Free Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason Page A

one by one, in a fit—amazed at how easy it is. A bat circles above the barn. The ducks are splashing. A bird Sandra can’t identify calls a mournful good night.
    “Those silly ducks wouldn’t come in,” she says, setting thetable. Her mother and grandmother stand around and watch her with starved looks.
    “I’m collecting duck expressions,” she goes on. “ ‘Lucky duck,’ ‘duck your head,’ ‘set your ducks in a row,’ ‘a sitting duck.’ I see where they all come from now.”
    “Have a rubber duck,” says Mama. “Or a duck fit.”
    “Duck soup,” says Grandmother.
    “Duck soup?” Sandra says. “What does that mean?”
    “It means something is real easy,” says Grandmother. “Easy as pie.”
    “It was an old picture show too,” Mama says. “The name of the show was
Duck Soup
.”
    They eat on the porch, and the moths come visiting, flapping against the screen. A few mosquitoes squeeze through and whine about their heads. Grandmother’s fork jerks; the corn slips from her hand. Sandra notices that her dishes don’t match. Mama and Grandmother exclaim over the meal, praising the tomatoes, the fresh corn. Grandmother takes another piece of chicken. “It has such a crispy crust!” she says.
    Sandra will not admit the chicken is crisp. It is not even brown, she says to herself.
    “How did you do that?” Grandmother wants to know.
    “I boiled it first. It’s faster.”
    “I never heard of doing it that way,” Grandmother says.
    “You’ll have to try that, Ethel,” says Mama.
    Sandra flips a bug off her plate.
    Her grandmother sneezes. “It’s the ragweed,” she says apologetically. “It’s the time of the year for it. Doesn’t it make you sneeze?”
    “No,” says Sandra.
    “It never used to do you that way,” Mama says.
    “I know,” says Grandmother. “I helped hay many a time when I was young. I can’t remember it bothering me none.”
    The dog is barking. Sandra calls him into the house. He wants to greet the visitors, but she tells him to go to his bed, under the divan, and he obeys.
    Sandra sits down at the table again and presses Grandmother to talk about the past, to tell about the farm Sandra can barelyremember. She recalls the dizzying porch swing, a dog with a bushy tail, the daisy-edged field of corn, and a litter of squirming kittens like a deep pile of mated socks in a drawer. She wants to know about the trees. She remembers the fruit trees and the gigantic walnuts, with their sweeping arms and their hard, green balls that sometimes hit her on the head. She also remembers the day the trees came down.
    “The peaches made such a mess on the grass you couldn’t walk,” her grandmother explains. “And there were so many cherries I couldn’t pick them all. I had three peach trees taken down and one cherry tree.”
    “That was when your granddaddy was so bad,” Mama says to Sandra. “She had to watch him night and day and turn him ever’ so often. He didn’t even know who she was.”
    “I just couldn’t have all those in the yard anymore,” says Grandmother. “I couldn’t keep up with them. But the walnut trees were the worst. Those squirrels would get the nuts and roll them all over the porch and sometimes I’d step on one and fall down. Them old squirrels would snarl at me and chatter. Law me.”
    “Bessie Grissom had a tree taken down last week,” says Mama. “She thought it would fall on the house, it was so old. A tornado might set down.”
    “How much did she have to pay?” asks Grandmother.
    “A hundred dollars.”
    “When I had all them walnut trees taken down back then, it cost me sixty dollars. That just goes to show you.”
    Sandra serves instant butterscotch pudding for dessert. Grandmother eats greedily, telling Sandra that butterscotch is her favorite. She clashes her spoon as she cleans the dish. Sandra does not eat any dessert. She is thinking how she would like to have a bourbon-and-Coke. She might conceal it in a coffee cup.