Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “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.

  —

  When the telephone rings at five o’clock one morning, Mary Lou is certain there must be bad news from Judy. As she runs to the kitchen to answer the telephone, her mind runs through dope, suicide, dorm fires. The man on the phone has a loud voice that blares out at her. He makes her guess who he is. He turns out to be Ed Williams, her long-lost brother. Mary Lou is speechless, having concluded several years ago that he must be dead. Ed had gone to Texas for his health, traveling with a woman with a dark complexion and pierced ears. Now he tells Mary Lou he is married to that woman, named Linda, and they are living in California with her two children from a former marriage.

  “What do you look like?” asks Mary Lou.

  “I’m a beanpole. I have to bend over to make a shadow.”

  Mary Lou says, “I’m old and fat and ugly. Mack would whip me to hear that. I’m not really, but after nine years, you’d know the difference. It’s been nine years, Ed Williams. I could kill you for doing us like that.”

  “I just finished building me a house, but I don’t have a thing I want to put in it except a washer and dryer.”

  “All the girls are gone. Judy’s in college—first one to go. We’re proud. She says she’s going to make a doctor. Betty and Janie are married, with younguns.”

  “I’ve got me a camper and a pickup and a retirement lot,” Ed says. “What’s Mack up to?”

  “Oh, he’s so lonesome with all the girls gone that he’s acting peculiar.”

  Disturbed and excited, Mary Lou burns the bacon while she’s telling Mack about the call. Mack seems surprised that Ed is still with the same woman.

  “How did she get him wrapped around her little finger? Ed would never even stay in one place long enough to get a crop out.”

  Mary Lou shoves Mack’s plate in front of him. “I thought to my soul he was dead. When he went out there, he looked terrible. He thought he had TB. But it was just like him not to write or call or say boo.”

  “Ed always was wild. I bet he was drunk.”

  Mary Lou sits down to eat. Cautiously, she says, “He wants us to come out and see him.”

  “Why can’t he come here?”

  “He’s got a family now. He’s tied down.”

  Mack flips through the Old Farmer’s Almanac as he eats.

  Mary Lou says, “We could go out there. We’re not tied down.”

  Mack fastens his finger on a page. “What if Judy wanted to come home? She’d have to stay here by herself.”

  “You beat all I’ve ever seen, Mack.” Mary Lou smears jelly on her toast and eats a bite. She says, “Ed said he just got to thinking how he wanted to hear from home. He said Christmas was coming up and—you want to know something, Mack? Ed was on my mind all one day last week. And then he calls, just like that. I must have had a premonition. What does the Farmer’s Almanac say to that?”

  Mack points to a weather chart. “It says here we’re due for a mild winter—no snow hardly a-tall. But I don’t believe it. I believe we’re going to have snow before Christmas.”

  Mack sounds so serious. He sounds like the President delivering a somber message on the economy. Mary Lou doesn’t know what to think.

  —

  The next evening at Clausie’s house, the Rookers are elated over Mary Lou’s news, but she doesn’t go into details about her brother’s bad reputation.

  “It sounded just like him,” she says. “His voice was just as clear.”

  Clausie urges Mary Lou to persuade Mack to go to California.

  “Oh, we
could never afford it,” says Mary Lou. “I’m afraid to even bring it up.”

  “It’s awful far,” says Thelma. “My oldest girl’s daughter went out in May of seventy-three. She left the day school was out.”

  “Did he say what he was doing?” Edda asks Mary Lou.

  “He said he just built him a house and didn’t have anything he wanted to put in it but a washer and dryer. Mack’s making fun of me for carrying on so, but he never liked Ed anyway. Ed was always a little wild.”

  For refreshments, Clausie has made lemon chiffon cake and boiled custard. Mary Lou loves being at Clausie’s. Her house is like her chiffon cakes, all soft surfaces and pleasant colors, and she has a new factory-waxed Congoleum floor in her kitchen, patterned after a brick wall.

  When Clausie clears away the dishes, she pats Mary Lou’s hand and says, “Well, maybe your brother will come back home, if you all can’t go out. Sounds like his mind’s on his family now.”

  “You and Mack need to go more,” says Edda.

  “You ought to get Mack out square-dancing!” says Clausie, who belongs to a square-dancing club.

  Mary Lou has to laugh, that idea is so farfetched.

  “My fiftieth wedding anniversary would have been day before yesterday,” says Thelma, whose husband had died the year before.

  “It’s too bad Otis couldn’t have lived just a little longer,” says Clausie sympathetically.

  “He bought us eight grave plots. Otis wanted me and him to have plenty of room.”

  The widows compare prices of caskets.

  “Law, I wouldn’t want to be cremated the way some of them are doing now,” says Edda. “To save space.”

  “Me neither,” says Clausie with a whoop. “Did y’all see one of them Russians on television while back? At his funeral there was this horse and buggy pulling the body, and instead of a casket there was this little-bitty vase propped up there. It was real odd looking.”

  “The very idea!” cries Edda. “Keeping somebody in a vase on the mantel. Somebody might use it for a ashtray.”

  Clausie and Edda and Thelma are all laughing. Mary Lou shuffles the cards distractedly, the way Mack flips through the Old Farmer’s Almanac, as if some wisdom might rub off.

  “Come on, y’all, let’s play,” she says.

  But the women cannot settle down and concentrate on the game yet. They are still laughing, overflowing with good humor. Mary Lou shuffles the cards endlessly, as though she can never get them exactly right.

  ——

  Mack hardly watches TV anymore, except when the Rookers are there. He sits in his armchair reading. He belongs to a book club. Since Judy went away to college, he has read Shōgun, Rage of Angels, The Clowns of God, and The Covenant. He read parts of Cosmos, which Mary Lou brought him from the library. He does not believe anything he has read in Cosmos. It was not on TV in their part of the country. Now he is struggling along with The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. When he reads that, his face is set in a painful frown.

  Mary Lou delivers a gun cabinet to a young couple in a trailer park. How they can afford a gun cabinet, she has no idea. She picks up some sandpaper for Mack. Mack will never make a list. He sends her to town for one or two things at a time. At home, he apologizes for not going on the errand himself. He is rubbing a piece of wood with a rag.

  “Look at this,” he says excitedly, showing Mary Lou a sketch of some shelves. “I decided what I want to make Judy for Christmas, for a surprise.”

  The sketch is an intricate design with small compartments.

  “Judy called while you were gone,” Mack says. “After I talked to her, I got an inspiration. I’m making her this for her dorm room. It’s going to have a place here for her turntable, and slots for records. It’s called a home entertainment center.”

  “It’s pretty. What did Judy call for?”

  “She’s coming home tomorrow. Her roommate quit school, and Judy’s coming home early to study for her exams next week.”

  “What happened to her roommate?”

  “She wouldn’t say. She must be in some kind of trouble, though.”

  “Is Judy all right?”

  “Yeah. After she called, I just got to thinking that I wanted to do something nice for her.” Mack is fitting sandpaper onto his sander, using a screwdriver to roll it in. Suddenly he says, “You wouldn’t go off and leave me, would you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  Mack sets down the sander and takes her by the shoulders, then holds her close to him. He smells like turpentine. “You’re always wanting to run around,” he says. “You might get ideas.”

  “Don’t worry,” says Mary Lou. “I wouldn’t think of leaving you.” She can’t help adding sarcastically, “You’d starve.”

  “You might go off to find Ed.”

  “Well, not in that pickup anyway,” she says. “The brakes are bad.”

  When he releases her, he looks happy. He turns on the sander and runs it across the piece of wood, moving with the grain. When he turns off the sander and begins rubbing away the fine dust with a tack rag, Mary Lou says, “People were always jealous of Ed. The only reason he ever got in trouble was that people picked on him because he carried so much money around with him. People heard he had money, and when he’d pull into town in that rig he drove, the police would think up some excuse to run him in. People were just jealous. Everything he touched turned to money.”

  The way Mack is rubbing the board with the tack rag makes Mary Lou think of Aladdin and his lamp. He rubs and rubs, nodding when she speaks.

  —

  Judy drives a little Chevette she bought with money she earned working at the Burger Chef. She arrives at suppertime the next day with a pizza and a tote bag of books. Mary Lou serves green beans, corn, and slaw with the pizza. She and Mack hover over their daughter. At their insistence, Judy tries to explain what happened to her roommate.

  “Stephanie had a crush on this Western Civ professor and she made it into a big thing. Now her boyfriend is giving her a real hard time. He accused her of running around with the teacher, but she didn’t. Now he’s mad at her, and she just took off to straighten out her head.”

  “Did she go back home to her mama and daddy?” Mary Lou asks.

  Judy shakes her head no, and her hair flies around like a dust mop being shaken. Mary Lou almost expects things to fly out. Judy’s hair is curly and flyaway. She has put something on it. Judy is wearing a seashell on a chain around her neck.

  “This pizza’s cold,” says Judy. She won’t touch the green beans.

  Mack says, “I don’t see why she won’t stay and finish her tests at least. Now she’ll have to pay for a whole extra semester.”

  “Well, I hope she don’t go off the deep end like her mama,” says Mary Lou. Judy once told them that Stephanie’s mother had had several nervous breakdowns.

  “Her daddy don’t eat meat a-tall?” asks Mack.

  “No. He’s a vegetarian.”

  “And he don’t get sick?”

  Judy shakes her head again.

  After supper, Judy dumps out the contents of her tote bag on the love seat. She has a math book, a science book, something called A Rhetoric for the Eighties, and a heavy psychology book. She sits cross-legged on the love seat, explaining quantum mechanics to Mary Lou and Mack. She calls her teacher Bob.

  Judy says, “It’s not that weird. It’s just the study of elementary particles—the littlest things in the world, smaller than atoms. There’s some things called photons that disappear if you look for them. Nobody can find them.”

  “How do they know they’re there, then?” asks Mack skeptically.

  “Where do they go?” Mary Lou asks.

  The seashell bounces between Judy’s breasts as she talks excitedly, moving her arms like a cheerleader. She is wearing a plaid flannel shirt with the cuffs rolled back. She says, “If you try to separate them, they disappear. They don’t even exist except in a group. Bob says this is one of the most important
discoveries in the history of the world. He says it just explodes all the old ideas about physics.”

  Bob is not the same teacher Stephanie had the crush on. That teacher’s name is Tom. Mary Lou has this much straight. Mack is pacing the floor, the way he does sometimes when Judy doesn’t come home on the weekend.

  “I thought it was philosophy you were taking,” he says.

  “No, physics.”

  “Mack’s been reading up on philosophy,” says Mary Lou. “He thought you were taking philosophy.”

  “It’s similar,” Judy says. “In quantum mechanics, there’s no final answer. Anything you look at might have a dozen different meanings. Bob says the new physics is discovering what the Eastern mystics have known all along.”

  Mary Lou is confused. “If these things don’t exist, then how do they know about them?”

  “They know about them when they’re in bunches.” Judy begins writing in her notebook. She looks up and says, “Quantum mechanics is like a statistical study of group behavior.”

  Abruptly, Mack goes to the basement. Mary Lou picks up her sewing and begins watching Real People on TV. She can hear the signs of her husband’s existence: the sound of the drill from the shop, then his saw. A spurt of swearing.

  —

  The next evening, Judy talks Mary Lou into going to a movie, but Mack says he has work to do. He is busy with the home entertainment center he is building for Judy. Mary Lou is embarrassed to be going to an R-rated movie, but Judy laughs at her. Judy drives her Chevette, and they stop to pick up Clausie, whom Mary Lou has invited.

  “Clausie changes with the times,” Mary Lou tells her daughter apologetically. “You ought to see the way she gets out and goes. She even square-dances.”

  Clausie insists on climbing in the back seat because she is small. “I wore pants ’cause I knew y’all would,” she says. “I don’t wear them when I come to your house, Mary Lou, because I just don’t feel right wearing pants around a man.”

  “I haven’t worn a dress since 1980,” says Judy.

  “This show is going to curl our ears,” Mary Lou tells Clausie.

  “Oh, Mom,” Judy says.

  “Is it a dirty movie?” Clausie asks eagerly.