Miss Jane by Brad Watson
Miss Jane
You would not think someone so afflicted would or could be cheerful, not prone to melancholy or the miseries. Early on she acquired ways of dealing with her life, with life in general. And as she grew older it became evident that she feared almost nothing—perhaps only horses and something she couldn’t quite name, a strange presence of danger not quite or not really a part of the world.
She didn’t fear a fever of the kind that had taken brother William at the age of three, before she was born. To her mind such fate belonged to that child, not her.
She wasn’t afraid of snakes, not even the poisonous kind, for she believed they wouldn’t bite her if she simply left them alone. Mosquitoes, for some reason of their own, did not bite her, although she took no precautions against them.
She did not fear chickens, because she found them to be comically sage—in spite of what people said about stupid chickens. The same with pigs, although their frequent, abrupt, chaotic, or oddly orchestrated and deafening panic at first frightened her, until she saw the comical in that. The panic was sudden in its arrival and departure, both. Cows were so obviously a threat to no one, if you did not threaten a mother’s calf. The bull was safely penned in his separate small pasture.
She didn’t fear the coyotes that sang at night in the open fields, nor the panthers that sometimes screamed far off deep in the woods. She loved to kneel at the open window and listen to the coyotes sing and imagine what they were singing to each other, what their singing meant to them. She did not mind them tearing mice, rabbits, and squirrels to pieces, nor running down newborn fawns. Nor the panthers sometimes taking a newborn calf. Her odd fear of an unnamed beast, something we might call mythical, came from having thought she once heard one grumbling near the house at night, and she was terrified then.
She was not afraid of screeching owls in the night, nor of the possibility of coming upon wild hogs during her walks in the woods, nor packs of wild dogs that sometimes roamed the pastures and were to everyone more fearsome than the coyotes or panthers or bears, their having no fear of man. She was not afraid of rabid coons or foxes, of her father’s guns, being a ten-gauge shotgun and a Winchester rifle. Nor of the hatchet used to decapitate the chickens, nor the long knives used to butcher the hogs, nor the smaller knives used to skin and butcher the occasional deer, nor the saws used for sawing their bones. Nor the large black kettle, used to boil water for washing soiled clothes and also for making soap in the yard, that she was told to stay clear of when she was small. Nor was she afraid of hell, although the preachers on the circuit warned of it, but she was not afraid of eternal fire or demons and the devil himself. She could not properly conjure them in her mind without a comical air. Jane, who rarely even went to town as a child, could not imagine going to hell, her imagination being neither successfully cross-country nor subterranean.
She was not afraid of cyclones in the darkest bile-green-and-black skies during storms that cracked off the limbs of oaks and the tops of pines and made the tin roof of the house and gallery pop and groan and bend upward at the edges. Nor of the hail that pocked the tin like buckshot raining down. Nor of lightning that split trees their length and left smoldering charred skeletons rooted to the wet, scorched earth. She was not afraid of God, with his sly and untrustworthy balance of love and wrath, who was yet curious enough to make himself vulnerable and walk among humans just like herself in the beautiful, harrowing embodiment of Jesus.
She feared horses because when they yanked their heads skyward and rolled their eyes she imagined they knew better than her what there was to fear in the air, in the inescapable physical world. She did not fear mules, which her father explained were smarter than horses and predictable, and later she liked it when she learned that they had no lineage. When she was small she feared standing bodies of water because for some reason she thought they were bottomless, but her father cured her of that by taking her fishing at their pond and coaxing her to wade in, cool off, feel the muddy earth safely there beneath the surface. Still, she would never learn to swim.
Her mother was more of an enigma than a threat, tending to lash out but seeming more angry at something inside herself than at others. Jane learned to weather the harsh and dark words, no more than a passing foul breeze in a world of variable winds of variable intensities but ephemeral and of no real consequence in a life.
She did not like the vexation of her incontinence, and wished she would outgrow it, but eventually accepted it as part of who she was, no matter how unsavory. She determined that she would live like any other girl as best she could, and when she could no longer do that, she would adjust her life to its terms accordingly. So she did not fear her own strangeness, even though her awareness of it grew and evolved as she got older.
In time her gaunt, dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty would be altered and sharpened by age, a visible sign of her difference, her independence, and a silent message to all that her presence in the world was impenetrable beyond a point of her own determination.
Purgatories
She was born into that time and place, in the farmland cut from the pine and broadleaf woods of east-central Mississippi, 1915, when there was no possibility of doing anything to alleviate her condition, no medical procedure to correct it. It was something to be accepted, grim-faced, as they accepted crop failure, debt, poverty, the frequent deaths of infants and small children from fevers and other maladies.
Her mother was thirty-nine and had not intended to have another child. Five years earlier she’d lost what she thought would be her last and youngest, a boy named William, who contracted a fever and died. The next year an unplanned child, her second girl, died stillborn. On William’s stone were the words, How desolate our home / Bereft of him. The stone for the infant girl read simply, Chisolm Infant, with the identical dates of her birth and death engraved below.
For the first few months she was pregnant with the girl who would become Jane, she pretended that she was not. That it was a false pregnancy, simply her body fooling with her, playing an evil joke. This figment of a child in her womb would go away, disappear like some temporary derangement of the senses brought on by God or the devil for reasons she could not divine. But at four months she could feel it quickening, and by five months it had begun to move around quite a bit, to thrust and kick and stretch, so she could not pretend it was anything else. By seven months in she had begun to talk to it. I will try to do right by you, she said, if you promise that you will try to do right by me. Do not die before I do. Do not come out a defective child doomed to unhappiness or an early death.
When she spoke to the child, the fetus, in this manner, it would go very still, as if listening, considering her terms.
The night her water broke, her husband summoned the midwife named Emmalene Harris, whose family sharecropped forty acres on their property, to tend to his wife until he could fetch Dr. Thompson. His two sons were already near-grown and working their way through the state college up north, so he had to make the errand himself. He feared complications, given his wife’s age and her darkened mental state.
Emmalene stood waiting for the doctor in a corner of the bedroom, flickered by firelight from a small woodstove against the far wall. She had heated a pot of water and put a basket of clean rags at the ready. She watched Mrs. Chisolm there in her bed, sweating, pale, tears in her eyes. She said a silent prayer, asking please God let this child be well. When Mrs. Chisolm cut her eyes over as if she could hear the woman’s thoughts, Emmalene turned away and busied herself checking the hot water, the neat little stack of clean rags.
On a small stool in a darkened corner of the room, silent, looking at the floor, elbows on her splayed knees, sat the older daughter, Grace, so still she was practically invisible. When she blinked her eyes Emmalene noticed and startled, as if the blink itself had materialized the girl, brought flesh and blood into being, revealing her sullen presence there among them.
DR. THOMPSON LIVED just two miles south of the Chisolm farm, on the semi-rural outskirts of the small but bustling city of Mercury. When Chisolm arrived at two a.m., the doctor was awake, sitting in the dim moonlight that fell through the windows of his study, unable to sleep. He heard the shod hooves on the road, then in his front yard, and stepped out onto the front porch in his nightgown.
The man sat bareback and silent, hat crammed down on his head, skinny shoulder bones rising like bumps inside the loose cotton blouse he wore.
“Aren’t you chilled in this evening, Chisolm?”
“Cold don’t bother me, no, sir.”
In the bedroom he took up his clothing from the day before, quietly as he could. The coin change in his pants pocket jingled and his wife groaned, turned over in sleep. He went back to his study to dress. In the yard, Chisolm was hitching big Rufus to the buggy.
He finished dressing, checked his medical bag, then stepped out, shutting the door quietly behind him. Chisolm stood holding his mule by the reins in one hand, Rufus in the other. The doctor pulled his lanky frame up into the buggy, packed and lit a pipe of tobacco, pulled an old blanket over his legs against the chill, and they began the two-mile trot out to the Chisolm place.
Rufus, his big bay gelding Missouri Fox Trotter, with a smooth gait and agreeable disposition, was good company on a night ride. The doctor could have taken his Ford, but reserved that for when he had to cover a lot of ground and make several stops in a day. He’d named the horse Rufus because noble as he was there was something of the jokester in his eye and disposition. The name seemed to fit.
He felt illogically happy to be out on this errand. The ghost of a friend’s imminent death seemed to trail out of him like wisps of smoke from the pipe. He’d briefly thought to take a little cocaine to pep himself up but resisted. He knew well enough to be stingy with that stuff, save it for extreme fatigue. He felt instead an itch for a drink. Chisolm made a good batch of whiskey, aged in an oak barrel that he charred on the inside, just like the fancy distilleries in Tennessee and Kentucky, so the whiskey had a nice mellow brown color. He tested each batch by taste for proof, added branch water to bring it down to what the doctor judged was close to ninety, then strained it through cheesecloth into pottery jugs and corked them with stobbers of whittled sweetgum sticks. All in all, a first-rate operation.
He hummed another tune, the words in his head, Let me call you “Sweetheart,” I’m in love—with—you, trotted the rig down the wide dirt highway, the man and mule close behind him in blue silhouette. “Get up, Rufus,” he said, tapping the reins against the horse’s flanks.
He took the narrow access road to Chisolm’s farm, barely lit by stars and sheen of moonlight, through hushed and tunneled woodland, beside pastures silvered with an evening frost on the grass, a waxing moonlight on them like blued silver dust, and down into the draw over the creek. He heard Chisolm’s mule veer off the road into the woods, taking a shortcut. He slowed to cross the bridge, little more than a couple of square-hewed logs supporting a narrow pallet of oak planks. The creek was quiet, low. More than once Chisolm had toppled his wagon off the bridge into the creek, taking it too fast or careless and slipping a wheel off the edge. And more than once the doctor had been summoned to peer into his dilated pupils seeking evidence of concussion, or to reset a dislocated shoulder, and thrice to set a broken arm and make sure a broken rib had not pierced a lung or other vital organ. Every time, Chisolm had been coherent enough to have one of his family place a fresh jug into the back of the doctor’s buggy under a feed sack before he left. The wife would have made sure that he toted a full stomach of chicken and dumplings or cornbread and greens back to the wagon. He’d sip from the jug on the way home, suffering no grievous consequences aside from his wife’s quiet indignation, half from the whiskey drinking itself and half because the rich food plus whiskey invariably gave him a case of flatulence that drove her from their bed and into the empty bedroom in the back of the house, to fulminate and toss and turn and fuss her lot as a country doctor’s wife. For that reason, he had adapted by staying up, sipping late into the evening, settling onto the sofa in his office or in front of the fireplace to snooze away the rest of the night in pleasant dreams and uninhibited, flatulent segregation from the niceties of marital diplomacy.
He pulled up at the Chisolms’ gallery, noted the mule already hitched to the post there. Chocked the buggy’s brake and climbed down as the side door to the house’s main room opened and a long rectangle of weak yellow light spilled out into the breezeway of the dog-trot house. Chisolm’s long angular face peered out, then pulled itself back inside. It was a dog-trot house but grander than most, larger and kept-up, and clean. The hound that had bayed at his arrival had quit and disappeared. Once in the house’s breezeway he could smell the dying scents of fried pork, stewed vegetables, fried bread, and molasses from the kitchen. He entered the house through the large common room, heard a low guttural moaning, and felt a tingle in the air of physical discomfort and alarm. Smelled the odors of labor, sweat and blood and fecal matter. Marveled that probably Mrs. Chisolm had done most of the dinner work herself before rolling into the bed to have this child. He was glad it was not her first.
Chisolm sat hunched in a straight-back chair before the fireplace, a loose-rolled cigarette burning down to the knuckles in one long bony hand. Nodded at the fire as if to the doctor, without looking up. The doctor caught the glint of a glazed jug in the shadows to one side of his weathered brogans.
He went on into the bedroom. A pot of water steamed on the small woodstove against the north wall. The midwife had hold of Mrs. Chisolm’s hand, another hand on her left leg, the covers tossed away. A hand dark as black coffee against skin pale as a blinding cataract. And there, in the mussed bedding, between the poor woman’s scrawny splayed thighs, the crowning head of what he hoped would be their last child.
Over in a dark corner of the room the daughter, Grace, sat on a stool looking grimly at nothing. She didn’t look up when he came in. He figured her to be about ten years now. Seemed older by a couple, at least.
He walked over to the bed and spoke to the midwife.
“Get me a bowl of that hot water—you boiled it? Good—a bar of soap, some of those clean rags, and set them on that bench. Light the lantern on that table beside the bed, there.”
She went over to the stove and came back in a minute with the water, soap, and rags and set them on the trunk that sat at the foot of the bed. Struck a match to the lantern wick.
He spoke to Mrs. Chisolm.
“You ready, then, madame?”
She gripped his wrist in a sweaty tourniquet. Her voice was a low whisper, her words reflecting her desperation.
“Where in hell have you been?”
“The usual purgatories.”
He detached her hand from his wrist, gave her a near-placebo dose of laudanum, washed his hands and forearms, carrying on a one-sided conversation as he went to work, as if he were dressing a simple wound. Generally this helped to calm people, baffling them into a kind of confusion that settled into a calmer state.
She was a veteran. Most of the hard work already done, she was finished in fifteen minutes. No stitching required. He snipped the cord, and took a good look at the child, who’d come around to crying a bit. He didn’t say anything. He looked at the midwife. She stared through narrowed eyes but kept her lips pressed shut. He gave her the child to wash, turned his attention to the placenta and cleaning up Mrs. Chisolm with warm water and disinfectant. The midwife helped him roll her off the soiled sheets and sop rags and took away the afterbirth in a pail, brought in fresh sheets, helped him get them under her. He washed his hands and forearms again as the midwife covered Mrs. Chisolm with a fresh sheet and clean counterpane. He took a lantern over to the crying child in the little crib padded with a folded quilt. It was squeezing its hands and crying well, head to one side. He looked closely, prodding a bit, peering through his spectacles in the poor light. He pulled a small notebook from his vest pocket and wrote something, put it down, and probed a bit with a blunt instrument. Picked up the notebook, wrote again. Then he drew a sketch in there on a fresh page. Looked at the child, back at the sketch, then put the notebook away.
“What is it?” Mrs. Chisolm said, propped up now against the pillows by the headboard and sleepy with exhaustion.
He heard someone come up behind him and saw the girl, Grace, looking around his shoulder at the child, her eyes pinched. Then she left and he heard her open the door and go out, say something to her father in the main room. He spoke quietly to the midwife, asked her to pin a diaper on the child.
Chisolm looked in from the other room. His long face half in shadow.
The doctor picked up the diapered baby, who was crying with some vigor now.
“What, then?” Chisolm said from the doorway.
“Well,” the doctor said. “Let’s have Mrs. Chisolm nurse and then we’ll have a talk.”
“About what?”
“Good set of lungs, eh?”
The doctor took the baby over to Mrs. Chisolm, who looked at him as if he were some kind of threat, but took the child and bared a breast and let it nurse. The baby suckled furiously and kept its milky blue eyes on its mother’s face, the infinite and divinely vulnerable eyes of an infant. Mrs. Chisolm looked as if she thought it to be some kind of potentially dangerous creature.