Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason

Author:Bobbie Ann Mason
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307806321
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 1982-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE RETREAT

Georgeann has put off packing for the annual church retreat. “There’s plenty of time,” she tells Shelby when he bugs her about it. “I can’t do things that far ahead.”

“Don’t you want to go?” he asks her one evening. “You used to love to go.”

“I wish they’d do something different just once. Something besides pray and yak at each other.” Georgeann is basting facings on a child’s choir robe, and she looks at him testily as she bites off a thread.

Shelby says, “You’ve been looking peaked lately. I believe you’ve got low blood.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“I think you better get a checkup before we go. Call Dr. Armstrong in the morning.”

When Georgeann married Shelby Pickett, her mother warned her about the disadvantages of marrying a preacher. Reformed juvenile delinquents are always the worst kind of preachers, her mother said—just like former drug addicts in their zealousness. Shelby was never that bad, though. In high school, when Georgeann first knew him, he was on probation for stealing four cases of Sun-Drop Cola and a ham from Kroger’s. There was something charismatic about him even then, although he frightened her at first with his gloomy countenance—a sort of James Dean brooding—and his tendency to contradict whatever the teachers said. But she admired the way he argued so smoothly and professionally in debate class. He always had a smart answer that left his opponent speechless. He was the type of person who could get away with anything. Georgeann thought he seemed a little dangerous—he was always staring people down, as though he held a deep grudge—but when she started going out with him, at the end of her senior year, she was surprised to discover how serious he was. He had spent a month studying the life of Winston Churchill. It wasn’t even a class assignment. No one she knew would have thought of doing that. When the date of the senior prom approached, Shelby said he couldn’t take her because he didn’t believe in dancing. Georgeann suspected that he was just embarrassed and shy. On a Friday night, when her parents were away at the movies, she put on a Kinks album and tried to get him to loosen up, to get in shape for the prom. It was then that he told her of his ambition to be a preacher. Georgeann was so moved by his sense of atonement and his commitment to the calling—he had received the call while hauling hay for an uncle—that she knew she would marry him. On the night of the prom, they went instead to the Burger King, and he showed her the literature on the seminary while she ate a Double Whopper and french fries.

The ministry is not a full-time calling, Georgeann discovered. The pay is too low. While Shelby attended seminary, he also went to night school to learn a trade, and Georgeann supported him by working at Kroger’s—the same one her husband had robbed. Georgeann had wanted to go to college, but they were never able to afford for her to go.

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