{"product_id":"nancy-culpepper-isbn-9780812976670","title":"Nancy Culpepper","description":"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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNancy 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. \u003cbr\u003eAlways 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBestselling author Bobbie Ann Mason’s prizewinning Nancy Culpepper chronicles have appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Southern Review\u003c\/i\u003e, and other distinguished literary anthologies. She has compiled these stories into one definitive collection, which includes the novella\u003ci\u003e Spence + Lila\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cb\u003eBobbie Ann Mason\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of \u003ci\u003eIn Country, Shiloh and Other Stories, An Atomic Romance, Nancy Culpepper, \u003c\/i\u003eand a memoir, \u003ci\u003eClear Springs\u003c\/i\u003e. 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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nancy Culpepper\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “They have chickens in Kentucky,” Nancy explained. “Don’t worry. We’re   not going yet.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Later he asked, “But what about the fish in the pond?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I don’t know,” said Nancy. “I guess we’ll have to rent a U-Haul.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “The flu settled in my ears,” Daddy says, cocking his head at an angle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Mine’s still popping,” says Mom.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You didn’t have to come back,” Daddy says to Nancy at the dinner   table. “We could manage.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “That’s ridiculous! Why would you do that?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “They were in the way.” He stands up and puts on his cap, preparing to   go out to feed his calves.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Will Granny care if I tear the wall down?” Nancy asks, joking.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The party afterwards lasted all night. Jack blew up two hundred   balloons and kept the fire going. They drank too much wine–and–\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I saw them once,” Jack said. “They were fantastic.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What was it like?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Shower curtains.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Really? That’s amazing.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Luminescent shower curtains.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’m shivering,” Nancy said. The sky was blank.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Let’s go in. It’s too cloudy anyway. Someday we’ll see them. I   promise.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What’s the matter?” a man asked Nancy. He was Dr. Doyle,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    her American History 1861–1865 professor. “This is your wedding. Loosen   up.” He burst a balloon and Nancy jumped.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “There aren’t any stopping places,” Nancy said. She was crying. “Songs   used to have stopping places in between.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Let’s just keep on dancing,” Jack said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Listen,” he said. “There. Right there.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It’s weeds,” said Nancy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’ve never heard of it,” Jack said. He hesitated, then took a small   serving.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “He’s teasing,” Nancy said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “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!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “How’s Granny?” asked Nancy. Her grandmother was then living alone in   her own house.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Tolerable well,” said Daddy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We’ll go see her,” Jack said. “Nancy told me all about her.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “She cooks her egg in her oats to keep from washing a extry dish,” Mom   said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What do you aim to be when you graduate?” Daddy asked Jack abruptly,   staring at him. Jack’s hair looked oddly like an Irish setter’s ears,   Nancy thought suddenly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Won’t you have to go in the Army?” Mom asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’ll apply for an assistantship if my grades are good enough,” Jack   said. “Anything to avoid the draft.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nancy’s father was leaning into his plate, as though he were   concentrating deeply on each bite.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “He makes good grades,” Nancy said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Nancy always made all A’s,” Daddy said to Jack.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “We gave her a dollar for ever’ one,” said Mom. “She kept us broke.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “In graduate school they don’t give A’s,” said Nancy. “They just give   S’s and U’s.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jack wadded up his napkin. Then Mom served fried pies with white sauce.   “Nancy always loved these better than anything,” she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After supper, Nancy showed Jack the farm. As they walked through the   fields, Nancy felt that he was seeing peaceful landscapes—arrangements   of picturesque cows, an old red barn. She had never thought of the   place this way before; it reminded her of prints in a dime store.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    While her mother washes the dishes, Nancy takes Granny’s dinner to her,   and sits in a rocking chair while Granny eats in bed. The food is on an   old TV-dinner tray. The compartments hold chicken and dressing, mashed   potatoes, field peas, green beans, and vinegar slaw. The servings are   tiny—six green beans, a spoonful of peas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Granny’s teeth no longer fit, and she has to bite sideways, like a cat.   She wears the lower teeth only during meals, but she will not get new   ones. She says it would be wasteful to be buried with a new   three-hundred-dollar set of teeth. In between bites, Granny guzzles   iced tea from a Kentucky Lakes mug. “That slaw don’t have enough sugar   in it,” she says. “It makes my mouth draw up.” She smacks her lips.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nancy says, “I’ve heard the food is really good at the Orchard Acres   Rest Home.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Granny does not reply for a moment. She is working on a chicken   gristle, which causes her teeth to clatter. Then she says, “I ain’t   going nowhere.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Mom and Daddy are moving back into their house. You don’t want to stay   here by yourself, do you?” Nancy’s voice sounds hollow to her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’ll be all right. I can do for myself.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When Granny swallows, it sounds like water spilling from a bucket into   a cistern. After Nancy’s parents moved in, they covered Granny’s old   cistern, but Nancy still remembers drawing the bucket up from below.   The chains made a sound like crying.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Granny pushes her food with a piece of bread, cleaning her tray. “I can   do a little cooking,” she says. “I can sweep.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Try this boiled custard, Granny. I made it just for you. Just the way   you used to make it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It ain’t yaller enough,” says Granny, tasting the custard.   “Store-bought eggs.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When she finishes, she removes her lower teeth and sloshes them in a   plastic tumbler on the bedside table. Nancy looks away. On the wall are   Nancy’s high school graduation photograph and a picture of Jesus. Nancy   looks sassy; her graduation hat resembles a tilted lid. Jesus has a   halo, set at about the same angle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Now Nancy ventures a question about the pictures hidden behind the   closet wall. At first Granny is puzzled. Then she seems to remember.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “They’re behind the stovepipe,” she says. Grimacing with pain, she   stretches her legs out slowly, and then, holding her head, she sinks   back into her pillows and draws the quilt over her shoulders. “I’ll   look for them one of these days—when I’m able.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Jack photographs weeds, twigs, pond reflections, silhouettes of Robert   against the sun with his arms flung out like a scarecrow’s. Sometimes   he works in the evenings in his studio at home, drinking tequila   sunrises and composing bizarre still lifes with lightbulbs, wine   bottles, Tinkertoys, Lucite cubes. He makes arrangements of gourds look   like breasts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the day Nancy tried to explain to Jack about her need to save   Granny’s pictures, a hailstorm interrupted her. It was the only   hailstorm she had ever seen in the North, and she had forgotten all   about them. Granny always said a hailstorm meant that God was cleaning   out his icebox. Nancy stood against a white Masonite wall mounted with   a new series of photographs and looked out the window at tulips being   smashed. The ice pellets littered the ground like shattered glass.   Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the hailstorm was over.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Pictures didn’t used to be so common,” Nancy said. Jack’s trash can   was stuffed with rejected prints, and Robert’s face was crumpled on   top. “I want to keep Granny’s pictures as reminders.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “If you think that will solve anything,” said Jack, squinting at a   negative he was holding against the light.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I want to see if she has one of Nancy Culpepper.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “That’s you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “There was another one. She was a great-great-aunt or something, on my   daddy’s side. She had the same name as mine.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “There’s another one of you?” Jack said with mock disbelief.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I’m a reincarnation,” she said, playing along.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “There’s nobody else like you. You’re one of a kind.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nancy turned away and stared deliberately at Jack’s pictures, which   were held up by clear-headed pushpins, like translucent eyes dotting   the wall. She examined them one by one, moving methodically down the   row—stumps, puffballs, tree roots, close-ups of cat feet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Nancy first learned about her ancestor on a summer Sunday a few years   before, when she took her grandmother to visit the Culpepper graveyard,   beside an oak grove off the Paducah highway. The old oaks had spread   their limbs until they shaded the entire cemetery, and the tombstones   poked through weeds like freak mushrooms. Nancy wandered among the   graves, while Granny stayed beside her husband’s gravestone. It had her   own name on it too, with a blank space for the date.Bestselling author of An Atomic Romance and In Country [quote]--Chicago Tribune","brand":"Random House Trade Paperbacks","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303951093989,"sku":"NP9780812976670","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812976670.jpg?v=1767733446","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/nancy-culpepper-isbn-9780812976670","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}