Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason Read Free Book Online Page B

Doody?”
    “This child don’t know nothing,” he said to my aunt. “She’s been raised with a bunch of country hicks.”
    “He’s fooling,” said Aunt Mozelle. “Go ahead and show her, Boone, for gosh sakes. Don’t keep it a secret.”
    He was talking about television. I hadn’t noticed the set in the living room because it had a sliding cover over the screen. It wasa ten-inch table model with an upholstered sound box in a rosewood cabinet.
    “We’ve never seen a television,” my mother said.
    “This will ruin her,” said my aunt. “It’s ruined Boone.”
    Uncle Boone turned on the television set. A wrestling match appeared on the screen, and I could see Gorgeous George flexing his muscles and tossing his curls. The television set resembled our radio. For a long time I was confused, thinking that I would now be able to see all my favorite radio programs.
    “It’s one of those sets you can look at in normal light and not go blind,” my aunt said, to reassure us. “It’s called Daylight TV.”
    “Wait till you see Howdy Doody,” said Uncle Boone.
    The picture on the television set was not clear. The reception required some imagination, and the pictures frequently dissolved, but I could see Gorgeous George moving across the screen, his curls bouncing. I could see him catch hold of his opponent and wrestle him to the floor, holding him so tight I thought he would choke.
    That night, I lay in the cedar-perfumed room, too excited to sleep. I did not know what to expect next. The streetlamps glowed like moons through the venetian blinds, and as I lay there, my guardian angel slowly crept into my mind. In
Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories
, there was a picture of a child with his guardian angel hovering over him. It was a man angel, and gigantic, with immense white feathery bird’s wings. Probably the boy could never see him because the angel stayed in what drivers of automobiles call a blind spot. I had a feeling that my own guardian angel had accompanied the bus to Michigan and was in the house with me. I imagined him floating above the bus. I knew that my guardian angel was supposed to keep me from harm, but I did not want anyone to know about him. I was very afraid of him. It was a long time before I fell asleep.
    —
    In the North, they drank coffee. Aunt Mozelle made a large pot of coffee in the mornings, and she kept it in a Thermos so she could drink coffee throughout the day.
    Mama began drinking coffee. “Whew! I’m higher than a kite!” she would say. “I’ll be up prowling half the night.”
    “Little girls shouldn’t ought to drink coffee,” Uncle Boone said to me more than once. “It turns them black.”
    “I don’t even want any!” I protested. But I did like the enticing smell, which awoke me early in the mornings.
    My aunt made waffles with oleomargarine. She kneaded a capsule of yellow dye into the pale margarine.
    “It’s a law,” she told me one morning.
    “They don’t have that law down home anymore,” said Mama. “People’s turning to oleo and it’s getting so we can’t sell butter.”
    “I guess everybody forgot how it tasted,” said Aunt Mozelle.
    “I wouldn’t be surprised if that business about the dye was a Communist idea,” said my uncle. “A buddy of mine at the plant thinks so. He says they want to make it look like butter. The big companies, they’re full of reds now.”
    “That makes sense to me,” said Mama. “Anything to hurt the farmer.”
    It didn’t make sense to me. When they talked about reds, all I could imagine was a bunch of little devils in red suits, carrying pitchforks. I wondered if they were what my uncle had seen in the Pacific, since devils had tails. Everything about the North was confusing. Lunetta Jones, for instance, bewildered me. She came for coffee every morning, after my uncle had left in a car pool. Lunetta, a seventh-grade teacher, was from Kentucky, and her parents were old friends of my aunt’s, so Mozelle and Boone