Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  The telephone is ringing. Spence runs inside and grabs the phone, expecting bad news. He has never gotten over the early association between bad news and the telephone.

  “Well, how’s Lila doing?” a shrill-voiced woman asks. She must be someone Lila knows from her trips with the senior citizens. “They said she was having her neck operated on,” the woman continues.

  “Yeah. Today—about one o’clock,” Spence says, longing for whole minutes of blissful forgetting.

  “Lila was looking bad,” she says.

  You old bat, he thinks, wishing the doctors would saw on her neck.

  He tells the woman, “Lila’s sassing the doctors. Can’t nothing hold her down. She’s raring to get home and do up her pickles.”

  “Well, I just wanted to know how she was,” the woman says, hanging up abruptly.

  It is past seven o’clock. Spence takes a capsule the doctor prescribed for Lila when she had bronchitis back in the winter. The bottle says, “Take one capsule after supper for breathing.” The steam from his shaving water helps clear his nose. In the refrigerator, tan beads of glistening moisture dot the sinking meringue of the coconut pie. Nancy and Cat didn’t take much of the food. Spence lays four strips of bacon on the bacon rack in the microwave and punches the time buttons. He watches the bacon curl, like time-lapse photography of flowers blooming and dying that he has seen on TV. He stops the oven just before the bell rings. He hates the sound—ping!—like a pebble from a slingshot hitting a hubcap. In the distance, the airplane’s engine is receding. Through the window, Spence sees Abraham on the porch licking orange dust from his fur.

  After breakfast, he pauses in the doorway of the spare room to look at some of Lila’s things—a row of old dolls on a quilt. She bought old dolls at yard sales and cleaned them up and sewed clothes for them. She found a porcelain doll head in the junkhouse behind the barn and made a body for it. Lila can take a scrap of anything and work it into something pretty. The day before, while the girls were freezing the corn, he thought he heard her call him, but it was Cat, and he realized that if Lila died he would hear the girls talking and he would catch an echo of her voice in theirs and think it was her.

  At the hospital, she says, “I had a hard night. I didn’t sleep a week.” She meant wink. She’s silly from the drugs. “I’m drunker’n a two-tailed tom,” she says, trying to raise her head. After they wheel her away to surgery, Spence strides down the corridor toward the elevator, passing a young woman who says to an older woman, “He wants to get Stevie one of them three-wheelers, but Renée don’t want him to have it.” A man in a hospital gown trudges down the hall alone, wheeling his I.V. and carrying his piss bag in his hands, carefully, like a baby. The prisoner is out walking too, pressing a folded blanket against his stomach, as if he has had surgery again. He is pale and weak, his eyes buried under those brows that jut out like awnings. He looks half dead.

  Downstairs, Spence buys a Coke from the machine and sits at a table by a window in a corner of the cafeteria. Coke always settles his stomach, and the Coke acid helps clean his dentures. The window opens onto a little gray enclosed area—a triangle of grass framed by the angles of the two wings of the building. An updraft suddenly catches some trash and begins spinning it up in the air. A plastic bag and a foil potato-chip bag are dancing and circling, battling each other. As they rise in the updraft, they seem like cartoon characters. They seem alive, a young courting couple chasing and pursuing each other, then falling exhausted to the grass before rising up with renewed energy for the chase again. The dance keeps going on for so long Spence sits there, mesmerized.

  He loses track of time, and Nancy and Cat find him there.

  “Come on, let’s eat,” says Cat. “When I’m nervous, I have to eat.”

  Nancy grabs his elbow. “Come on, Dad, they have a lot of food you like. They have corn bread and green beans.”

  Nancy and Cat travel through the line, knowing exactly what they are doing. Spence hates cafeterias. There are too many choices. As they approach the cashier, he regards with chagrin what he has taken from the salad bar: corn bread, salad with bacon bits, cottage cheese, pineapple, peppers, shredded cheese, cherry tomatoes, dill pickles, crackers.

  They sit at a table near the back of the cafeteria, away from the crowd.

  “Do you want some of these tommytoes?” he asks Nancy, shoving the cherry tomatoes at her.

  “No. I like those fresh tomatoes from Mom’s garden. We brought her some the other day, with an onion.”

  “She saved some of it in a drawer for supper, and you could smell that onion all over the hospital,” says Cat with a laugh. “Hey, there’s Mom’s preacher, Dad.”

  Spence spots the preacher from Lila’s church speaking with a man on the far side of the cafeteria.

  “Tell me something, Dad,” Nancy says. “I remember the Pentecostals around here never would wear jewelry and makeup. But the PTL Club is Pentecostal, and they decorate themselves like Christmas trees. Why is that?”

  “TV commercials,” he says.

  “I guess so.”

  “That reminds me. I heard a great joke, Dad,” says Cat. “If you scrape off all of Tammy Bakker’s makeup, do you know what’s underneath?”

  “What?”

  “Jimmy Hoffa.”

  Spence can hardly eat. Cat is eating out of nervousness, not missing a bite. Nancy is picking at salad.

  “Where do you hear jokes like that, Cat?” asks Nancy. “I never hear jokes.”

  Cat shrugs. The preacher is headed their way. He stops at their table and lays his hand on Spence’s shoulder, saying, “I’ve got some sick here to look after, but I want you to call me this evening and tell me how she’s doing.”

  “All right,” says Spence, cringing. He hates to use the telephone.

  The preacher’s hand is still on Spence’s shoulder, and now the man starts working the muscle. It’s supposed to be a friendly and caring gesture, Spence figures, but it makes him nervous. He has never known a man who caressed anybody’s shoulder that way. Cat and Nancy are staring at the way the preacher is rubbing on Spence’s shoulder.

  “I’ll be praying real hard for Mrs. Culpepper,” the preacher says. He is a young fellow who reminds Spence of the Cards’ utility infielder. Spence can’t remember the player’s name.

  20

  With his children, Spence sits in the second-floor waiting room, a small corner area with a Coke machine and a telephone and a TV. The Cards are playing the Astros, and Lee seems absorbed in the game. Nancy is reading a book. Nancy would probably read a book during a nuclear attack. Cat would reach for food, and Lee would go to sleep. Lee always slept when something was bothering him. He would sleep so long it was like a deep illness.

  “Dad, what size bra does Mom wear?” asks Cat, who is filling out a form.

  “I don’t know. Big ones.” Five-pound flour sacks.

  Nancy says, “When that phone rings, I’m going to jump out of my skin.”

  Cat folds the form and picks up a women’s magazine. A red-white-and-blue Fourth of July cake is on the front. She says to Nancy, “Look at this article, ‘How to Warn Your Children About Strangers Without Scaring Them.’ I’m at the point where I’m going to have to trust Krystal to know what goes on. I think she’s smart. I think she knows what goes on.”

  In a TV commercial for Time magazine, the Pope appears momentarily, holding a strange animal Spence can’t identify. “I didn’t know the Pope was allowed to have pets,” he says.

  “He probably needs something,” says Lee, dragging on his cigarette.

  A couple about Spence’s age enter the waiting area and sit down on a vinyl couch. They stare at the TV. The woman’s eyes, with sagging pouches under them, are red from crying. She holds her pocketbook like a lap cat and rubs the material of her skirt nervously. The man, in short sleeves, seems cold. Spence can see the goose pimples on the man’s arms.

  “Is Joe Magrane pitching today?” the man asks.

  “Y
eah. He’s starting,” says Lee, not taking his eyes from the screen.

  The man says, “Saint Louis sure goes for those lefties.”

  “The Cards wouldn’t know a right-handed pitcher if he knocked ’em in the head,” says Lee.

  Jack Clark is up, and he hits a double for the Cards. Spence tries to lose himself in the slow, careful movements of the game. Baseball is the same situations over and over, but no two turn out alike. Like crops and the weather. Life.

  When the telephone rings, Cat grabs it. Nancy shuts her book on her thumb and lowers her reading glasses. Spence sees Cat’s intake of breath, then her affirmative nod toward them.

  “She’s O.K.,” Cat says, hanging up. “But he thought at first she might have had a slight stroke. When he woke her up, her speech was a little slurred for a minute.”

  “Her words are always slurred when she’s sleepy,” Spence says. “That ain’t nothing.”

  “Well, he decided she was all right. He wanted to wake her up as soon as he could, just to see if she had any nerve damage.”

  “She’s O.K. then,” Nancy says, breaking into a smile. “God, I’m relieved!” She holds her book at arm’s length. “Look how I’m shaking.”

  Spence realizes he is shaking too—all the way to his knees.

  “Thank God,” says Lee. He jams his cap down on his head and turns toward the elevator. “I have to get back to work,” he says. “I’ll see y’all tonight.”

  Lila will be in intensive care that night, and they will have to wait until nine o’clock to see her. They will be allowed to see her for fifteen minutes—no more than two persons at a time. Spence decides to go home for a few hours.

  In the car, the radio plays “Hearts on Fire” and he sings along with it. Then Phil Collins comes on. Spence can’t stand Phil Collins, with his high-pitched yapping, like a pup fastened up in a shed. He turns the radio down. When he drove to the hospital that morning, his head had been full of intolerable imaginings—a funeral in two days. Now his relief empties out his mind, and he drives all the way home as if in a dream.

  At home, a loaf of homemade bread wrapped in tinfoil sits on the deck, with a note, “From Hattie Goebel.” It is still warm. He stuffs the loaf in a kitchen cabinet, then goes out and cranks up the push mower. He mows the patch around the orchard that he missed a few days before. The mower needs oiling. It keeps sputtering. He’s proud of the appearance of his place—well cared for and not trashy. The new siding on the house looks good. After mowing, he reads the newspaper and tries to take a nap, but he can’t get to sleep. He gets up and puts on his boots and heads for the back field with a tow sack and a bucket and a shovel.

  “Come on, Oscar,” he says. “We’ve got work to do.”

  For half an hour, he works at transplanting the marijuana plants from the corn row over to the back edge of Bill’s land across the creek. He doesn’t want to get in trouble with the Frost boys. Maybe Bill thought he was being neighborly, telling Spence about the plants when he might need help with his hospital bills, but it makes Spence angry. He doesn’t want a handout. He has never borrowed, and he has always made good on his farm. But the plants in his corn have been bothering him—not the risk, so much. He doubts if the law would find these few plants; they go after major offenders, and he could always claim the seeds strayed from Bill’s crop. And it’s not that he is being especially virtuous. There’s just something about growing them that seems out of character for him. Instead of being an outlaw, he would actually be in fashion, and he never wanted to follow the crowd. It would be like borrowing to buy a combine, or spraying his fields, or getting a credit card, or mortgaging his house—getting in deeper and deeper, like everyone else. He felt helpless when Nancy lectured him about the plastic bottles, but at the moment he feels he can do something. He can imagine the whole farm planted in this stuff someday; it could take over, like jimsonweed and burdock. But not yet.

  He waters the plants with buckets of water from the creek. He props a drooping plant against a cornstalk. Oscar, wet and muddy from splashing in the creek, flops down at Spence’s feet, spraying water on him.

  “Oscar, you sure love to work, don’t you, boy?” Spence says, pulling a cocklebur from the dog’s shaggy chin.

  Spence walks back to the barn in a state of suspension—the worst over but an air of uncertainty remaining, like waiting out a drought.

  After feeding the calves, he eats a bowl of cereal and a piece of baloney and drinks a glass of milk. The news is on. He washes his teeth and runs the dishwasher. He waters the hanging plants on the deck. He feeds Abraham a can of turkey and giblets. Spence dreads calling the preacher.

  When he returns to the hospital, Lee is waiting for him in the lounge.

  “They moved her to the fourth floor, to the intensive care ward in the heart unit,” Lee says.

  “What’s wrong with her heart?” His own heart somersets.

  “Nothing. They just didn’t have enough beds in the main unit.”

  “Oh. You liked to scared me there for a minute.”

  They crowd into the elevator. There is a hush and a giggle when three more people squeeze in. “The limit’s sixteen!” cries a nervous woman in lime-green pants. “Reckon it’ll quit on us?” someone asks. Spence squirms. “We’ve got too many overweight folks in here!” another woman says cheerfully.

  In the corridor, Spence asks Lee, “Could you do me a favor and call the preacher?”

  “What for?”

  “He wanted to know how she was.”

  “Why can’t you call him?”

  “He makes me nervous.”

  The walls of the fourth floor are painted shades of pink, light tones of blood, like blood you spit out when brushing your teeth. As they walk down the hall, Spence says, “Preachers have this act they go into—one for the sick, one for the grief-stricken, one for weddings. They just switch from one to another like they was dialing a TV channel. And then the bull they start in on is like those get-well cards.”

  “That’s their job,” says Lee.

  Nancy was right. Spence should have taught Lee to farm. If he spent some time out in the fields, he might have a chance to think about things and he wouldn’t make so many excuses. Lee’s always taking up for the wrong people.

  Nancy and Cat are already in the lounge. “She’s doing fine,” Nancy says. “A nurse just told us she’s awake.”

  Cat’s hair is swept up on one side and fastened with an old-fashioned turtle-shell comb. “Did you eat supper?” Cat asks Spence.

  “Some cereal and a piece of baloney.”

  “We went to that new Italian restaurant by the mall,” Cat says, making a face at Spence’s supper. “It was real good.”

  “I don’t like Italian food,” said Spence, wrinkling his nose back at her. “Pizza. Ugh!”

  “Heartburn City,” says Lee to Spence with a grin.

  “We didn’t have pizza,” says Cat. “We had calamari.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Squid,” Cat says, eyeing Lee. “I’m surprised I had the nerve to eat it, but I decided to go for it.”

  The waiting room of the heart unit is large and pleasant, with comfortable chairs and a huge television—a thirty-six-inch, Spence guesses. There is probably more money in heart bypasses than other kinds of surgery, he realizes. People with money probably have more heart trouble because making money is so stressful. The people with stomach problems on the second floor seemed poorer than the people on the fourth floor. A nun slips past the door, almost a hallucination—a penguin. Spence has seen very few nuns, except on TV, but once he saw a nun driving a tractor along a main road, and he puzzled about that for years, inventing histories for her.

  He sits there, the music from a rock-and-roll program on TV going through his veins. No one else is watching except him and Cat. If Lila had died during the operation, he thinks now, he would hear rock-and-roll at her funeral. It would be in his head. Lee laughs at him for listening to rock music, but Spence doesn’t
care. He doesn’t really care what people think most of the time. Yet he knows he couldn’t have that music at her funeral because of what people would think. If she gets through this illness he might take her dancing again—if his back doesn’t act up.

  Cat says, “I’ve got this record. This group is great.”

  Some long-haired group is swinging bright-colored guitars flamboyantly.

  “Their hair looks like they’ve been rolling around in cow mess,” says Spence. Nancy has plunged into her book again, oblivious. “Is your book good?” he asks.

  She nods. “Uh-huh.”

  He should read more, but reading gives him bad headaches. Since he got cable, though, watching TV is an education. When the news shows people in a foreign country, you can tell what the weather is like by what they are wearing. His favorite show is National Geographic. He gets to see places he’d never go to—the ocean floor, the North Pole, Siberia, Australia. He loves seeing unusual animals from all over the world. His grandchildren are smart because of all they are exposed to on TV. Sometimes he is flabbergasted by how much they know. They know about dinosaurs, the Japanese yen, satellite communications—the most unlikely subjects.

  At nine o’clock a nurse says, “Two of you can go in for ten minutes and then the other two can go in.”

  “Come on, Lee,” Cat says. “Let’s you and me go first.”

  They follow the nurse, and Spence says to Nancy, “She’ll be half asleep, on them tubes. She won’t even know they’re there.”

  A moment later he says, “You’re right. I should have learnt Lee to farm.”

  When Nancy and Spence take Cat and Lee’s places at nine-fifteen, Lila is awake but too weak to raise her head. She smiles faintly.

  “Get out of that bed and rattle them pots and pans!” Spence bellows at her. “We’ve got to go milk.”

  “Oh, shoot! I ain’t about to get up and go milk,” she says. “I’ve milked enough cows in my time.”

  She groans and he keeps teasing her, while Nancy places a washrag on Lila’s forehead and gives her some water to sip. Her hair is tousled, and she has on no makeup. Tubes are taped to her wrist, and down her neck is the fresh wound, a long slash clamped together with metal staples. The loose flesh under her chin is pulled tight.