Miss Jane

by Brad Watson

  “Clear enough for now, then?” he said.

  “I guess,” Jane said. Then she said, “I want to go to school like everybody else.”

  “I know.”

  “Help me figure out how to do it.”

  “All right. Let me think about it for a couple of days.”

  He started to go, then turned back.

  “You know, Jane, there will likely be teasing.”

  She just looked at him, tears welling up that she blinked back. She nodded.

  “I already know that,” she said.

  Mrs. Ida Chisolm

  Rt. 1, Old Paulding Rd.

  Dear Mrs. Chisolm,

  As per our conversation regarding daughter Jane’s (and your) concerns about managing her incontinence as she begins her public life at the Damascus school, and if you feel the necessity of taking extra measures to insure her mental comfort and avoid accidents, I would recommend that the child refrain from eating and drinking after the evening meal. A little extra time in the privy first thing in the morning. A very light breakfast (absolutely no coffee, as this is not good for children of her age in any case but coffee is a diuretic and would increase the frequency of urination and possibly bowel movements as well), a very light lunch. She should sip a little water during the day so as to avoid dehydration. She should have a healthy snack when she gets home and partake heartily at supper. Make sure she drinks plenty of water in the afternoons. I would not give her iced nor hot tea.

  I’m sure she has told you that I went over all this with her myself. She seemed to understand. Such a wise little girl you have there, as you well know.

  She is a healthy child, all things considered, and this regimen should not cause her any more than some initial, mild discomfort, to which I believe she soon will become accustomed.

  Yours truly,

  Ed Thompson, M.D.

  AND SO SHE willingly took up the routine. At home they had a double privy with a wall in between, so she would go there first thing in the morning and stay, stomach growling, until she felt she was entirely empty. She hardly even noticed the coming and going of others on the other side. No one spoke to her, interrupted her concentration on becoming an empty vessel, her body an empty, hollow chamber of flesh, dry and clean as the inside of a cleaned-out fish. And then she would step back out into the yard, feel the dust on her feet and between her toes, as if she had stepped out onto the surface of the moon, which was sometimes still there pale and wan just above the tops of the trees.

  Her dresses were sewn to be loose and hang from her shoulders in a way that would not cinch her waist and accentuate her preventive undergarment. There were no secrets, really, in such a small world as their little school, but there was a kind of natural discretion. Her mother gave her a vial of inexpensive perfume to dab onto her wrists and her undergarments to disguise—at least for a moment, for a getaway—any smells in case of an unavoidable accident. Even young Jane sensed the sad futility of this gesture, although she would wear a bit of perfume most days for the rest of her life.

  Despite the constant faint but cloying scent of this perfume, the smells peculiar to a school classroom fascinated her almost to the point of being mesmerized. Pencil lead, waxy crayons, ­writing-tablet paper and the paper in the schoolbooks, all of them used and handed down from children years and years before, the chalk used on the blackboard, the rising and then fading smells of lunch the students ate from their paper sacks, lunch boxes, or (for some of the poorest) pails covered with a kitchen towel, the boys’ hair oil and the girls’ bath powder, the dung from the horses and mules that some of the older children would ride to get there and then tether outside the building to a hitching post. All of it combined into a medley of smells that would always mean “school” in her memory.

  It was a small school that took the community children all the way from first grade to high school graduation, and there were not many enrolled, so the environment was relatively intimate, like some great, overgrown family, in a way. The children seemed to know and understand one another like siblings, whether lovingly, or with hostility, or with the purposeful ignoring of this one or that.

  She established herself in the little world there, and was accepted well enough, easygoing as she was, and thick-skinned by virtue of her family’s ways in general and her mother’s often harsh tongue. She could tell that Grace was keeping a distant eye on her but she stayed just that: distant. Early on, she caught some teasing from the other children during recess, saying, She wears diapers. The principal and high school teacher, Miss Deen, who had taken it on herself to supervise the younger children’s little playground, reprimanded them.

  “You should not make fun of anyone for being who she is,” Miss Deen said to them in her calm and level but somber voice. She was a tall and sophisticated woman with a long face and square jaw and glinting sharp green eyes who had grown up in the capital in Jackson, then married a local farmer she’d met at the state agriculture and teachers college.

  “You there, Steven,” she said, at which the boy immediately blushed a florid pink. “Should we all laugh at you for your disgusting habit of picking your nose and eating the product thereof? You, Morgan, shall we laugh at you because you secretly like to nibble the lead from your pencil? Do you know that will make you feeble-minded? You, Marjory, should we suggest that you wear diapers because of the time you laughed too hard and wet yourself right there in your seat? You, Bobby Land, because you soiled yourself being afraid to go alone to the privy?”

  All fell silent in a pall of embarrassment. A couple of other children had come up and giggled but when Miss Deen turned her hard gaze upon them fell silent again. None was more appalled than Jane. She willed Miss Deen just to be silent and let it go.

  “I am sorry to have embarrassed anyone,” Miss Deen said. “But perhaps y’all have learned a lesson about making fun of other people for the ways in which they are not perfect human beings. As we none of us are.”

  Jane both loved her and was angry at her for making more of it than had already been made. She’d rather have fended for herself.

  She saw Grace, shaking her head, go back into the schoolhouse.

  The other children didn’t tease her so much after all that, and then after a while not at all. Jane had a dignity about her that the others had come to admire and respect, though some of the other girls did seem to quietly resent her, as if thinking she was a little stuck-up. But that wasn’t it. She was in fact in a bit of a fog by midday, usually, the effect of having not eaten or drunk anything since the night before.

  But no matter how much the other children seemed to begrudge a respect for her, to feign unawareness of her mysterious need to wear diapers (and who could tell how much they might know or think they knew through rumor?), and no matter how out of it she generally was, she was all too aware of her difference. How that was what really communicated to others that sense of strangeness. This was enough in itself to cause a gathering of something like sadness in her mind, a heaviness in her chest. There was no getting away from this awareness, a strange self-consciousness, as long as she was around others. And so it wasn’t very long before she began to question whether this business of schooling, of trying to be like everyone else, was actually worth the trouble. The odd mingling of a sense of sadness and embarrassment.

  She had even caught Grace looking at her more than once with what seemed, possibly, a genuine sympathy. That was almost harder to take than what she sensed in the others.

  And besides, she found it hard to concentrate, being hungry and thirsty all day. And tired of pretending to eat a lunch when she actually only picked at a bit of cornbread or biscuit she carried in a napkin in her pocket like some crumbling talisman, to ward off any overly curious attention. She knew it was safe to eat her lunch—nothing would happen before she got home—but she was too anxious about it all.

  On the last day of school before the Christmas holiday, she let Grace walk on ahead without even trying to keep up or asking Grace
to slow down. She cut through the woods, around the house, and came out in the pecan grove, the spindly gray branches ugly against the austere sky. A loneliness she didn’t even know how to name welled up in her so swiftly that she didn’t realize she had tears in her eyes until she felt them cold on her cheeks, and for the first time since she was very small she let them come, blurring her vision, pushing the hurtful feeling from her heart. When it was done she went on to the house. Her mother, standing on the back porch as if watching for her, didn’t speak but looked as if she understood everything. And so Jane went to her room to be alone until time for supper. And they left her alone, no doubt knowing.

  Ellison Adams, M.D.

  Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Dear Ellis,

  I have a regular supply of very decent homemade spirits and the occasional quarter of venison from Chisolm. He feels the need to pay me for my attention to the girl but I persuade him otherwise with the argument of acquiring valuable medical research. She is now seven years old, and seems practically immune to the kinds of infection apparently common in some such cases. Your diagnosis has not faltered at all.

  Her disposition is generally bright, if also somewhat prodigiously contemplative. A fairly solitary and independent little sprite. I have driven up, looked around, finally asked, and no one will know where she is nor seem too concerned about the not knowing. And then she will appear, as if from thin air, behind me, standing there looking up at me and smiling. We talk. It’s rare that anything she says prompts me to request a thorough examination.

  In any case, I figure we are out of the woods in terms of any potentially dangerous complications. I will keep a close watch when it comes near time for puberty, of course, although—again—if it is indeed what you believe it to be, I shouldn’t have to worry about that.

  It was a disappointment to her, the attempt to attend our local school. I don’t know exactly what happened, and it didn’t seem the teasing was excessive. She was melancholy for a while after, but seemed to recover entirely by spring. Still, I cannot help but think that she hides a deep emotional burden inside her little child’s chest. I don’t see how she could escape it. My god, Ellis, the child pretty much picked up reading in just three months there. Such a waste.

  I am considering taking it on myself to bring her up there for a thorough examination by Young, if you could help me arrange it. She is plenty old enough now to undergo surgery, if it were advisable. I know you think my own examinations and communications are probably sufficient to diagnose as you have: that this is not an operable condition, at this point in time, and that most likely even sphincter construction is unlikely. But, if the girl and her family are willing, I would rest easier knowing for sure, after examination by an experienced specialist in the field. If not your people, then at least let one of the urologists in Memphis take a look. It is only a little over 200 miles from here, as opposed to the near 1,000 to you.

  In any case, I will be in touch about the potential visit/examination. Please continue to send any news of developments, but I will try to make this examination happen as soon as possible. The girl is such a delight, truly, that I hate to think ahead and imagine her living a long life of isolation and shame, which is sure to come on her if there is nothing to be done about her condition once she is older.

  My best to Mary Kate, when you see her. Tell her the one she should have married wishes you all well. I do so miss Lett. Her family keeps fresh flowers at her grave in town. She is in their plot, as you know. As for me, burn and scatter the ashes in my woods if I go first. It’s in the will.

  Yrs,

  Ed

  PRETENDING TO BEGRUDGE it but seeming to enjoy it once they’d get started, Grace sometimes helped Jane with her reading in the evenings, bringing home books from the school library, and corrected her handwriting efforts. The teachers had let her borrow the books, knowing she had a little sister at home who wanted to learn. There was the Bible in the house, of course, but it was incomprehensible. No one read from it, much less aloud. The pictures of paintings inside it were interesting. More helpful was the Sears, Roebuck catalog, with its pictures of the items described there for sale. There was always a new one in the house, and an older one in the outhouse. Sometimes she would take the newer catalog to her father in the evenings and ask him to read her the description of something in there for sale. It was all a kind of schooling, anyway.

  When Dr. Thompson learned that she wanted for reading material, he began bringing books when he visited.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think to, before,” he said. “Lett was a reader. I am, too, of course, but she read novels, made-up ­stories. I like some of them but it’s the rare one I like a lot. I thought I’d bring some by, you see which ones you like, we’ll start to get an idea of which ones I ought to give you.”

  “You don’t have to give them to me for good.”

  He shrugged, said, “I don’t care much about hanging on to books after I’ve read them. Most of them, anyway. Better to give them away to others who might want to read.”

  “Well. Thank you.” Then she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on his bristly cheek. The doctor stood there a long moment, something like a look of amused wonder on his face. Then he smiled to himself, got into his car, and drove off.

  Inside, Jane looked at the books he’d given her. One had her own name in the title, Jane Eyre. It seemed a little bit dense, but would be interesting to her later on. Another was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It was an old battered copy and about boys, so she thought it might have been his own book and he was just tired of reading it. She set it aside, too. The third one was old, also, but not so worn. It was a slim little book with a faded red cover and the title on the spine: A Simple Heart, by Gustave Flaubert, an odd name. She set to reading it that night, and couldn’t stop. She finished by candlelight. She was in tears over poor Félicité’s sad but beautiful life, her broken heart and her loneliness, her love for her mistress’s children, and fascinated by the way she began to lose her mind, and filled with wonder at the spirit of her beloved parrot hovering over her at her death.

  She lay awake late into the night, the candle finally guttering out in its holder, and in the dim light left in the room from a bit of moon she passed into sleep without even feeling it coming, and dreamed heavily, and though she couldn’t remember anything particular when she woke the next morning, she remembered that the dreams had been kind of heartbreaking, and thought that she may have wept in her sleep. The odd thing was that she didn’t feel sad in their aftermath. She felt something like a lightened joy. She felt the damp of her tears on the pillow, and turned it over so that her mother would not see.

  SHE BEGAN TO HELP her mother out in the kitchen, preparing meals. She wasn’t allowed to cook anything yet but she was shown things, so that she would gradually learn that and be able to take over from Grace—and maybe even her mother—after Grace left home. No one knew when that would be, although when she was angry Grace was threatening to leave any minute. She made no secret of her desire to get off the farm.

  As her mother and Grace began early preparations for supper, Jane helped shell peas and butterbeans, rinsing them and leaving them in water for their mother to boil all morning with salt pork while Jane sucked her thumb, which was sore from prying apart the butterbeans’ tough pods. If there was to be a chicken fried, her mother would walk calmly among the nervous yard birds, casual as if just strolling through, and then would snatch one by the head and give it a quick twirl to snap its neck. Then she would dip it in scalding water, pluck and gut it, chop off its feathered head and hard yellow feet.

  Jane took the bucket in which her mother had tossed the head, feet, and guts down to the hog pen and tossed them straight onto the bare earth there, where after a momentary silence for comprehension the hogs, sows, and shoats set upon it, bawling, brawling, squealing from lust and the pain of swift and intense battle. Yet another, if negativ
e, reason to dislike the eating of their meat.

  Back at the house her mother had carried the plucked and headless hen back to the porch and pumped a little water to wash it, then carried it inside, cut it to frying pieces, dipped it in egg and milk, dredged it in flour, and dropped it piece by piece into the broad pan of hot lard on the stove, and set it piece by browned piece aside to drain on a sheet of newspaper on the counter.

  Jane would be set to peeling potatoes to boil and mash for the meal, or washing greens in a small tub on the back porch. Looking out over the yard, she would recall the remarkably casual, vivid slaughter, each arcing flop of the hen’s unceremonious exit from this world, each rise and quick chopping blow of the little hatchet through its neck into the oak stump, and somehow feel apart or invisible, a strange presence locked in her own consciousness, like no one else’s in the world, apart from all others, her fingers tightening in recollection of this or that casually violent action, and it sent a current into her spine up into the base of her neck, the tingling of it coming out her eyes in invisible little needles of light indistinguishable from the light of the gathering day.

  Grace in the Wilderness

  Anyone could tell something was up with Grace, these days. It was her last year of school. She seemed distracted, more than usual, and even more silent. Jane spied on her when she wasn’t aware of it. She was distracted and strange, like one of the chickens when it got what her mother called “broody” and wouldn’t leave the roost or just wandered about if her mother shut it out of the pen and henhouse, like it didn’t know what to do with itself and was ornery.