by Brad Watson
She received a letter one day in 1982, when she was sixty-seven years old, from a doctor at Johns Hopkins. She was confused, wondering what in the world anyone there would be writing to her about at this point in time.
It was from a surgeon named Wilkes, who said he had been a protégé of Dr. Young et al. but especially of Dr. Ellis Adams, who’d been close friends with her own physician, Dr. Thompson. In brief, Miss Chisolm, the letter read, I am writing to tell you that we have just this past month performed the first entirely successful operation on a condition I am fairly certain matches yours, after many years of research and practice. And I am writing to enquire if you would like to take advantage of this, entirely at our expense, of course, in honor of Dr. Thompson and in gratitude for your having contributed to our research in the past. Yours, etc.
She felt an anger well up in her. She went out for a walk, venturing just to the edge of her woods. Tears welled up but she pushed them down in favor of indignation. She decided she had no anger toward this man or that place. They’d done what they could. But my God, why even bother to let her know, at this point? She went back to the house and composed a brief letter.
Dear Dr. Wilkes,
I thank you kindly for your letter informing me of the new advances and your offer to “fix” me, so to speak. I do appreciate it. But you must understand I am now an old woman, I live alone on my family’s farm, and have no interest in going through such an operation as I see no need for it, and there is certainly not the desire.
Yours truly,
Jane Chisolm
She sealed and put a stamp on the letter, walked to the end of the drive, put the letter into her mailbox, raised the flag, and slammed the mailbox door shut, muttering to herself about what idiots some people could sometimes be.
It seemed that her dreams had become more vivid, and there were more of them. More that she recalled upon waking, anyway. Mushrooms, covering the forest floor. A foreign forest. A fairy-tale forest. Awesome trees towering way, way up, blocking the sky. She sat plucking and eating the fungi, chewing the black dirt at the base of their stems along with their flesh. She’d never known they had eyes.
She woke from another sort of dream and went into the kitchen, and at the table there she wrote a letter, sealed it in an unmarked envelope, and tucked it into her chest of keepsakes at the foot of her bed.
Dear Elijah,
In my dream I walked alone in my meadow in the woods. I laid myself down in the wild grass there and let you gaze on me to see what I am. I let the sun beat down on my pale skin so it became transparent as the skin of an oyster—what is the word—translucent. And you could see the strange miracle of my body. In the world of us that gathered in my mind there was no need for physical perfection in order to enjoy the act of love. This I knew upon what I will call awakening.
J
It was late autumn, cooling down. The world had gone again. She wandered around the house in her slippers and a heavy robe, the propane space heater she’d had installed hissing its blue flame in the quiet living room where it sat on the old fireplace hearth. She was forgetful, leaving her cup of coffee or jelly jar of brandy in one room and forgetting to bring it with her to the next. Or setting down her reading glasses and being unable to remember where she’d set them down when she needed to read a label or an interesting item in the Sunday newspaper she had delivered each week.
She had all but forgotten that her life was compromised, had been compromised, in any way.
From the corner of her eye she saw a blur of bright color like the moving progress of a rainbow through the air of her yard. The peacocks, flying from one roosting tree to another.
She heard their calls through the afternoon, and in the dusk after sunset. Soon it would be winter and they would go quiet for a while. In the late evening she woke to them again, pulled on her robe, and shuffled to a window to look down on the overgrown pasture between the garden and the pond. The moon was almost full after several nights’ waxing in the clear cold sky. Its light blue-silver on the grass. At the edge of the yard, a single peacock stood alone, calling to the moon, displaying his magnificent tail as if to woo it, the moon itself.
She settled back into her bed. A cock somewhere deep in the woods gave out the haunting, lulling call that she loved and pulled her down into sleep. She came through her little meadow where the wildflowers trembled, then up the silvery trail and into the yard, where she stopped as if moonstruck. She’d entered a secret avian cathedral, filled with some kind of winged and feathered things she’d never seen. They stood very still, hushed, their gleaming black eyes fixed on her, white beaks open in a strange, alert anticipation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m deeply grateful to the following people and institutions for their kindness and generosity and smarts during the many years I spent trying to figure out how to write this novel (and writing whatever I could when I couldn’t actually write this one), and the three years I spent actually writing and rewriting it down: the University of West Florida Department of English; the University of Alabama, Birmingham; the National Endowment for the Arts; the University of Mississippi Department of English and MFA in Creative Writing, and John and Renee Grisham for their endowed chair at Ole Miss; the Lannan Foundation; the University of California, Irvine, Department of English and MFA in Creative Writing; the Taylor family, especially Dr. Marvin Taylor; the Guggenheim Foundation; the Fairhope Writers Colony; the Aspen Writers Foundation and the Aspen Institute; the University of Wyoming Department of English and MFA in Creative Writing. Thank you to all the wonderful colleagues and friends at these places.
Thanks to Dr. Gary Ludwin, for valued information and corroboration and insights concerning important medical facts (any remaining errors would be mine, not Dr. Ludwin’s); Angela Beese, for dog talk and encouragement; my Clay family cousins, for memories; Jimmy White, for long friendship and tall tales; my stepmother, Vivian Watson, just for being herself, for saving my father, and for reading a draft of the book and offering insight and advice.
I’d also like to thank the following people: Neltje, for the gift of friendship and a most beautiful place to get away and wrangle with the book at crucial times; also her staff, David and Cindy; Ric Dice, who read the manuscript more times than anyone but the writer should have to and offered great advice and much encouragement; Jason Thompson, for dropping by my office several times in the past couple of years to ask about the book and offer encouragement; Kelly Kornegay, for a last-minute tip that made a big difference; Duncan and Anne Chalk, for long friendship and unmatchable hospitality; Rattawut Lapcharoensap, for letting me sit in his study and whine and moan anytime I wanted; Jon Hershey, who, though I didn’t bug him about this book, pulled me out of the basement back when I’d quit writing and so has my eternal gratitude; my amazing agent, Peter Steinberg, for good humor, patience, encouragement, and a keen eye at the perfect time; Dave Cole, for his superb work on the manuscript; the good and (infinitely) patient and supportive people at W. W. Norton & Company, especially Nomi Victor, Dan Christiaens, Marie Pantojan, Erin Sinesky Lovett, Bill Rusin, and of course my incredible editor for all these years, Alane Salierno Mason, whose apparently near-infinite patience I stretched so thin, whose belief in this book often easily surpassed my own, who pressed me with wise advice and encouragement, whose apparently endless support I had no reason to expect to last this long—my gratitude, love, and apologies. My love and gratitude to my wife, Nell Hanley, who not only read many drafts but somehow found a way to live with me while I worked on this book.
Thank you to my beautiful, talented, irrepressible granddaughter Maggie, named after my grandmother, who was such a marvelous source of good stories for me. Maggie, who upon being read a chapter from an early draft of this novel, for some reason said, “Pappy should put a peacock in there.” And I did. And it changed everything. Clear-minded, innocent genius. Thanks, Mags.
And thanks to all my old friends on the road who have given me love and support,
guest beds, food and drink, good company, and their own unmatchable hospitality, especially Horn, Cawthon, Pettit; McLemore; Denny; Dice; Noble-Horne; Bobo-Brock; Howorth, Franklin-Fennelly, Kornegay, Donelson, Hudson-Formichella; Pritchard; Winthrop; Gessner-de Gramont; Salter; Wier; Peterson-Shacochis; Vaswani-Holter; Esslinger-Sanders; Borofka; Hershey-Blalock; Hathaway-Wickelhaus; Bausch; Carlin; Williams; Huggins; Parrish; Canty; Brown; Harwood; Brewer; Geuder; Chiarella; Butler; Singleton; and Mr. Land; and others I hate to think I may be forgetting at the moment. I’m a little tired.
I’d like to acknowledge the following sources in what was a difficult search for information as I tried to engage in (roughly) educated speculation about rare, complicated, and serious urological issues: Genital Abnormalities, Hermaphroditism and Related Adrenal Diseases, Hugh H. Young; Hugh Young: A Surgeon’s Autobiography; and the website emedicine.medscape.com. Also, for information on Southern daily rural life and country doctors: The Doctor Stories, by William Carlos Williams, particularly “Old Doc Rivers” and his cocaine habit; Up Before Daylight, ed. James Seay Brown, Jr., particularly the essay “A Plain Country Doctor,” Lawrence F. Evans (wife conks husband with shovel); The Country Doctor Handbook, by the editors of FC&A Medical Publishing; Never Done: A History of American Housework, Susan Strasser; Cotton Tenants, by James Agee; photographs by Walker Evans.
The lines from the song “Let Me Call You Sweet Heart” come from the popular song published in 1910, with music by Leo Friedman and lyrics by Beth Slater Whitson. The song was first recorded by the Peerless Quartet.
ALSO BY BRAD WATSON
Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives: Stories
The Heaven of Mercury: A Novel
Last Days of the Dog-Men: Stories
Author’s Note
Inspired in part by circumstances in the life of my maternal great-aunt, Miss Jane is
nonetheless a work of fiction: names, characters, places, and incidents are the product
of my imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
or persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintentional.
Copyright © 2016 by Brad Watson
All rights reserved
First Edition
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