Miss Jane

The Infernal Voices of Reason

When the crash came in ’29, the farm soon felt the effect of it. Before it was over, they’d see prices for cattle and crops drop so badly that for some years they would live mostly on the garden, their own corn, the hogs and chickens. Chisolm increased the croppers’ percentages in an attempt to help them survive — to keep them from giving it up and leaving everyone all the poorer. He could see the worse times coming by 1930, so he scraped up the money to increase the product of his distillery, and this helped. He declined to charge more in hard times. Charged less for the younger batches. He managed to keep the little store he’d used to supply his neighbors and sharecroppers, even though it did less business. He even gave a little credit every now and then, taking the man’s word that he’d pay him somehow, when he could. He sold only the occasional cow, not nearly as often as he used to.

He’d always believed that a man could prosper at least modestly if he worked very hard and all the time. And so he worked even harder. And since he knew that if he was drinking he would not work as hard, he tried not to drink. Not too much, anyway. If you were drinking, you did not get to bed when you should. You could not get up as early as you should. You would not think clearly for much of the day. You would not pay proper attention to your animals. You would not spend time in the winter and on summer evenings mending harnesses, repairing machinery, taking stock of your stores and planning ahead.

So he would try especially hard not to drink in these times, or not too much, even though trading more of his makings kept the temptation high. Generally, when he worried, he drank, and now he worried more than ever. When he felt overwhelmed, he couldn’t help it and would drink. His moods became darker and he spent more of his time in front of the fire or on the porch, drinking and smoking one cigarette after another, going over and over what had occurred between him and this person or that, cursing them for making things more difficult for him or cursing himself for letting them do so. If his Mrs. bothered him when he was so engaged, he was quick to tell her to mind her own business and leave him alone. “You don’t think you are part of the problem here?” he said. And to himself he cursed her for being nothing but an ornery burden. Hardly even a decent cook and taking in no sewing to speak of these days and not even bothering to peddle butter and eggs for a bit of spending money, so what was a man to do all on his own with nothing left but a bitter, worthless woman as a partner in this world?

He had no more money in the bank to speak of, it was all in land and cattle. Even the money from Temple’s death was gone. When the banks and even the wealthy merchants stopped lending to farmers and cattlemen, and beef prices continued to drop along with the prices for crops, things began to shut down. He had done well enough by being careful, parsimonious, and having his whiskey and little store on the side. Now all that was not quite enough. Other farms began to lose their tenants and sharecroppers.

When he was drinking in front of the fireplace in the living room or on the porch, chain-smoking, Jane would come sit with him, making his cigarettes with the little red tin rolling machine, but he was so distracted it was hard to keep the fact of her presence in mind if he wasn’t taking one from her little hand. Whenever he had smoked one down, she would build another, and by the time he had tossed the butt of the one into the fireplace or the dry dust of the front yard, she would hand him the next. If they were by the fire he would light it with the end of a stick he kept by his chair, which he would lay into the fire for a moment until it caught, and then bring it up to his cigarette and smoke. If they were on the porch she would strike a kitchen match and hold it up for him, then let the match burn down in her fingers before blowing it out.

He talked to himself even when she was there beside him, forgetting he wasn’t alone there with the people who lived in his mind. “Is that what you think, then? I’ll tell you what I think about it, and you can have your damned opinion on the matter. But I’ll not abide such as that, by God.”

Or, quietly, “I have done my best, God knows. I have done my very best. A man can’t do better than that.”

One time his daughter’s small voice intruded on him while he was lost in such conversation, waking him to her presence, and asked him who he was talking to. He was startled out of his distraction and for a moment didn’t even recognize her, and it gave him such a fright he felt his heart might stop, and then a different kind of fear when he realized who she was, a fear that flooded through his body into his mind like the shock of sudden freezing cold. He began to tremble so badly that he had to get up and go walk it off, leaving the girl there looking as if she’d seen a ghost.

On the days when he would hitch mules to the buckboard and take what stock he could trade into town, he would not eat nor drink during the long ride down except for a little jerky and water, stopping at a creek beside the road to let the mules and cattle drink and graze a bit. He would deliver his cows to the market, make his meager deals, have a simple supper at the café next to the stockyard or just a hunk of cheese and a few crackers, and then begin the long ride home, which he would not complete until after dark. And invariably on the long quiet ride, no cattle tethered to the rig and making their sounds of adjustment and discomfort, just the creaking of rigging and suspension springs, the grunting groans of the mules, and the sound of many dissatisfactions and regrets inside his head, voiced aloud to the dark looming trees and shadows along the road, he would begin to drink. If he had made decent money on the sale he might have given in to temptation and bought a bottle of good bootleg rye whiskey from a man who kept it in the trunk of an automobile parked near the stockyard. A nice change of pace from the pure corn. If he had not traded well he would nip from a jug of his own distillation, as he always brought one along just in case he couldn’t stand being with himself without it.

On this clear night when the full moon rose into a sky still blue but darkening, he began to sip from the jug he’d brought along, at first corking it between sips and then just squeezing it between his boots on the buckboard planks and sipping more often. On his mind was a man at the stockyard who’d called him a swindler because he’d simply done what he did best: bought a cow that seemed worthless for next to nothing and nursed it back to health and sold it for a decent profit. It was the man he’d bought it from the year before who’d confronted him: “You knew it wasn’t sick and could have told me, but you taken advantage and now you’re making money off my misfortune.”

“It was sick and could have gone either way,” he said to the man then, and again to himself now, aloud. He hadn’t said to the man what he should have, which was, Ignorance don’t come cheap. Neither does foolishness. He said aloud again now what he had said then: “If you don’t know enough about your own animal to know it’s got promise, don’t know enough to keep it healthy on your own, then you get what you deserve, which is to lose the cow and lose money on it. I took my own risk, taking it on.” Then the man had said, You could have said it was a good cow and give me a little neighborly advice on how to bring it on back to health.

“Horseshit,” Chisolm said aloud again now, playing it out in his head and hearing his own words in the quiet night, angry again, but the sound of his words giving him some salve, knowing he’d defended himself with good reason. “I could have been wrong, too. I took a risk. And you think you would have taken my advice? You’d a sold that cow to someone else for more than I paid if you could’ve, but I gave you more than it was worth because I was willing to take on the risk, and that’s because I’ve taken a risk before, and made it work. You see all these others, you don’t see them taking risks with a poorly cow. I know you. I been knowing you many years and I know what you would’ve done and what you would not’ve. Call me a cheat? Then don’t ever look to me for help when you need it. Even when you deserve it.’”

He hit the jug again, stobbered it, and set it between his shoes.

When he got to the creek bridge just below his place, he stopped the rig and assayed the situation, still a bit lost in rumination. But he was just sober enough to dismount from the wagon and lead his team across the narrow wooden structure, then remount and cluck his mules to pull up the hill and turn onto the two-track driveway. Daughter Jane had heard him coming and was waiting to unhitch the mules and lead them to the barn. He saw her glance at the jug hanging from his crooked finger for a second before looking away and saying, “Yes, sir,” to his instructions concerning the mules.

Chisolm stood in the yard in the moonlight and took one more long draft from the jug before corking it and walking over to the shed and placing it behind a nail barrel there. Then he went into the house.

His wife was at the fireplace repairing a torn quilt and did not look up at him when he entered. He stopped and stared at her, angry, and only by a hair did he keep himself from taking it out on her, sitting there in her false, infuriating placidity. As if he were the problem, whereas if it wasn’t for him they’d be eating clay for sustenance. He said nothing but took the few bills and coins from his sale and dropped them into the jar in the cupboard. He went back onto the veranda and out into the yard, made a cigarette, and smoked it, watching the shadows from the coal-oil lamp of Jane and the mules in the barn as she brushed them down and forked some hay into their stalls, then gave them just a bit of field corn, not too much. Girl’s not a bad hand, he thought.

As the moon had risen high above the farm now, illuminating the plow and disc, harrow, baler, and the high sharp peak of the barn’s roof and the shed and outhouse off to the south of the yard and the shadowed chairs on the rough-hewn floor of the veranda, he walked over to the shed and retrieved the jug he’d set there earlier and brought it back to the veranda, where he drank from it and rolled cigarettes until the moon was down at the tips of the pines in its descent. He calmed a bit, but it wasn’t long before he resumed his low and angry conversation with demons real and imaginary in his mind. He hardly noticed when his wife came out and fetched the girl, hadn’t noticed she’d been over by the door, sitting in the shadows. Hardly heard their sibilant voices just inside the house, listening instead as he was to the louder voices inside his head.

IN THE KITCHEN her mother whispered, “You take care you do not get his ire up.” And she looked at Jane with a hard expression until Jane turned and left to go back to bed. Jane could still hear her father talking to himself and his people, a low murmuring that became the murmurings of small crowds of faceless people who had lost their way to wherever they were going and occupied the evening’s crepuscular landscape, not understanding they had passed from one kind of living into another, unrecognizable one.