Nancy Culpepper Read Online Free

notebook. Aunt Sass, Uncle Joe, Dove and Pear Culpepper, Hortense Culpepper.
    “Hort Culpepper went to Texas,” says Granny. “She had TB.”
    “Tell me about that,” Nancy urges her.
    “There wasn’t anything to tell. She got homesick for her mammy’s cooking.” Granny closes the album and falls back against her pillows, saying, “All those people are gone.”
    While Granny sleeps, Nancy gets a flashlight and opens the closet. The inside is crammed with the accumulation of decades—yellowed newspapers, boxes of greeting cards, bags of string, and worn-out stockings. Granny’s best dress, a blue bonded knit she has hardly worn, is in plastic wrapping. Nancy pushes the clothing aside and examines the wall. To her right, a metal pipe runs vertically through the closet. Backing up against the dresses, Nancy shines the light on the corner and discovers a large framed picture wedged behind the pipe. By tugging at the frame, she is able to work it gradually through the narrow space between the wall and the pipe. In the picture a man and woman, whose features are sharp and clear, are sitting expectantly on a brocaded love seat. Nancy imagines that this is a wedding portrait.
    In the living room, a TV evangelist is urging viewers to call him, toll-free. Mom turns the TV off when Nancy appears with the picture, and Daddy stands up and helps her hold it near a window.
    “I think that’s Uncle John!” he says excitedly. “He was my favorite uncle.”
    “They’re none of my people,” says Mom, studying the picture through her bifocals.
    “He died when I was little, but I think that’s him,” says Daddy. “Him and Aunt Lucy Culpepper.”
    “Who was she?” Nancy asks.
    “Uncle John’s wife.”
    “I figured that,” says Nancy impatiently. “But who
was
she?”
    “I don’t know.” He is still looking at the picture, running his fingers over the man’s face.
    Back in Granny’s room, Nancy pulls the string that turns on the ceiling light, so that Granny can examine the picture. Granny shakes her head slowly. “I never saw them folks before in all my life.”
    Mom comes in with a dish of strawberries.
    “Did I pick these?” Granny asks.
    “No. You eat yours about ten years ago,” Mom says.
    Granny puts in her teeth and eats the strawberries in slurps, missing her mouth twice. “Let me see them people again,” she says, waving her spoon. Her teeth make the sound of a baby rattle.
    “Nancy Hollins,” says Granny. “She was a Culpepper.”
    “That’s Nancy Culpepper?” cries Nancy.
    “
That
’s not Nancy Culpepper,” Mom says. “That woman’s got a rat in her hair. They wasn’t in style back when Nancy Culpepper was alive.”
    Granny’s face is flushed and she is breathing heavily. “She was a real little-bitty old thing,” she says in a high, squeaky voice. “She never would talk. Everybody thought she was curious. Plumb curious.”
    “Are you sure it’s her?” Nancy says.
    “If I’m not mistaken.”
    “She don’t remember,” Mom says to Nancy. “Her mind gets confused.”
    Granny removes her teeth and lies back, her bones grinding. Her chest heaves with exhaustion. Nancy sits down in the rocking chair, and as she rocks back and forth she searches the photograph, exploring the features of the young woman, who is wearing an embroidered white dress, and the young man, in a curly beard that starts below his chin, framing his face like a ruffle. The woman looks frightened—of the camera perhaps—but nevertheless her deep-set eyes sparkle like shards of glass. This young woman would be glad to dance to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on her wedding day, Nancy thinks. The man seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far away.
    Blue Country
    “The Blue Lantern Inn—that’s a name straight out of a Nancy Drew book,” said Nancy.
    “Is Nancy Drew your namesake?” teased Jack.
    Nancy laughed. “Nancy Drew