to Mack about his behavior. “You could at least be friendly,” she says.

“I like to see you playing cards,” says Mack.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“You light up and you look so pretty.”

“I’ll say one thing for those old gals. They get out and
go
. They don’t hide under a bushel. Like some people I know.”

“I don’t hide under a bushel.”

“You think they’re just a bunch of silly old widow women.”

“You look beautiful when you’re having a good time,” says Mack, goosing her and making her jump.

“They’re not that old, though,” says Mary Lou. “They don’t act it. Edda’s a great-grandmother, but she’s just as spry! She goes to Paducah driving that little Bobcat like she owned the road. And Clausie hasn’t got a brain in her head. She’s just like a kid—”

But now Mack is absorbed in something on TV, a pudding commercial. Mary Lou has tried to be patient with Mack, thinking that he will grow out of his current phase. Sooner or later, she and Mack will have to face growing older together. Mack
says that having a daughter in college makes him feel he has missed something, but Mary Lou has tried to make him see that they could still enjoy life. Before she began playing regularly with the Rookers, she had several ideas for doing things together, now that they were no longer tied down with a family. She suggested bowling, camping, a trip to Opryland. But Mack said he’d rather improve his mind. He has been reading
Shōgun
. He made excuses about the traffic. They had a chance to go on a free weekend to the Paradise Valley Estates, a resort development in the Ozarks. There was no obligation. All they had to do was hear a talk and watch some slides. But Mack hated the idea and said there was a catch. Mack made Mary Lou feel she was pressuring him, and she decided not to bring up these topics for a while. She would wait for him to come out of his shell. But she was disappointed about the free weekend. The resort had swimming, nature trails, horseback riding, golf, fishing, and pontoon boat rentals. The bathrooms had whirlpools.