Brad Watson: Miss Jane

When she spoke to the child, the fetus, in this manner, it would go very still, as if listening, considering her terms.

The night her water broke, her husband summoned the midwife named Emmalene Harris, whose family sharecropped forty acres on their property, to tend to his wife until he could fetch Dr. Thompson. His two sons were already near-grown and working their way through the state college up north, so he had to make the errand himself. He feared complications, given his wife’s age and her darkened mental state.

Emmalene stood waiting for the doctor in a corner of the bedroom, flickered by firelight from a small woodstove against the far wall. She had heated a pot of water and put a basket of clean rags at the ready. She watched Mrs. Chisolm there in her bed, sweating, pale, tears in her eyes. She said a silent prayer, asking please God let this child be well. When Mrs. Chisolm cut her eyes over as if she could hear the woman’s thoughts, Emmalene turned away and busied herself checking the hot water, the neat little stack of clean rags.

On a small stool in a darkened corner of the room, silent, looking at the floor, elbows on her splayed knees, sat the older daughter, Grace, so still she was practically invisible. When she blinked her eyes Emmalene noticed and startled, as if the blink itself had materialized the girl, brought flesh and blood into being, revealing her sullen presence there among them.

DR. THOMPSON LIVED just two miles south of the Chisolm farm, on the semi-rural outskirts of the small but bustling city of Mercury. When Chisolm arrived at two a.m., the doctor was awake, sitting in the dim moonlight that fell through the windows of his study, unable to sleep. He heard the shod hooves on the road, then in his front yard, and stepped out onto the front porch in his nightgown.

The man sat bareback and silent, hat crammed down on his head, skinny shoulder bones rising like bumps inside the loose cotton blouse he wore.

“Aren’t you chilled in this evening, Chisolm?”

“Cold don’t bother me, no, sir.”

In the bedroom he took up his clothing from the day before, quietly as he could. The coin change in his pants pocket jingled and his wife groaned, turned over in sleep. He went back to his study to dress. In the yard, Chisolm was hitching big Rufus to the buggy.

He finished dressing, checked his medical bag, then stepped out, shutting the door quietly behind him. Chisolm stood holding his mule by the reins in one hand, Rufus in the other. The doctor pulled his lanky frame up into the buggy, packed and lit a pipe of tobacco, pulled an old blanket over his legs against the chill, and they began the two-mile trot out to the Chisolm place.

Rufus, his big bay gelding Missouri Fox Trotter, with a smooth gait and agreeable disposition, was good company on a night ride. The doctor could have taken his Ford, but reserved that for when he had to cover a lot of ground and make several stops in a day. He’d named the horse Rufus because noble as he was there was something of the jokester in his eye and disposition. The name seemed to fit.

He felt illogically happy to be out on this errand. The ghost of a friend’s imminent death seemed to trail out of him like wisps of smoke from the pipe. He’d briefly thought to take a little cocaine to pep himself up but resisted. He knew well enough to be stingy with that stuff, save it for extreme fatigue. He felt instead an itch for a drink. Chisolm made a good batch of whiskey, aged in an oak barrel that he charred on the inside, just like the fancy distilleries in Tennessee and Kentucky, so the whiskey had a nice mellow brown color. He tested each batch by taste for proof, added branch water to bring it down to what the doctor judged was close to ninety, then strained it through cheesecloth into pottery jugs and corked them with stobbers of whittled sweetgum sticks. All in all, a first-rate operation.

He hummed another tune, the words in his head, Let me call you “Sweetheart,” I’m in love — with — you , trotted the rig down the wide dirt highway, the man and mule close behind him in blue silhouette. “Get up, Rufus,” he said, tapping the reins against the horse’s flanks.

He took the narrow access road to Chisolm’s farm, barely lit by stars and sheen of moonlight, through hushed and tunneled woodland, beside pastures silvered with an evening frost on the grass, a waxing moonlight on them like blued silver dust, and down into the draw over the creek. He heard Chisolm’s mule veer off the road into the woods, taking a shortcut. He slowed to cross the bridge, little more than a couple of square-hewed logs supporting a narrow pallet of oak planks. The creek was quiet, low. More than once Chisolm had toppled his wagon off the bridge into the creek, taking it too fast or careless and slipping a wheel off the edge. And more than once the doctor had been summoned to peer into his dilated pupils seeking evidence of concussion, or to reset a dislocated shoulder, and thrice to set a broken arm and make sure a broken rib had not pierced a lung or other vital organ. Every time, Chisolm had been coherent enough to have one of his family place a fresh jug into the back of the doctor’s buggy under a feed sack before he left. The wife would have made sure that he toted a full stomach of chicken and dumplings or cornbread and greens back to the wagon. He’d sip from the jug on the way home, suffering no grievous consequences aside from his wife’s quiet indignation, half from the whiskey drinking itself and half because the rich food plus whiskey invariably gave him a case of flatulence that drove her from their bed and into the empty bedroom in the back of the house, to fulminate and toss and turn and fuss her lot as a country doctor’s wife. For that reason, he had adapted by staying up, sipping late into the evening, settling onto the sofa in his office or in front of the fireplace to snooze away the rest of the night in pleasant dreams and uninhibited, flatulent segregation from the niceties of marital diplomacy.

He pulled up at the Chisolms’ gallery, noted the mule already hitched to the post there. Chocked the buggy’s brake and climbed down as the side door to the house’s main room opened and a long rectangle of weak yellow light spilled out into the breezeway of the dog-trot house. Chisolm’s long angular face peered out, then pulled itself back inside. It was a dog-trot house but grander than most, larger and kept-up, and clean. The hound that had bayed at his arrival had quit and disappeared. Once in the house’s breezeway he could smell the dying scents of fried pork, stewed vegetables, fried bread, and molasses from the kitchen. He entered the house through the large common room, heard a low guttural moaning, and felt a tingle in the air of physical discomfort and alarm. Smelled the odors of labor, sweat and blood and fecal matter. Marveled that probably Mrs. Chisolm had done most of the dinner work herself before rolling into the bed to have this child. He was glad it was not her first.

Chisolm sat hunched in a straight-back chair before the fireplace, a loose-rolled cigarette burning down to the knuckles in one long bony hand. Nodded at the fire as if to the doctor, without looking up. The doctor caught the glint of a glazed jug in the shadows to one side of his weathered brogans.

He went on into the bedroom. A pot of water steamed on the small woodstove against the north wall. The midwife had hold of Mrs. Chisolm’s hand, another hand on her left leg, the covers tossed away. A hand dark as black coffee against skin pale as a blinding cataract. And there, in the mussed bedding, between the poor woman’s scrawny splayed thighs, the crowning head of what he hoped would be their last child.

Over in a dark corner of the room the daughter, Grace, sat on a stool looking grimly at nothing. She didn’t look up when he came in. He figured her to be about ten years now. Seemed older by a couple, at least.