Miss Jane

by Brad Watson

  He left the plate in the sink and stood in the doorway to the bedroom and looked at his empty bed. He could see, out the window there, smoke rising from the chimney in the cottage he’d had spruced up for Hattie Harris, down the hill at the woods’ edge. A former slave cottage, was the irony there. The chimney smoke trailed off above the trees of his woods, sloping down the long wooded decline to the hidden lake, dissipating to nothing. There was no birdsong. Some respite between the noisy late afternoon and the last ephemeral moments of dusk. The heavy presence of his wife’s absence—not just gone from home but no longer a presence in the living world—was suddenly unbearable, and he wept, silently, standing there, let his tears blur those things before his eyes. Like the vision of a weary newborn child. He stood there until his eyes stopped leaking and dried themselves, stiffening trails down his cheeks he could feel tightening the skin. Such a mortal feeling, this small thing.

  DURING JANE’S FIRST few years, her two much older brothers would come home from the state college in the summers to help out, wiry and Indian-brown like their father from working the experimental farm up there. Jane was happiest then, with these grown-up brothers she hardly knew teasing her and playing jokes on her, Sylvester, Jr., tickling her (Don’t do that to HER, their mother said), and all the conversation around the table. Her father seemed better able to avoid drinking when his older sons were around.

  Now they were grown and gone, with families of their own, and it was just her, Grace, and their parents. Sylvester, Jr., and Belmont married and took their wives all the way out to Wyoming, impossibly—unimaginably—far away, to work on a ranch and look for a piece of land to buy and ranch for themselves. Sylvester, Jr., wrote a postcard back:

  It’s a big place. Has to be. Takes ten times as much grassland to graze a cow here as back home. Winter is hard, hard, hard. Summer is heaven but spring (around June) brings mosquitoes that make ours look like mites. Saying is, mosquitoes that could stand up and mate with a wild turkey, ha. Work is constant, and people are very tough. Belmont and I are saving everything we can and hope to buy a good sized spread in a few years. If you want to see us, you need to come out. Much love from your sons and brothers. S.S.C., Jr.

  “We’ll never see them again,” her mother said, dropping the card into the stove and clanking the lid back down. “Got away when they could, didn’t they?” Her father said nothing, as if he hadn’t even heard.

  Days seemed longer then, on the farm. At dawn everyone rose and set to the chores, she and Grace milking, her mother getting breakfast together in the kitchen, her father checking the stock for losses or injury or sickness come in overnight. The sourceless light in distant trees, in the dust raised by their feet in the yard. Jane helped her mother scatter cracked corn for the chickens and check their nests and hideaways for eggs. Before heading to school, Grace cleaned up from breakfast as her mother began to plan the noon and evening meals, the dog-trot silent save for the sounds of her working the kitchen or sweeping the floors or churning laundry in the grassless, immaculately swept yard, hauling water from the pump on the back porch in a heavy bucket, heating it in the big black pot over a fire, stirring the dirty clothes with a long, stout hickory stick. There was the bustling of the noon dinner meal when her father came in, ate, then went back out to work, the clanking and scrubbing of cleaning up, the long hot still afternoon, her joy at Grace’s arrival home from school, then preparation for supper, and finally the rustling descent of quiet voices and bodies slowing into the evening until everyone slept.

  Soon enough she was given the job of feeding the poultry and pigs herself. The pigs had their large pen, below the work shed, and when she wasn’t kept busy with something she sometimes slipped away and watched them, their strange aimless waddling, and then sudden activity, frightening the shoats into loud squealing races around the pen as if some predator were after them, but really it was all in their minds. She came to understand that it was play. She didn’t want to eat pork after that, and became even thinner, for that was their daily meat except for the occasional venison, rabbit, or squirrel. And there was really no avoiding it entirely, since nearly every vegetable they ate was simmered with fatback for hours.

  She fed what little table scraps there were to the two dogs, but otherwise they hunted and scavenged. They knew not to get after the chickens, somehow, some sense of self-preservation. There was the hound and the shaggy thin-shouldered mutt with a long snout and a natural smile, with black fur around one eye and white around the other. This one she took for her dog and named it Top. How’d you come up with that name? they said. He’s Top Dog, she said, and they laughed, even Grace and her mother. The hound had no interest in following her but Top followed her everywhere. He would allow Jane to gaze at him and he would gaze right back at her. He didn’t smile, just looked attentive and expectant, as if he could feel what she was feeling about him. Most dogs when you looked at them, strays mostly wandering through, would look away. Her father said it was the wild still in them somewhere deep. But Top was more like a person that way, not afraid of her, at least, and sometimes if she didn’t pay him enough attention he would come over and rest his snout on her arm or leg and sigh, then look up at her with just his eyes, and if she was distracted and didn’t pet him, then he would give her a little kiss-lick on her hand or forearm, then press his snout onto her arm or leg again until she scratched him behind the ears or rubbed the top of his head or his back. Sometimes he would roll onto his back and allow her to place her ear against his furry chest and listen to his heart beating, so fast, even when he seemed just as calm as could be. She figured a dog had to get in all his heartbeats in a hurry if he wasn’t going to live as long as a person might.

  She loved the taste of cool buttermilk more than anything in the world. And her favorite after buttermilk was butter on hot biscuits, and after that, butter on hot cornbread, and after that, fried chicken, and after that, apple pie and the rare treat of homemade ice cream, and after that, and later on, fried bream from their own pond. Especially the crisp, salted tails.

  Between the ages of four and five, she began to make sure she was the last to sleep. It made her feel safer to be the last one awake, watching and listening to the world settle into the evening quiet and dark. The steady breathing, snoring, sleep-mumbling of the others made her feel more awake and alive, and that was a kind of safeness, too. An owl hooted down in the woods and she hoped no one would die. She studied the pale palms of her hands in the darkened room. The skin there gave off a light as soft as starlight on birch bark. How private, the palm of one’s hand. How intimately one knows it. So she may have said, had she the words.

  She was a guardian over the slumbering household in her sole awareness of it, and in that comforting role she could finally let go and sleep herself. Although one night, when she was just dropping into that long dark nothing where for an unknown time you ceased to exist, and from which may never come back, it was so hard to get over the idea of that—for every night she said her prayers, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take—she heard the low growling of something, a growl of something that sounded massive, slow, and fierce passing just below the window of her room. Some unspeakable monster. Her heart seized and she shouted out. Grace sat up in her bed, looking around for whatever was the cause of it, and her mother and then her father came running from their beds across the breezeway. Her mother came to her bedside, while her father remained in the doorway open to the breezeway and glittery moonlight slanted on the unpainted boards there. Her father took a lantern around the house to look for tracks. But there was nothing, they said, there had been no beast.

  “I didn’t hear a thing,” Grace said. “I was sound asleep till she started yelling.”

  “Why would you imagine such an awful thing?” her mother said.

  “It could have been a bear,” Grace said.

  “Not only would we’ve heard that,” her father said, “we sure would’ve smelled it. Nothing stinks quite like a bear
.”

  But Grace surprised her by lying down beside her until she could go back to sleep. She even teased her with a lullabye she made up: Hush, little girl, now, don’t be a’feared, wasn’t nothing but an old bear you hee-rd. That got her giggling and soon she relaxed and went to sleep, and when she woke up Grace was still there, snoring lightly on top of her bedcovers in her nightgown. She watched her till she blinked her eyes awake. Grace looked over, grumpy again, muttered something to herself. Then said, “How could you know what a bear is when you’ve never seen or even heard one, far as that goes?”

  “It was you said it was a bear,” Jane said. “Have you ever seen one?”

  “I’ve seen worse,” Grace said.

  “Like what?” she asked, fascinated.

  “Haven’t you?” Grace said, being mysterious. “In your sleep?”

  “No.”

  “You will.”

  But her only nightmares would be about the nameless beast she had heard, her sleeping mind imagining it in all kinds of forms, none of which she was ever able to recall upon waking.

  Light of the Gathering Day

  By late spring of the year she would turn six, a more complex awareness of her difference had begun to shape itself in her mind like the root of some strange plant down deep in the woods. She had moments when she felt like a secret, silent creation, invisible, more the ghost of something unknowable than a person, a child, a little girl. More than once she felt the light slap of her mother’s hand against the back of her head, the voice saying, Snap out of it, have you gone deaf and dumb and blind, now? For a second it was as if something just as ethereal as herself, a harsh and spiteful guardian angel, had snatched her back into the world against her nature, then whooshed away again on invisible wings.

  She began thinking about what it would be like to go to school. She couldn’t go the following year because of her late November birthday, but she began to wonder what it would be like, among strange children—and adults—who did not know about her. Would her mother or father tell them and would that make everything all right? She had played a game of checkers one day with Mister, the doctor’s housekeeper’s son, out on the doctor’s back porch. They’d been watching the doctor’s new peacocks in the yard, but Mister got bored and suggested checkers. She said, “When did he get those peacocks?”

  “I ’on’ know,” Mister said. “Recent. It’s a strange bird.” They watched the birds, several of them, peck about the yard and stand every now and then to fan their tails. “Said he just liked to watch them. Mama says he’s been lonesome since his wife died.”

  He was a skinny boy, with his hair clipped close to his head and baggy clothes that’d been handed down from his cousins.

  “They sure are pretty,” Jane said. She could see their deep, shiny blue neck feathers gleaming in the sunlight.

  Mister went to get the board and chips. She was a bit sketchy on the rules, so when Mister made one of his pieces a king she insisted that he allow her to make one of hers a queen.

  “Ain’t no such thing as a queen in checkers,” he said. They were on the back porch just off the kitchen, and Mister’s mother Hattie kept a close eye on them.

  “If you get to be a king, then I get to be a queen,” she said.

  To which Mister replied, “That ain’t how the game works. You got to get all the way to the top. And they call these pieces ‘men’ and that’s why it’s a king when you get it there. Plus, you stink.”

  “What?”

  She’d become so accustomed to her accidents that unless she was in public she sometimes didn’t even attend to them right away.

  Then Hattie came out where they were and told him to hush, he was being rude.

  “Well, she does,” Mister insisted, and that got him a light whack on the noggin and a scolding, and by that time Mister’s words had sunk in and Jane had become acutely self-conscious and smelled herself. She got up and ran inside the house to the doctor’s indoor privy, stripped off her diaper, cleaned herself, ran water in the tub, and scrubbed the garment with soap, rinsed it, squeezed it as dry as she could, washed her hands, then put it back on, cold and wet against her skin beneath her skirt. Then she rinsed the tub good and turned off the water.

  Mister called from outside the locked door, “Why you taking so long in there?”

  “Hush up, Mister,” she heard Hattie whisper, and then the sounds of her pulling him out of the room over his protests. She waited on the front porch until the doctor came home from the emergency call he’d made, and asked him to take her home.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “Yes,” was all she would say in reply. But after that she didn’t want to play with Mister, and would demur when the doctor offered to take her to his house for a visit. Sometimes she would ask him if he would just take her on a drive in his car or a ride in his buggy, since she didn’t want him to think she didn’t like him anymore. If he had other patients to see she would wait outside until he came back out and took her home again. If there were other children about she would stay in the car or buggy and decline their offers to come play.

  Her parents and other members of her family had got to where they never said anything to her about her “problem,” except to tell her quietly to go change herself if she forgot about it, especially before a meal or if someone was dropping by for a visit.

  But now she thought about it quite a lot, through the winter and into the spring. How she was different. It descended more deeply into her mind that she was the only one made the way she was made. That she was strange. She became accustomed to that flushing sense of shame that could come on and heat your face and make your scalp tingle and make you want to cry.

  Summer came early, and then came on hard in June. It was very hot. She took to wearing light dresses and leaving off her diaper, and staying outside in the shade most of the day, hopping behind a bush or tree when she felt something coming on, instead of out in the open as she had when she was younger. She kept with her a catalog page she would tear a piece off of, use, and discard. And she would feel that flush of shame whenever it happened, and her mind would bristle with the sense of that strangeness. Ever since the day playing checkers with Mister, she had taken to washing her own diapers down at the creek instead of letting her mother or Grace take care of it. She would not put them in her mother’s boiling pot for sterilizing washed undergarments until all the others’ had been removed.

  She was past her sixth birthday that November before it occurred to her that no one had even mentioned the possibility of attending school the next year.

  She went to where her mother sat mending a shirt on the front porch.

  Her mother looked up as she stood there.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I guess I won’t be going to school next year like the rest.”

  Her mother stopped her mending, though she looked down at it for a bit before meeting her daughter’s eye again.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t see the sense in putting you through it.” Then, more to herself, she said, “Most girls, I’d say it’s a waste of time, anyway.” She looked a long moment at Jane again and said, “We will have to figure out something that you can do.”

  Her mother and Grace taught her simple sewing, her mother offering single-word corrections now and then, while Grace did the hands-on teaching. Jane’s hands were small and clumsy and she pricked herself, her bottom lip trembling when she tried not to cry. Be patient, her mother said, and she tried, and got better. The idea was it might be something useful in life when there was no more mother, no more father, nothing but the farm, which would probably be sold by her older siblings. It was understood that Grace would have to make do on her own soon enough, as well. Either get married or go to find work in town.

  She got better at sewing and soon even enjoyed it, applying a child’s blind concentration to the task, from mending seams and sewing patches into quilts, up to eventually using the machine to make simple smocks and skirts
and then dresses. She liked the rhythm of pumping the machine’s treadle to keep the stylus going and guiding the material through. She had to stand to reach it with her foot. Everything else disappeared from her mind. She was more like her father than her mother. He did not mind work, easily focused on a task.

  Perhaps as a consolation for not having school to look forward to, she was given freedom to wander about the whole place as she wanted. She walked the path through the woods that were charmed with their strange stillness and the scents of various plants and rich earth beneath moldering leaves. She walked the path down to the beaver pond, which was so much prettier in its wooded canyon than the cow pond sitting in the open and surrounded by hoof-cleaved muddy banks at the edge of their south pasture. She came out and sat on the hill above those woods and watched, at the juncture of field and woods down below, a pack of scruffy stray dogs that she imagined were the wild dogs she’d been cautioned about. They skirted the field in a silent little troop, tongues lolling, then disappeared into the undergrowth again, as if they’d been a ghost pack not really having been there except in her own mind.

  HER FATHER TOOK her fishing one Saturday afternoon when the bream were on their beds, down at the beaver pond. They walked the trail slowly, her father guiding the tips of their two cane poles through the tree limbs and saplings and shrubbery along the trail, and sat in the shade over a bed and pulled out more than a dozen of the broad, snub-nosed sunfish, wriggling. They were bluegills and bigger ones her father called shell crackers. The tug on her line ran a current from the line and pole straight through her body, a long-lined static shock, and she soiled herself in excitement. Her father only laughed a little and told her to toss her undergarment aside and lift her skirt and go for a little cool wade down the bank at a clear and shallow spot. When she hesitated, he said, “It’s safe there, go on.” Her mother had forbidden her to go down to the pond by herself and said the water was dangerous, as if she had a morbid fear of it herself. Her father came over, found a stick, and told her to beat the grass near the edge before stepping through it, to scare off any snake that might be resting there. She whacked at the grass, waited a moment, hesitating again, looking at the smooth brown surface of the water. “Go on, now,” her father said again. She carefully took a step in, ankle-deep. The cool water on her skin, the cool mud of the bottom squishing up between her toes, was delicious to her senses.