Miss Jane

Copper Pennies

It was nearing noon the next day when Jane came home from a walk to the grocery and saw the doctor’s pickup at the curb in front of the house. At first her heart lifted, but then she felt something cold and viscous flood into it.

When she stepped into the parlor, she saw the doctor and Grace sitting in the two chairs by the bay window, partially drunk cups of coffee on saucers on the table between them, seeming to have quietly awaited her arrival into the world from some long, childish dream. The doctor stood, his hat in his hands. She set her sack of groceries down on the floor.

“It’s Papa,” Grace said. “He passed.”

“What happened?”

“Went quietly,” the doctor said. “In his sleep.”

Dr. Thompson offered to drive them both up home, but Grace said she would drive her own car so she could come into town to check on things if she needed to.

“You know he came to see me yesterday, after leaving here,” she said. When neither replied to that she said, “He wanted me to quit my job.”

After an awkward silence, Jane said, “Was he still angry, Grace?”

Grace looked at her, an unfamiliar emotion in her face.

“He seemed more sad than angry, I thought,” she said. “I hate my last words to him were so harsh.”

No one said anything and it was quiet in the room. Death was in the room and they were quiet in its presence. Then Grace gathered her bag and keys and left.

Jane and Dr. Thompson were quiet during the drive up, the doctor taking it slow. At first they drove in the wake of billowing dust and slung gravel from Grace’s Plymouth until she pulled well ahead, out of sight. And only then, as if Grace could have heard them before, Jane said, “What happened?”

The doctor, who’d been seeming to chew on something, a habit with his mouth he’d taken up in his age, was quiet a long moment. Then he said, “No mystery. I guess he finally drank himself to death.”

“He’s been doing that a long time,” Jane said.

“Well. That’s pretty much how it’s done.”

They drove a good mile without speaking. The hem of her light fabric dress fluttered against the layered slips she’d taken to wearing and she pressed it down against them, to keep it still. She noticed the doctor glance over discreetly.

“I don’t really read it as liver failure,” he said. “Most likely his heart. Heavy drink will do that. Plus his heavy smoking.”

Jane watched the road ahead.

“I guess it was a worse binge than the usual,” the doctor said. “Or one too many.”

“How is Mama taking it?” Jane said.

“She’s quiet.”

After a while, Jane said, “Was he in the house?”

“She found him down at his shed. He’d been down there all night. She woke up and he wasn’t at the house, and she made coffee and breakfast, all but the eggs. When he still hadn’t showed she went down and found him there. Lying on the ground next to the little fire pit. It was just smoldering a bit. There was a nearly empty jug. Doesn’t mean he drank it all last night, though. He was lying like he’d lain down to go to sleep. Not like he’d fallen. Gets chilly at night, this time of year. Alcohol lowers the body temperature, actually. Could have been exposure involved, too. His little fire seemed long cold, time I got there.”

After a while, Jane said, “I wonder what she’s going to do now. She always seemed like she just wanted people to leave her alone, but being alone like this, with nobody. I’ll be around of course. I was going to move back, anyway. I can’t live with Grace. Not anymore.”

With that she gave just a glance at the doctor, who seemed to have taken on a momentary rictus himself.

He slowed and turned off the main road onto the dirt road that her father had taken so often on his trips to and from town, crossed the old bridge, and at the top of the rise turned left onto the drive to the home where Jane had grown up.

Grace was in the kitchen with her mother. A single bare bulb burned in its outlet in the ceiling there. They’d had a power line strung to the house the year before. And a phone line, too — the new crank telephone on the wall. Her mother’s face was set in some kind of slackened flatness, her hair combed straight back on her head. She looked up at Jane and the doctor, her face set and pale in the glaring light. Jane reached up and pulled the string to turn it off.

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.