Miss Jane

Light of the Gathering Day

By late spring of the year she would turn six, a more complex awareness of her difference had begun to shape itself in her mind like the root of some strange plant down deep in the woods. She had moments when she felt like a secret, silent creation, invisible, more the ghost of something unknowable than a person, a child, a little girl. More than once she felt the light slap of her mother’s hand against the back of her head, the voice saying, Snap out of it, have you gone deaf and dumb and blind, now? For a second it was as if something just as ethereal as herself, a harsh and spiteful guardian angel, had snatched her back into the world against her nature, then whooshed away again on invisible wings.

She began thinking about what it would be like to go to school. She couldn’t go the following year because of her late November birthday, but she began to wonder what it would be like, among strange children — and adults — who did not know about her. Would her mother or father tell them and would that make everything all right? She had played a game of checkers one day with Mister, the doctor’s housekeeper’s son, out on the doctor’s back porch. They’d been watching the doctor’s new peacocks in the yard, but Mister got bored and suggested checkers. She said, “When did he get those peacocks?”

“I ’on’ know,” Mister said. “Recent. It’s a strange bird.” They watched the birds, several of them, peck about the yard and stand every now and then to fan their tails. “Said he just liked to watch them. Mama says he’s been lonesome since his wife died.”

He was a skinny boy, with his hair clipped close to his head and baggy clothes that’d been handed down from his cousins.

“They sure are pretty,” Jane said. She could see their deep, shiny blue neck feathers gleaming in the sunlight.

Mister went to get the board and chips. She was a bit sketchy on the rules, so when Mister made one of his pieces a king she insisted that he allow her to make one of hers a queen.

“Ain’t no such thing as a queen in checkers,” he said. They were on the back porch just off the kitchen, and Mister’s mother Hattie kept a close eye on them.

“If you get to be a king, then I get to be a queen,” she said.

To which Mister replied, “That ain’t how the game works. You got to get all the way to the top. And they call these pieces ‘men’ and that’s why it’s a king when you get it there. Plus, you stink.”

“What?”

She’d become so accustomed to her accidents that unless she was in public she sometimes didn’t even attend to them right away.

Then Hattie came out where they were and told him to hush, he was being rude.

“Well, she does,” Mister insisted, and that got him a light whack on the noggin and a scolding, and by that time Mister’s words had sunk in and Jane had become acutely self-conscious and smelled herself. She got up and ran inside the house to the doctor’s indoor privy, stripped off her diaper, cleaned herself, ran water in the tub, and scrubbed the garment with soap, rinsed it, squeezed it as dry as she could, washed her hands, then put it back on, cold and wet against her skin beneath her skirt. Then she rinsed the tub good and turned off the water.

Mister called from outside the locked door, “Why you taking so long in there?”

“Hush up, Mister,” she heard Hattie whisper, and then the sounds of her pulling him out of the room over his protests. She waited on the front porch until the doctor came home from the emergency call he’d made, and asked him to take her home.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“Yes,” was all she would say in reply. But after that she didn’t want to play with Mister, and would demur when the doctor offered to take her to his house for a visit. Sometimes she would ask him if he would just take her on a drive in his car or a ride in his buggy, since she didn’t want him to think she didn’t like him anymore. If he had other patients to see she would wait outside until he came back out and took her home again. If there were other children about she would stay in the car or buggy and decline their offers to come play.

Her parents and other members of her family had got to where they never said anything to her about her “problem,” except to tell her quietly to go change herself if she forgot about it, especially before a meal or if someone was dropping by for a visit.

But now she thought about it quite a lot, through the winter and into the spring. How she was different. It descended more deeply into her mind that she was the only one made the way she was made. That she was strange. She became accustomed to that flushing sense of shame that could come on and heat your face and make your scalp tingle and make you want to cry.

Summer came early, and then came on hard in June. It was very hot. She took to wearing light dresses and leaving off her diaper, and staying outside in the shade most of the day, hopping behind a bush or tree when she felt something coming on, instead of out in the open as she had when she was younger. She kept with her a catalog page she would tear a piece off of, use, and discard. And she would feel that flush of shame whenever it happened, and her mind would bristle with the sense of that strangeness. Ever since the day playing checkers with Mister, she had taken to washing her own diapers down at the creek instead of letting her mother or Grace take care of it. She would not put them in her mother’s boiling pot for sterilizing washed undergarments until all the others’ had been removed.

She was past her sixth birthday that November before it occurred to her that no one had even mentioned the possibility of attending school the next year.

She went to where her mother sat mending a shirt on the front porch.

Her mother looked up as she stood there.

“What’s the matter?”

“I guess I won’t be going to school next year like the rest.”

Her mother stopped her mending, though she looked down at it for a bit before meeting her daughter’s eye again.

“No,” she said. “I don’t see the sense in putting you through it.” Then, more to herself, she said, “Most girls, I’d say it’s a waste of time, anyway.” She looked a long moment at Jane again and said, “We will have to figure out something that you can do.”

Her mother and Grace taught her simple sewing, her mother offering single-word corrections now and then, while Grace did the hands-on teaching. Jane’s hands were small and clumsy and she pricked herself, her bottom lip trembling when she tried not to cry. Be patient, her mother said, and she tried, and got better. The idea was it might be something useful in life when there was no more mother, no more father, nothing but the farm, which would probably be sold by her older siblings. It was understood that Grace would have to make do on her own soon enough, as well. Either get married or go to find work in town.

She got better at sewing and soon even enjoyed it, applying a child’s blind concentration to the task, from mending seams and sewing patches into quilts, up to eventually using the machine to make simple smocks and skirts and then dresses. She liked the rhythm of pumping the machine’s treadle to keep the stylus going and guiding the material through. She had to stand to reach it with her foot. Everything else disappeared from her mind. She was more like her father than her mother. He did not mind work, easily focused on a task.

Perhaps as a consolation for not having school to look forward to, she was given freedom to wander about the whole place as she wanted. She walked the path through the woods that were charmed with their strange stillness and the scents of various plants and rich earth beneath moldering leaves. She walked the path down to the beaver pond, which was so much prettier in its wooded canyon than the cow pond sitting in the open and surrounded by hoof-cleaved muddy banks at the edge of their south pasture. She came out and sat on the hill above those woods and watched, at the juncture of field and woods down below, a pack of scruffy stray dogs that she imagined were the wild dogs she’d been cautioned about. They skirted the field in a silent little troop, tongues lolling, then disappeared into the undergrowth again, as if they’d been a ghost pack not really having been there except in her own mind.

HER FATHER TOOK her fishing one Saturday afternoon when the bream were on their beds, down at the beaver pond. They walked the trail slowly, her father guiding the tips of their two cane poles through the tree limbs and saplings and shrubbery along the trail, and sat in the shade over a bed and pulled out more than a dozen of the broad, snub-nosed sunfish, wriggling. They were bluegills and bigger ones her father called shell crackers. The tug on her line ran a current from the line and pole straight through her body, a long-lined static shock, and she soiled herself in excitement. Her father only laughed a little and told her to toss her undergarment aside and lift her skirt and go for a little cool wade down the bank at a clear and shallow spot. When she hesitated, he said, “It’s safe there, go on.” Her mother had forbidden her to go down to the pond by herself and said the water was dangerous, as if she had a morbid fear of it herself. Her father came over, found a stick, and told her to beat the grass near the edge before stepping through it, to scare off any snake that might be resting there. She whacked at the grass, waited a moment, hesitating again, looking at the smooth brown surface of the water. “Go on, now,” her father said again. She carefully took a step in, ankle-deep. The cool water on her skin, the cool mud of the bottom squishing up between her toes, was delicious to her senses.

“Now, how’s that?” he said.

“It’s grand, Papa,” she called back, and when she came out again he gave her a little one-armed hug, an expression of sentiment so rare in their household that it sent her senses singing all over again, and brought the beginning of tears to her eyes, which she hid by walking away and picking wildflowers on the little hill above the pond and bringing them back to him.

“That’s good,” he said. “Your mama can set them on the table for our supper.”

That evening they had a big mess of crisply fried bream and her father showed her how to nibble on the crisp, salty tails, which Grace said was disgusting but they ignored her. The delicate white meat peeled easily off the fishes’ thin bones and you could pull the whole skeleton and head away, which seemed in its simplicity almost a miracle.

“Why haven’t we done this before?” she said, and her father said he guessed he’d just got out of the habit, and they would have to do it again soon.

“I think your mama got tired of them,” he said.

“Well, tired of cleaning them, maybe,” their mother said, frowning at being called out.

As her father rose to go be by himself, and Grace and her mother began to clean the table and wash dishes, she sat looking at her own, with its two beautifully symmetrical, cleaned fish skeletons lying there in a thin film of congealed grease. It occurred to her what a very strange creature a fish was, a thing that lived in the water, underwater. And somehow breathed water, which would kill a body fool enough to try it, though she’d once wondered if she could sift it carefully through her lips and make that work, and when she’d mentioned it to her father, he’d blanched and said, “Don’t ever try that.”

Now in this moment she wished she had paid more attention when her mother was cleaning the fish, scraping out their insides, their small and delicate organs, had gazed on the mystery of them. And she wished she had asked her mother for one of the heads, so that she could peer closely at those gills, what they had instead of lungs, her father said, with their strange, blood-filled filaments that were apparently the secret to their magical abilities to live as they did.

She wondered what happened to a fish that was born without them. If it just floated to the surface of the water and died.

HER FATHER WOULD point things out to her. He knew the names of most trees, the oaks, elms, sycamore and sweetgum, the beech, pines, hickory, the maples, redbud, dogwood, the hollies, magnolia, swamp bay, cherry, cypress, pecan. Some shrubs, the buckeye, sweetshrub, huckleberry, sumac, snowbell. Flowers, lily of the valley, wisteria, joe-pye weed, jack-in-the-pulpit.

Of the mushrooms roosting in the loam and on the bark of trees live and rotten, he would only say some knew which ones you could eat but that he’d had an uncle who thought he knew them and died after making a mistake one day. “Stay away from them,” her father said.

When she would go into the woods with her mother it was for the express purpose of gathering edible plants and herbs for use in food dishes and medicinal potions. Chicory, dandelion greens, primrose root, wild strawberries, garlic, and wild onion. Teaberry, beechnuts, sassafras, blackberries, blueberries, rose hips for tea and jelly. She showed Jane how to prepare them, and when they were in the kitchen preparing for a regular meal she would call out the names of this one or that, and if Jane was unable to recall their uses and method of preparation, she would sometimes come over and pluck a single dark brown hair from Jane’s head and say, “You don’t want to be going around bald-headed for not knowing your lessons, do you?”

When she walked alone in the woods barefoot at midday after the noon meal she tried remembering the names of the trees and shrubs and flowers. She was fascinated by the mushrooms and their dry or slimy tops and delicate stems and gills beneath their caps. She liked to pop her toes against the ones that burst into orange dust that bloomed in the breezeless air. But it was the quiet, modest ones that were most interesting. If they didn’t want you to see them, you would not. They lived out their lives in shade and dampness, quivering when you passed and going so still if you happened to notice and squat down to take a closer look, to touch. One day she came upon a strange one that was not at all modest, growing straight up and tall with a small cap on its top. She broke it off at the base and took it home to show her father, but her mother saw it first and snatched it from her hand and threw it into the hog slop bucket.

“But what is it?” Jane said. “I’ve never seen one like it.”

“If you see another, you leave it alone,” her mother said, oddly angered.

“What’s it called?”

“It’s called a stinkhorn,” her mother said, “and aptly so.”

When she asked her father about it later, during one of their walks, and asked him why it grew straight up like that when all the others were short and round or flat like fat leaves growing from a tree’s bark, he said some called it the devil’s horn and some called it dead man’s finger. “There’s different shapes of it from just what you found.”

When she next saw Dr. Thompson she asked him about the stinkhorn and her mother’s reaction to it.

“Your mother was upset because she’s a modest woman and it so happens the stinkhorn mushroom resembles a part of the male anatomy or body, the part that is used in reproduction. In making babies.”

“Sure is a big’un,” she said.

The doctor said nothing, but rubbed his mouth for a moment and seemed to grip his jaw, then removed his shaded spectacles and rubbed the lenses on his shirtsleeve.

“Well, in fact,” he said, “there are varieties of the plant that resemble the complementary part of the female anatomy as well, in quite a lurid fashion.”

She didn’t know those words, complementary, lurid.

“Like mine?”

“No,” the doctor said. “Not really.”

“It’s what I’m supposed to look like, then?”

“Not exactly,” the doctor said. “It’s just people using their imagination. For the most part, anyway.”

He told her that he would explain it to her in more detail when she was a little older.

“What’s wrong with now?”

He fiddled in his vest pocket for his pipe and took it out, but only held it out from him and looked at it as if to examine it for flaws. Then he looked sideways at her.

“Soon enough,” he said. “When the time is right.”

She walked off, perturbed, but then came right back.

“I need you to tell me why I’m the way I am, why I’m different, or how I’m different. Why can’t I control myself?” She had learned this discreet term well enough over the years.

He looked at her a long moment, his eyes squinting that tired squint, a mote of some kind in there that was more than a speck of dust, more something in his mind than his eye. Then he nodded, said, “All right, then.”

They sat on the ground and he told her as best he could about what she did not have that most girls and women had. “First, there’s no ‘why.’ It’s just how you’re made. Inside you,” he said, “I believe you have just about everything, if not everything, that any other girl has. But on the outside you don’t have everything they do. Everything is kind of tucked up inside you, hidden away. And one thing you do not have is the little muscle that allows you to control yourself. It’s a squeezing muscle, see. And when you need to go potty, if you have the little muscle, then you can squeeze it and stop it until you get to a privy or bathroom or a good-sized bush to hide behind, you know.”

She nodded, serious. She was trying to form a picture in her mind of her insides, and make that match up somehow with what she’d been able to tell about herself from what she could see on the outside. It was like trying to imagine some very complex mushroom.

“What you have on the inside is just as complex — I mean it is just as much a wonder of a miracle of the human body — as anyone else. But it didn’t get to finish putting itself all together, didn’t get to finish itself up and get everything right, before it was time for you to be born. Or maybe I should say at some point, for some reason, it just stopped making itself into what it was supposed to.” He paused, looked at her looking back at him, her brow bunched down. “That’s about as best I can explain it to you at your age, Janie. I hope that helps a little bit. It’s not anyone’s fault, certainly not yours, and it’s not anything to be ashamed of. It’s just a difference, is all. And the only thing is that it causes you to have to live your life in a special way. To have less freedom to go to school and such as that. But it does not mean that you are not a normal little girl. You’re just a little girl who has to deal with more things than most little girls. And that will make you strong. It already has.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I hope one day someone can. But right now I don’t know. Well, I know they will one day. I just don’t know when. I know they work at figuring these things out all the time.”

Jane nodded, still trying to put together some kind of picture in her mind that made sense. She was coming up with something, although she had no idea if it was a fantastical idea or something close to what the doctor knew.

SHE WOULD HOLD a mirror beneath herself and stare for a long time, studying herself there. She had seen her mother naked, and her sister Grace, too, but not really up close. It was not the kind of thing she could ask to examine, to use the doctor’s word.

But she longed to do just that. If she could only look closely at Grace, and then again at herself, it would satisfy such a curiosity. So she got up her courage one day and asked Grace, bluntly, if she could see her down there.

“I mean take a real good look,” she said. “An examination.”

Grace looked offended, even baffled.

“Find you some girl your own age, if you want to play doctor,” she said before heading off toward the barn and her smokes.

Sometimes she was frightened, in a heightened way, briefly, as if some panic were about to take hold of her, and she would run, just run, until she outran it, or wore it out, and she would find herself way out in the middle of a pasture, with a curious, half-startled cow looking at her, stopped in its cud-chewing, like she was some kind of creature it had never seen before. Then she would notice the other cows, all turned to look at her, their chewing interrupted, some with long pieces of grass hanging from their mouths, their big brown eyes on her as if in wonder about how she’d suddenly appeared in their midst, a tiny creature from some other world. They’d wait to see what she would do. She would think in that moment she could do anything. She would move slowly to pluck a long piece of Johnson grass and chew on the sour end of it, let it hang from her mouth. The cows would take notice. She would stand very still. When she moved again they would startle, as if she had suddenly become human again.

Then, calmed, she would walk in the woods by herself.

She loved most being in the woods, with the diffused light and the quiet there. Such a stillness, with just the pecking of ground birds and forest animals, the flutter of wings, the occasional skittering of squirrels playing up and down a tree. The silent, imperceptible unfurling of spring buds into blossom. She felt comfortable there. As if nothing could be unnatural in that place, within but apart from the world.

There were innumerable little faint trails her father said were game trails. Animal trails. Their faint presence like the lingering ghosts of the animals’ passing. There was a particular little clearing she believed she had discovered, only her, filled with yellow sunlight on clear days, its long grass harboring primroses and wild sunflowers. A meadow she considered to be her very own, her place. The eyes of all the wild, invisible animals watching her. Time was suspended, or did not exist. She could linger there as long as she liked and when she returned from it no time had passed at all since she had stepped into the clearing and then awakened from it. That’s what it was like.

The meadow did not exist if she wasn’t in it.

THE SPRING AND summer storms were terrifying and thrilling, with sudden gusting winds, thick waves of rain, bone-jarring thunder, lightning that made everything for an instant like the inside of a vast glass bowl of bright blue light, or crackled across the sky as if to crack it open to the heavens, or boomed so near so sudden, leaving smoking trees in the woods or the edge of a field. There was a wooded area her father left open to the cattle so they could hide in there during storms. The rain flooded the flat yard, creating rivers where before there seemed no natural depression in the ground. Wind howled around the house in long, bending moans, moving against it like a flooding river, so that she feared it would rip the whole thing from its columns of foundation stones. And always, after, the yard and the fields beyond were littered with stripped branches and leaves, arboreal detritus and debris, and often, in the yard, some animal drowned from the sheer volume of water in such a brief time, a stray housecat caught out in it, or a bird, or a possum.

She would sit alone on a branch in a hickory nut tree near the pig pen, watching the hogs, sows, and piglets. Beyond that the cattle grazed in the pasture beside the pond, in their massive, slow, ponderous bodies. With their stupid, wary expressions. They startled easily.

She’d seen the hogs mount the sows in their pen. The hogs seemed almost to try to tender up the sows before they got to it, bumping the sows’ behinds with their noses, rubbing up beside them, bumping their heads gently, almost like a kind of kiss. The boars’ big pink things with the curled tip would come poking out. She went a little pop-eyed first time she saw that. They did not look like stinkhorns. And when they would mount the sows, the hogs didn’t seem to move much, every now and then pushing against her bottom, shuffling their comically tiny hind feet toward her in a little two-legged dance. And the sows stood as still as they could, just kind of staring ahead, their ears canted forward, and then after the hog got down they would kind of stand next to each other until another sow or boar came up, curious, and broke the spell.

When she asked about it, her mother seemed surprised and shocked, but the others only laughed at her questions.

She had seen dogs going at it, too, of course. A female would stray from a neighboring farm and have a small pack of males trailing along, nosing her. The female always seemed a little sullen, as if to say, I suppose I’m ready for this, although I’m not sure about it. She would be evasive without actually running away. The male had always to follow the female around, patiently impatient, attentive, until the female would stand still long enough for him to mount her. Then it was quick, with great purpose, the male’s eyes wandering off either in pleasure or distraction, she could not tell. The female’s eyes kind of sideways like she was thinking and not able to quite figure it out.

She had never seen their hound or Top doing it. What she didn’t realize was the hound was too old, stupid, and lazy, and Top, having been a stray, had been fixed by whoever he had first belonged to, before he was run off or ran away on his on.

Birds fluttered themselves together while on a branch in a tree and then fluttered apart and looked a little bewildered. The birds did not truly understand their compulsions at all. She thought maybe they would actually forget they had done it pretty much just right after doing it. Birds are the most distracted creatures in the world, she thought. She could figure that much. Bird brains. The rooster, too, hopped onto the backs of the hens, who seemed to bow down for him and lift their tails, and he clawed and grappled and flapped his wings and pushed himself at them, and you couldn’t really see much because of all their feathers, just the thrashing around. If they let that hen keep her eggs they would have chicks.

She was never able to come upon cats going at it. They were as secretive and mysterious about this as they were about anything else, if not more so. Although a female in heat seemed truly tortured by the condition. She did not want what needed to happen to actually happen but if it didn’t happen soon she was going to lose her mind. But somewhere, sometime, it always happened, for the female would disappear and no longer be seen creeping through the yard yowling in a low growly way, shoulders hunched. You might hear them down in the woods, screaming like tiny panthers. And then later there would be kittens.

She spied on Grace and her mother, when she could, after their baths, while they were dressing. If they saw her they stiffened and turned away or shut the door. Then she would take the shaving mirror from the wall over the pump sink out back and, down in the woods, set it on the ground, pull up her skirt, and examine herself. She hadn’t been able to tell enough about Grace or her mother to see much difference, but she could tell she was different, all the same. Well, she’d long known she was different, but she wanted to know more.

When she asked the doctor to tell her more, at first he looked a little exasperated, then said he would try to show her.

He came back the next day with a book in which there were drawings of the female genitalia. He let her study it. She asked questions about some of the details, and he answered her bluntly. She looked at it for several minutes, the drawing. Then she closed the book and said, “I’ll be back in a minute,” and ran off for the shaving mirror, book in hand. Down in the woods, squatting over the mirror, she looked back and forth between the image there and the drawing in the book. At this point, she was mostly just fascinated by seeing what she was seeing. She didn’t feel a shock, or anything bad, just then. She closed the book, returned the mirror to its place, and went back out front where the doctor was waiting. She handed him the book and thanked him.

“Clear enough for now, then?” he said.

“I guess,” Jane said. Then she said, “I want to go to school like everybody else.”

“I know.”

“Help me figure out how to do it.”

“All right. Let me think about it for a couple of days.”

He started to go, then turned back.

“You know, Jane, there will likely be teasing.”

She just looked at him, tears welling up that she blinked back. She nodded.

“I already know that,” she said.

Mrs. Ida Chisolm

Rt. 1, Old Paulding Rd.

Dear Mrs. Chisolm,

As per our conversation regarding daughter Jane’s (and your) concerns about managing her incontinence as she begins her public life at the Damascus school, and if you feel the necessity of taking extra measures to insure her mental comfort and avoid accidents, I would recommend that the child refrain from eating and drinking after the evening meal. A little extra time in the privy first thing in the morning. A very light breakfast (absolutely no coffee, as this is not good for children of her age in any case but coffee is a diuretic and would increase the frequency of urination and possibly bowel movements as well), a very light lunch. She should sip a little water during the day so as to avoid dehydration. She should have a healthy snack when she gets home and partake heartily at supper. Make sure she drinks plenty of water in the afternoons. I would not give her iced nor hot tea.

I’m sure she has told you that I went over all this with her myself. She seemed to understand. Such a wise little girl you have there, as you well know.

She is a healthy child, all things considered, and this regimen should not cause her any more than some initial, mild discomfort, to which I believe she soon will become accustomed.

Yours truly,

Ed Thompson, M.D.

AND SO SHE willingly took up the routine. At home they had a double privy with a wall in between, so she would go there first thing in the morning and stay, stomach growling, until she felt she was entirely empty. She hardly even noticed the coming and going of others on the other side. No one spoke to her, interrupted her concentration on becoming an empty vessel, her body an empty, hollow chamber of flesh, dry and clean as the inside of a cleaned-out fish. And then she would step back out into the yard, feel the dust on her feet and between her toes, as if she had stepped out onto the surface of the moon, which was sometimes still there pale and wan just above the tops of the trees.

Her dresses were sewn to be loose and hang from her shoulders in a way that would not cinch her waist and accentuate her preventive undergarment. There were no secrets, really, in such a small world as their little school, but there was a kind of natural discretion. Her mother gave her a vial of inexpensive perfume to dab onto her wrists and her undergarments to disguise — at least for a moment, for a getaway — any smells in case of an unavoidable accident. Even young Jane sensed the sad futility of this gesture, although she would wear a bit of perfume most days for the rest of her life.

Despite the constant faint but cloying scent of this perfume, the smells peculiar to a school classroom fascinated her almost to the point of being mesmerized. Pencil lead, waxy crayons, writing-tablet paper and the paper in the schoolbooks, all of them used and handed down from children years and years before, the chalk used on the blackboard, the rising and then fading smells of lunch the students ate from their paper sacks, lunch boxes, or (for some of the poorest) pails covered with a kitchen towel, the boys’ hair oil and the girls’ bath powder, the dung from the horses and mules that some of the older children would ride to get there and then tether outside the building to a hitching post. All of it combined into a medley of smells that would always mean “school” in her memory.

It was a small school that took the community children all the way from first grade to high school graduation, and there were not many enrolled, so the environment was relatively intimate, like some great, overgrown family, in a way. The children seemed to know and understand one another like siblings, whether lovingly, or with hostility, or with the purposeful ignoring of this one or that.

She established herself in the little world there, and was accepted well enough, easygoing as she was, and thick-skinned by virtue of her family’s ways in general and her mother’s often harsh tongue. She could tell that Grace was keeping a distant eye on her but she stayed just that: distant. Early on, she caught some teasing from the other children during recess, saying, She wears diapers. The principal and high school teacher, Miss Deen, who had taken it on herself to supervise the younger children’s little playground, reprimanded them.

“You should not make fun of anyone for being who she is,” Miss Deen said to them in her calm and level but somber voice. She was a tall and sophisticated woman with a long face and square jaw and glinting sharp green eyes who had grown up in the capital in Jackson, then married a local farmer she’d met at the state agriculture and teachers college.

“You there, Steven,” she said, at which the boy immediately blushed a florid pink. “Should we all laugh at you for your disgusting habit of picking your nose and eating the product thereof? You, Morgan, shall we laugh at you because you secretly like to nibble the lead from your pencil? Do you know that will make you feeble-minded? You, Marjory, should we suggest that you wear diapers because of the time you laughed too hard and wet yourself right there in your seat? You, Bobby Land, because you soiled yourself being afraid to go alone to the privy?”

All fell silent in a pall of embarrassment. A couple of other children had come up and giggled but when Miss Deen turned her hard gaze upon them fell silent again. None was more appalled than Jane. She willed Miss Deen just to be silent and let it go.

“I am sorry to have embarrassed anyone,” Miss Deen said. “But perhaps y’all have learned a lesson about making fun of other people for the ways in which they are not perfect human beings. As we none of us are.”

Jane both loved her and was angry at her for making more of it than had already been made. She’d rather have fended for herself.

She saw Grace, shaking her head, go back into the schoolhouse.

The other children didn’t tease her so much after all that, and then after a while not at all. Jane had a dignity about her that the others had come to admire and respect, though some of the other girls did seem to quietly resent her, as if thinking she was a little stuck-up. But that wasn’t it. She was in fact in a bit of a fog by midday, usually, the effect of having not eaten or drunk anything since the night before.

But no matter how much the other children seemed to begrudge a respect for her, to feign unawareness of her mysterious need to wear diapers (and who could tell how much they might know or think they knew through rumor?), and no matter how out of it she generally was, she was all too aware of her difference. How that was what really communicated to others that sense of strangeness. This was enough in itself to cause a gathering of something like sadness in her mind, a heaviness in her chest. There was no getting away from this awareness, a strange self-consciousness, as long as she was around others. And so it wasn’t very long before she began to question whether this business of schooling, of trying to be like everyone else, was actually worth the trouble. The odd mingling of a sense of sadness and embarrassment.

She had even caught Grace looking at her more than once with what seemed, possibly, a genuine sympathy. That was almost harder to take than what she sensed in the others.

And besides, she found it hard to concentrate, being hungry and thirsty all day. And tired of pretending to eat a lunch when she actually only picked at a bit of cornbread or biscuit she carried in a napkin in her pocket like some crumbling talisman, to ward off any overly curious attention. She knew it was safe to eat her lunch — nothing would happen before she got home — but she was too anxious about it all.

On the last day of school before the Christmas holiday, she let Grace walk on ahead without even trying to keep up or asking Grace to slow down. She cut through the woods, around the house, and came out in the pecan grove, the spindly gray branches ugly against the austere sky. A loneliness she didn’t even know how to name welled up in her so swiftly that she didn’t realize she had tears in her eyes until she felt them cold on her cheeks, and for the first time since she was very small she let them come, blurring her vision, pushing the hurtful feeling from her heart. When it was done she went on to the house. Her mother, standing on the back porch as if watching for her, didn’t speak but looked as if she understood everything. And so Jane went to her room to be alone until time for supper. And they left her alone, no doubt knowing.

Ellison Adams, M.D.

Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Baltimore, Maryland

Dear Ellis,

I have a regular supply of very decent homemade spirits and the occasional quarter of venison from Chisolm. He feels the need to pay me for my attention to the girl but I persuade him otherwise with the argument of acquiring valuable medical research. She is now seven years old, and seems practically immune to the kinds of infection apparently common in some such cases. Your diagnosis has not faltered at all.

Her disposition is generally bright, if also somewhat prodigiously contemplative. A fairly solitary and independent little sprite. I have driven up, looked around, finally asked, and no one will know where she is nor seem too concerned about the not knowing. And then she will appear, as if from thin air, behind me, standing there looking up at me and smiling. We talk. It’s rare that anything she says prompts me to request a thorough examination.

In any case, I figure we are out of the woods in terms of any potentially dangerous complications. I will keep a close watch when it comes near time for puberty, of course, although — again — if it is indeed what you believe it to be, I shouldn’t have to worry about that.

It was a disappointment to her, the attempt to attend our local school. I don’t know exactly what happened, and it didn’t seem the teasing was excessive. She was melancholy for a while after, but seemed to recover entirely by spring. Still, I cannot help but think that she hides a deep emotional burden inside her little child’s chest. I don’t see how she could escape it. My god, Ellis, the child pretty much picked up reading in just three months there. Such a waste.

I am considering taking it on myself to bring her up there for a thorough examination by Young, if you could help me arrange it. She is plenty old enough now to undergo surgery, if it were advisable. I know you think my own examinations and communications are probably sufficient to diagnose as you have: that this is not an operable condition, at this point in time, and that most likely even sphincter construction is unlikely. But, if the girl and her family are willing, I would rest easier knowing for sure, after examination by an experienced specialist in the field. If not your people, then at least let one of the urologists in Memphis take a look. It is only a little over 200 miles from here, as opposed to the near 1,000 to you.

In any case, I will be in touch about the potential visit/examination. Please continue to send any news of developments, but I will try to make this examination happen as soon as possible. The girl is such a delight, truly, that I hate to think ahead and imagine her living a long life of isolation and shame, which is sure to come on her if there is nothing to be done about her condition once she is older.

My best to Mary Kate, when you see her. Tell her the one she should have married wishes you all well. I do so miss Lett. Her family keeps fresh flowers at her grave in town. She is in their plot, as you know. As for me, burn and scatter the ashes in my woods if I go first. It’s in the will.

Yrs,

Ed

PRETENDING TO BEGRUDGE it but seeming to enjoy it once they’d get started, Grace sometimes helped Jane with her reading in the evenings, bringing home books from the school library, and corrected her handwriting efforts. The teachers had let her borrow the books, knowing she had a little sister at home who wanted to learn. There was the Bible in the house, of course, but it was incomprehensible. No one read from it, much less aloud. The pictures of paintings inside it were interesting. More helpful was the Sears, Roebuck catalog, with its pictures of the items described there for sale. There was always a new one in the house, and an older one in the outhouse. Sometimes she would take the newer catalog to her father in the evenings and ask him to read her the description of something in there for sale. It was all a kind of schooling, anyway.

When Dr. Thompson learned that she wanted for reading material, he began bringing books when he visited.

“I don’t know why I didn’t think to, before,” he said. “Lett was a reader. I am, too, of course, but she read novels, made-up stories. I like some of them but it’s the rare one I like a lot. I thought I’d bring some by, you see which ones you like, we’ll start to get an idea of which ones I ought to give you.”

“You don’t have to give them to me for good.”

He shrugged, said, “I don’t care much about hanging on to books after I’ve read them. Most of them, anyway. Better to give them away to others who might want to read.”

“Well. Thank you.” Then she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on his bristly cheek. The doctor stood there a long moment, something like a look of amused wonder on his face. Then he smiled to himself, got into his car, and drove off.

Inside, Jane looked at the books he’d given her. One had her own name in the title, Jane Eyre. It seemed a little bit dense, but would be interesting to her later on. Another was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It was an old battered copy and about boys, so she thought it might have been his own book and he was just tired of reading it. She set it aside, too. The third one was old, also, but not so worn. It was a slim little book with a faded red cover and the title on the spine: A Simple Heart, by Gustave Flaubert, an odd name. She set to reading it that night, and couldn’t stop. She finished by candlelight. She was in tears over poor Félicité’s sad but beautiful life, her broken heart and her loneliness, her love for her mistress’s children, and fascinated by the way she began to lose her mind, and filled with wonder at the spirit of her beloved parrot hovering over her at her death.

She lay awake late into the night, the candle finally guttering out in its holder, and in the dim light left in the room from a bit of moon she passed into sleep without even feeling it coming, and dreamed heavily, and though she couldn’t remember anything particular when she woke the next morning, she remembered that the dreams had been kind of heartbreaking, and thought that she may have wept in her sleep. The odd thing was that she didn’t feel sad in their aftermath. She felt something like a lightened joy. She felt the damp of her tears on the pillow, and turned it over so that her mother would not see.

SHE BEGAN TO HELP her mother out in the kitchen, preparing meals. She wasn’t allowed to cook anything yet but she was shown things, so that she would gradually learn that and be able to take over from Grace — and maybe even her mother — after Grace left home. No one knew when that would be, although when she was angry Grace was threatening to leave any minute. She made no secret of her desire to get off the farm.

As her mother and Grace began early preparations for supper, Jane helped shell peas and butterbeans, rinsing them and leaving them in water for their mother to boil all morning with salt pork while Jane sucked her thumb, which was sore from prying apart the butterbeans’ tough pods. If there was to be a chicken fried, her mother would walk calmly among the nervous yard birds, casual as if just strolling through, and then would snatch one by the head and give it a quick twirl to snap its neck. Then she would dip it in scalding water, pluck and gut it, chop off its feathered head and hard yellow feet.

Jane took the bucket in which her mother had tossed the head, feet, and guts down to the hog pen and tossed them straight onto the bare earth there, where after a momentary silence for comprehension the hogs, sows, and shoats set upon it, bawling, brawling, squealing from lust and the pain of swift and intense battle. Yet another, if negative, reason to dislike the eating of their meat.

Back at the house her mother had carried the plucked and headless hen back to the porch and pumped a little water to wash it, then carried it inside, cut it to frying pieces, dipped it in egg and milk, dredged it in flour, and dropped it piece by piece into the broad pan of hot lard on the stove, and set it piece by browned piece aside to drain on a sheet of newspaper on the counter.

Jane would be set to peeling potatoes to boil and mash for the meal, or washing greens in a small tub on the back porch. Looking out over the yard, she would recall the remarkably casual, vivid slaughter, each arcing flop of the hen’s unceremonious exit from this world, each rise and quick chopping blow of the little hatchet through its neck into the oak stump, and somehow feel apart or invisible, a strange presence locked in her own consciousness, like no one else’s in the world, apart from all others, her fingers tightening in recollection of this or that casually violent action, and it sent a current into her spine up into the base of her neck, the tingling of it coming out her eyes in invisible little needles of light indistinguishable from the light of the gathering day.