Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  2001 Modern Library Edition

  Copyright © 1982 by Bobbie Ann Mason

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  MODERN LIBRARY and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This work was originally published in 1982 by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. This edition is published by arrangement with the author.

  This page constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.

  “Shiloh,” “Offerings,” “Nancy Culpepper,” and “Third Monday” appeared originally in The New Yorker. “Detroit Skyline, 1949,” “A New-Wave Format,” “Drawing Names,” and “The Retreat” appeared originally in Atlantic Monthly. “Still Life with Watermelon” first appeared in Redbook. “Old Things” first appeared in somewhat different form in The North American Review. “The Climber” first appeared in the Washington Post Magazine. “Residents and Transients” first appeared in New Boston Review. “The Ocean” first appeared in somewhat different form in Bloodroot under the title “Recreation.” “Graveyard Day” first appeared in somewhat different form in Ascent.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Mason, Bobbie Ann.

  Shiloh and other stories / Bobbie Ann Mason.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80632-1

  1. Kentucky—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.A7877 S49 2001

  813′.54—dc21 2001019418

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  SHILOH

  THE ROOKERS

  DETROIT SKYLINE, 1949

  OFFERINGS

  STILL LIFE WITH WATERMELON

  OLD THINGS

  DRAWING NAMES

  THE CLIMBER

  RESIDENTS AND TRANSIENTS

  THE RETREAT

  THE OCEAN

  GRAVEYARD DAY

  NANCY CULPEPPER

  LYING DOGGO

  A NEW-WAVE FORMAT

  THIRD MONDAY

  Permissions Credits

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  SHILOH

  Leroy Moffitt’s wife, Norma Jean, is working on her pectorals. She lifts three-pound dumbbells to warm up, then progresses to a twenty-pound barbell. Standing with her legs apart, she reminds Leroy of Wonder Woman.

  “I’d give anything if I could just get these muscles to where they’re real hard,” says Norma Jean. “Feel this arm. It’s not as hard as the other one.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re right-handed,” says Leroy, dodging as she swings the barbell in an arc.

  “Do you think so?”

  “Sure.”

  Leroy is a truckdriver. He injured his leg in a highway accident four months ago, and his physical therapy, which involves weights and a pulley, prompted Norma Jean to try building herself up. Now she is attending a body-building class. Leroy has been collecting temporary disability since his tractor-trailer jackknifed in Missouri, badly twisting his left leg in its socket. He has a steel pin in his hip. He will probably not be able to drive his rig again. It sits in the backyard, like a gigantic bird that has flown home to roost. Leroy has been home in Kentucky for three months, and his leg is almost healed, but the accident frightened him and he does not want to drive any more long hauls. He is not sure what to do next. In the meantime, he makes things from craft kits. He started by building a miniature log cabin from notched Popsicle sticks. He varnished it and placed it on the TV set, where it remains. It reminds him of a rustic Nativity scene. Then he tried string art (sailing ships on black velvet), a macramé owl kit, a snap-together B-17 Flying Fortress, and a lamp made out of a model truck, with a light fixture screwed in the top of the cab. At first the kits were diversions, something to kill time, but now he is thinking about building a full-scale log house from a kit. It would be considerably cheaper than building a regular house, and besides, Leroy has grown to appreciate how things are put together. He has begun to realize that in all the years he was on the road he never took time to examine anything. He was always flying past scenery.

  “They won’t let you build a log cabin in any of the new subdivisions,” Norma Jean tells him.

  “They will if I tell them it’s for you,” he says, teasing her. Ever since they were married, he has promised Norma Jean he would build her a new home one day. They have always rented, and the house they live in is small and nondescript. It does not even feel like a home, Leroy realizes now.

  Norma Jean works at the Rexall drugstore, and she has acquired an amazing amount of information about cosmetics. When she explains to Leroy the three stages of complexion care, involving creams, toners, and moisturizers, he thinks happily of other petroleum products—axle grease, diesel fuel. This is a connection between him and Norma Jean. Since he has been home, he has felt unusually tender about his wife and guilty over his long absences. But he can’t tell what she feels about him. Norma Jean has never complained about his traveling; she has never made hurt remarks, like calling his truck a “widow-maker.” He is reasonably certain she has been faithful to him, but he wishes she would celebrate his permanent homecoming more happily. Norma Jean is often startled to find Leroy at home, and he thinks she seems a little disappointed about it. Perhaps he reminds her too much of the early days of their marriage, before he went on the road. They had a child who died as an infant, years ago. They never speak about their memories of Randy, which have almost faded, but now that Leroy is home all the time, they sometimes feel awkward around each other, and Leroy wonders if one of them should mention the child. He has the feeling that they are waking up out of a dream together—that they must create a new marriage, start afresh. They are lucky they are still married. Leroy has read that for most people losing a child destroys the marriage—or else he heard this on Donahue. He can’t always remember where he learns things anymore.

  At Christmas, Leroy bought an electric organ for Norma Jean. She used to play the piano when she was in high school. “It don’t leave you,” she told him once. “It’s like riding a bicycle.”

  The new instrument had so many keys and buttons that she was bewildered by it at first. She touched the keys tentatively, pushed some buttons, then pecked out “Chopsticks.” It came out in an amplified fox-trot rhythm, with marimba sounds.

  “It’s an orchestra!” she cried.

  The organ had a pecan-look finish and eighteen preset chords, with optional flute, violin, trumpet, clarinet, and banjo accompaniments. Norma Jean mastered the organ almost immediately. At first she played Christmas songs. Then she bought The Sixties Songbook and learned every tune in it, adding variations to each with the rows of brightly colored buttons.

  “I didn’t like these old songs back then,” she said. “But I have this crazy feeling I missed something.”

  “You didn’t miss a thing,” said Leroy.

  Leroy likes to lie on the couch and smoke a joint and listen to Norma Jean play “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” and “I’ll Be Back.” He is back again. After fifteen years on the road, he is finally settling down with the woman he loves. She is still pretty. Her skin is flawless. Her frosted curls resemble pencil trimmings.

  —

  Now that Leroy has come home to stay, he notices how much the town has changed. Subdivisions are spreading across western Kentucky like an oil slick. The sign at the edge of town says “Pop: 11,500�
��—only seven hundred more than it said twenty years before. Leroy can’t figure out who is living in all the new houses. The farmers who used to gather around the courthouse square on Saturday afternoons to play checkers and spit tobacco juice have gone. It has been years since Leroy has thought about the farmers, and they have disappeared without his noticing.

  Leroy meets a kid named Stevie Hamilton in the parking lot at the new shopping center. While they pretend to be strangers meeting over a stalled car, Stevie tosses an ounce of marijuana under the front seat of Leroy’s car. Stevie is wearing orange jogging shoes and a T-shirt that says CHATTAHOOCHEE SUPER-RAT. His father is a prominent doctor who lives in one of the expensive subdivisions in a new white-columned brick house that looks like a funeral parlor. In the phone book under his name there is a separate number, with the listing “Teenagers.”

  “Where do you get this stuff?” asks Leroy. “From your pappy?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Stevie says. He is slit-eyed and skinny. “What else you got?”

  “What you interested in?”

  “Nothing special. Just wondered.”

  Leroy used to take speed on the road. Now he has to go slowly. He needs to be mellow. He leans back against the car and says, “I’m aiming to build me a log house, soon as I get time. My wife, though, I don’t think she likes the idea.”

  “Well, let me know when you want me again,” Stevie says. He has a cigarette in his cupped palm, as though sheltering it from the wind. He takes a long drag, then stomps it on the asphalt and slouches away.

  Stevie’s father was two years ahead of Leroy in high school. Leroy is thirty-four. He married Norma Jean when they were both eighteen, and their child Randy was born a few months later, but he died at the age of four months and three days. He would be about Stevie’s age now. Norma Jean and Leroy were at the drive-in, watching a double feature (Dr. Strangelove and Lover Come Back), and the baby was sleeping in the back seat. When the first movie ended, the baby was dead. It was the sudden infant death syndrome. Leroy remembers handing Randy to a nurse at the emergency room, as though he were offering her a large doll as a present. A dead baby feels like a sack of flour. “It just happens sometimes,” said the doctor, in what Leroy always recalls as a nonchalant tone. Leroy can hardly remember the child anymore, but he still sees vividly a scene from Dr. Strangelove in which the President of the United States was talking in a folksy voice on the hot line to the Soviet premier about the bomber accidentally headed toward Russia. He was in the War Room, and the world map was lit up. Leroy remembers Norma Jean standing catatonically beside him in the hospital and himself thinking: Who is this strange girl? He had forgotten who she was. Now scientists are saying that crib death is caused by a virus. Nobody knows anything, Leroy thinks. The answers are always changing.

  When Leroy gets home from the shopping center, Norma Jean’s mother, Mabel Beasley, is there. Until this year, Leroy has not realized how much time she spends with Norma Jean. When she visits, she inspects the closets and then the plants, informing Norma Jean when a plant is droopy or yellow. Mabel calls the plants “flowers,” although there are never any blooms. She always notices if Norma Jean’s laundry is piling up. Mabel is a short, overweight woman whose tight, brown-dyed curls look more like a wig than the actual wig she sometimes wears. Today she has brought Norma Jean an off-white dust ruffle she made for the bed; Mabel works in a custom-upholstery shop.

  “This is the tenth one I made this year,” Mabel says. “I got started and couldn’t stop.”

  “It’s real pretty,” says Norma Jean.

  “Now we can hide things under the bed,” says Leroy, who gets along with his mother-in-law primarily by joking with her. Mabel has never really forgiven him for disgracing her by getting Norma Jean pregnant. When the baby died, she said that fate was mocking her.

  “What’s that thing?” Mabel says to Leroy in a loud voice, pointing to a tangle of yarn on a piece of canvas.

  Leroy holds it up for Mabel to see. “It’s my needlepoint,” he explains. “This is a Star Trek pillow cover.”

  “That’s what a woman would do,” says Mabel. “Great day in the morning!”

  “All the big football players on TV do it,” he says.

  “Why, Leroy, you’re always trying to fool me. I don’t believe you for one minute. You don’t know what to do with yourself—that’s the whole trouble. Sewing!”

  “I’m aiming to build us a log house,” says Leroy. “Soon as my plans come.”

  “Like heck you are,” says Norma Jean. She takes Leroy’s needlepoint and shoves it into a drawer. “You have to find a job first. Nobody can afford to build now anyway.”

  Mabel straightens her girdle and says, “I still think before you get tied down y’all ought to take a little run to Shiloh.”

  “One of these days, Mama,” Norma Jean says impatiently.

  Mabel is talking about Shiloh, Tennessee. For the past few years, she has been urging Leroy and Norma Jean to visit the Civil War battleground there. Mabel went there on her honeymoon—the only real trip she ever took. Her husband died of a perforated ulcer when Norma Jean was ten, but Mabel, who was accepted into the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1975, is still preoccupied with going back to Shiloh.

  “I’ve been to kingdom come and back in that truck out yonder,” Leroy says to Mabel, “but we never yet set foot in that battleground. Ain’t that something? How did I miss it?”

  “It’s not even that far,” Mabel says.

  After Mabel leaves, Norma Jean reads to Leroy from a list she has made. “Things you could do,” she announces. “You could get a job as a guard at Union Carbide, where they’d let you set on a stool. You could get on at the lumberyard. You could do a little carpenter work, if you want to build so bad. You could—”

  “I can’t do something where I’d have to stand up all day.”

  “You ought to try standing up all day behind a cosmetics counter. It’s amazing that I have strong feet, coming from two parents that never had strong feet at all.” At the moment Norma Jean is holding on to the kitchen counter, raising her knees one at a time as she talks. She is wearing two-pound ankle weights.

  “Don’t worry,” says Leroy. “I’ll do something.”

  “You could truck calves to slaughter for somebody. You wouldn’t have to drive any big old truck for that.”

  “I’m going to build you this house,” says Leroy. “I want to make you a real home.”

  “I don’t want to live in any log cabin.”

  “It’s not a cabin. It’s a house.”

  “I don’t care. It looks like a cabin.”

  “You and me together could lift those logs. It’s just like lifting weights.”

  Norma Jean doesn’t answer. Under her breath, she is counting. Now she is marching through the kitchen. She is doing goose steps.

  —

  Before his accident, when Leroy came home he used to stay in the house with Norma Jean, watching TV in bed and playing cards. She would cook fried chicken, picnic ham, chocolate pie—all his favorites. Now he is home alone much of the time. In the mornings, Norma Jean disappears, leaving a cooling place in the bed. She eats a cereal called Body Buddies, and she leaves the bowl on the table, with the soggy tan balls floating in a milk puddle. He sees things about Norma Jean that he never realized before. When she chops onions, she stares off into a corner, as if she can’t bear to look. She puts on her house slippers almost precisely at nine o’clock every evening and nudges her jogging shoes under the couch. She saves bread heels for the birds. Leroy watches the birds at the feeder. He notices the peculiar way goldfinches fly past the window. They close their wings, then fall, then spread their wings to catch and lift themselves. He wonders if they close their eyes when they fall. Norma Jean closes her eyes when they are in bed. She wants the lights turned out. Even then, he is sure she closes her eyes.

  He goes for long drives around town. He tends to drive a car rather careles
sly. Power steering and an automatic shift make a car feel so small and inconsequential that his body is hardly involved in the driving process. His injured leg stretches out comfortably. Once or twice he has almost hit something, but even the prospect of an accident seems minor in a car. He cruises the new subdivisions, feeling like a criminal rehearsing for a robbery. Norma Jean is probably right about a log house being inappropriate here in the new subdivisions. All the houses look grand and complicated. They depress him.

  One day when Leroy comes home from a drive he finds Norma Jean in tears. She is in the kitchen making a potato and mushroom-soup casserole, with grated-cheese topping. She is crying because her mother caught her smoking.

  “I didn’t hear her coming. I was standing here puffing away pretty as you please,” Norma Jean says, wiping her eyes.

  “I knew it would happen sooner or later,” says Leroy, putting his arm around her.

  “She don’t know the meaning of the word ‘knock,’ ” says Norma Jean. “It’s a wonder she hadn’t caught me years ago.”

  “Think of it this way,” Leroy says. “What if she caught me with a joint?”

  “You better not let her!” Norma Jean shrieks. “I’m warning you, Leroy Moffitt!”

  “I’m just kidding. Here, play me a tune. That’ll help you relax.”

  Norma Jean puts the casserole in the oven and sets the timer. Then she plays a ragtime tune, with horns and banjo, as Leroy lights up a joint and lies on the couch, laughing to himself about Mabel’s catching him at it. He thinks of Stevie Hamilton—a doctor’s son pushing grass. Everything is funny. The whole town seems crazy and small. He is reminded of Virgil Mathis, a boastful policeman Leroy used to shoot pool with. Virgil recently led a drug bust in a back room at a bowling alley, where he seized ten thousand dollars’ worth of marijuana. The newspaper had a picture of him holding up the bags of grass and grinning widely. Right now, Leroy can imagine Virgil breaking down the door and arresting him with a lungful of smoke. Virgil would probably have been alerted to the scene because of all the racket Norma Jean is making. Now she sounds like a hard-rock band. Norma Jean is terrific. When she switches to a Latin-rhythm version of “Sunshine Superman,” Leroy hums along. Norma Jean’s foot goes up and down, up and down.