Miss Jane

by Brad Watson

  Spring has arrived, in any case—gusty, always thrilling to me. The songbirds are in a riot of pugnacious pleasure. What I would do to have this season exist without end. Except, what did the poet imply, that having our pleasures always in-hand we would no longer appreciate them? Possibly even our recognition of them would cease to be anything remarkable at all.

  Yours, etc.

  Eldred The Terrible & etc.

  Weanings

  Ida Chisolm weaned her new one at little less than a year old and the baby took to her mush of peas and sweet potatoes with the same toothless puzzlement, then gluttony, as any child. Grace, whenever she wasn’t at school, went about her babysitting duties in silence. At eleven years she had the demeanor of a disgusted, life-strangled sixteen-year-old. As if to speed up and thereby shorten the period of being harnessed to the task, she worked hard to train her little sister on the chamber pot, then the outhouse, and taught her to clean herself. But soon enough recognized a problem and complained about frequent accidents and once the doctor confirmed the incontinence it was a matter of either getting the child to run to the outhouse or to drop her drawers (the loose diaper she had continued to wear, in any case) wherever she stood in the yard, or pasture, or at the edge of the woods, by the barn, wherever. Since she was just a toddler they allowed it, since she did not like soiling herself and wanted to go like everyone else. She tried. A good-humored, even cheerful little child. She seemed intelligent enough but not dangerously impulsive, so Grace let her wander by herself around the house and yard barefoot (except in winter) as freely as a child at least a year or two older. It became a familiar sight to the family and the sharecroppers and tenants, this small scrawny creature baring her bony bum and relieving herself whenever and wherever like one of the animals in their care.

  Watching this from the front porch at churning, or from the back porch washing dishes in the pump sink, or emerging from the privy, Grace indulged in what little humor she had in her system, smiling a tight smile and muttering to herself in a low chuckle, shaking her head and going back to work, keeping one eye loosely on the child. Jane was indeed like some kind of herky-jerky windup toy that never wound down till sometime in the evening right after supper when the winder just stopped and clump, down she went. Clean her and put her to bed.

  When she got a break from her babysitting Grace would sneak out to the barn and go around it to smoke a cigarette from the Luckies she now kept hidden behind a loose chink in one of the foundation posts. Got to where she liked them so much she began sneaking one after supper, too, watching from shadows for when the washbasin was unoccupied, then hurrying to wash up, brush her teeth, before going to bed without a word to or a glance at anyone. They were all used to that.

  When little Jane noticed a rag doll in the Sears catalog, Grace put one together for her using material from a flour sack and filling the shape with hard corn kernels cracked with a hammer. She let Jane help draw on a face with India ink, then stitched over that with blue thread. They made a tiny skirt for it and drew a pair of slippers on its shapeless feet.

  She’d thrown her own similar doll into the bushes along the road one day years before, suddenly embarrassed and disgusted with herself for still carrying it in her school satchel. Now, young as she was, she felt a twinge of lost childhood and tried to steel herself against it, turning her thoughts once again to getting away. But she could not harden herself entirely anymore against her feelings for this little girl, her baby sister and the only one in her household she could enjoy even a little bit being around. With her yellow hair and blue eyes, she felt like a changeling left at the door of this cantankerous woman and gloomy man, yet here was this child, this odd one, a defective, dark like their parents but with blue eyes even bluer than hers. She did not want to love her, or as she sometimes referred to her, it, but she thought, I have to love something.

  She sat on the porch one afternoon during the autumn Jane would turn three and watched her wander out into the yard and over near the shed across the drive, stop, squat, and instead of what Grace expected from that, saw her reach down and pick something up, hands working like she was winding something around them as she walked, stopped at the edge of the porch, hands raised, eyes wide open with the secret hidden in them.

  “Well, what is it?” Grace said. She was looking on this strange and beautiful child, big eyes so expressive, as if wiser or more knowing than possible.

  Little Jane opened her hands and a tiny garden snake no bigger around than a night crawler and no longer than the length of a knitting needle popped up and curled around her hands as if it were the strange birth of an extra, wild, writhing digit. Grace stood up as if called to military attention, not knowing whether to go knock the snake from the child’s hands or trust to luck it was a harmless one.

  “Put it down, now,” she said as calmly as she could. But Jane closed her eyes and laughed and ran past her into the house and in a moment she heard her mother shriek and holler to “get that thing out of this house right now!”

  Later, she looked on as their father gave Jane a lesson on which snakes were safe and which were not. He drew pictures of the poisonous snakes’ broad, triangular heads, and brought out an old rattle from one he’d killed in the yard, shook it for her. “You hear that,” he said, “you stop, stand real still, figure out where it is, and you back away. You see this here cottonmouth moccasin, you run,” and he described and drew one, told her their coloring and shape. Told her about coral snakes: Red touch yellow, kill a fellow; red touch black, friend to Jack. She liked that rhyme enough to mimic it back to him, making him smile a rare smile.

  He said, “Anyway, you see one of those snakes, you hightail it out of there. And if you can’t tell, don’t chance it.”

  She asked if she could have the rattle to keep on a string around her neck.

  He seemed amused by this but said he thought not, as it might attract another snake.

  “All right,” she said, handing the rattle back. Her father put it away in the little box on the mantel where he kept it along with a bear’s tooth and the tiny mole skull Jane herself had found one day, just roaming around the yard.

  When they left, Grace went to the mantel, took out the rattle, and made herself a necklace of it by poking a hole in the open end and lacing through it a length of pale thread. She made it long enough so the rattle would be hidden by her blouse. She hooked a finger under it and gave it a little shake, and something about the sound made her heart beat a little faster.

  Little Jane heard it one day and was excited. “You made a rattle necklace!” she said. “Papa wouldn’t let me.”

  “I know.”

  “He said it might make a real snake come after me.”

  “I doubt that,” Grace said. “You want it?”

  Jane seemed to think about it, then shook her head with a mysterious grin.

  Her mother asked Grace one day what she had on that thread around her neck.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “I can see there’s something on it, there under your blouse. I can hear it making some kind of little noise when you move around.”

  “Nothing but the rattle of my little old heart,” Grace said, and ignored the look her mother gave her.

  LEAVING THE CHILD’S care to her older daughter had made it a little easier for Ida Chisolm to avoid her dark thoughts, though not entirely. When she had a little break she sat on the front porch, dipped a bit of snuff—which she knew was smallish sinful but did it anyway, a soul was corrupt at birth and adding a little vice wouldn’t change the equation much—and spat into the bare dirt of the yard doing the best she could to empty her clamorous mind. Crows banked about the grove of pine and hardwood down by the cow pond and flew back up on fluff-cranked wings into the pecans near the barn, settling in their gnarly limbs like black fluttering shadows into the foliage of clouded thoughts she could not and did not bother to plumb. Late fall blackbirds swept in waves to the oaks at the yard’s edge, and their deafening, squa
wking, creaking calls, the cacophonous tuning of a mad avian symphony, drew the grief-borne anger from her heart, into the air, and swept it away in long, almost soothing moments of something like peace. The occasional fluid murmuration of migrating starlings, a wondrous sight when she was a child, could evoke in her all over again a strange sense of foreboding.

  She said nothing to anyone about her feeling that this child Jane’s condition could’ve come from the sinful way in which she was conceived. No matter a man and woman be husband and wife. If the wife doesn’t even know it’s going on, it’s a sin and an abomination to the woman and the punishment would not be a death but something to linger, to remind you of what you had done or allowed done, either one. And in God’s eyes does it really matter who was to blame, and who could say she did not bear her share of the blame, putting herself in such a state that he could do what he did without her awareness, much less consent? Being a man, he considered their long-ago vows consent enough, and that thought sent her out to the woodpile to chop kindling till she could see again, so blind she felt in her rising and inexpressible anger. When she had spent her rage, kindling chunks around her as if the woodpile had exploded and left her standing, she buried the ax in the block and stalked off out the back yard and down the main trail in the woods to the fishing pond. She stood there looking at the smooth brown surface of the pond, arms straight at her sides, and thought she could go back up, fetch a heavy piece of mechanical scrap and a rope, tie it about her waist, and walk into the water until submerged and will herself to fill her lungs with the silty water. She let her mind imagine the scene, the moment. Then, in angry tears again, she stripped off her clothing, leaving on her shoes, and waded in to her neck, dunked herself, and swam out deeper. She held her breath as long as she could, then blew it out, her body sinking deeper, until in a panic she pushed herself back up to the surface, broke out of the water, and bobbed there, treading water. She slung hair from her eyes and saw her husband on the bank where she’d entered, his arms limp at his sides, watching her. She watched him, feeling like a wild animal caught in the open by a strange human creature, until he turned and walked back up the bank on the trail, out of sight. Only then did she swim in and put her clothes back onto her wet, clingy body, feet squishing in her sodden shoes, feeling at least a little bit mollified, as if his having witnessed her act was at least a warning, an act of emotional revenge. She was washed clean in body, if not entirely in mind.

  IN THE FALL of 1918 there came news of the flu epidemic. Several cases down in Mercury left people alarmed, and when a local child seemed to have come down with it, officials closed the school and Grace was free to perform her babysitting duties full-time.

  Ida Chisolm took advantage of Grace’s presence to disappear into the woods and gather a large basket of echinacea and ginseng root. She slipped off to a neighbor’s farm to beg some fruit from their pomegranate tree and, not finding them home, scuttled away like a desperate thief with several pomegranates tucked into the folds of her apron. She set into a constant, haranguing administration of tea from the herbs and doses of a syrup she made from the pomegranate seeds stirred into drams of her husband’s precious apple brandy, which Grace and Jane resisted, grimacing, but she put her own grimacing face into theirs and told them in a cold voice to drink it or die. “I will not have death visit this house again until it is mine own,” she said in her ominous way. She looked up to see her husband watching her from the other room, looking wary and maybe even a bit worried by what must seem her obsessive manner. Well, let him think I’m crazy, she thought. Somebody around here has to practice good common sense. She got up and went over to him, took up the tin cup he was using to sip whiskey, and poured a measure of the syrup in there, too. Looked him in the eye. “Drink it,” she said. He shrugged and did as she said.

  They did stay healthy, and she looked at them all in defiance for their lack of faith. The school reopened in late fall but she for­bade Grace to return just yet, saying she didn’t trust the ones saying the worst was over. Dr. Thompson, during one of his visits, said he couldn’t disagree with her on that.

  “I’d rather lose a year of school than risk the sickness myself,” he said. “I’ve seen people with it, and I’ve seen them die of it. Children do seem to be less at risk than young adults. If I were you,” he said to Sylvester Chisolm, “I’d wear a mask whenever I went to town to trade.”

  “Mask?” Chisolm said.

  “Gets close and crowded in the cattle auction at the stockyard, doesn’t it?”

  The doctor went to his car and got his bag and from it brought a square surgical mask with string ties. He gave it to Chisolm. Ida Chisolm watched all this as if witnessing some kind of introduction to a ritual, her shoulders hunched as if against bad luck or a jinxing.

  “Wash it good, tie it above your ears and then behind your neck.”

  Chisolm looked askance, took the mask by one tie string between finger and thumb, and examined it.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. He went to hand it to his wife but she drew back and shook her head.

  “This is not your regular ague,” the doctor said, leaning forward and putting on his serious face. “This one is killing people. Not so bad here as in town, and not so bad in town as in big cities. But if you get it, you’re in trouble all the same.”

  And then they heard, not two weeks later, that the doctor’s own wife, who had been spending a lot of time in Mercury proper with her family and, it was said, going to society parties and such, had become a victim of the illness. Dr. Thompson tended to her along with the regular hospital doctors and nurses in town, but it did no good.

  “You see what good newfangled medicine does for a body, now,” Ida Chisolm said.

  Mrs. Thompson was buried in the cemetery on the east side of town after a service at her family’s church, and after all the people who’d come to the funeral were done, Sylvester Chisolm went over, Ida Chisolm following, reluctant, little Jane nearly hidden in the folds of her voluminous skirts. Then Jane broke from her mother and ran to her father’s side. Ida felt a chill in her heart as the doctor reached to take the child in his own arms. He smiled and pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said to her father. “Thank you for coming today. It’s good to lay eyes on this little angel at such a time.”

  “Say you’re welcome,” Chisolm said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You need to say it,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” the doctor said. “She said it with her eyes. Why don’t you bring her along sometime when you go to town? I’ll have our Hattie make a pie. And she can play with her little boy.”

  Ida Chisolm tried to speak in protest but only a nearly silent croak emerged.

  “What’s his name?” Jane said.

  “His name is Mister. He’s the same age as you.”

  “All right,” she said, with the kind of kerplunk finality of a child.

  “Bright little thing,” the doctor said. “I always wished Lett and I had had children, but now I suppose it’s best we never did.”

  “Is Mister your little boy?” Jane said.

  The doctor and Chisolm laughed at that, and little Jane laughed with them. Then the doctor looked over at Ida Chisolm glaring at him from where she stood a few feet away.

  “I appreciate you all came,” the doctor said, looking past her to where Grace sat in the bed of their buckboard. Like her mother she wore a black dress and black bonnet that hid her face. “The Mrs. seems upset.”

  Chisolm said, looking over at her, jaw set, “She did consent to come along, but I’m afraid that death does not become her.”

  THAT EVENING, the doctor sat in his study with a tumbler of Memphis bourbon on ice. Earlier in the stealthy departure of dusk and standing on his porch he’d heard the calling of a young mockingbird down in the virgin woods behind his house. On the randy hunt, he supposed. Wouldn’t be long lonely, not down there. Had half a mind to walk
his trail through them all the way down to the lake, as if following the looping flight of some dreamed night bird, in dry moonlit undergrowth, step from the canopy to come upon open water and a calling loon. Though he feared it would take him too deeply into his sadness to escape. He ate a tin plate of supper left in the stove warmer by the young woman Hattie he’d hired to keep his house and cook when it became apparent that he and Lett were living a practical separation. He’d come home once too often to no supper, no fire in the hearth or cookstove, a house with dust balls fairly rolling along the baseboards like little animated creatures. This Hattie, the midwife Emmalene’s daughter, with her illegitimate child, he’d taken pity on her and admired what seemed an admirable dignity about her, advanced for her young age. He’d had a patient one day who’d observed her child Mister playing in the yard by himself and then said something about colored people not caring for their family. Sometimes he was astonished how often he forgot people’s cruel ignorance, people who’d never been anywhere but the little hamlets where they were born, raised, and would die. Not that he hadn’t known plenty of so-called sophisticated people with the same attitude. He’d said, “You know that the smartest thing about you, Heck, is probably your pecker.” Even Heck had to laugh at that, being treated as he was for a case of gonorrhea.