Free Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason Page B

But she would not be able to explain why she was drinking coffee at night.
    After supper, when Grandmother is in the bathroom, Mama says she will wash the dishes, but Sandra refuses.
    “Do you hear anything from Jerry?” Mama asks.
    Sandra shrugs. “No. He’d better not waltz back in here. I’mthrough waiting on him.” In a sharp whisper, she says, “I don’t know how long I can keep up that night-shift lie.”
    “But she’s been through so much,” Mama says. “She thinks the world of you, Sandra.”
    “I know.”
    “She thinks Jerry hung the moon.”
    “I tell you, if he so much as walks through that door—”
    “I love those cosmos you planted,” Mama says. “They’re the prettiest I’ve ever seen. I’d give anything if I could get mine to do like that.”
    “They’re volunteers. I didn’t do a thing.”
    “You didn’t?”
    “I didn’t thin them either. I just hated to thin them.”
    “I know what you mean,” says Mama. “It always broke my heart to thin corn. But you learn.”
    ——
    A movie,
That’s Entertainment!
, is on TV. Sandra stands in the doorway to watch Fred Astaire dancing with Eleanor Powell, who is as loose as a rag doll. She is wearing a little-girl dress with squared shoulders.
    “Fred Astaire is the limberest thing I ever saw,” says Mama.
    “I remember his sister Adele,” says Grandmother. “She could really dance.”
    “Her name was Estelle,” says Mama.
    “Estelle Astaire?” says Sandra. For some reason, she remembers a girl she knew in grade school named Sandy Beach.
    Sandra makes tomato sauce, and they offer to help, but she tells them to relax and watch the movie. As she scalds tomatoes and presses hot pulp through a food mill, she listens to the singing and tap-dancing from the next room. She comes to the doorway to watch Gene Kelly do his famous “Singin’ in the Rain” number. His suit is soaked, and he jumps into puddles with both feet, like a child. A policeman scowls at his antics. Grandmother laughs. When the sauce boils down, Sandra pours it into bowls to cool. She sees bowls of blood lined up on the counter. Sandra watches Esther Williams dive through a ring of fire and splash in the center of a star formed by women, with spread legs, lying on their backs in the water.
    During a commercial, Sandra asks her mother if she wants to come to the barn with her, to help with the ducks. The dog bounds out the door with them, happy at this unexpected excursion. Out in the yard, Mama lights a cigarette.
    “Finally!” Mama says with a sigh. “That feels good.”
    Two cats, Blackie and Bubbles, join them. Sandra wonders if Bubbles remembers the mole she caught yesterday. The mole had a star-shaped nose, which Bubbles ate first, like a delicacy.
    The ducks are not in the barn, and Sandra and her mother walk down a narrow path through the weeds to the pond. The pond is quiet as they approach. Then they can make out patches of white on the dark water. The ducks hear them and begin diving, fleeing to the far shore in panic.
    “There’s no way to drive ducks in from a pond,” Mama says.
    “Sometimes they just take a notion to stay out here all night,” says Sandra.
    They stand side by side at the edge of the pond while Mama smokes. The sounds of evening are at their fullest now, and lightning bugs wink frantically. Sometimes Sandra has heard foxes at night, their menacing yaps echoing on the hillside. Once, she saw three fox pups playing in the full moon, like dancers in a spotlight. And just last week she heard a baby screaming in terror. It was the sound of a wildcat—a thrill she listens for every night now. It occurs to her that she would not mind if the wildcat took her ducks. They are her offering.
    Mama throws her cigarette in the pond, and a duck splashes. The night is peaceful, and Sandra thinks of the thousands of large golden garden spiders hidden in the field. In the early morning the dew shines on their trampolines, and she can imagine