by Brad Watson
The Boy with the Camera
Elijah came over with a Brownie camera one day and took some pictures of her on their walk. He mailed the film to town to have them developed and printed. One, his favorite, was of Jane looking over her shoulder at him in a flirtatious way, and she made him give her the print of that one, she thought it was so funny. “But it’s my favorite one,” he said. “Well, you just get yourself another one made up,” she said.
Her mother and father, demure in their greetings but not impolite, watched them from the front porch as they would pause and turn to one another, as the Key boy would sometimes take her hand when he spoke to her.
After having seen the photograph and thinking about it as he sat before the fireplace late into an evening, her father had an idea to send Jane into town to live with her sister Grace, who was now proprietor of the dry-cleaning operation she’d started out with as a seamstress. Chisolm worried that living in town might afford Jane less freedom to get out and about—at least here she had roam of the property without socializing if it wasn’t convenient—but thought it might be a good thing to separate her from the Key boy, for the good of them both.
“Better to have her upset with me than have her heart broken by that boy one day,” he said to himself.
“Of course,” his wife said, surprising him. He hadn’t known she was in the room. He looked at her, a bit irritated by her sneakiness and her sarcastic tone.
Things were getting no better moneywise, either. He would worry less, maybe, if she wasn’t around, if she was in town learning how to live off the farm, moving toward learning how to be on her own in the world. Once he’d really thought about it, he couldn’t imagine she’d want to live on this farm by herself when he and the wife were dead and gone.
And to himself he admitted he was drinking more. Craving it more. Slipping off to his makings shed more often. But after a few drinks he would forget or not care about discretion and bring the jug or jar back up to the house. He worried about her seeing that.
His wife suggested that Jane could take in some sewing, maybe from some of Grace’s customers, to help out with expenses. She might build up a little business of her own that way.
They presented Jane with the idea the next afternoon before supper. She looked at them, sitting there at the kitchen table beside which she stood, listening. Her face had taken on the kind of look she’d put on as a child, when something upset her.
“I’d rather just stay here,” she said. “I can earn my keep.”
“Well,” her mother said, deliberately not looking at her. “We think it’s the best thing for now.”
Jane went into her room and sat on the bed, hearing her father go out again and her mother get to work on the meal. In a while, she got up and went back into the kitchen to help. Her mother stopped to look at her, then went back to what she’d been doing.
“You could take in some sewing work, like I said, just to help Grace out a little,” she said. “She practically raised you, anyway.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jane said. “But don’t make me leave right now. Please. Not just yet.”
Her mother looked at her long enough for Jane to feel the room begin to close in on them, the outside world to disappear from her senses. “And why do you want to stay here, with just us? Why do you want that so much just now?”
“I’m not like Grace. I’ve never wanted to get away, restless. Let me stay at least through the spring. For the dances, then. I had such a good time.”
“Maybe you are restless,” her mother said. And they stared at one another until her mother stood up to leave the room.
“If you would watch those peas on the stove,” she said as she left, “I’d appreciate it. Don’t let them boil over. I need to get out of this house for a bit.”
“All right.” Although she said it softly and her mother didn’t appear to be listening, reaching for her tin of snuff up on the mantel before going out onto the porch to sit by herself for a while.
THERE WERE LIGHT breezes passing through the hay stalks, cotton bolls beginning to bloom, the corn leafed out deep green. Jane walked with the doctor down into the woods and around the fishing pond and he talked about his love for fried fish and potatoes and patted his growing belly. Occasionally he pulled his briar pipe from his vest pocket and loaded it with tobacco and stopped to smoke leisurely while she waited. He was getting on in years, not really old but seemed so to Jane, and he stopped often to catch his breath and sigh out about how he knew he wasn’t really getting old, but he sure wasn’t young anymore. When they came out of the woods and walked down to the pasture below the house, he paused in his gait, knocked ashes from his pipe, and said, “Well, I have put off showing you this, or giving you the information that I promised I would, but from what your parents say, you and the Key boy seem to be courting in earnest, and so I thought I should not put it off any longer.”
She listened, her ears burning with what she half knew and feared he was going to say.
“You showed me,” she said.
“I showed you the simple stuff,” he said. “And gave you a general explanation. What I have to show you now is more detailed and specific.”
“Okay.”
“I know you’re both still very young and I doubt seriously either of you has thought ahead to anything more serious between yourselves. But still.”
He pulled from the side pocket of his jacket a printed pamphlet, with illustrations, and gave it to her.
“My friend in Baltimore sent me this pamphlet. It’s part of their stock-in-trade, see. It explains—graphically and in detail—how it is that a man and a woman come to be with child,” he said. “I know you’ve seen things,” he murmured, almost to himself. “But. In any case, if you’ll pay particular attention to page three, the inside-view illustration there of the usual female anatomy. As I said before, while you were growing inside your mother, becoming who you are, something happened to alter or change the normal process of this development. Or more likely stopped the development before you were fully formed. But now, after you have read this and seen the illustration he’s made and put in here—after talking to me and to that Dr. Davis in Memphis—you will understand what I mean when I say that, in your case, conceiving a child and carrying it to term would be extremely unlikely without major surgical repair or alterations, and as I said, I believe that will be possible one day but there is just no way to say when. And if you, as you are now, were able to engage in intercourse or sexual relations—do what you’ve seen your sister and, ah, the others do—it wouldn’t be the same as it is with people who have what’s considered the ‘normal’ anatomical makeup. I’ve said that you are a normal girl, and you are. But inside you down there, because you stopped developing before everything was finished, and maybe some wires got crossed in the process—that is where you’re not ‘normal.’ I’m afraid that if the Key boy were to marry you, on your wedding night—I’m afraid he might feel confused and unsettled. He might even believe he had been betrayed. There is nothing in this world that saddens me more than to have to tell you this straight-out. But it simply is not right to get into a serious relationship with someone without everyone knowing the facts. Or at least enough of them.”
The doctor paused.
“You see the slip of paper there in the back of the pamphlet.”
“Yes.”
“You can look at that and compare it to the illustration in the pamphlet, which is a drawing of the interior female anatomy without any sort of complications.”
In the margin of the pamphlet on that page he had drawn an arrow and written, This is where one has access to the part inside that allows a child to be conceived. And there was another arrow pointing to the drawing of the male parts, without additional words, as if to say, This is self-evident, no?
“You can see the obvious and extensive difference if you look here”—and he pointed to the pamphlet graphic—“and then here”—and he pointed to the handmade drawing. It looked to have bee
n traced from some professional document. Looking from the one to the other, the printed drawing in the pamphlet and the drawing on the slip of paper, she felt a cold heaviness flood into her heart. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t known it anyway, on some level. But she had never really been able to imagine the details. Seeing it there, laid out so plainly, was a form or level of confrontation with the reality of her self that she had essentially avoided—just by being herself, she supposed. She dropped her hand holding the drawing and pamphlet to her side, fought back useless tears. There was no sense in being upset over what just couldn’t be. Or at least no sense in making a scene over it in front of anyone else.
He held out his long, big-knuckled hand and took hold of hers. She tried to withdraw it but he held on.
“I may have overstepped my rights,” he said.
“Did you tell him all this?” she said, butting in. “Did you show him this?”
“Heavens, no, child. No. I did talk to him. I kept it private, just him and me. I said nothing more than that it was not likely you could ever conceive a child. And that for the sake of both of you, you ought to take that into consideration. I beg your forgiveness if I have gone too far. But I thought it might be easier on you for me to tell him that. And only that.”
She held his gaze and said, deliberately, “What if I just told him right-out, told him everything, and see what he says?”
“Do you think he would be able to understand, Janie?”
She couldn’t answer that, and fought to control her emotions. She knew the answer to the question.
“What they call your condition is printed there, you see. There are variables—not every case is exactly the same, so this is what I guess you might call a generalization. But the variations are generally not great. And from what Dr. Davis saw during his examination in Memphis, and from what I can tell, myself, I think it’s pretty accurate.”
She said nothing, trying to control her emotions.
“You are starving yourself,” he said. “And dehydrated. I’ve heard of young women dying of such measures, for whatever their reasons.”
“Well,” she said. “That won’t happen. I’m fine.”
Then, when he still stood there, she said, “I understand, Dr. Thompson.”
He left her there and walked back to their house. She saw him reach the porch and speak for a little while to her parents, who said nothing. She saw her father nod and say something. Then the doctor got into his car and drove off.
When Jane approached the gallery her father got up and walked past her without saying anything. Her mother, when Jane met her gaze, gave a small, grim-faced nod of approval. Jane went past her and on into her room. She sat on her bed, set down the pamphlet, looked again at the drawing. Read the words she’d never seen or heard before printed there, defining her: Urogenital sinus anomaly. Persistent cloaca. They made no sense.
He should have let me tell him, she thought, anger welling up. Then she realized the truth of the matter. She wouldn’t have known how to do it. She would have had to just turn her back on him. And she didn’t know how she could have done that.
Dear Ellis,
Thank you for sending me those materials, although it was painful to use them. She took it hard. Maybe harder than I’d even expected. I’d fooled myself into thinking she had not indulged in some illogical youthful optimism.
It was impossible to tell just what went through the parents’ minds as I was telling them what I told the girl. Essentially. Seriously if I were a card player I would want Chisolm’s deadpan visage. Not as if he doesn’t wear his hardships in that expression that is somehow not hard but enduring. Like the surface of some hard-traveled rutted clay road. As if made for that. The wife shows more, albeit not without some amount of the inscrutable.
Not as if the whole thing isn’t something these folks hardly ever talk about. Not comfortably, anyway. Country folks being the kind who kindly turn away, out of discretion and courtesy as much as helplessness.
If any consolation’s to be had from this it is possibly that young Jane will stop starving herself to death, and suffering dehydration, in some kind of last-century version of lovesickness. She looks almost like those consumptive maidens my father would talk about sometimes, wooing young gentlemen with their darkened eyes full of death. Visibly becoming ghosts of themselves until the ghost is given up.
I wished I’d thought to hint at the possibility of a fresh bit of corn whiskey from the man before leaving. Would have felt awkward, though. Barely had the heart to look them in the eye after I said what I had to say. Nor did he have the heart to look at me. Mrs. did. Like some bitter, deposed old queen thinking to kill the messenger.
Ed
ONE DAY SOON after that, Jane took her solitary walk in the woods and went down to sit in her favorite little meadow, shaded on one side. It was her private place. The shaded grass was cool on the soles of her bare feet. She heard something and looked up to see Elijah Key standing only a few yards away, seeming a little abashed at having followed her there. She thought he must have been watching the house. She was startled, but when she saw it was him, she breathed again. Then another moment of alarm until she realized she was clean, not having thought about it on her way out. Then she burned with the knowledge of why he was there. He moved closer, hands shoved into the pockets of his overalls.
“I hear you’re up and moving to town,” he said in his quiet voice.
“I guess so,” she said. “My sister needs help at her dry cleaner’s, I guess.”
They walked together back up the path toward her place.
“What about you and me?” he said.
She looked down at her feet in the soft earth of the trail she walked. It was into June now, and heating up every day, and the birds were most alive in the cooler shade trees deeper in the woods, their leaves still the deep green of late spring, and the sunbeams the trees allowed down through their limbs were slanted and cleaved through the general light, canted columns of yellow-gold with no substance beyond phenomenal beauty and perfect stillness.
“It’s complicated,” she said. “I guess it’s just not to be.”
He stopped her and gently turned her shoulders so she could face him.
“But why not? You can tell me.”
She felt the color rise in her throat and face and she thrust her tingling hands into the pockets of her skirt and said nothing.
“Is it something about me?”
Still she said nothing, and tried to calm herself into an attitude and expression that said nothing, gave nothing. She looked away.
“You know it’s not,” she said.
“Dr. Thompson told me you can’t have children. I don’t care about that.”
“You might, one day, Elijah. I don’t doubt you would.”
She shook her head and stepped away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s more than that, anyway. I can’t talk about it.”
“I’ll come see you in town.”
She shook her head. This was becoming too hard.
“No. Don’t.”
Neither said anything. And then he spoke.
“Won’t you give me a kiss before you go?”
She felt herself blushing again and was frightened. Then she nodded and stood still. Elijah Key walked over—he was barefoot, too, his feet grayish red with dust from the road and the trail through the woods. She thought he had nice feet. He moved closer, removed his eyeglasses, revealing undistorted his beautiful blue eyes. She thought he might kiss her on the lips and with tears forming in the corners of her eyes quickly gave him her left cheek, and he very gently put his lips there, and gave her a soft kiss in the hollow between her cheekbone and her mouth, lingering. She felt the warm breath from his nostrils as he kissed her cheek. He smelled sweetly of horses and clod dirt and hay. And then he said softly, “Good-bye, sweetheart.” He put his glasses back on and ran off down the trail at a trot. She hadn’t even noticed that he wasn’t wearing a shirt below his overall
s’ suspenders.
Jane would ever be sorry she didn’t have a photograph of Elijah Key, and berated herself for not thinking to ask him if she could take his picture that day after he’d taken hers.
She thought there had been a catch in his voice, there in the leaf-dappled light on the trail. She thought she might weep, herself. But only for a moment. She swallowed it down thickly in her throat and walked slowly back to the house, seeing nothing until she arrived in the yard, which was empty but for the chickens let loose from their pen—her mother’s doing, no doubt—dawdling and pumping their heads walking around. The light in the yard so bright on them that at first they seemed like something else, otherworldly birds alighted there in a migration she might have been the first to see. Then she blinked in the hard light, held a hand over her brow to shade her eyes, and they were just chickens.
After Her Kind
So in the fall of 1932, when she was sixteen going on seventeen, she went to live with Grace in town. Grace’s personality hadn’t changed much, but it did seem that she took things easier here, on her own. She’d married the owner of the dry-cleaning business, a man with the unlikely name of Noble Sidebottom. Then Mr. Sidebottom—who must have truly had quite enough of Grace—ran off with an even younger woman, leaving Grace the business, house, and automobile but not a word of good-bye. Took what cash they had, too. Grace said she figured they hauled off to Mexico, where life was cheap. Some afternoons she drank beer or gin and smoked cigarettes, right out on the front porch where anybody walking by on the sidewalk could see.
