Miss Jane

Mortality

Eldred O. Thompson, M.D.

North Poplar Road

Mercury, Miss.

Dear Ed,

I have, as I hope you know, been taking careful notes from your letters, concerning your monitoring and examinations of the Chisolm girl in your care. Recently I put them together in the most assimilated fashion I could and sat down with colleagues — and even managed to get the busy Dr. Young into the meeting. We had your notes, your drawings. We met quite a while, for meetings in this place — a good half hour or more. I must tell you that Dr. Young and the others — and I concurred — concluded that it is highly improbable anything can be done here to correct the girl’s condition, at this point in time, given what we know about what’s possible, surgically. I will say that Dr. Young raised an eyebrow at me and told me that he thought, and certainly hoped, and had good reason to think, that we or others to follow us will soon have the knowledge, skill, and means to correct her particular condition, but it is impossible to know, just now, exactly when. Dr. Young did say he was certain that a young woman he examined in the past few months has a condition almost if not identical to your Miss Chisolm’s, down to the length of the common channel, and he chose not to — could not with any degree of confidence for success — operate. I would imagine that, if there is anything definitive to learn by having someone in Memphis (I recommend Davis) examine her, it would be to find out whether or not sphincter work is possible, at this point. We doubt it.

You take care, now, Ed. Living alone, there, you take care not to over-indulge in your favorite vices. I would complain and urge you to work a little bit at marrying again but there is a part of me, as you know, that feels like you have always been the loner kind at heart, and that if you could get a bit of relief from wanton urges now and then you’d be fine. But, I know, small town, etc. etc. I do wish you had some closer poker or drinking buddies than those backwater snobs in your town. Take a vacation and come see us. Or hell, just hide out in a hotel and I’ll take you out on the town incognito.

Yrs.,

Ellis

HE TUCKED THE LETTER into his jacket pocket and took a walk down the path into the woods behind his house. Walking through the yard was like walking through some kind of medieval court, given all the peacocks standing around watching his passage as if he were a strange and sacred cow in their midst.

He’d already persuaded the Chisolms to let him take Jane up to Memphis to be looked over there. Lied and said it wouldn’t cost anything, that they would consider odd cases for the value of learning more about them in order to treat others down the line.

He rounded a corner in the trail and heard something and just did see the spritely forms of half-grown children bounding away through a thicket like so many frightened deer. A rare sighting of the species Urchinus trespassus. Although he knew very well his woods were regularly roamed by boys from nearby farms and even the northernmost neighborhoods in town. He’d seen their roughshod forts and campsites. That was all fine with him. In his better moods he’d pretend they were his own wayward, half-wild children, conceived in a sylvan, satyrical dream, mythical forest creatures not to be tended like the mortal child. He didn’t like knowing the little bastards shot songbirds with their air guns, but he had done the same as a boy. It was rare he heard the rifle or shotgun of a true poacher, and if he’d heard it regular he would’ve called the sheriff, but so far that hadn’t been the case. There were deer and hogs and turkey in here, he knew, and, he suspected, an ivorybill, maybe a pair. He only hoped some fool boy or man would not shoot one or both of those birds. He heard the call of a peacock deeper in the woods and thought, Or them.

He crossed the creek where it was shallow and narrow and walked through a little glade and then up a long, sloping hill. At the top there was the old gazebo he’d built just after he and Lett married. They’d loved to come out here, have a bottle of beer and a picnic. It was high up. You could see out over the woods. Just a glimpse of glinting light on the lake a quarter mile west, at the end of the property. He knew those same boys (and their parents) trespassed to fish there all the time. By now most knew he didn’t spend much time in his own woods. They probably considered it public property, for all they cared. And he practically did, too, he supposed. As long as he knew he himself had access, and no one the right to tell him otherwise.

He sat in the now-neglected gazebo and remembered those Sunday afternoon picnics. No one could reach him there, with her, even if they came calling, even if someone was a-dying and a-crying, Oh, my lord! he would not know it. He put the world out of his mind and enjoyed the time alone in a little paradise with his sweetheart, before she began to go sour on him. On them. Nothing is forever, it was true. He could be sitting alone here now with her alive and no longer even caring to come out here with him, to enjoy such days. Which is better? he wondered. What is the difference, given enough time?

ACROSS THE YARD from the front porch, to the right of the drive that came to the house from the road, was the large shed where her father would do everything from work on farm machinery, to smith horseshoes or mend tools, to grooming the horses or mule before turning them out to graze for the evening if they’d been worked. In the part where he had worked for years on machinery, the earth was red clay discolored and redolent with oil and grease, and packed hard, and the smell of those things combined was for some reason one of the most delicious to her, even more than those in the barn. What she wished almost more than anything was that she could fix a tractor, or repair a broken wheel, or even hammer out a wheel rim or horseshoe on the anvil. That’s what seemed like real work to her, even as a child, not sweeping a porch or churning milk or washing and hanging clothes or cooking over a hot stove. Men’s work seemed like freedom.

Just down the two-track drive, closer to the road, was the one-room general store her father operated for the tenants, sharecroppers, and neighbors who didn’t want to travel to the larger one in Liberty a few miles away. It had a simple board counter where her father set his money box when he went up there, shelves on the walls for dry goods, canned goods, crackers, tobacco and matches, flour and sugar, canned coffee, and such as that. Heavy sacks of feed were stacked in one corner. Leather for tack repair hung on the wall space just behind the board counter. A tall potbellied woodstove sat in the center of the room, placed in a sandbox, and sometimes a customer would sit next to it for a bit sharing a smoke or a sip with her father, usually in the late afternoon. He didn’t keep regular hours there, but people would just walk or ride up and wait outside it till someone saw them there and went to tell her father, who would come serve them if he could get away from work. If he couldn’t get away, her mother or Grace (before she left) would get the key and go tend to it.

Jane had taken to following her father or mother or Grace to the store when someone came up. She stayed quiet and out of the way but she was studying what went on as intently as a bird eyeballing a worm, pulling up close when the money was exchanged, and jumping to get a product when someone asked. And without anyone noticing she had learned not only the inventory but about money and how to count it, too, all from just watching and thinking, and when there was something she didn’t quite understand she would keep her mouth shut and watch more closely the next time. So pretty soon when she would run to get a sack of meal or tobacco or sugar or coffee or what have you, she would plop it onto the counter and call out the price, and when the customer would put down his or her money she would call out that amount and in a flicker call out what change they had coming back, leaving her father or mother shaking their heads in wonder, or Grace glowering at her in irritation. “How’d she figure all that out?” her father would say, and her mother would say, “Well, you know when she gets quiet, watch out, ’cause she’s thinking and she’s going to come up with something to surprise you, I’ll tell you that.”

So when she would see someone coming or pulling up to the store she would run to her father so fast, so light on her feet, it felt like she hardly had to touch the ground to get going, half flying to where the key hung on a nail in the mantel, saying, Customer! At first her father hadn’t wanted her to tend the store by herself, she was too young despite her talents, but soon he gave in and got her an old apple crate to stand on and let her mind the store whenever she wanted. And since she was pretty much the only one who cared anything about it, and who didn’t have anything really to be interrupted by it, she became principal storekeeper. So much so that her father took to just leaving the cash box on the mantel near the key so she could grab it, too.

And when people would come in, black or white, they always greeted her with respect, some with a bit of humor, “Hello, young lady,” or, “Hello, Miss Jane.” And she would pipe up, “What can I get for you, Mr. Everett?”

“I’ll be durned if I don’t think more people been coming by the store since she started keeping it more often,” her father said, laughing a little bit. He said to her, “You remember what I said, though, about strangers or rough-looking types. You don’t open up for them, you hear?”

Sometimes a neighbor man, vaguely familiar, would not tell her what he wanted and only ask her to get her father. “I can get you anything you want, sir,” she would say. And the man would act as if he were deaf or stupid, until she went to get her father, and he would tell her to stay put or go to the house, he would take care of this one.

Later she’d come to realize the man was there to purchase liquor. There was a locked cabinet at the very rear corner of the store that she was never given a key to.

The only time she didn’t run out to the store to meet a customer was when she had just had an accident and had no time to clean up, and she hated that.

She liked to go into the smokehouse after the meat had cured and stand beneath the big bodies of meat hanging from hooks attached to fence wire that was secured around the joist beams. The sides of bacon, roasts, hams, and rib slabs turned so slightly in the thin strips of light that leaked between the board siding that she may have imagined it, as she did the spinning of the earth itself as she stood stock-still in the middle of the yard, causing her mother to call out from the breezeway, “Jane! Come in this house and cool your forehead. Have you gone feebleminded on me?”

There was a small two-room storage shed that contained odd discarded objects the family no longer used. Jane was told to stay out of there, might be snakes or wasps or things that could fall off of shelves and knock her in the head. So she did, though sometimes she tried to see through the windows. The panes were too dusty for her to make out much. One day she went in against the rules and saw a dust-covered little red wagon high on a shelf, and wondered why it was up there and she’d never been allowed to play with it when she was younger. And then her father told her it had belonged to her older brother William Waldo, who’d died of the fever just a few years before she was born, and that her mother had made him put it up on that shelf and wouldn’t let anyone so much as touch it, much less play with it.

“Why did she want to keep it, then?” Jane said.

Her father gave her a long look, blinking his eyes, and shook his head. He looked away. “She loved him best,” he finally said. “You have to keep that in mind when she’s acting ornery. Losing that little boy broke her heart.”

She kind of nodded.

“He was just three years old, going on four,” her father said. He leaned down to tug on her blouse where it had gotten twisted a bit. Then he looked her in the eye, his gray eyes there but hardly seeming to really look at her. He was seeing something else. Maybe the dead boy William Waldo. Then he said, “That’s when a child is most precious, you see. Kind of between being a baby and a little boy or girl. It’s when they seem like little angels. It’s the hardest time to lose one. I do believe.” He patted her shoulder and went off, leaving her there feeling something she hadn’t felt before. Only later would she identify it as grief. The gift of it given from her father, and her mother, too, to her.

THEY WOULD MAKE the trip to Memphis after all, she and Dr. Thompson. She did not know that he had been vacillating on the idea for some weeks, only that he up and said to get ready for the trip. Her mother and father seemed tense and didn’t want to discuss it. She was so excited about taking the train ride to Memphis that she felt little or no apprehension about the fact that they were going to see a doctor up there, someone who would supposedly know more about what was wrong with her than Dr. Thompson himself. She doubted that. But the trip sure sounded like fun. She’d never been farther than to town, and never been on a train.

They rode coach to Jackson, then switched to the Chicago train for the ride to Memphis. Though the ride would be relatively brief, the doctor got them a private compartment anyway, so that she wouldn’t have to worry about accidents. The rolling countryside to Jackson was pretty, the bright and rusty leaves fluttering down from the trees along the railway. On the northbound to Memphis the land flattened out once they veered close to the Delta. The doctor got her a soda pop and some peanuts and had himself a beer as they rode, throwing the peanut shells out the window and making her laugh and join in like a game.

In Memphis, they caught a streetcar to what the doctor said was the medical college. It was a big, square, red-brick four-story building. Jane had never seen anything quite like it. But then they’d seen lots of big buildings, hotels and civic buildings, on the way there through town. Her neck just about got a crick from looking right and left every block.

There was a woman sitting near them on the streetcar who looked back at them with a sour expression and got up to sit somewhere else. Jane saw her say something to the woman she sat down next to, and the other woman turned to look at them, too. The doctor stuck his tongue out at them and they looked horrified, but they stopped looking then. Everything seemed so loud, from people’s voices to the car’s bell, automobile engines and horns, and even the smells were loud, of exhaust fumes, the strange burnt smell of the sparking streetcar wires, all kinds of food cooking, and the savory smoke coming from restaurant kitchens and street vendors. It was like they were in a foreign country. The doctor seemed to be enjoying watching her experience it all more than he enjoyed being there himself.

They climbed the big white steps up into the hospital. It smelled sharply of what he said were sanitary chemicals, soap, and lots of human odors. Not a place where she would feel so self-conscious about herself. They went straight into an examination room, which felt like a different world, something weirdly not like regular life. She’d never been in a room that felt so starchy clean and white, with gleaming metal tables and bright light. She half expected to be packaged up as a specimen and shipped to the future or something. Then a tall man, even taller than Dr. Thompson, but thinner, wearing thick spectacles on a small nose, with a balding head and a crewcut, came in and said he was Dr. Davis. There was a nurse with him but he didn’t even bother to introduce the woman, who wore a blank expression beneath her white cap and said nothing, just did what the doctor said like she was some mechanical person instead of a real one. Her hands were cold and Jane looked at her, momentarily startled by her, and the woman didn’t even seem to notice.

Quickly, they had her on the table and in the stirrups, the sheet up, cleaned her good, and then she heard Dr. Davis murmur the usual words about cold, some discomfort, and so on, and she felt him using what she called the metal duck thing to look inside her. She flinched but soon calmed and turned her head to the side to see Dr. Thompson, who was watching the doctor. When he saw her looking at him he came over and held her hand. He patted it.

“Won’t take long,” he said.

Indeed it didn’t. Dr. Davis, out of sight behind the sheet and using his bright light and reflector, used some kind of blunt instrument to poke and probe her here and there inside, seeming to take care not to hurt her, to be gentle. Then he pulled everything out, stood up, told the nurse Jane could get dressed again, and went over to a sink to wash his hands. Dr. Thompson took a fresh diaper from a bag he’d carried and handed it to the nurse.

“If you wouldn’t mind, madame,” he said.

The nurse suddenly turned into a human being, broke into a big smile, and said, “Not at all, Doctor!” Almost startled Jane into peeing on the tabletop.

Then Dr. Thompson went out with Dr. Davis and they stood talking in low tones in the hallway. The nurse went back to being a mechanical person, putting the fresh diaper on Jane, gathering up the instruments, and putting the sheets into a hamper in a corner, and then she left without so much as a glance at or a word to Jane. I guess she must be used to the likes of me, Jane thought.

As they were leaving, Dr. Thompson said he was going to take her out on the town.

“What did the doctor say?” she said.

“Tell you in a bit,” he said.

They went to see the Pink Palace mansion, where the doctor said a strange old lady lived by herself, which was amazing. They went to the river bluff to see steamboats tied up and going by. They went to the zoo, where Jane was disappointed they didn’t have any monkeys, but fascinated by the tiger and elephant, more so by the tiger, until the doctor told her that elephants were very smart and had long memories and were sad and cried when one of their loved ones was killed or died.

After the zoo they ate at what he said was a famous barbecue place before going to their lodgings. She didn’t want the pork ribs, so she got the smoked chicken that fell off the bone, and was afraid she might never love fried chicken as much again after that.

They were staying at the old Hotel Peabody, a huge five-story building with an enormous lobby, and Jane had a room all of her own, right next to the doctor’s room, with a door that adjoined them. He told her how they were going to tear the old hotel down, and that was too bad because a lot of interesting, important people had stayed there, and it stayed open and served as a hospital when the city was struck down by a yellow fever epidemic in the late 1870s. He said it was similar to what had killed her older brother William, before she was born.

“Now, if you need anything, or get scared in the night, you know I’m right through that door, you just come on in and wake me up.”

“Okay, but I’ll be all right.”

“I know you will.” He gave her a kiss on the forehead.

“When are you going to tell me what that doctor said?”

“Tomorrow, on the way home.”

She sat up for a few minutes, wondering why he wouldn’t tell her right away what the other doctor had said, although she knew in her mind and heart what he had to say, and why he hesitated to say it. That there was nothing they could do for her. She alternated between a kind of nameless dread and a forgetfulness borne of her fatigue from the day.

The sounds of people and cars and wagons on the street below went well into the night, and the soft glow from streetlamps cast shadows on the room’s ceiling. It was the tallest ceiling she’d ever seen in her life, as if the room were meant to be a place for enormous people, giants, but then how would they get through the regular-sized door? She was thinking about people who came in through the door at a normal size but started growing then, becoming huge, giants, and as she passed through that image into sleep her body felt heavy, massive, so much so that she was unable to move, and sleep overcame her and moved through her like death.