Miss Jane

Death Insurance

It was not quite the end of childhood, but something between that and whatever would come after. After Grace left, she’d been essentially alone on the farm. The Harris sharecroppers’ children were either nearly grown or gone. The young tenant Lon Temple and his even younger wife had no children yet. She wanted to make friends with young Lacey Temple but she seemed hard to approach, somehow. So Jane was the only child around, and hardly ever went anywhere, the Chisolm girl who had something wrong with her, something mysterious, and who kept to herself with her family. Strange little bird.

She still had the thought, though, that maybe she could make friends with Lacey Temple, now that she was a little older herself. She walked down one afternoon, hoping to catch her alone. Lacey was sweeping her small front porch and wearing her bonnet, and when she looked up, startled, Jane saw a deep purple bruise on her cheekbone. Lacey set her broom aside and hurried into the house. Jane knew better than to follow. When she went home she commented on it to her mother, who stopped what she was doing and turned to give her a grim look.

“I knew that young fellow had a temper but I had hoped he wouldn’t be the kind to do that.”

“You think Lonnie hit her?”

“Well, how else do you get a bruise like that?” her mother said. “And who else do you think would or could’ve done it?”

Jane said nothing. She’d seen her father slap her mother that one time. They were at the dinner table, just the two of them, supper done. Jane watched from the breezeway through the screen door. In the middle of one of her mother’s rants her father stood halfway up from his seat, leaned over the table, and slapped her across the face, and she looked shocked but she went quiet and just sat there. In a minute they both began drinking their coffee again in silence, and the slap hadn’t left anything more than a red mark that disappeared soon after.

“I wouldn’t bet against that he knocked her down with a blow like that,” her mother said then, turning back to finish stirring her cornbread batter and pour it sizzling into the hot greased pan on top of the stove. The smell of the browning batter was delicious enough to distract Jane from her thoughts, but only for a moment.

“Papa ought to say something to him about it,” she said.

“Your papa is not the kind to interfere in other people’s affairs.”

“What if he was to really hurt her, I mean bad?”

“I reckon the sheriff would come calling if it came to that,” and then she said no more on the subject.

That weekend, late Saturday afternoon, they had a visit from her uncle Virgil McClure, her mother’s younger brother. Sometimes when he came by it was just for family matters and he would bring his beautiful wife Beatrice, with her abundant black hair, full lips, beautiful pale skin, dark brown eyes, and their two children, Little Bea and Marcus. But this afternoon he came alone, wearing his narrow-brim Open Road Stetson, and his business coat, and carrying the leather briefcase he used in his job selling insurance for the Rosenbaum firm down in Mercury. There weren’t all that many ways to get out of a farming life, but Virgil had the smarts to start selling insurance on the side and got good enough to do it full time. No one disrespected him for it.

He sat and had a cup of coffee with her mother while they waited on Jane’s father to come in from the pecan grove, where he had been up on a ladder all day pruning and trimming. Spring would be coming soon and they hoped for a good, heavy crop this year, as the year before had been a light one. Jane loved the pecan grove, the way you crossed through a narrow strip of woodland between the cotton field behind the house and the view opened up to the beautiful gray-barked trees with their crazy limbs splayed against the sky and how they leafed out in spring, their long, narrow leaves so green in the spring and summer, like precise clippings from larger leaves when they browned, shrank, and fell in the fall. You could walk around the field and woods but she liked taking the path through them. She loved walking through the grove after harvest and searching for pecans they’d missed and cracking two together in her palms to get the sweet nut meat from those that hadn’t rotted in the rains. She helped gather at harvest, and her father had explained to her how the catkins were the male flower and the little spiky new flowers were the female, and how they had planted two different kinds of pecan trees so that the differences between them would combine to make a robust crop. The wind would blow the pollen from the catkins to the female and the nut would begin to grow in the female flower, on the new growth. It was fascinating to Jane. It made the trees seem alive in a whole new way. They made their fruit, working together. It wasn’t just some accident of nature. It made her wonder anew about the strange miracle of creation, how the world came to be, and all the beautiful and strange plants and animals and insects that made it alive.

When her father came up onto the porch and into the house from the grove, he seemed surprised.

“Didn’t expect you today, Virgil,” he said, and Jane noticed her mother shut herself down in the secretive way she sometimes did when she wanted to hide something from you. Jane went silent and tried to turn her ears toward their talk the way a dog or cat would when it heard something curious and interesting.

Uncle Virgil had a quiet, soft voice and an old country way of not moving his jaw or mouth much when he spoke so that his words somehow always seemed private and friendly. Intimate, like he was chewing softly on the words. Even when he was speaking of hard matters, such as a death or someone in trouble, he spoke in the same even voice, and somehow that carried a kind of authority, his expression consistently one of earnest interest, not like he was amused but like he took it all in stride as part of life. He had briefly been sheriff in the county and had been good at it but did not run for reelection, saying it saddened him too much to see all the hard things a sheriff has to see. But the experience had made him more even-tempered than he’d been before.

“Well,” he said then, glancing at Jane’s mother and straightening his gaze onto her father. “I had me an idea. I don’t know as you’d like to spend the money, but it’s a pretty good arrangement and likely to help everybody out should there be an accident.”

Her father just looked placidly back at Virgil, waiting, seeming neither impatient nor overly interested. He could be a patient man when his work had gone well and he wasn’t itching for a drink.

“What I’m talking about is something more and more farmers are doing these days, and that’s taking out accidental death and dismemberment policies on their tenants and sharecroppers.”

Her father still said nothing, although he leaned his head just slightly to the side and his eyes registered a combination of wary curiosity and heightened interest.

“I take it you want me to continue on,” Virgil said.

Her father nodded, only then taking off his field hat and setting it on the table beside a cup of coffee Jane’s mother had set in front of him on a saucer. He brought the hot black coffee to his mouth and took a careful sip, set it back onto the saucer. Virgil did the same with his cup. Her mother occupied herself with mending a tear in the shoulder of a shirt she had in her lap.

Virgil took some papers from his briefcase and set them on the table.

“Now, these here pay you, the one paying the premiums, if one of the people you take out a policy on should die as result of an accident here on the farm or anywhere else, or if they lose a hand, arm, part of an arm, or a leg, even a finger or two-three. Anything that affects their ability to continue to work for you.”

“How much is it for each policy?”

“Here’s the price of the monthly premium, you can see it’s not much. You could pay for it easy out of their rent if they’re tenants and their crop if they’re sharecroppers. You just get a little less, but if something should happen to them, well, then you get paid this”—and he pointed to some figures on the papers—“for a death, and this”—he pointed again—“if it’s a dismemberment. It’s more than enough to carry you over till you find someone else to lease the land or sharecrop it.”

Her father looked at the papers and figures, blinking a couple of times, seeming to study them and to think.

“It’s an investment, Sylvester, if you think about it. Against potential catastrophic loss. You do have to put some money in up front, but after that you can figure it out of your profit from these sections, just like you would any other expense. Now, I know for a fact you’ve had it happen before. Accident, I mean.”

“That fellow name of Whitehead. Saw blade caught him in the leg right where the big artery sits, he bled out on the spot.”

“That’s right,” Virgil said. “Nothing anybody could’ve done. And you had to hire help to finish his crop. And still gave his widow a share of the profit.”

Her father nodded, still looking at the papers. He took a sip of his coffee, glanced at his wife, who got up and poured a bit more in to reheat it.

“And not to mention the poor Stephens woman helping her husband pitch hay and catches him right in the neck, that must’ve been a good ten, twelve years back.”

Her father nodded, sipped the fresh coffee.

“Ten,” he said.

“Now, if you look here,” Virgil said, pointing, “for just fifty cents more each premium, you get enough to cover a lost crop, should you not be able to get anyone in there to take it over in time, and still have money left over. I’d say it’s worth it.”

“And this all goes to me, something happens?”

“’Less you want to give something to the widow, or help out the disabled man, which of course some do, some don’t.”

“Let me think on it a little bit,” her father said.

“How many you got here on the place now?” Virgil said, although even Jane knew Virgil knew the answer to that. He was a good salesman, even to his own kin.

“Got the colored ’cropper Harris, and the young tenant Temple.”

“Each doing eighty.”

“Right. I do my forty in cotton, tobacco, and corn. Ten acres in pecan trees. Rest in cattle pasture and the woods here behind the house. I keep it for hunting, fishing, and just pleasure, you know.”

“Well, you don’t have to cover everybody. I’d say the tenant, maybe. Maybe just Harris himself, not his sons.” Virgil scribbled some numbers on a pad. “This premium every three or six months, your choice. Feel safer, protected from some fool accident, or one couldn’t be avoided, for that matter. Happens.”

“Happens,” her father said, nodding. “And what about myself?”

“Wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Virgil said, scribbling again. “I can get you a discount on yourself, I’m pretty sure, you being the owner and taking responsibility for them that work your land.” He scribbled a little more.

Her father studied the new numbers a minute, nodded, went to the jar in the kitchen cupboard, and gave Virgil some bills and coins.

“All right, then,” Virgil said. “All I’ll need is for you to get their full legal names and dates of birth. You can tell them it’s like a liability policy on the whole place, as it is, practically speaking. This is completely legal, and as I said more and more common. Makes good sense in the farming business, all things considered. I can set up everything here, and you can fill out that information about these men when you get it, and I’ll come back by next week and get the papers.”

Then they both signed, and Virgil and her father stepped out onto the porch after Virgil had said good night to Jane’s mother.

Jane slipped out the kitchen door and crept through the breezeway to spy-listen on them there.

“I’m recalling that business up in Scooba,” her father said.

“Well,” Virgil said, “that was an unfortunate case.”

“I wouldn’t want anybody thinking I had anything like that in mind.”

“No reason anybody would, you got a spotless reputation.”

“Drinkin’ aside.”

“Well. You got a lot of company in that, I’d say. Now, like I said, this is becoming more and more common among your farmers.”

“Folks know I’m a good businessman, always aboveboard.”

“Yes, they do.”

“Anything was to happen, I’d hope nobody’d think anything underhanded gone on here.”

“No reason to think that. Besides, that thing in Scooba — I wouldn’t call a fellow dying of poison spasms exactly an accidental death. They got away with it for so long because that doctor up there was involved in it.”

They were quiet for a long moment.

“Well, Virgil, I reckon this is good business.”

“It is, Sylvester. You don’t have to think twice about that.”

“I generally think three, four times about most everything.”

“Well. That’s why people respect you.”

“I mean to keep it that way.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Want a little snort before you go?”

“I would, but Bea wouldn’t approve.”

“You stay on her good side, don’t you?”

“That’s good business, too.”

“How come you all don’t call this kind of thing ‘death insurance,’ since that’s what it is, wouldn’t you say?”

“That would be bad for business,” Virgil said.

The men chuckled together at that. And then there were no more words at parting. She heard Uncle Virgil descend the porch steps, make his way to his Ford pickup, and the pickup coughed and rattled and creaked on down the drive out to the main road. She heard her father descend the steps, walk across the yard to his little store, and then come back. When she heard him sit in his rocker and pull the stobber from his jug, she stole around and sat on the porch boards beside the chair.

“Want me to roll you a cigarette, Papa?”

“Here you go, girl,” he said, handing her a tin of Prince Albert and his little rolling machine. She rolled up a perfect one for him.

“Can I light it for you?”

He handed her a box of matches. She struck one, held the match to it, and sucked lightly on it.

“Mind you, don’t take it into your young lungs.”

She handed him the lit cigarette, held the warm smoke in her mouth and then puffed it out.

“I won’t,” she said.

“I don’t want you to take up smoking like your sister Grace.”

“I won’t.”

“You do, I’ll tan your little hide.”

They watched a mockingbird come down from his perch and peck at Top’s head as he tried to cross the yard toward them. The dog ducked his head, then leapt up to try to catch the bird in his jaws when it came at him again. They watched this dance until Top made it to the porch and the bird quit and flew off. The way Top looked at them then, the look on his face, like he was both happy and confused at the same time, just made them laugh again. The dog, embarrassed, went underneath the porch instead of coming up onto it with them.

“Oh, come on up, Top,” Jane said. “Come on up here.”

But they heard the dog sigh hard through his nose and flop down in the dirt.

“Sometimes that dog acts like he knows as much about what’s going on as we do.”

“He does, Papa.”

“Dog’s supposed to have it easier than that,” he said.

ON A SPRING AFTERNOON when it was near harrowing time, before planting, Jane walked up on her father having what appeared to be an argument with young Temple down by the shed. She slowed and stayed back, behind the tractor pulled up near the shed for repair.

“Well, then, you do like I did,” she heard her father say to Temple in his quiet, hard voice. He never raised his voice but he had a way of leveling and hardening it that let you know he was angry and meant business.

Temple said something she couldn’t understand, half mumbling. He had his hat off and was nearly crushing the brim in both hands in front of his waist. He kept looking down at the hat, off at the field, and then giving her father brief looks, askance. He caught her peeping from behind the tractor before she could duck down and his face reddened. Now she was caught spying and couldn’t sneak off.

“You do like I did and like anybody would do that wants to make a better life,” her father said. “You save everything you don’t have to spend to live on. You find any way you can to make a little money during the winter, you can’t be too proud about what it is, neither. When you have a good year, you put as much back as you can and don’t just spend it. And when you can, you buy yourself some land of your own.”

Temple mumbled something else. Jane couldn’t see him now, kept her head down behind the tractor wheel fender.

“You can’t resent them that has more than you if you don’t put in the honest effort to make your own way. And you might try and fail by plain bad luck when others make out all right trying no harder, but there’s nothing to be done then, either, but to try again. Let me tell you, son, I’ve known failure, and I could fail tomorrow, any farmer or cattleman could, and you know that. So don’t come to me complaining about a fair, agreed-on trade which is me giving you a chance to make a start. Everybody starts humble. If you didn’t like this agreement, you shouldn’t have signed on to it.”

Temple said nothing. Jane peeked up. He was looking down, but looking angry, too.

“And you can pack up and go now, too, if that’s what you want,” her father said. “I’ll find a way to finish your crop, if that’s what you want to do. But if you walk away from it, it’s not your crop anymore, you understand? You don’t get your rent money back. You’ve had the land while you’ve worked it.”

Temple said something, looked her father in the eye kind of sideways, and seemed like he said he didn’t want that.

“Well, then,” her father said. And both men stood there another minute, her father looking steadily at Temple and Temple trying to meet her father’s eye but unable to for more than a moment at a time.

And then Temple said something, and held out his hand, her father took and shook it once, and Temple went on back walking toward his place. Her father turned and Jane ducked down, then peeked up to see him go into the shed, taking his hat off and running a hand through his graying hair, shaking his head.

Two days after that, a Saturday, Jane was walking in the woods looking for a sweet gum tree that might be leaking some sap she could nibble. Top kept dashing off to chase foraging squirrels. She heard the tractor muttering its way in a field and looked up to see she was on the edge of it, and it was Temple on the machine, having stopped to tinker with something. Her father let him use it when he could. Temple looked up and saw her there, and she ducked back into the shrubs and trees and made her way toward the trail again. In a while she found a tree with a leaking seam, gathered a little of the gum on the end of a twig, and rolled it into a ball she put in her mouth to nibble with her front teeth. She sat there and Top came to lie down beside her. But in a moment he stood up and gave a low growl and she saw the fur on the back of his neck stand up. When she stood up and turned around she saw it was Lon Temple standing among some oak saplings not far away, looking at her.

“I want a word with you, girl,” he called out just loud enough for her to hear, and she froze. Top growled. She could still hear the tractor idling off in the field.

It took a moment to get her voice. She put a hand on Top’s bristling neck. “All right,” she said.

“My wife said you been coming around snooping at our place. Far as I’m concerned, even though we rent from your daddy, my place is private property. You ought to respect that, keep it in mind.”

Jane flushed with embarrassment, afraid he was on to her sometimes spying on them, but then realized he was probably only talking about her seeing Lacey in the yard with her bruise.

“You hear what I’m saying?” Temple said. “I ain’t saying nothing nobody wouldn’t say about their property.”

“I haven’t been snooping,” Jane said. “It was just that once and I was only coming down to be neighborly.”

He stared at her.

“We ain’t neighbors,” he said. “We’re tenants.”

Temple spat, as if to spit that word out of his mouth, then turned and made his way back up the hill through the woods and out of sight.

She was trembling. The man scared her. She stayed there, squatting and holding Top, sound seeming to disappear into the noise in her mind. She stayed until she finally calmed and then she and Top started home, first walking, then running down the trail.

“What in heaven’s name is the matter with you?” her mother said when they burst into the yard. She was taking clothes from the line and had a bunch of them draped over one arm, a basket for pins crooked onto the other.

“Nothing,” Jane said when she could. “Top and me thought maybe there was a bear.”

“A bear!” her mother said. “This close to the house? Did you see it?”

She shook her head. Then her mother shook her head, too.

“Imagining things again, are you?”

And Jane knew she was talking about that quiet evening when she was little and heard some terrifying beast walk growling by the house beneath the open window and burst into tears, but no one else had heard a thing. And now she was old enough to wonder, what if she had only imagined the beast, and if so, where had that come from? Why and even how would a small child carry something like that in her imagination if it were not already there when she was born, and for some reason? And if it were not to make sure the child learned to keep in her heart a certain measure of fearfulness, in order to keep herself safe, what other reason could there be? There was something frightening about Lon Temple that seemed to bring up a similar feeling in her.

But these were not the kinds of things she cared to try to discuss with her mother. It was perhaps something she could bring up with Dr. Thompson. But she couldn’t imagine how she could bring it up without feeling silly, like a little girl with an overly rich and foolish imagination.

IT WAS JUST under a fortnight after her encounter with Temple in the woods when she came home from a long walk down by the fishing pond and saw Dr. Thompson’s car parked in the yard. He was sitting in her father’s rocker on the front porch, smoking his pipe, a glass of water on the little stand beside him. She stopped still in the yard, that same kind of fear she had thought she might discuss with him suddenly there, inside her. After a moment, she walked on up.

“What’s happened?” she said.

He puffed his pipe, but it had gone out.

“Something got to be wrong before I can come by, now?”

“Well, no.”

“But it’s kind of odd, me sitting out here on the porch by myself.”

“Yes.”

He nodded as if to himself, tapped his pipe out against his boot.

“Temple’s wife is in there with your mother and father,” he said. “There was an accident. You might better wait out here with me awhile.”

Her heart did a double bump in her chest.

“Tell me.”

He looked at her, as if trying to figure her state of mind.

“I haven’t even told you and you’re pale as a ghost.”

“I can tell it’s something bad.”

“Well, it is. Young Temple was killed today.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was an accident. He fell off the tractor and was cut up badly by the disc harrow. Died out in the field. Didn’t come in for lunch and his wife went out looking, found him there, tractor run up against a tree at the edge of the field and faltered. He’s down at their cabin, laid out on the floor there. His folks will come to take the body for burial.”

“How did it happen?” she said then. Her mind keening with the memory of their encounter, how she had hated him then as much as she’d feared him.

“Seems he was drinking. He smelled strong of it. I believe he got into your papa’s makings.”

She sat down onto the porch beside Dr. Thompson and they sat there awhile. Soon they heard the breezeway door to the kitchen open and Lacey hurried past them in tears.

“Miss Lacey?” Jane called, but all she could get out was a whisper.

Lacey Temple didn’t hear, her head down, walking slowly now toward the cabin where her husband lay dead.

“Boy wasn’t but twenty-three years old,” Dr. Thompson said. “And she’s not but, what, eighteen or nineteen, maybe.”

“I don’t know, really,” Jane said. She was watching Lacey Temple make her drifty way down the lane almost as if she were a bit drunk herself, wobbly.

“Still, not even twenty years of age and a widow. I need to talk to your mama and papa for a minute before the sheriff and coroner arrive, soon enough. I expected they’d have been here by now.” He got up and went into the house.

When she heard a car coming down the road and then turn into their drive, her father and Dr. Thompson came out onto the porch and went to meet it. They spoke to the two men in there, one the sheriff, and the other man in a dark suit must have been the coroner. Then the doctor went in the car with the coroner down toward the Temple cabin while her father and the sheriff walked that way and veered off toward the pasture where Temple must have been discing when he fell off and was killed. The four men came back around the same time and stood talking around the sheriff’s car for a few minutes, and then the sheriff and coroner left. Dr. Thompson said some words to her father, then got into his car and left, too.

Her father came over and told her to tell her mother that he had to go see Virgil in town and would be back as soon as possible.

“You take a plate of dinner down to the Temple girl, see if she’ll eat,” he said to Jane. “Your mama’s got one fixed in the kitchen.” Then he got into his cattle truck and left.

She stayed on the porch. She didn’t know what to feel anymore. She smelled supper cooking in the kitchen. She went inside just as her mother was covering a pie tin with a clean kitchen towel.

“You take this down to her,” she said.

“Mama,” Jane said, “I don’t want to.”

Her mother stopped and gave her a long stern look that didn’t need words to convey its meaning.

“But what if she won’t eat? How could she be hungry right now?”

“All you can do is try,” her mother said. “Go on, now. What’s the matter with you?”

Jane shook her head and didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

She freshened herself up and then walked down toward the Temple cabin, careful with the warm edges of the tin, using the towel so as not to burn her fingers, careful not to trip and spill it. She felt wooden and clumsy. When she got up onto the porch she set the tin down and knocked on the door. There was no lamp on inside although light was fading and shadows already deep inside.

When there was no answer, she called out, but in a fainter voice than she’d meant to. When Lacey Temple didn’t reply she grew worried, turned the knob on the cabin door, picked up the tin, gently opened the door with her shoulder, and went in.

It was just a two-room shotgun cabin with a little kitchen area in one corner of the front room, a small dining table with a couple of chairs in the other, and a sitting area against the other wall by a small fireplace. She stopped still when she saw, in the shadows, what had to be the body of young Temple lying on the floor over by the fireplace, covered with a bloodied counterpane. She felt a coldness run through her, and sick, as if she might vomit.

“I can’t bring myself to wash him,” she heard Lacey’s voice say then, coming from their little bedroom in the back. Then she saw the ghostly figure step into the shadowed doorway. She no longer wore the bonnet and her pale face glowed softly in the faint light left in the windows.

“He’d been out there in the sun long enough the blood had dried hard and I don’t want to hurt him cleaning it off. I know he won’t feel nothing but I can’t do it.”

Jane could hear the crying in her voice. She worked hard to find her own.

“My mama fixed you a plate of supper. I’ll set it over here on your table.”

She started for the table and was setting the tin down when Lacey spoke again.

“I’ll not touch that, you can take it back.”

Jane set it down anyway. She could hardly grip her fingers on it and feared she might drop it to the floor.

“I told Mama you probably wouldn’t want to eat.”

“I’m not hungry but I would not eat it anyway,” Lacey said. She took a step toward Jane, and Jane could see now that her face had not only grief in it but anger. Jane thought she might strike her.

“I’m so sorry,” and then she sobbed, overcome by emotion she couldn’t begin to understand.

“What have you got to cry about?” Lacey said.

“I don’t know.”

Lacey stepped even closer and Jane felt herself let go, let loose, expecting the blow. She wished for it. She wanted to fall to her knees. She needed something to happen to her, something that in some odd way would make sense.

“You think I don’t know she or your daddy, one, put something in that whiskey he was drinking? I could tell. He wasn’t right. He drunk before but he was different.”

And a whole other kind of shock came into Jane then.

“What are you saying?”

“Don’t you know he took out that insurance policy on Lon, and on Harris, too? And he stands to make good money on my Lon’s death here?”

Jane froze at the words and tried to make sense of it.

“That just doesn’t make any sense, Lacey. My papa wouldn’t do that.”

“Lon said you seen them arguing. Your daddy theatening him.”

“But it wasn’t like that. It was — well, I don’t really know what it was, but it didn’t sound like that to me, Lacey, I promise.”

“Well, that’s what Lon told me he said. Wanted us gone. Lon might have had him a temper but he didn’t lie to me.”

Jane was speechless again, hearing these words. Lacey stepped closer, close enough that Jane could see her ruined eyes from the crying, the crusty trails of tears on her pale face. She worked her mouth and blinked her eyes. Then she looked straight at Jane.

“What happened between you and him in the woods that day? Don’t lie to me. I know he seen you in there. He told me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Said he told you to leave us alone.”

Neither said anything for a long minute.

“Did he touch you?” Lacey said. “Did he try to hurt you?”

Jane shook her head, and shook it again. “No. No, he didn’t, I swear it.”

“And did you tell on him for it? Tell me the truth.”

“I swear it, Lacey, I didn’t tell a thing.”

“What did he say to you?”

Jane felt the tears coming to her eyes again and tried to stop them. When she spoke her voice was clouded with them.

“Nothing, Lacey. He just told me to stay away. Like he just didn’t like me. Or us. Like he was mad about y’all being our tenant.”

Lacey stared hard at her for a long moment, her eyes moving back and forth on Jane’s.

“You tell your daddy and your mama that money ought to go to me. All of it. I’m the one took care of my husband day in and day out. I’m the one now left with nothing. A widow, at my age.”

Jane said quietly, “Okay.”

“Now you go on, and take that plate of supper with you.”

“It’s good food, Lacey. There’s nothing wrong with it.”

But Lacey only stared at her, saying nothing. She looked over at the body of her husband on the floor beneath the counterpane by the fireplace, then turned and went back into the bedroom.

Jane stood there. She felt a fearful chill, averted her eyes from Lon Temple’s covered, still form, grabbed up the plate, and hurried back up the hill to her house.

“She wouldn’t take it,” her mother said.

“No’m.”

“Why didn’t you just leave it, case she changed her mind?”

“Mama. She thinks Papa put something into that whiskey Lon was drinking.”

Her mother’s face went hard.

“Or even that maybe you did.”

Her mother’s head jerked back and her eyes went sharp.

“What, now?”

“That’s what she said. She said it was because of the insurance.”

Her mother seemed to gaze, stricken, at something above Jane’s head for a minute, then she shook her head and turned toward the counter and leaned against it on her hands. She shook her head again.

“It was my idea, to get that insurance,” she said then. “But good lord, it wasn’t me or your papa did anything to that boy. He stole whiskey and drove that tractor drunk and fell out. He was bound for a bad end, anyone could see that.”

And she stayed there like that as darkness fell and didn’t move to light a lamp. Jane left her in there and went back out onto the porch and sat in her father’s rocker. In a bit the tree frogs and crickets began to whir and sing. A dog barked, sounded like from a nearby farm, and Top came around the house, barked back once, then went under the porch to settle. Bullfrogs traded notes in their offbeat basso chorus, peepers like playful notes in response.

She couldn’t get the image out of her mind, the shape of Temple’s body beneath the bloody counterpane. In that dim room.

When her father finally drove up some time later, and the scents from the early supper her mother had made had all but faded as she apparently had not bothered to keep it warm in the stove, she waited for him to reach the porch, then stood up.

He stopped and stood there facing her in the dim light of a half-moon just beginning to rise over the trees.

“What is it, girl?” he finally said.

“Nothing, Papa.”

He stood there looking very tired, then went inside, and she followed. Her mother was there beside the fire in the main room working on a quilt. She looked up at him, then at Jane.

“Jane tell you what the Temple girl said to her?”

“No.”

She told him.

“Are you going to give the girl any of that money?” Jane’s mother said then.

He looked away at the room’s back wall for a minute, his long, grave face half obscured in shadow.

“I’ll give her some,” he said. “I’m the one paid the premiums, to protect his crop.” He went back outside. They heard him on the porch, and then descending the steps and walking across the drive toward the work shed.

What Jane had never told anyone was that she had gone down there once in the late afternoon and, before she reached the house, heard them in their bed. She couldn’t see in the window, but she heard the sounds they made and was embarrassed to be so stirred by them. And when the sounds died away she took off her shoes so as to sneak away in the gathering dusk as quietly as possible. It had felt low-down, like stealing something from them. But in her heart she had planned to try spying on them again, this time in the dark, when she might get into position to see something. She wanted to see again what she’d seen with Grace and the Barnett boy, and maybe understand better what she was seeing, now that she was older and smarter. So she had crept down several times in the evenings just after supper, sneaked away from the house and went down, and found a place behind a cedar tree whose lower limbs she could spy through, and waited, thinking, They’re a young couple and they must be wanting a baby. Several times she gave up, as it was taking too long for them to go to bed, and once she was petrified when Lon Temple came out onto their front porch to smoke. But it was always after dark when she went, so she wasn’t discovered. It wasn’t long into this routine that one evening she saw Lacey light the lamp in their bedroom and then turn it down low, but Jane could still see as she removed a towel wrapped around herself and got into their bed, a bit of a rawboned girl but fleshy enough in the bottom and legs, and then she noticed Lon Temple standing in the bedroom doorway looking at his wife. She watched him drop his overalls and remove his shirt and get into bed with her. Jane felt the electricity of seeing what she wasn’t supposed to see, what no one but this couple was supposed to see. To be. She was violating a great privacy, something sacred between the two, but she could not take her eyes away from watching them in the act, which was like what she had seen between Grace and the Barnett boy except that it was tender and slow, and Lacey seemed so vulnerable. It was almost shocking to see Temple act so gently with his wife, as he had always seemed only a man of anger, a man with a temper, impatient. But now he was touching her tenderly, touching her breasts, and with his hand down there, and she was closing her eyes and parting her lips, and she was guiding him into her, and then for a little while Jane was as lost in the act as they were, so that when they finished, and kissed, and pulled themselves apart, she was flooded with feeling as if she had been there with them, that somehow she had embodied them both and experienced what they had. Then she was overcome with shame, a feeling that she had stolen it from them somehow. When in a moment she was brought back to a clear consciousness of herself she saw Lacey sit up in the bed, pull her knees to her breasts, and begin to sob, while Lon first tried to comfort her but she wouldn’t accept it, and so he rolled away and snuffed the lamp, turning the room into darkness. In a horror of guilty wonder Jane, barefoot, moved away as quietly and quickly as possible toward her house — just in time, as her mother called out to her from up there. But ever after that she would worry that she had done something terribly wrong, that by watching what she was not supposed to see she had interfered with their effort to have a child, and that Lacey somehow knew and that’s why she was crying. My wife said you been coming around snooping, Lon had said to her in the woods. And Jane had the awful thought, Now I have become the monster outside the window, the one who cannot do what normal people who are not monsters can do in loving each other, and I have stolen something human away from them.

THE NEXT DAY a buckboard with an older man and a younger man came rattling by the house on its way down to the Temple cabin. In a little while it came back up, with Lacey sitting on the seat beside the older man, in full bonnet, and the younger man in the back with Lon Temple’s body still under the same counterpane.

Her father stepped off their porch and approached the wagon, which stopped and waited on him. She saw him speaking to Lacey, who would not look at him. The younger man in back was looking at her father with his mouth half open, as if he was thinking of something he might say but couldn’t come up with it. The older man looked at her father briefly, then turned his eyes straight ahead again. Then her father held a brown envelope up to Lacey, who sat very still for a moment. Then she took it from his hand, tucked it into her lap. The older man tapped the reins against his horse’s backside and the buckboard continued on up their drive and out of sight. Her father watched them go, then came back to the house. He didn’t say anything to Jane, and went inside.

In the kitchen he was telling her mother that he planned to let the Swede, a bulky older neighbor who’d given up farming his own small place but still looked strong as a horse, take over half of Temple’s place on half shares, and let Harris take the other forty acres, if he felt they could do it. Otherwise, she and Jane would have to help him finish it out if they could. Might have to hire a hand.

“Did you give her all the money, Papa?” Jane said. She set a plate before her father. He gave her a puzzled look.

“I borrowed against that policy to give her something,” he said. “The payment won’t come right away, takes a while.”

He picked up his knife and fork.

“I wouldn’t give her all of it, in any case.” He looked directly at her. “I would not have bought the policy just for that. Don’t you see that doesn’t make any sense?”

“What are you going to do with the rest?”

She had no idea how much it might be.

Her father ate a forkful of peas and speared a cut of ham.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Not like there’s anything you can call extra cash these days.”

Then he said, “You might need it someday.”

“Me?”

He looked at her.

“You might not want to end up spending your whole life on this place, girl.”

“Where would I go?”

Her father didn’t answer right away. He left off the cold peas and ate the ham with a chunk of cornbread, washed it down with tea.

Then he said, “That would be entirely up to you, now, wouldn’t it?”

HE FELT THE DEATH of that young man, the weight of it, more than any of them knew, more than he would let on. Now that he had the insurance money coming he realized he hadn’t truly thought out how he would feel on receiving it, blood money it was, no matter how you looked at it, no matter how much that. boy. brought it on himself with his temper and his foolish behavior, reckless. And thought, too, how it could happen to anyone, and how many times had he been on that tractor or on a mule-pulled rig with those same blades rolling behind him, and him with a snootful of mash? But now here he stood, about to get his hands on a stack of cash money, and he could feel it bring up in him the lesser part of his nature. Greed, pure and simple. But it wasn’t just greed for himself, now, was it? It was for them all. And for young Jane. He stood at the edge of the cattle pond, looking at nothing, but turned to look back up at the house and saw her there, playing in the yard with her hoop and stick, chasing the hoop around like she was the little tyke she used to be. Death could move and frighten the young, he figured, but it didn’t affect them the way it did their elders, who thought about it every day, and feared it.

He heard the thunk and thwack of the kindling ax out back of the house. Speak of the devil. He could picture his wife back there, working in a blind fury. Where she went when her own mind wouldn’t let her be. He wondered idly if one day she would ever, for whatever reason or none, take it to him, in his sleep or as he simply walked right in through the front door. He almost laughed to himself, imagining that.