by Brad Watson
Her father was in the bedroom, in his clothes and shoes, on top of the made-up counterpane, arms crossed over one another on his chest. She was surprised, almost alarmed, to see that a bright copper penny rested on top of each of his closed eyes. She almost reached over to remove them but heard something and her mother came in.
“Well,” her mother said. “There he is.”
She took in a heavy, tired-sounding breath, and let it out.
Dr. Thompson said he would arrange for the grave to be dug, and that the notice would be in the next afternoon’s papers for the service and burial on Sunday.
“I’ll send telegraphs to your brothers, if you like,” he said.
“Thank you,” Jane said.
“He’ll be fine in there if you keep it cool, closed off from the heated rooms, with the shades down. Mr. Finicker will come by with a casket for when you have him cleaned up and dressed. I doubt you’ll need ice beneath him unless we have to wait for burial, but if you think differently, just give me a telephone call and I’ll have some delivered.”
No one said anything in response and the kitchen was quiet but for the ticking of the stove from the dying noon-meal fire in there.
AFTER DR. THOMPSON left, Grace said she was going back into town to take care of business and arrange time off. Then she left, too.
Later that afternoon, Uncle Virgil came by. He accepted a cup of coffee, apologized for his wife Bea not coming along, but said she would come by tomorrow with the children unless they’d rather them not come along. And then after a few sad pleasantries he cleared his throat and withdrew from his jacket’s inside pocket an envelope.
“That’s a check from my company, money from the insurance policy your father took out on himself when he took them out on his tenants, if you recall. I had to pull some strings, lord knows they can drag their feet these days.” He placed the envelope on the table. Jane’s mother sat looking at it a long moment, then got up and left the room. They heard her rocker start up on the porch.
Virgil and Jane sat for a while in silence. Then Virgil got up, thanked Jane for the coffee.
“Do you know who the beneficiary is, Jane?” he said.
She just looked at him.
“The primary beneficiary is you,” Virgil said.
“Me.”
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t it my mother? Or Grace or one of my brothers, for that matter?”
“He didn’t say,” Virgil said, placing his hat on his head. “I don’t know. I guess he figured you’d be the one to end up taking care of your mother.”
Jane opened the envelope and looked at the figure on the check.
Virgil said, “I guess he didn’t think your mother would know what to do with it. She never handled money. I know he thought highly of your good sense, knew you’re a smart one. Responsible with things.”
“Or maybe he was angry with Grace.”
Virgil ducked his head. “Could be.”
“He didn’t think I was acting very levelheaded when he sent me to live with her.”
Virgil looked away, as if knowing this wasn’t his territory. Jane studied the check.
“It’s more than I thought it would be,” she said.
“He did increase it a couple of years ago.”
She looked up at Virgil and he was looking back at her.
“How did he afford it?” she said.
“Well,” Virgil said, taking his hat off again and straightening the brim. “Must’ve thought it was better than putting what little he had in some bank to be lost. Increase didn’t really cost that much.”
Jane looked at the check again.
“I guess he figured his time was short,” Virgil said.
When Jane, still looking absently at the check in her hand, did not respond, Virgil let himself out. She was wondering, was this what he thought his life had been worth, or was it simply all he could afford to buy against it? Or had he thought it worth less but, being a businessman, took advantage of the system when he could?
THEY COULD NOT WAIT the days it would take for Sylvester, Jr., and Belmont to travel all the way from Wyoming for the funeral, even had the brothers been able to come. Jane had Dr. Thompson inform them by telegraph that there would be photographs taken, and they could visit when it was most convenient.
They held the funeral service at graveside, there in the plot near their house, instead of the church. Most of the mourners were neighbors and men he’d done business with in cattle. It was an early afternoon. The crops were in, fields turned under. He had apparently at least waited for that. Always a man to finish a job he had already started.
When the words were spoken and the mourners dispersed, she saw a young man at the edge of the little graveyard, standing next to the road. His eyeglasses glinted in the sunlight. She went over. He took off his hat but not his glasses. He was looking at her. She saw the wedding band on his finger. She looked up to see that he noted she had seen it. He was as handsome a young man as he had been a beautiful boy. Hands squared and strong-looking. A nice, mild creasing of fine lines about his blue eyes and closely shaven cheeks, chin stronger than when he was younger, even though he was still just twenty-six years old. His kind nature still evident in his eyes, his expression. Weathered in a way that suggested farming, and when she asked he said yes, he had a place up north of Scooba. The gray wool suit he wore looked just a bit snug on him, as if he’d put on a little weight since buying it but no doubt would wear it as long as the suit and his frame would allow.
“And family?” she said.
“Yes. Two little boys, I’m afraid,” he said with a soft laugh at what that meant to him.
“No more?”
He grinned. “Well, so far. But I kind of think two’s enough, these days. Especially boys. They’re a handful.”
He turned slightly away as if to check the weather. His cheekbones seemed more defined, face matured into a man’s, little trace of the boy’s softness.
“Well,” she said. “It was kind of you to come. Thoughtful.”
He nodded.
“I confess I just wanted to lay eyes on you one more time.”
Her heart turned over. She swallowed.
“Your father was a good man,” he said.
“Yes, he was.”
“Did you know that he came to see me, after they sent you to town?”
“No. I had no idea. Why?”
“He told me that he was sorry about it all. That he knew I was a good boy. ‘Young man,’ he said. He said I should go on with my life, that you would be all right, he would make sure of it. He said, ‘I take care of my own, son.’ I guess I have to say it was something of a comfort to me then.”
He took her hand in his strong, callused fingers, leaned down and kissed the back of it, like some Old World gentleman. He took off his glasses and slipped them into his coat pocket, as if to let her see him without them again, then put on his hat and walked away down their drive. She heard a vehicle start up out there, then drive away.
Her hand burning where his lips had touched it. Or more like a tingling of the nerve endings that one can’t tell if it’s hot or cold, painful or pleasant. It was a lingering feeling, and then after a while, without her noticing its passing, it was gone.
EVERYONE HAD LEFT by midafternoon the next day.
“Leave me alone just tonight,” her mother said. And after receiving no answer, she said, “I’ll be fine. I would just rather be alone tonight.”
“All right,” Jane said then. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
And so the doctor drove his own way home, and she and Grace drove back to town, quiet, went to their separate rooms in the house. She stood at the window and looked out over the town, the sparse Sunday auto traffic, the trains coming from the east and the west. The steam from stacks at the power plant, the forge, the Nabs plant, the creosote plant, and the hospital’s laundry. Puffy white clouds drifting low over the hills to the south and making their way along the valley, moving
northeast like a patient fleet of ghost dirigibles carrying the equally weightless, invisible souls of the dead. Quiet.
Grace drove her back up the next day. Surprising Jane, she proposed to their mother that she come to live with them in town.
After a long moment Ida Chisolm said, “I don’t want that. I’ve lived in this house since I was seventeen years old. I can’t even hardly remember living anywhere else. It’s just”—she waved a hand as if at a fly—“gone.”
She had indeed lost something. She slept in, a thing she’d never done. Jane milked their milk cow, gathered the eggs, made coffee and breakfast, although her mother would hardly eat. A few bites of greens or peas at supper. She disdained bread. She had taken up smoking a corncob pipe and would sit on the front porch puffing it.
“I’ve got half a mind to see if your father left any of his apple brandy down at his shed,” she said. And she laughed. It was a single sharp, Ha, as if to say, There, what do you think of that? But then she frowned and puffed some more on the pipe.
They endured that first winter alone. Her mother would wrap herself in a heavy coat and blankets to sit on the porch in all weather. As if she couldn’t stand to be inside except to sleep. Dr. Thompson visited them frequently, and would talk to Jane. When Mrs. Chisolm blurted out that she wanted him to give her laudanum, he hesitated, then said he would. After that, Jane’s mother slept in even later, and went to bed immediately after supper, what little she ate.
In the spring Jane went to work in the old garden, planting tomatoes, snap beans, butterbeans, a single row of sweet corn, yellow squash.
Whereas all her life her mother had more often than not been in conflict not only with others but with herself, her own circumstances, angry about one thing or another, mostly dissatisfied and even resentful of her lot in life, now she seemed to have let that go. But in its stead, there appeared to be nothing. As if she had finally fully burned her ability to care about anything in the long-stoked fire of her discontent. And now she was empty.
She did little beyond sit on the front porch, puffing at a corncob pipe and rocking. She spoke little. She made no effort to cook and ate almost nothing. It was difficult for Jane to convince her to wash herself, or even brush her hair. She began to look like those people other people called crazy. Those people who would wander the streets of town or even the rural roads, staring at nothing, acknowledging no one, talking to themselves. Her poor father had seemed to be losing his mind, during the hardest times, and here now her mother was losing hers in some different kind of way, not frightening or even bewildering but sad. If her mother talked to herself, it was a silent conversation. She took no interest in her grandchildren when Sylvester, Jr., and Belmont finally visited, and looked at them as if observing a stranger’s children, the reason for whose purpose in her presence she could not quite divine.
Jane dealt with what business there was on the farm, totting up the Harrises’ crop, selling off to a neighboring cattleman what beef stock her father hadn’t already sold. Selling his cattle truck and buying an automobile, a little yellow Ford coupe, for occasional trips to town. By the fall of ’39 she was considering whether to take on another tenant or sharecropper to farm or raise cattle on the land her father had always used himself.
Then an oddly hard cold set in one week in early December, and her mother slipped from the house in the middle of the night. The next morning Jane found her lying in the shorn cornfield, clothed only in her thin nightgown, curled up with her frozen fists to her face, her eyes shut and mouth open as if to take her last breath or mutter some kind of unimaginable prayer.
Jane called Dr. Thompson first, then Mr. Finicker at the funeral home. There was now a more or less permanent preacher at the Methodist church in Damascus and she decided just to let that man come if he heard about it and thought he ought, but made no direct attempt to contact him herself. She figured her mother would have left it at that, if it’d been her decision.
Dr. Thompson and Finicker arrived together, with two young men to help remove her mother from the field.
“Do you want Finicker to take her on to his place?” the doctor asked, to which Jane, after a moment’s hesitation, said yes. Funerals in homes were becoming a thing of the past in some quarters and the thought of having her mother’s funeral there, in her own home where she had so often been so unhappy, just seemed too dreary. Finicker’s men carried her mother on a gurney out to his long funeral car. She stopped them before they closed the door, reached in and pressed a penny onto each of her mother’s shrunken, shriveled eyelids. The men looked at her in something like muted astonishment. Then she stepped back and watched them drive her mother away into eternity, vested with her toll to the other side.
Worm
Then she was indeed alone, though Dr. Thompson still visited often. She made her own occasional visits to her tenants, to check in. She put in her garden. One day in July she stood beside the tomato row in a mild state of wonder, watching a doomed tomato worm eat her best plant. The worm’s fat, segmented body was studded with the rows of pure white cocoons that had grown from wasp eggs laid under its skin. They looked like embedded teardrop pearls or beautiful tiny onion bulbs growing from its bright green skin. Inside the cocoons, wasp larvae sucked away the worm’s soft tissue as casually as a child drawing malt through a straw. The worm seemed entirely unperturbed. No doubt a tomato worm is born expecting this particular method of slow death, a part of the pattern of its making somehow, something its brain or nerve center, whatever it has, is naturally conditioned to recognize and accept. Just as a person hardly registers, until near the end, the long slow decadence of death.
She bent over to dab sweat from her brow with the hem of her skirt. It was July-hot, but a bearable breeze lilted through the clearing where their house and barn and outbuildings had stood since long before her birth, a breeze hinting at something more from the large cumulus that seemed to grow by the minute, a towering mountain of billowing white to the south, its center like tarnished silver.
She heard what sounded like the doctor’s pickup coming down the main road, then its wheels bumbling across the bridge over the creek, beyond the trees between there and the house. Its engine churned it up the hill. She knelt and used her thumb and forefinger to pluck the worm from the leaf of the tomato plant—rolled it into her long narrow palm and cupped it there, feeling its weird little stumpy legs work against the tender skin, tickling, an odd stimulation. She snapped off the leaf stem where it had been dining and carried it to the edge of the yard, set it down, let the worm grapple back onto it. It set to eating again right away. For the worm, this stem and leaf were the whole world. Some bird would snatch it up directly. She walked quickly toward the house as the doctor’s pickup appeared around the corner of their long drive, a thin drift of red dust rising behind it. In the room she’d slept in growing up, she dabbed a bit of her best perfume onto her wrists, her neck, and dropped her soiled undergarment into a pail she kept covered in the corner, sprinkling in a bit of her cheaper perfume before replacing the lid. Washed herself with water and soap from the basin on the back porch and went back outside.
The blue pickup was parked there in front of the house. The doctor got out then, fanning himself with his hat. He spoke to her and joined her on the front porch, and she fetched them both glasses of sweet tea with chips of ice. A flicker sang its hard staccato song from a high limb in her mother’s beloved apple tree, singing against the softening light of the hot afternoon. The doctor sipped his tea, rocking, that closed-down expression on his noble but slightly birdlike face, eyes narrowed above his beak.
“You might as well tell me what it is on your mind,” she finally said.
He looked at her as if he’d been interrupted in thought, as if he’d been alone there on the porch with those thoughts. Not atypical. He smiled. He was a kindly man. Then he took on a serious look as if the thought in his mind had indeed become about her. He took a sip of his tea, ice chips tinkling against the glass, and set
it down.
“All right.”
And he told her. He’d kept up with things, through his friend in Baltimore. There’d been a lot of progress since she was a little girl. He thought it was time they asked another specialist to examine her.
“The very best, so that you can know without doubt whether or not it’s possible to correct your condition. Or to do anything about it.”
“With surgery.”
“Yes.”
He said the work being done in Baltimore was remarkable. New developments every year. He didn’t think anyone in the country would be able to examine her with greater certainty than the men there.
“It may still not be possible yet. It may still be too complicated. You’ve been through this before. But they’ve made great advances in the last ten years, and I think the emotional risk is worth it. I think we should be aggressive. And if they cannot correct it now, they may at least know enough to give you a good idea of when they might.”
He spoke his words in a serious manner but still, as always, with the kind of gentle thoughtfulness that was his hallmark as a man and a doctor. His keen eyes in the squint they took on when he was talking seriously. As if he’d got a mote in his eye.
Her father’s eyes had seemed so haunted, there near the end. For years had, really.
She peered at the doctor a moment, then looked away, feeling strangely perturbed and not bothering to hide it.
“No doubt expensive,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course, now you have the money from your father’s insurance policy.”
She looked up.
“Did you speak to him about this?”
“I mentioned, years ago, when you were born, that he might put something away toward the possibility.”
“Recently, I mean.”
“I did tell him, when he asked a couple of years before his death—while you were living in town—that I thought the odds were getting better.”
After a moment of looking at him as if he’d said something incomprehensible, she stood up and walked to the edge of the porch.
