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 been 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 overalls’ 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.
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 young policeman suffered much derisive joking for having tried to give a ticket to Mr. Sylvester Chisolm.