Free Nancy Culpepper by Bobbie Ann Mason Page B

sending the tray toward Lila on a roller platform that fits over the bed. On the tray are dark broth, red Jell-O, black coffee.
    “Couldn’t I have ice-tea?” Lila asks. “Coffee makes me prowl all night.”
    “Don’t worry. We’ll give you a sleeping pill.”
    Lila watches the sports news, something she would never do at home. When the weather comes on, she pays careful attention. The radar map shows rain everywhere in the adjoining states, but none in western Kentucky. They need rain bad. They had too much rain back in the spring. The high today was eighty-nine.
    The liquid supper splashes in her stomach. From behind the curtain partition, a woman is groaning. A nurse coaxes her out of bed and helps her walk out of the room. The patient is old, her face distorted with pain as she clutches a pillow to her belly.
    Lila hasn’t felt so alone since Spence was in the Navy. Nancy was two, and they were still living with Spence’s parents. Rosie and Amp were so quiet, their faces set like concrete as they lost themselves in their chores. Lila was awkward in Rosie’s kitchen, with Rosie hovering over her. When Lila wanted to warm food for Nancy, Rosie insisted that Lila had to use a certain small aluminum pan, so they wouldn’t have to wash a large one. But the food always stuck to the little pan, and it was hard to scrape clean. Rosie washed dishes in an enamel pan set on a gas ring and scalded them in another pan on another ring. The scum of the slippery lye soap never really washed off the dishes. Rosie added the dirty dishwater to the slop bucket for the hogs. Hogs liked the taste, she said. That fall, a neighbor helped Amp butcher a hog and Rosie made lye soap from the fat. Lila sewed sausage casings from flour sacks. She added flecks of dried red peppers to the ground sausage. She added more than she should have, because she knew Spence liked it extra hot, and she wanted it to be spicy for him when he came home. She knew he would come home.
    Lila had to talk to somebody, so she chattered away to Nancy in their room. She was still stunned by the new experience of having a baby. Nancy kept on nursing, and Lila let her, even though her teeth made the nipples sore. She read Spence’s letters aloud to her. Nancy couldn’t understand the words, but Lila knew she needed her daddy, and that was the best Lila could do to help her feel his existence. Nancy listened, serious and focused, like a curious bird. There was not much to see out there, he wrote—a few birds resting on the waves like setting hens, and now and then playful porpoises that seemed to do circus tricks in the water. Spence wrote about a storm at sea, in which the boat rocked like a tire swing, the waves washing the deck. The ship stopped at an island in the Philippines and he got a twelve-hour shore leave. He wrote messages to Nancy—had she learned to milk a cow yet? was she shedding her baby teeth? Silly things, to be funny. Not until he got home did he tell about the deafening noises of the war, a racket like the end of the world.
    Their room was unheated and they had a hard winter. Nancy caught cold after cold, and Lila huddled her close in the bed, under the weight of half a dozen quilts. She was afraid of rolling over on her, the way a sow sometimes mashed her pigs. One night Lila woke up and found Nancy uncovered, wet and shivering. After that, the cold went into pneumonia. Lila wanted to take her to the doctor, but Amp protested, “Why, he would charge! We can doctor her.” Rosie baked onions in ashes and squeezed the juice into a spoon and fed it to her. At night Lila warmed the bed with heated bricks wrapped in newspaper, and she hardly slept, making sure she kept the child covered up; in the daytime she made a bed for her in a box close to the fireplace. She wrapped her chest in greased rags. One frightening night, when Lila prayed so hard she was almost screaming, Nancy’s fever finally broke, and gradually her breathing improved. Over the