Miss Jane

by Brad Watson

  Weekdays, Jane worked as a seamstress in Grace’s shop, mending and hemming men’s britches and shirtsleeves, repairing the stitching in winter coats, vests. She had learned while living with her mother to make dresses, skirts, shirts from whole cloth. She sat at her machine and pumped the treadle with her foot, humming tunes of her own making as she worked. She kept the big washing machine going for the laundry customers, and hung clothes on the lines out back, and helped Grace iron when she could. It was hard work.

  She had ended her habit of fasting, as she had to keep her wits to get everything done. She had little contact with others, anyway, outside her very controlled environment. She’d taken to wearing several slips beneath her dress, as many as five or six, hoping that would muffle odors, and a protective rubber garment. And perfume, a slight distraction. And it was Grace who gave the customers their items and took their money. Jane stayed in the back, working. Clients came to the shop to drop off or pick up items they’d had repaired or sewn, but she rarely saw them.

  Their house, just a couple of blocks north of the new hospital, was one of those plain Victorian homes of plank siding painted white, with tall windows and a second, attic floor with dormers, where Jane made her rooms.

  The streets were paved to just north of Fourteenth Street, so in all seasons Jane and Grace could hear the clopping of horses’ hooves when wagons and buggies passed, going to the hospital or down the hill to town, and also the chustling of old vehicles and the whining acceleration of the newer motorcars owned mostly by townspeople who lived in the outlying areas. At all hours of the day and night came the plaintive steam whistles of freights and passenger trains plying the tracks along Front Street, south to Hattiesburg and the coast, north to Columbus and Tupelo, east to Birmingham, west to Jackson. To Jane, who’d never heard trains so close with such regularity, the wailing whistles and the banging of cars together in the rail yard, rumbling out of the valley in all directions, was comforting. Up in the attic apartment, her windows open spring, summer, and fall for breeze, she heard these sounds, along with the sloppy hard-edged language of men walking home from the saloons in late evening, and she felt most times as if she had little real privacy, so accustomed she was to the quiet farm with its occasional cow or bull sounding off, bellowing at the moon or calling a calf or hailing a harem of heifers, a horse blowing a big flappity sigh, restless in its stall, a dog barking, an owl hooting now and then, and the startled songbirds’ calls in its wake, or their silence. Coyotes. Crickets. Cicadas. Tree frogs, and bullfrogs down by the cattle pond. And during quiet moments in the summertime, the breezes rustling the full-leafed stalks in the cornfield.

  If she was to stay there and live in Grace’s attic, then she was to be the primary cook, washwoman, and cleaning woman, in spite of the fact that she put in a full day six days a week at Grace’s shop for meager wages, as well. Grace was hard in her determination not to be soft in a world where men expected that of women so they could have their way.

  In one of her more callous moments, she said to Jane, “You don’t know how good you have it, not even having to think about dealing with a man pawing at you all the time, bossing you around.”

  They were in the kitchen, Jane having cracked several eggs into a bowl to scramble them. Grace leaned over to look into the bowl.

  “You didn’t take out the little squiggly things.”

  “Why should I?”

  “It’s the rooster jism,” Grace said. “Sperm.”

  “It is not,” Jane said, looking again at the eggs in the bowl with revulsion.

  “Well, what would you know about it? You’ve never seen it.”

  “That is just not possible,” Jane said.

  “Sure looks like it,” Grace said.

  WHENEVER HER FATHER would come to town to sell a cow at the stockyard, which wasn’t so often anymore, he would stop and pick up Jane and let her go along. It was always a Saturday, and he would always just pull up to the curb in front of the house and sit in his big cattle truck smoking cigarettes, until one of them would hear the cows in back complaining of being cooped up and go out to speak to him. If it was Grace, he’d nod and just say, “Tell sister to come on with me to the stockyard.”

  “He must think I have an eye for cattle,” Jane said.

  “What I figure is he knows he won’t drink till after the trading if you’re along,” Grace said.

  Jane would try to talk to him but he had become a man of even fewer words. His lean and chiseled features now more lined, the jawline softer. Eyes seeming to go gray behind spectacles that gleamed in sun or streetlamp light like glass coins in filament frames. Just after the auction—and the loading of a cow if he’d bought as well as sold—he would go off by himself, come back, and begin to take furtive swallows from a pint bottle of liquor he’d acquired from some local purveyor or another hanging about the lot like a regular truck farmer. One evening they were driving back to Grace’s when a policeman pulled them over, ringing away at the bell on the roof of his car. Her father looked annoyed and puzzled. The policeman came up to the truck window and spoke to her father. Evidently he knew who he was. He looked around her father and tipped his hat to her.

  “Ma’am,” he said, touching the bill of his policeman’s cap. Then, “Mr. Chisolm, did you realize you were exceeding the speed limit?”

  Her father looked at the young man for a good long moment and said, “It’s getting late and I’m in a hurry to get home.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand that. Have you been drinking, Mr. Chisolm?”

  Her father just looked at him as if he hadn’t said anything at all. Jane took a furtive glance at the pint bottle lying beside her father’s leg on the seat.

  “I need to get on,” her father said then. “I have to drop my daughter off at her sister’s house and then drive clear out to my place, a good five-six mile from here, and I like to get to bed early, you understand.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand. If you could wait for just a minute, though, I’m afraid I’m going to have to write you a citation.”

  “A what?”

  “A ticket. For the speeding. I’ll let the drinking go, as you seem capable of driving, if you’ll keep the speed down.”

  “All right, but I need to get on,” he said again then.

  “Yes, sir, it will only take a minute.”

  But when the officer went back to his patrol car to get his ticket book, her father simply put the truck into gear and drove on.

  “Papa,” she said. She looked through the rear window at the policeman, who was standing there beside his vehicle looking after them as if someone had just asked him a question he had no idea how to answer.

  Her father said nothing. Dropped her off. She kissed him on the cheek and said good night. He looked over at her then. His features had drawn themselves down into what looked like a permanent sadness, as if he no longer had the will or strength to pull them up into any expression but the forlorn. She wanted to say, Papa, how bad could it be? You still have the farm, the land. Others have it worse, for sure. But she knew what pride he took in having made something out of nothing, only to see it threatened by hard times. She supposed she could apply that thinking to not just the farm but his whole life. There now living alone with a woman who must seem a hostile stranger to him, and him a hollow one to her.

  “Night, daughter,” he said, and drove on.

  She watched his truck slowly gearing up the hill and away. Right in the middle of the road, but steady. The shadowed shape of his hat and head there in the truck’s cab, visible in the gaps between the oak boards of the cattle guard. She felt the ghost of an apprehension. He still looked strong but in many ways ten years older than he was. She had a sudden irrational fear that this would be the last time she ever saw him. But she fought that down, knew it was foolish, superstitious in some way.

  Later, Grace would tell her that the story of the foiled traffic ticket had got around town. Apparently their father was quite the local character, and the you
ng policeman suffered much derisive joking for having tried to give a ticket to Mr. Sylvester Chisolm.

  THAT WAS HER LIFE there, in town. She stayed so busy and tired that it seemed like time didn’t matter anymore. Didn’t so much pass as disappear, like memories neglected and forgotten. Years can slip away in such manner, in such a life.

  Somehow, even as the thirties wore on and things worsened, Grace held on to her business by cutting costs, undercutting competitors’ prices, shamelessly complimenting the women who came in, whether they were beautiful, plain, or just plain ugly, flirting furtively with the men (and sometimes more than flirting, Jane strongly suspected—from long lunch hours when Grace made her tend the counter, or sent her off to lunch at the house and when Jane came back she would see Grace turning the door sign to Open again).

  Jane had wanted to put in a vegetable garden, and after first saying no, Grace changed her mind and practically ordered her to do it. At least she helped a bit with the canning. They pretty much gave up meat aside from a small cut of pot roast on Sundays. That was fine with Jane, who’d never eaten much meat, anyway. It made certain odors stronger.

  She learned how to get along with Grace by holding her own in an argument and by getting out every now and then on a Saturday, for the whole day, wandering town, window-shopping, and having a modest meal such as a Chik Steak at the Triangle, only a nickel in those days—they used breaded pork loin but it tasted so good she couldn’t resist—and then going home. She would practice the fasting and dehydrating before an outing, as she had when she was a girl, so generally she was back home at Grace’s before the possibility of an accident, and well before the possibility of a “serious” one. She wrote home every week, and received in return the occasional postcard from her mother: the blank manila ones with nothing printed on them, not even a vertical line on the side where you wrote the address, the back side filled with her mother’s scrawl that read like a diary she might have written for herself or posterity: There’s no ice because the iceman’s truck broke down. One of the breeding cows died and your father does not yet know why it happened. Had rain most of last week, couldn’t dry a stitch of clothing on the line. Mister Chisolm (as she had always formally called her husband) had to shoot a fox that was getting into the henhouse, gave it to the Harrises for the skin although for all I know they ate it too. Your father is not up to hog killing anymore and had to hire Harris and his boys to do it, he knew it needed done but he didn’t really care one way or other, gave them half the hog for the job, a sunny winter day, thank the Lord. He is not exactly behaving himself, she would occasionally say, which Jane took to mean he was drinking too much more often.

  They were just hanging on through these times, she wrote.

  One ended with the odd mentioning, Crows flocking into the pines at dusk. I find it frightening, hard to sleep.

  At least once a month, when the weather was good, she badgered Grace into driving them up to their parents’ place for Sunday dinner. When Grace tired enough of that, she taught Jane to drive her automobile in a flat field on the south side of town and after that Jane would visit her mother and father by herself when she could. Sometimes she went up early enough to stop for coffee with Dr. Thompson before going on to the home place. She always drove back to town before dark. Her father seemed to be in decline. She would come upon him standing at the edge of the pasture, looking at his cows as if he hardly knew what they were. Or he would sit on the front porch by himself, smoking. He drank before breakfast, and then periodically throughout the day.

  “Papa?” she’d say.

  “Yes.”

  And sometimes they would say no more than that, as if that were enough, or all there was, a generic reply to her all-but-­unspoken query into his condition. She sat and looked at his lean, hard profile, now bearing the wire-rimmed spectacles, and wondered what he was seeing as he stared straight ahead into the yard beyond the porch, seeming deep in thought but saying nothing.

  Suitors

  Sometimes when one of Grace’s gentleman friends came over Jane crept out and walked the mostly empty evening sidewalks downtown. She liked the evening air, the slow and scarce traffic that rolled or clopped through town at that hour. The smells of the bakery baking on the night shift. The coal smoke from the trains. But she was lonelier than ever, and many a night such as this she longed just to be back on the farm, alone in that way. It seemed to her to be the place she belonged.

  Occasionally one of the “friends” came over for supper, and sometimes he stayed later, when Jane had already gone up to her room, and she could hear him and Grace partly from the stairwell, their murmuring talk, and partly from the outside, where their voices drifted from the windows and into the air and back into Jane’s windows above them. On some of those nights, though they kept the radio on to cover their sounds, she heard the faint whine of the bad hinge on Grace’s bedroom door, the light metallic click of the door closing. And she might drift over to that side of the house, to the little sitting room she had arranged across from her bedroom, and sit beside the open window looking out over downtown below and listen to the sounds of their lovemaking, so carefully quietened they were, like the whispers of a lover in Jane’s own ears, burning with the shame of her eavesdropping.

  One of Grace’s suitors was a man named Louis Fontleroy. He was a shoe salesman for one of the two ladies’ shoe stores downtown. He dressed as if he were more than that, and was handsome, although somewhat in the way of a handsome housecat, and younger than Grace. He wore engraved tie clasps on his silk ties, and ankle boots that to Jane seemed oddly effeminate, and smoked cigarettes he kept in a silver case. He was infinitely polite to Jane, even bending to kiss the top of her hand sometimes when she entered the room. Jane felt he was patronizing, yet she was polite in return. When they dined, he would make pleasant small talk, making sure to address questions to Jane as well as Grace. Once, when Grace had left the room for a moment, Jane was fairly certain that after remarking what a good cook she was, how excellent was the pot roast, he had winked at her. She blushed but when she looked back at Mr. Fontleroy he seemed to be examining his manicured fingernails as if to search for some flaw he might attend to when he returned home. She thought him a dandy.

  One evening when Grace had said Mr. Fontleroy was coming for dinner and asked Jane to join them, Jane came downstairs and entered the parlor to find not just Grace and Mr. Fontleroy, but another man as well. She froze in the doorway to the parlor, her heart thumping and anger flashing into her mind, at the same time that both gentlemen stood, setting their coffee cups into their saucers on the coffee table with a little clatter.

  “Won’t you join us, Miss Jane?” Fontleroy said.

  “Come have a seat, Jane,” Grace said in a wry voice. “This is Mr. Fontleroy’s friend Gabe Satchel.”

  “Miss Chisolm,” Satchel said, nodding, and then he took a step toward her on his long legs and extended his hand. She reached out and shook it, her palm damp, and then sat in the chair next to her sister, her cheeks burning, and rested the damp palm on her skirt to dry it. She hoped she wouldn’t have to rush off, embarrassing herself and Grace alike.

  This Mr. Satchel was older, looked almost middle-aged, though what looked older in his features was mostly facial, and she sensed that some burden had made them lined in that way. There was also a kind of serenity in the way he listened when someone spoke, looked at them and seemed to absorb what they were saying as if it had kindled his deepest, most intimate interest. It warmed her and made her flush a bit, and she couldn’t help but feel drawn to him for this, if not for his looks. But what were looks? How long could anyone stay beautiful, if it came to that?

  But then what would he see in her, no doubt still just a country girl, even if she had lived in town with Grace now for a good five years? And why should she even think about such a thing, given the realities of her situation? She’d come a long way toward coming to terms with that.

  And yet she sensed in this Gabe Satchel some kind o
f sadness borne along by a natural kindness. It made her heart leap a bit, and made her feel, at the same time, as miserable as she felt the day she’d said good-bye to Elijah Key.

  So now she knew why Grace had insisted that she cook an entire pot roast and more potatoes and carrots than usual, and why Grace herself had put together a salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. And now she had little appetite, and her emotions were building inside her so as to make it impossible even to swallow without difficulty.

  As they ate, Jane said little but was courteous. Mr. Satchel was tall, several inches taller than Jane, and slim but not nearly as bone-thin as her father, and as she was becoming. In the brighter light of the dining room (which she hated, preferring a lower light at meals), she realized that for all its almost enchanting kindness, his face was a little bit cockeyed, his ears a bit crooked. Even so, he had good table manners and was not overly loud in conversation. In fact, he was on the quiet side.

  “Mr. Satchel was in the Great War,” Grace said at one point, to which Mr. Satchel said nothing but smiled faintly at his dinner plate as he cut himself another bite of the roast.

  “Did you serve in France, Mr. Satchel?” Jane asked.

  “That he did,” Mr. Fontleroy said. “He was in battle.”

  “Well, I’m happy that you came home.”

  “Mostly, ma’am,” Mr. Satchel said then in an odd way. “I was wounded, but thankful I’m alive and in good health. I was never gassed like a lot of fellows I knew.”

  “Mr. Satchel’s family is from up around Tupelo,” Grace said, going around and filling everyone’s glass with more tea.

  “What brought you down here?” Jane said.

  “Work,” Satchel said. “I’ve been with the railroad since the war, and they transferred me to here a couple of years ago. I’m hoping what seniority I have holds me through these times.”

  “Anybody’s lucky to be working or running a business in these times,” Fontleroy said. “I’m afraid the only way I’m holding on in the shoe business is by wearing the hell out of my own,” he said, laughing at his own joke.