Miss Jane

Weanings

Ida Chisolm weaned her new one at little less than a year old and the baby took to her mush of peas and sweet potatoes with the same toothless puzzlement, then gluttony, as any child. Grace, whenever she wasn’t at school, went about her babysitting duties in silence. At eleven years she had the demeanor of a disgusted, life-strangled sixteen-year-old. As if to speed up and thereby shorten the period of being harnessed to the task, she worked hard to train her little sister on the chamber pot, then the outhouse, and taught her to clean herself. But soon enough recognized a problem and complained about frequent accidents and once the doctor confirmed the incontinence it was a matter of either getting the child to run to the outhouse or to drop her drawers (the loose diaper she had continued to wear, in any case) wherever she stood in the yard, or pasture, or at the edge of the woods, by the barn, wherever. Since she was just a toddler they allowed it, since she did not like soiling herself and wanted to go like everyone else. She tried. A good-humored, even cheerful little child. She seemed intelligent enough but not dangerously impulsive, so Grace let her wander by herself around the house and yard barefoot (except in winter) as freely as a child at least a year or two older. It became a familiar sight to the family and the sharecroppers and tenants, this small scrawny creature baring her bony bum and relieving herself whenever and wherever like one of the animals in their care.

Watching this from the front porch at churning, or from the back porch washing dishes in the pump sink, or emerging from the privy, Grace indulged in what little humor she had in her system, smiling a tight smile and muttering to herself in a low chuckle, shaking her head and going back to work, keeping one eye loosely on the child. Jane was indeed like some kind of herky-jerky windup toy that never wound down till sometime in the evening right after supper when the winder just stopped and clump, down she went. Clean her and put her to bed.

When she got a break from her babysitting Grace would sneak out to the barn and go around it to smoke a cigarette from the Luckies she now kept hidden behind a loose chink in one of the foundation posts. Got to where she liked them so much she began sneaking one after supper, too, watching from shadows for when the washbasin was unoccupied, then hurrying to wash up, brush her teeth, before going to bed without a word to or a glance at anyone. They were all used to that.

When little Jane noticed a rag doll in the Sears catalog, Grace put one together for her using material from a flour sack and filling the shape with hard corn kernels cracked with a hammer. She let Jane help draw on a face with India ink, then stitched over that with blue thread. They made a tiny skirt for it and drew a pair of slippers on its shapeless feet.

She’d thrown her own similar doll into the bushes along the road one day years before, suddenly embarrassed and disgusted with herself for still carrying it in her school satchel. Now, young as she was, she felt a twinge of lost childhood and tried to steel herself against it, turning her thoughts once again to getting away. But she could not harden herself entirely anymore against her feelings for this little girl, her baby sister and the only one in her household she could enjoy even a little bit being around. With her yellow hair and blue eyes, she felt like a changeling left at the door of this cantankerous woman and gloomy man, yet here was this child, this odd one, a defective, dark like their parents but with blue eyes even bluer than hers. She did not want to love her, or as she sometimes referred to her, it, but she thought, I have to love something.

She sat on the porch one afternoon during the autumn Jane would turn three and watched her wander out into the yard and over near the shed across the drive, stop, squat, and instead of what Grace expected from that, saw her reach down and pick something up, hands working like she was winding something around them as she walked, stopped at the edge of the porch, hands raised, eyes wide open with the secret hidden in them.

“Well, what is it?” Grace said. She was looking on this strange and beautiful child, big eyes so expressive, as if wiser or more knowing than possible.

Little Jane opened her hands and a tiny garden snake no bigger around than a night crawler and no longer than the length of a knitting needle popped up and curled around her hands as if it were the strange birth of an extra, wild, writhing digit. Grace stood up as if called to military attention, not knowing whether to go knock the snake from the child’s hands or trust to luck it was a harmless one.

“Put it down, now,” she said as calmly as she could. But Jane closed her eyes and laughed and ran past her into the house and in a moment she heard her mother shriek and holler to “get that thing out of this house right now!”

Later, she looked on as their father gave Jane a lesson on which snakes were safe and which were not. He drew pictures of the poisonous snakes’ broad, triangular heads, and brought out an old rattle from one he’d killed in the yard, shook it for her. “You hear that,” he said, “you stop, stand real still, figure out where it is, and you back away. You see this here cottonmouth moccasin, you run,” and he described and drew one, told her their coloring and shape. Told her about coral snakes: Red touch yellow, kill a fellow; red touch black, friend to Jack. She liked that rhyme enough to mimic it back to him, making him smile a rare smile.

He said, “Anyway, you see one of those snakes, you hightail it out of there. And if you can’t tell, don’t chance it.”

She asked if she could have the rattle to keep on a string around her neck.

He seemed amused by this but said he thought not, as it might attract another snake.

“All right,” she said, handing the rattle back. Her father put it away in the little box on the mantel where he kept it along with a bear’s tooth and the tiny mole skull Jane herself had found one day, just roaming around the yard.

When they left, Grace went to the mantel, took out the rattle, and made herself a necklace of it by poking a hole in the open end and lacing through it a length of pale thread. She made it long enough so the rattle would be hidden by her blouse. She hooked a finger under it and gave it a little shake, and something about the sound made her heart beat a little faster.

Little Jane heard it one day and was excited. “You made a rattle necklace!” she said. “Papa wouldn’t let me.”

“I know.”

“He said it might make a real snake come after me.”

“I doubt that,” Grace said. “You want it?”

Jane seemed to think about it, then shook her head with a mysterious grin.

Her mother asked Grace one day what she had on that thread around her neck.

“Nothing,” she said.

“I can see there’s something on it, there under your blouse. I can hear it making some kind of little noise when you move around.”

“Nothing but the rattle of my little old heart,” Grace said, and ignored the look her mother gave her.

LEAVING THE CHILD’S care to her older daughter had made it a little easier for Ida Chisolm to avoid her dark thoughts, though not entirely. When she had a little break she sat on the front porch, dipped a bit of snuff — which she knew was smallish sinful but did it anyway, a soul was corrupt at birth and adding a little vice wouldn’t change the equation much — and spat into the bare dirt of the yard doing the best she could to empty her clamorous mind. Crows banked about the grove of pine and hardwood down by the cow pond and flew back up on fluff-cranked wings into the pecans near the barn, settling in their gnarly limbs like black fluttering shadows into the foliage of clouded thoughts she could not and did not bother to plumb. Late fall blackbirds swept in waves to the oaks at the yard’s edge, and their deafening, squawking, creaking calls, the cacophonous tuning of a mad avian symphony, drew the grief-borne anger from her heart, into the air, and swept it away in long, almost soothing moments of something like peace. The occasional fluid murmuration of migrating starlings, a wondrous sight when she was a child, could evoke in her all over again a strange sense of foreboding.

She said nothing to anyone about her feeling that this child Jane’s condition could’ve come from the sinful way in which she was conceived. No matter a man and woman be husband and wife. If the wife doesn’t even know it’s going on, it’s a sin and an abomination to the woman and the punishment would not be a death but something to linger, to remind you of what you had done or allowed done, either one. And in God’s eyes does it really matter who was to blame, and who could say she did not bear her share of the blame, putting herself in such a state that he could do what he did without her awareness, much less consent? Being a man, he considered their long-ago vows consent enough, and that thought sent her out to the woodpile to chop kindling till she could see again, so blind she felt in her rising and inexpressible anger. When she had spent her rage, kindling chunks around her as if the woodpile had exploded and left her standing, she buried the ax in the block and stalked off out the back yard and down the main trail in the woods to the fishing pond. She stood there looking at the smooth brown surface of the pond, arms straight at her sides, and thought she could go back up, fetch a heavy piece of mechanical scrap and a rope, tie it about her waist, and walk into the water until submerged and will herself to fill her lungs with the silty water. She let her mind imagine the scene, the moment. Then, in angry tears again, she stripped off her clothing, leaving on her shoes, and waded in to her neck, dunked herself, and swam out deeper. She held her breath as long as she could, then blew it out, her body sinking deeper, until in a panic she pushed herself back up to the surface, broke out of the water, and bobbed there, treading water. She slung hair from her eyes and saw her husband on the bank where she’d entered, his arms limp at his sides, watching her. She watched him, feeling like a wild animal caught in the open by a strange human creature, until he turned and walked back up the bank on the trail, out of sight. Only then did she swim in and put her clothes back onto her wet, clingy body, feet squishing in her sodden shoes, feeling at least a little bit mollified, as if his having witnessed her act was at least a warning, an act of emotional revenge. She was washed clean in body, if not entirely in mind.

IN THE FALL of 1918 there came news of the flu epidemic. Several cases down in Mercury left people alarmed, and when a local child seemed to have come down with it, officials closed the school and Grace was free to perform her babysitting duties full-time.

Ida Chisolm took advantage of Grace’s presence to disappear into the woods and gather a large basket of echinacea and ginseng root. She slipped off to a neighbor’s farm to beg some fruit from their pomegranate tree and, not finding them home, scuttled away like a desperate thief with several pomegranates tucked into the folds of her apron. She set into a constant, haranguing administration of tea from the herbs and doses of a syrup she made from the pomegranate seeds stirred into drams of her husband’s precious apple brandy, which Grace and Jane resisted, grimacing, but she put her own grimacing face into theirs and told them in a cold voice to drink it or die. “I will not have death visit this house again until it is mine own,” she said in her ominous way. She looked up to see her husband watching her from the other room, looking wary and maybe even a bit worried by what must seem her obsessive manner. Well, let him think I’m crazy, she thought. Somebody around here has to practice good common sense. She got up and went over to him, took up the tin cup he was using to sip whiskey, and poured a measure of the syrup in there, too. Looked him in the eye. “Drink it,” she said. He shrugged and did as she said.

They did stay healthy, and she looked at them all in defiance for their lack of faith. The school reopened in late fall but she forbade Grace to return just yet, saying she didn’t trust the ones saying the worst was over. Dr. Thompson, during one of his visits, said he couldn’t disagree with her on that.

“I’d rather lose a year of school than risk the sickness myself,” he said. “I’ve seen people with it, and I’ve seen them die of it. Children do seem to be less at risk than young adults. If I were you,” he said to Sylvester Chisolm, “I’d wear a mask whenever I went to town to trade.”

“Mask?” Chisolm said.

“Gets close and crowded in the cattle auction at the stockyard, doesn’t it?”

The doctor went to his car and got his bag and from it brought a square surgical mask with string ties. He gave it to Chisolm. Ida Chisolm watched all this as if witnessing some kind of introduction to a ritual, her shoulders hunched as if against bad luck or a jinxing.

“Wash it good, tie it above your ears and then behind your neck.”

Chisolm looked askance, took the mask by one tie string between finger and thumb, and examined it.

“I’ll think about it,” he said. He went to hand it to his wife but she drew back and shook her head.

“This is not your regular ague,” the doctor said, leaning forward and putting on his serious face. “This one is killing people. Not so bad here as in town, and not so bad in town as in big cities. But if you get it, you’re in trouble all the same.”

And then they heard, not two weeks later, that the doctor’s own wife, who had been spending a lot of time in Mercury proper with her family and, it was said, going to society parties and such, had become a victim of the illness. Dr. Thompson tended to her along with the regular hospital doctors and nurses in town, but it did no good.

“You see what good newfangled medicine does for a body, now,” Ida Chisolm said.

Mrs. Thompson was buried in the cemetery on the east side of town after a service at her family’s church, and after all the people who’d come to the funeral were done, Sylvester Chisolm went over, Ida Chisolm following, reluctant, little Jane nearly hidden in the folds of her voluminous skirts. Then Jane broke from her mother and ran to her father’s side. Ida felt a chill in her heart as the doctor reached to take the child in his own arms. He smiled and pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear.

“I’ll be all right,” he said to her father. “Thank you for coming today. It’s good to lay eyes on this little angel at such a time.”

“Say you’re welcome,” Chisolm said.

“Okay,” she said.

“You need to say it,” he said.

“It’s all right,” the doctor said. “She said it with her eyes. Why don’t you bring her along sometime when you go to town? I’ll have our Hattie make a pie. And she can play with her little boy.”

Ida Chisolm tried to speak in protest but only a nearly silent croak emerged.

“What’s his name?” Jane said.

“His name is Mister. He’s the same age as you.”

“All right,” she said, with the kind of kerplunk finality of a child.

“Bright little thing,” the doctor said. “I always wished Lett and I had had children, but now I suppose it’s best we never did.”

“Is Mister your little boy?” Jane said.

The doctor and Chisolm laughed at that, and little Jane laughed with them. Then the doctor looked over at Ida Chisolm glaring at him from where she stood a few feet away.

“I appreciate you all came,” the doctor said, looking past her to where Grace sat in the bed of their buckboard. Like her mother she wore a black dress and black bonnet that hid her face. “The Mrs. seems upset.”

Chisolm said, looking over at her, jaw set, “She did consent to come along, but I’m afraid that death does not become her.”

THAT EVENING, the doctor sat in his study with a tumbler of Memphis bourbon on ice. Earlier in the stealthy departure of dusk and standing on his porch he’d heard the calling of a young mockingbird down in the virgin woods behind his house. On the randy hunt, he supposed. Wouldn’t be long lonely, not down there. Had half a mind to walk his trail through them all the way down to the lake, as if following the looping flight of some dreamed night bird, in dry moonlit undergrowth, step from the canopy to come upon open water and a calling loon. Though he feared it would take him too deeply into his sadness to escape. He ate a tin plate of supper left in the stove warmer by the young woman Hattie he’d hired to keep his house and cook when it became apparent that he and Lett were living a practical separation. He’d come home once too often to no supper, no fire in the hearth or cookstove, a house with dust balls fairly rolling along the baseboards like little animated creatures. This Hattie, the midwife Emmalene’s daughter, with her illegitimate child, he’d taken pity on her and admired what seemed an admirable dignity about her, advanced for her young age. He’d had a patient one day who’d observed her child Mister playing in the yard by himself and then said something about colored people not caring for their family. Sometimes he was astonished how often he forgot people’s cruel ignorance, people who’d never been anywhere but the little hamlets where they were born, raised, and would die. Not that he hadn’t known plenty of so-called sophisticated people with the same attitude. He’d said, “You know that the smartest thing about you, Heck, is probably your pecker.” Even Heck had to laugh at that, being treated as he was for a case of gonorrhea.

He left the plate in the sink and stood in the doorway to the bedroom and looked at his empty bed. He could see, out the window there, smoke rising from the chimney in the cottage he’d had spruced up for Hattie Harris, down the hill at the woods’ edge. A former slave cottage, was the irony there. The chimney smoke trailed off above the trees of his woods, sloping down the long wooded decline to the hidden lake, dissipating to nothing. There was no birdsong. Some respite between the noisy late afternoon and the last ephemeral moments of dusk. The heavy presence of his wife’s absence — not just gone from home but no longer a presence in the living world — was suddenly unbearable, and he wept, silently, standing there, let his tears blur those things before his eyes. Like the vision of a weary newborn child. He stood there until his eyes stopped leaking and dried themselves, stiffening trails down his cheeks he could feel tightening the skin. Such a mortal feeling, this small thing.

DURING JANE’S FIRST few years, her two much older brothers would come home from the state college in the summers to help out, wiry and Indian-brown like their father from working the experimental farm up there. Jane was happiest then, with these grown-up brothers she hardly knew teasing her and playing jokes on her, Sylvester, Jr., tickling her (Don’t do that to HER, their mother said), and all the conversation around the table. Her father seemed better able to avoid drinking when his older sons were around.

Now they were grown and gone, with families of their own, and it was just her, Grace, and their parents. Sylvester, Jr., and Belmont married and took their wives all the way out to Wyoming, impossibly — unimaginably — far away, to work on a ranch and look for a piece of land to buy and ranch for themselves. Sylvester, Jr., wrote a postcard back:

It’s a big place. Has to be. Takes ten times as much grassland to graze a cow here as back home. Winter is hard, hard, hard. Summer is heaven but spring (around June) brings mosquitoes that make ours look like mites. Saying is, mosquitoes that could stand up and mate with a wild turkey, ha. Work is constant, and people are very tough. Belmont and I are saving everything we can and hope to buy a good sized spread in a few years. If you want to see us, you need to come out. Much love from your sons and brothers. S.S.C., Jr.

“We’ll never see them again,” her mother said, dropping the card into the stove and clanking the lid back down. “Got away when they could, didn’t they?” Her father said nothing, as if he hadn’t even heard.

Days seemed longer then, on the farm. At dawn everyone rose and set to the chores, she and Grace milking, her mother getting breakfast together in the kitchen, her father checking the stock for losses or injury or sickness come in overnight. The sourceless light in distant trees, in the dust raised by their feet in the yard. Jane helped her mother scatter cracked corn for the chickens and check their nests and hideaways for eggs. Before heading to school, Grace cleaned up from breakfast as her mother began to plan the noon and evening meals, the dog-trot silent save for the sounds of her working the kitchen or sweeping the floors or churning laundry in the grassless, immaculately swept yard, hauling water from the pump on the back porch in a heavy bucket, heating it in the big black pot over a fire, stirring the dirty clothes with a long, stout hickory stick. There was the bustling of the noon dinner meal when her father came in, ate, then went back out to work, the clanking and scrubbing of cleaning up, the long hot still afternoon, her joy at Grace’s arrival home from school, then preparation for supper, and finally the rustling descent of quiet voices and bodies slowing into the evening until everyone slept.

Soon enough she was given the job of feeding the poultry and pigs herself. The pigs had their large pen, below the work shed, and when she wasn’t kept busy with something she sometimes slipped away and watched them, their strange aimless waddling, and then sudden activity, frightening the shoats into loud squealing races around the pen as if some predator were after them, but really it was all in their minds. She came to understand that it was play. She didn’t want to eat pork after that, and became even thinner, for that was their daily meat except for the occasional venison, rabbit, or squirrel. And there was really no avoiding it entirely, since nearly every vegetable they ate was simmered with fatback for hours.

She fed what little table scraps there were to the two dogs, but otherwise they hunted and scavenged. They knew not to get after the chickens, somehow, some sense of self-preservation. There was the hound and the shaggy thin-shouldered mutt with a long snout and a natural smile, with black fur around one eye and white around the other. This one she took for her dog and named it Top. How’d you come up with that name? they said. He’s Top Dog, she said, and they laughed, even Grace and her mother. The hound had no interest in following her but Top followed her everywhere. He would allow Jane to gaze at him and he would gaze right back at her. He didn’t smile, just looked attentive and expectant, as if he could feel what she was feeling about him. Most dogs when you looked at them, strays mostly wandering through, would look away. Her father said it was the wild still in them somewhere deep. But Top was more like a person that way, not afraid of her, at least, and sometimes if she didn’t pay him enough attention he would come over and rest his snout on her arm or leg and sigh, then look up at her with just his eyes, and if she was distracted and didn’t pet him, then he would give her a little kiss-lick on her hand or forearm, then press his snout onto her arm or leg again until she scratched him behind the ears or rubbed the top of his head or his back. Sometimes he would roll onto his back and allow her to place her ear against his furry chest and listen to his heart beating, so fast, even when he seemed just as calm as could be. She figured a dog had to get in all his heartbeats in a hurry if he wasn’t going to live as long as a person might.

She loved the taste of cool buttermilk more than anything in the world. And her favorite after buttermilk was butter on hot biscuits, and after that, butter on hot cornbread, and after that, fried chicken, and after that, apple pie and the rare treat of homemade ice cream, and after that, and later on, fried bream from their own pond. Especially the crisp, salted tails.

Between the ages of four and five, she began to make sure she was the last to sleep. It made her feel safer to be the last one awake, watching and listening to the world settle into the evening quiet and dark. The steady breathing, snoring, sleep-mumbling of the others made her feel more awake and alive, and that was a kind of safeness, too. An owl hooted down in the woods and she hoped no one would die. She studied the pale palms of her hands in the darkened room. The skin there gave off a light as soft as starlight on birch bark. How private, the palm of one’s hand. How intimately one knows it. So she may have said, had she the words.

She was a guardian over the slumbering household in her sole awareness of it, and in that comforting role she could finally let go and sleep herself. Although one night, when she was just dropping into that long dark nothing where for an unknown time you ceased to exist, and from which may never come back, it was so hard to get over the idea of that — for every night she said her prayers, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take—she heard the low growling of something, a growl of something that sounded massive, slow, and fierce passing just below the window of her room. Some unspeakable monster. Her heart seized and she shouted out. Grace sat up in her bed, looking around for whatever was the cause of it, and her mother and then her father came running from their beds across the breezeway. Her mother came to her bedside, while her father remained in the doorway open to the breezeway and glittery moonlight slanted on the unpainted boards there. Her father took a lantern around the house to look for tracks. But there was nothing, they said, there had been no beast.

“I didn’t hear a thing,” Grace said. “I was sound asleep till she started yelling.”

“Why would you imagine such an awful thing?” her mother said.

“It could have been a bear,” Grace said.

“Not only would we’ve heard that,” her father said, “we sure would’ve smelled it. Nothing stinks quite like a bear.”

But Grace surprised her by lying down beside her until she could go back to sleep. She even teased her with a lullabye she made up: Hush, little girl, now, don’t be a’feared, wasn’t nothing but an old bear you hee-rd. That got her giggling and soon she relaxed and went to sleep, and when she woke up Grace was still there, snoring lightly on top of her bedcovers in her nightgown. She watched her till she blinked her eyes awake. Grace looked over, grumpy again, muttered something to herself. Then said, “How could you know what a bear is when you’ve never seen or even heard one, far as that goes?”

“It was you said it was a bear,” Jane said. “Have you ever seen one?”

“I’ve seen worse,” Grace said.

“Like what?” she asked, fascinated.

“Haven’t you?” Grace said, being mysterious. “In your sleep?”

“No.”

“You will.”

But her only nightmares would be about the nameless beast she had heard, her sleeping mind imagining it in all kinds of forms, none of which she was ever able to recall upon waking.