Nancy Culpepper

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “You’ll be needing a few bolts,” he announced, after examining the doors.

  “Could I ask you to block up the letter slot somehow?” I asked. I explained how the door could be opened through the slot.

  Smith flipped the brass plate a couple of times. He frowned. “How would you get the post?”

  “I’m not expecting any letters.” Andy might write, but that didn’t matter. Jack didn’t even know where I was.

  “I could screw it down,” Smith said begrudgingly. He was a heavyset man who looked as though he worked out at a gym. He wore clean, creased green twill. Between bites of his bap, he shot an electric screwdriver into the lock plate of the living-room door and removed some screws. The sound was insect-shrill.

  “Likely this was committed by some Pakis,” he said, pausing in his attack. “The Pakis are worse than the Indians.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I murmured. I was trying to remember where Louise’s parents belonged. I had tried them out in the bedroom, but they looked too disapproving.

  “We have some very aggressive blacks,” Smith went on. “Some of them look you right in the eye.”

  “I wouldn’t jump to conclusions,” I said. I plumped a sofa cushion.

  “But you know how it is with the blacks in your country.” A screw dropped to the floor.

  I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t used to hearing people talk like this, but as an American I didn’t seem to have a right to object. “Have you ever been to America?” I asked.

  “No. But I long to take the kids to Disney World.” He scooped up the screw. “Maybe one day,” he added wistfully.

  After that, I toured London by fury. I walked everywhere, replaying what had happened, hardly seeing the sights. I walked right past Big Ben and didn’t notice until I heard it strike behind me. “Eng-a-land swings, like a pendulum do, bobbies on bicycles two by two”—that song kept going through my head. I walked the streets, dread growing inside me. I saw signs on walls of unoccupied stores: FLY STICKERS WILL BE KNACKERED! It sounded so violent, like “liquidated” or “exterminated.”

  I found that I was talking to myself on the street. A teapot was a grenade. A briefcase could be a car bomb. There were guns. I remembered the time Jack and I went with our little boy to see the crown jewels. It was 1975, at the Tower of London. We were waiting in a long line—Louise would say queue—to see the royal baubles, and an alarm went off. A group of baby-faced young men in military uniforms materialized, their M-16s trained on the tourists. Any one of us might be an IRA terrorist.

  The cacophony on the major streets was earsplitting. On the Pall Mall, the traffic was hurtling pell-mell. The boxy cabs maneuvered like bumper cars, their back wheels holding tight while the front wheels spun in an arc. A blue cab duded up with ads screeched to a halt right in front of me and let me trot the crosswalk. Still angry, I marched to Westminster Abbey, aiming for the Poets’ Corner. I had a bone to pick with the poets. Where were these guys when you needed them? I had to elbow through a crowd of tourists earnestly working on brass-rubbings. A sign warned that pickpockets operated in the area. I never followed directions and now I refused to ask where the Poets’ Corner was. I was sure I’d find them, lurking in their guarded grotto. I walked through a maze of corridors, stepping on the gravestone lids of the dead. A great idea, I thought, walking over the dead. I stomped on their stones, hoping to disturb them. Then I saw an arrow pointing toward the Poets’ Corner. But a velvet rope and a man in a big red costume blocked my way.

  “Why can’t I see the poets?” I demanded.

  “Because it’s past four o’clock,” he said.

  I didn’t know the poets shut up shop at teatime. Slugabeds and layabouts. Pick a poet’s pocket—pocketful of rye? Would prisoners have more self-esteem if their bars had a velvet veneer? I wended my way past a woman in a battery-powered chair that resembled a motor scooter. I skirted the suggested-donation box and plowed around a crash of schoolchildren.

  I left the poets to their tea.

  At the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street I searched for music. Everything was there, rows and racks of CDs and singles of folk and gospel and classical and ragga and reggae and rock and pop and world. The new Rolling Stones blared out over the P.A. No moss on Mick! Then a group I couldn’t identify caught me up in an old-style rock-and-roll rhythm. I had to find out what it was. It was a clue to the new music, all the music I had been reading about but couldn’t hear in the soundless turkey décor of Louise’s flat.

  “What group is playing?” I asked a nose-ringed clerk.

  “Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats, from their greatest-hits CD,” he said, smiling so that his nose ring wiggled. “Circa ’seventyeight, that song.”

  Where had I been all these years? Why didn’t I know this? Did this mean I was old? The song ended. The Virgin Megastore was so huge and so stimulating I felt my blood sugar dropping. There was too much to take in. Whole walls of Elvis.

  At the British Museum, I stared at ancient manuscripts. I saw something called a chronological scourge. It was a handwritten manuscript in the form of a “flagellation,” an instrument used in ritual self-discipline for religious purposes. The chronicle was a history of the world, written on strips of paper streaming from the end of a stick. There was a large cluster of the shreds, exactly like a pompon. I wondered if Andy was flagellating himself at the monastery. A paper scourge wouldn’t hurt. It would only tickle and annoy, like gnats. Birch-bark twigs would give pleasure. Rattan would smart and dig. Barbed wire would maim.

  For two days, I kept telephoning Louise, getting no answer at the villa in Italy where she was supposed to be. Then I got an answering machine, Louise in Italian. I guessed at the message, heard the beep, and blurted out the story. “Don’t worry,” I said. “There wasn’t any damage. Just the telly and the radio and nothing broken. I had to change the locks.” I asked her to let me know about the insurance. I didn’t tell her about the gagged letter slot and how I found her mail littering the mews because I kept missing the postman. I knew she would say “telly” and not “TV.” Louise had gotten so English she would probably have tea during an air raid.

  I sat in a cheap Italian trattoria and drank a bottle of sparkle-water. The waitress brought some vegetable antipasto. Then she brought bread. I ate slowly, trying to get my bearings. I knew what Andy would do: Purify, simplify, and retreat. He’d listen to his Enya records, those hollow whispers. I felt a deep hole inside. The family at a table nearby was having a jovial evening, although I could not make out most of their conversation. A young man, perhaps in his thirties, had apparently met his parents for dinner. The father ordered Scrumpy Jack and the son ordered a bottle of red wine. The mother pulled out a package from a bag. It was gift-wrapped in sturdy, plain paper. The young man opened it—underwear!—and discreetly repackaged it. He seemed grateful.

  Another young man arrived, carrying a briefcase. The two young men kissed on the lips. Then the new arrival kissed the mother and shook hands with the father. He sat down at the end of the table— diagonally across from the birthday boy—and removed a package from his briefcase. It traveled across the table. Some kind of book, I thought. No, it was a leather case filled with what looked like apothecary jars. The birthday boy seemed elated. He lit a cigarette just as a young woman swept in, wearing a long purple knit tank dress with a white undershirt and white high-heeled basketball shoes. Her hair was short, as if Sinead O’Connor hadn’t shaved in a week or two. She handed the boy of the hour a present. I decided she was his sister. But maybe they weren’t even a family, I thought. Maybe I was just jumping to conclusions, the way the locksmith did.

  My main course arrived. Something with aubergines and courgettes. I couldn’t remember what courgettes were and couldn’t identify them in the dish. I didn’t know why the Italian menu used French words. I wondered if Louise had learned Italian because Italy was where she learned of her mother’s death. Maybe she had wanted to translate her memories of those foreign so
unds we heard that unforgettable day at the American Express office, near the Spanish Steps, when she got the news from America.

  Finally, I spoke to Louise on the telephone. “Don’t worry about this little episode, Nancy,” she assured me. She had no hidden valuables that might be missing. We discussed the insurance details. I’d get my hundred dollars, she’d get her telly.

  “The police said it might be Gypsies that live nearby,” I offered.

  “Oh, but those are proper Gypsies,” she said. “They don’t live in the council estates.”

  Council estates meant something like public housing. “Proper Gypsies?” I said, but she was already into a story about how a cultural attaché’s estranged wife showed up in Rome. The Gypsies must live in regular flats like Louise’s, I thought. In America, no one would ever use a phrase like “proper Gypsies.” Yes, they would, I realized. It was like saying “a good nigger.”

  “Louise,” I said firmly. “I’m very disturbed. Listen.” I wanted to ask her about the Indians and Pakistanis, but I couldn’t phrase it. Instead, I said, “Remember when we went to Europe on five dollars a day?”

  “More like six,” she said with a quick little ha-ha.

  “You know how I didn’t know what to say to you when your mother died? I was useless, not a comfort at all.”

  “Why are you upset about that now?”

  “I just wanted to tell you I’m really sorry.”

  “Look, Nancy,” Louise said, in mingled kindness and exasperation. “I know you’re unnerved about being burgled. But you got the locks changed, so you’ll be O.K. This is not like you. I believe you’re just not adjusted to your separation from Jack.”

  “It’s not that,” I said quickly. “It’s the world. And the meaning of justice. Major stuff.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Ciao, Louise.”

  At a little shop, I bought detergent and a packet of “flapjacks,” just to find out what the Brits meant by the term. I went to a laundrette. How did Louise do her wash? The laundrette had a few plastic chairs baking in a sunny window. Two Indian women cleverly bandaged in filmy cotton were washing piles of similar cotton wrappings. They were laughing. One said, “She was doing this thing that thing.” She had beautiful hands, which she used like a musical accompaniment to her speech. It dawned on me that Louise’s maid did her wash, probably taking it home with her to her own neighborhood laundrette. I wondered if the proper Gypsies had maids. Technically, wouldn’t a proper Gypsy be one that fit all the images? Gold tooth, earrings, the works? I sat on one of the hot plastic chairs. In my pocket I had a fax from Andy—a fax from a monastery! I didn’t think I would answer his simple-Simon missive. I couldn’t imagine a monk faxing. I waited in the laundrette, eating the “flapjacks.” They were a kind of Scottish oat cake mortared with treacle. The Scottish called crumpets “pancakes.” They had tea very late, giving the impression they couldn’t afford dinner. But the English had afternoon tea just early enough to make it seem they didn’t have to work during the day. The English said “starters” for appetizers, preferring a crude word to a French word. Their language was proper yet at times strangely without euphemism. They ate things they called toad-in-the-hole, bubble-and-squeak, spotted dick, dead baby. They ate jacket potatoes and drank hand-pulled beers. I couldn’t decide whether this was terribly strange or very familiar.

  I threw my jeans and T-shirts and socks into a spin dryer called The Extractor. It was a huge barrel encrusted with ancient grime and thick cables of electricity. It looked like a relic of a brutal technology. Dark satanic mills.

  At Trafalgar Square, trying to get from Nelson’s Column to Charing Cross, I got caught up in a demo of some kind. With my plastic bag of laundry, I squeezed among a bunch of punks with electric-blue and orange Mohawks. Spiritless teenagers in ragged, sloppy outfits propelled me through a flock of pigeons. I kept one hand on my belly-bag; the pickpockets from Westminster Abbey were probably here. Maybe poets, too. I couldn’t tell what the protest was, something about an employment bill. I saw turbans and saris, and I heard hot, rapid Cockney and the lilt of Caribbean speech and the startled accents of tourists. I could hardly move. My plastic bag of laundry followed me like a hump. Although it was scary, there was something thrilling about being carried along by the crowd. I felt all of us swirling together to a hard, new rhythm. My hair was blowing. I could feel a tickle of English rain. A man next to me said “Four, four, four,” and the woman with him beat time in the air with her fists. Her earrings jangled and glinted. The scene blurred and then grew intensely clear by gradations. It was like the Magic Eye, in which a senseless picture turns into a 3-D scene when you diverge your eyes in an unfocused stare. As you relax into a deeper vision, the Magic Eye takes you inside the picture and you can move around in it and then a hidden image floats forward. Inside the phantasmagoria of the crowd, everything became clear: the stripes and plaids and royal blue and pink, the dreadlocks and Union Jacks. I saw T-shirts with large, red tie-dyed hearts, silver jewelry, gauzy skirts, a large hat with a feather, a yellow T-shirt that said STAFF. I saw a coat with many colors of packaged condoms glued all over it. The surprise image that jumped into the foreground was myself, transcendent. All my life I had had the sense that any special, intense experience—a sunset, the gorgeousness of flowers, a bird soaring—was incomplete and insufficient, because I was always so aware it would end that I would look at my watch and wait. This was like that, in reverse. I knew the crush of the crowd had to cease. It was like an illusion of safety, this myth of one’s own invincibility.

  Finally, I reached a crosswalk where a policeman had halted traffic and was rushing people across the street. I landed in front of the National Gallery. I joined a smaller throng inside and found myself staring at some sixteenth-century Italian crowd scenes and round Madonnas. The thumping piano of “Lady Madonna” surged through my head.

  I thought about the first time I visited England. It was in the summer of 1966, and I was alone in London for a few days because Louise had gone on ahead to deal with her mother’s effects. It had been five weeks since her mother died. I was left alone, emptied of Louise and her grief. I was going home soon. The Beatles were going to America, too, to begin what turned out to be their last tour there. Their records were being burned in the States because John Lennon had commented offhandedly that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. I figured he was right. The morning newspaper gave their flight number and departure time. It was a summons to their fans to wish them well on a dangerous, heroic journey. The Beatles’ vibrant rebellion had taken a somber turn. I decided to go to the airport and try to get a glimpse of them because I was young and alone and I loved them fiercely, more than I’d ever loved Jesus. I took the tube to the Heathrow station, then had to catch a shuttle bus. While I was waiting, a motorcade turned a corner right in front of me. It was a couple of police vehicles, with one of those black cabs sandwiched between them. I realized it was the Beatles being escorted to their flight. I could see vague shapes in the back of the cab. I waved frantically. Through the dim glass I couldn’t tell which was which. But I believed they saw me, and I knew they were thinking about America, cringing with dread at the grilling they faced. They were looking at me, I was sure, and I was looking at my own reflection in the dark glass.

  The rest is history.

  2002

  The Heirs

  1

  In February 2002, in the attic of her grandmother’s house, Nancy found a packet of letters and a small stick of dynamite in a shoe box.

  Nancy was born here at the Culpepper homeplace in 1943, and she had grown up on the farm, but she had not lived there for many years. Now all the older generations of her family were gone, and the family farm had come to her, to be split with her younger brother and sister. The land was now rented out to soybean farmers, and the house, unoccupied for a year, had deteriorated. Whenever she returned to the farm, she always felt intimate with it, filled with an overpowering love for the familiar c
ontours of the fields and the thick fencerows and the meandering creeks. The farm had shaped the family for generations, as if each individual had been carved by the wash of the creek and the breeze of the heavy oaks. It was the place she had always called her real home, and it had endured. Yet it had changed over time, just as she had herself, and now the farm would pass from her life. She wanted to approach the impending sale to a development consortium with some detachment. She could not live here. Her parents were dead. And the greatest old oak trees had fallen, split by lightning. The barn had burned. The other house, the small wood-frame where she had grown up, had been razed. The smokehouse, the corncrib, and the henhouse disappeared years ago.

  In a motel room on the bypass around the small town, Nancy filled the ice bucket with water and set the stick of dynamite in it. The stick, about eight inches long, was rust red, crumbling slightly on the rim. Perhaps it was only a Roman candle, she thought. She remembered fireworks at Christmas when she was a child—never on the Fourth of July, when the family always stayed home because of holiday death tolls.

  Nancy placed the shoe box on the bed, with her laptop and book satchel. She felt comfortable in the anonymity of motels, where she could be alone, uninvolved with her surroundings. She unlaced her hiking boots and slid them off. Settling herself on the bed, with the pillows behind her, she began to examine the contents of the box. She forced herself to contain her eagerness; she wanted to savor the details. She was hoping for family secrets, for clues that would illuminate her own life. Along with the letters was a newspaper clipping, an ad for Detroit Special overalls: “They wear like a pig’s nose.” In the bottom of the box were a pink self-covered button, several large hairpins, and a small booklet about a corn drill. She flipped through the booklet, recalling how as a teenager she rode on such a drill behind her father’s tractor, helping him plant corn one spring. She could almost feel the metal seat—hard, punctured with holes arranged in a daisy design. Holes to aerate one’s bottom. She remembered sitting there for hours, operating the seed hoppers. A day of labor seemed like a year, and her sunburn got infected.