Nancy Culpepper: Stories - Hardcover

Mason, Bobbie Ann

3.61

139 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375507183 ISBN 13: 9780375507182

Publisher: Random House, 2006

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Kentucky native Nancy Culpepper boldly left home to attend school in Massachusetts, married a Yankee, and raised her son in the Northeast. “One day I was feeding chickens and listening to Hank Williams and the next day I was expected to know what wines went with what,” she tells her husband, Jack. Yet no matter where she travels, her rural southern heritage is never far from her thoughts, her habits, and her heart.

Nancy is on a lifelong quest to understand her place in the world. Returning home to the family farm, she searches for photographic evidence of an ancestor bearing her own name. Still in her jeans, she brings home strange ideas and an assertiveness she learned up north.
Always adventurous, Nancy travels far and wide–searching, seeking. The narrative sweep of her life traverses the turbulent sixties, the Vietnam War, the eighties and the foreboding death of John Lennon, and finally the new millennium–when a self-assured Nancy finally emerges. These humorous and often touching stories recount her courtship and marriage to Jack, her relationship with her precocious son, and the deep, loving bond between her parents, Spence and Lila Culpepper. Eventually Nancy’s marriage is threatened by a cultural divide that plagued her and Jack from the start. But when she inherits the Culpepper family farm and discovers more pieces of her ancestral puzzle, she realizes that her life is assuming its proper shape. Later, standing on a lonely mountain in England, she sees the world from a surprising perspective.

Bestselling author Bobbie Ann Mason’s prizewinning Nancy Culpepper chronicles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The Southern Review, and other distinguished literary anthologies. She has compiled these stories into one definitive collection, which includes the novella Spence + Lila, two new, never-before-published stories, and one Pushcart Prize winner. Heartfelt and thought-provoking, Nancy Culpepper is a poignant depiction of change and growth in a modern-day heroine.

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About the Author:

Bobbie Ann Mason is the author of In Country, Shiloh and Other Stories, An Atomic Romance, Nancy Culpepper, and a memoir, Clear Springs. She is the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, two Southern Book Awards, and numerous other prizes, including the O. Henry and the Pushcart. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky.

1980–1982

Nancy Culpepper

When Nancy received her parents’ letter saying they were moving her grandmother to a nursing home, she said to her husband, “I really should go help them out. And I’ve got to save Granny’s photographs. They might get lost.” Jack did not try to discourage her, and she left for Kentucky soon after the letter came.

Nancy has been vaguely wanting to move to Kentucky, and she has persuaded Jack to think about relocating his photography business. They live in the country, near a small town an hour’s drive from Philadelphia. Their son, Robert, who is eight, has fits when they talk about moving. He does not want to leave his room or his playmates. Once, he asked, “What about our chickens?”

“They have chickens in Kentucky,” Nancy explained. “Don’t worry. We’re not going yet.”

Later he asked, “But what about the fish in the pond?”

“I don’t know,” said Nancy. “I guess we’ll have to rent a U-Haul.”

When Nancy arrives at her parents’ farm in western Kentucky, her mother says, “Your daddy and me’s both got inner ear and nerves. And we couldn’t lift Granny, or anything, if we had to all of a sudden.”

“The flu settled in my ears,” Daddy says, cocking his head at an angle.

“Mine’s still popping,” says Mom.

In a few days they plan to move Granny, and they will return to their own house, which they have been renting out. For nine years, they have lived next door, in Granny’s house, in order to care for her. There Mom has had to cook on an ancient gas range, with her mother-in-law hovering over her, supervising. Granny used only lye soap on dishes, and it was five years before Nancy’s mother defied her and bought some Joy. By then, Granny was confined to her bed, crippled with arthritis. Now she is ninety-three.

“You didn’t have to come back,” Daddy says to Nancy at the dinner table. “We could manage.”

“I want to help you move,” Nancy says. “And I want to make sure Granny’s pictures don’t get lost. Nobody cares about them but me, and I’m afraid somebody will throw them away.”

Nancy wants to find out if Granny has a picture of a great-great-aunt named Nancy Culpepper. No one in the family seems to know anything about her, but Nancy is excited by the thought of an ancestor with the same name as hers. Since she found out about her, Nancy has been going by her maiden name, but she has given up trying to explain this to her mother, who persists in addressing letters to “Mr. and Mrs. Jack Cleveland.”

“There’s some pictures hid behind Granny’s closet wall,” Daddy tells Nancy. “When we hooked up the coal-oil stove through the fireplace a few years ago, they got walled in.”

“That’s ridiculous! Why would you do that?”

“They were in the way.” He stands up and puts on his cap, preparing to go out to feed his calves.

“Will Granny care if I tear the wall down?” Nancy asks, joking.

Daddy laughs, acting as though he understood, but Nancy knows he is pretending. He seems tired, and his billed cap looks absurdly small perched on his head.

When Nancy and Jack were married, years ago, in Massachusetts, Nancy did not want her parents to come to the wedding. She urged them not to make the long trip. “It’s no big deal,” she told them on the telephone. “It’ll last ten minutes. We’re not even going on a honeymoon right away, because we both have exams Monday.”

Nancy was in graduate school, and Jack was finishing his B.A. For almost a year they had been renting a large old house on a lake. The house had a field-rock fireplace with a heart-shaped stone centered above the mantel. Jack, who was studying design, thought the heart was tasteless, and he covered it with a Peter Max poster.

At the ceremony, Jack’s dog, Grover, was present, and instead of organ music, a stereo played Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was 1967. Nancy was astonished by the minister’s white robe and his beard and by the fact that he chain-smoked. The preachers she remembered from childhood would have called him a heathen, she thought. Most of the wedding pictures, taken by a friend of Jack’s, turned out to be trick photography—blurred faces and double exposures.

The party afterwards lasted all night. Jack blew up two hundred balloons and kept the fire going. They drank too much wine–and–

7-Up punch. Guests went in and out, popping balloons with cigarettes, taking walks by the lake. Everyone was looking for the northern lights, which were supposed to be visible that evening. Holding on to Jack, Nancy searched the murky sky, feeling that the two of them were lone travelers on the edge of some outer-space adventure. At the same time, she kept thinking of her parents at home, probably watching Gunsmoke.

“I saw them once,” Jack said. “They were fantastic.”

“What was it like?”

“Shower curtains.”

“Really? That’s amazing.”

“Luminescent shower curtains.”

“I’m shivering,” Nancy said. The sky was blank.

“Let’s go in. It’s too cloudy anyway. Someday we’ll see them. I promise.”

Someone had taken down the poster above the fireplace and put up the picture of Sgt. Pepper—the cutout that came with the album. Sgt. Pepper overlooked the room like a stern father.

“What’s the matter?” a man asked Nancy. He was Dr. Doyle,

her American History 1861–1865 professor. “This is your wedding. Loosen up.” He burst a balloon and Nancy jumped.

When someone offered her a joint, she refused, then wondered why. The house was filled with strangers, and the Beatles album played over and over. Jack and Nancy danced, hugging each other in a slow two-step that was all wrong for the music. They drifted past the wedding presents, lined up on a table Jack had fashioned from a door—hand-dipped candles, a silver roach clip, Joy of Cooking, signed pottery in nonfunctional shapes. Nancy wondered what her parents had eaten for supper. Possibly fried steak, two kinds of peas, biscuits, blackberry pie. The music shifted and the songs merged together; Jack and Nancy kept dancing.

“There aren’t any stopping places,” Nancy said. She was crying. “Songs used to have stopping places in between.”

“Let’s just keep on dancing,” Jack said.

Nancy was thinking of the blackberry bushes at the farm in Kentucky, which spread so wildly they had to be burned down every few years. They grew on the banks of the creek, which in summer shrank to still, small occasional pools. After a while Nancy realized that Jack was talking to her. He was explaining how he could predict exactly when the last, dying chord on the album was about to end.

“Listen,” he said. “There. Right there.”

Nancy’s parents had met Jack a few months before the wedding, during spring break, when Jack and Nancy stopped in Kentucky on their way to Denver to see an old friend of Jack’s. The visit involved some elaborate lies about their sleeping arrangements on the trip.

At the supper table, Mom and Daddy passed bowls of food self-consciously. The table was set with some napkins left over from Christmas. The vegetables were soaked in bacon grease, and Jack took small helpings. Nancy sat rigidly, watching every movement, like a cat stationed near a bird feeder. Mom had gathered poke, because it was spring, and she said to Jack, “I bet you don’t eat poke salet up there.”

“It’s weeds,” said Nancy.

“I’ve never heard of it,” Jack said. He hesitated, then took a small serving.

“It’s poison if it gets too big,” Daddy said. He turned to Nancy’s mother. “I think you picked this too big. You’re going to poison us all.”

“He’s teasing,” Nancy said.

“The berries is what’s poison,” said Mom, laughing. “Wouldn’t that be something? They’ll say up there I tried to poison your boyfriend the minute I met him!”

Everyone laughed. Jack’s face was red. He was wearing an embroidered shirt. Nancy watched him trim the fat from his ham as precisely as if he were using an X-Acto knife on mat board.

“How’s Granny?” asked Nancy. Her grandmother was then living alone in her own house.

“Tolerable well,” said Daddy.

“We’ll go see her,” Jack said. “Nancy told me all about her.”

“She cooks her egg in her oats to keep from washing a extry dish,” Mom said.

Nancy played with her food. She was looking at the pink dining room wall and the plastic flowers in the window. On the afternoon Jack and Nancy first met, he took her to a junk shop, where he bought a stained-glass window for his bathroom. Nancy would never have thought of going to a junk shop. It would not have occurred to her to put a stained-glass window in a bathroom.

“What do you aim to be when you graduate?” Daddy asked Jack abruptly, staring at him. Jack’s hair looked od...

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