Brad Watson: Miss Jane

He walked over to the bed and spoke to the midwife.

“Get me a bowl of that hot water — you boiled it? Good — a bar of soap, some of those clean rags, and set them on that bench. Light the lantern on that table beside the bed, there.”

She went over to the stove and came back in a minute with the water, soap, and rags and set them on the trunk that sat at the foot of the bed. Struck a match to the lantern wick.

He spoke to Mrs. Chisolm.

“You ready, then, madame?”

She gripped his wrist in a sweaty tourniquet. Her voice was a low whisper, her words reflecting her desperation.

“Where in hell have you been?”

“The usual purgatories.”

He detached her hand from his wrist, gave her a near-placebo dose of laudanum, washed his hands and forearms, carrying on a one-sided conversation as he went to work, as if he were dressing a simple wound. Generally this helped to calm people, baffling them into a kind of confusion that settled into a calmer state.

She was a veteran. Most of the hard work already done, she was finished in fifteen minutes. No stitching required. He snipped the cord, and took a good look at the child, who’d come around to crying a bit. He didn’t say anything. He looked at the midwife. She stared through narrowed eyes but kept her lips pressed shut. He gave her the child to wash, turned his attention to the placenta and cleaning up Mrs. Chisolm with warm water and disinfectant. The midwife helped him roll her off the soiled sheets and sop rags and took away the afterbirth in a pail, brought in fresh sheets, helped him get them under her. He washed his hands and forearms again as the midwife covered Mrs. Chisolm with a fresh sheet and clean counterpane. He took a lantern over to the crying child in the little crib padded with a folded quilt. It was squeezing its hands and crying well, head to one side. He looked closely, prodding a bit, peering through his spectacles in the poor light. He pulled a small notebook from his vest pocket and wrote something, put it down, and probed a bit with a blunt instrument. Picked up the notebook, wrote again. Then he drew a sketch in there on a fresh page. Looked at the child, back at the sketch, then put the notebook away.

“What is it?” Mrs. Chisolm said, propped up now against the pillows by the headboard and sleepy with exhaustion.

He heard someone come up behind him and saw the girl, Grace, looking around his shoulder at the child, her eyes pinched. Then she left and he heard her open the door and go out, say something to her father in the main room. He spoke quietly to the midwife, asked her to pin a diaper on the child.

Chisolm looked in from the other room. His long face half in shadow.

The doctor picked up the diapered baby, who was crying with some vigor now.

“What, then?” Chisolm said from the doorway.

“Well,” the doctor said. “Let’s have Mrs. Chisolm nurse and then we’ll have a talk.”

“About what?”

“Good set of lungs, eh?”

The doctor took the baby over to Mrs. Chisolm, who looked at him as if he were some kind of threat, but took the child and bared a breast and let it nurse. The baby suckled furiously and kept its milky blue eyes on its mother’s face, the infinite and divinely vulnerable eyes of an infant. Mrs. Chisolm looked as if she thought it to be some kind of potentially dangerous creature.

WHEN HIS WIFE finally nursed the child to sleep and then dozed off herself, and the midwife had put the baby back into the crib, Chisolm went over to look. He loosened the diaper, gently raised the child’s bottom, leaned sideways so as not to block the light. The doctor watched him but didn’t come over.

“Good lord,” Chisolm said. “What trouble have we gone and brought into this world now?”

“Trouble for you and Miz Chisolm,” the midwife said. “But more trouble for the child, I expect, poor thing.”

Chisolm didn’t look her way. He gazed at the child. The doctor was quiet.

“I ’spec so,” Chisolm said. He called softly to his older girl, Grace . The girl came slumping in.

“Get the doctor a plate like I told you. And some coffee.”

To the doctor he said, “I’ll leave a little something in your buggy for the ride home.”

The doctor nodded and touched a finger to his brow in a gesture of appreciation.

Chisolm’s jug was empty. He pulled on a barn jacket, took a lantern from where it hung on a nail beside the door, went outside, and stood on the porch. Maybe an hour till the full dawn, just a sense of its light in the sky. Against that stood the black outline of trees west of the house and the fields to the south, silhouette of the barn’s pitch, and the shed. He lit the lantern and headed down the narrower of two paths into the woods behind the house, veered off that one onto an even more narrow and discreet one — no more than a game trail, at best — that led to his makings and storage. Light had begun to sift like faintly luminous dust into the trees. He could just make out the delicate shadowy patterns of the variously stubbled barks on the trunks, knots on limbs. Switch branches brushed his denim overalls like blind, limber tentacles noting his passing, allowing his pass. In a little clearing down near the creek was the squat figure of his still and the crude shed of rough lumber he’d built there with a heavy door and the padlock he left unlocked most of the time. Folks were aware of his habitual vigilance. He set down the lantern, removed the unhasped lock, and opened the door. He selected a jug from a middle shelf, set it on a broad stump near the fire pit. He went back into the shed and fetched a small pail of kerosene-soaked sawdust, shook some onto the blackened wood in the pit, put the pail up, closed the shed door. He took some gathered limbs from a small stack next to the pit, set them on top of the old logs, struck a match to the sawdust, watched the flames come up and catch the fresh pieces. He took up the jug and sat on the stump, pulled the whittled beech stick that served as his signature cork from its mouth, took a good swig, forced it down, coughed, recorked, and set the jug on the ground behind him, back from the fire. The throbbing heat of the whiskey filled his chest and drifted in blood up into his mind and opened a little door, just a bit. He let out a heavy breath, took his tobacco pouch and papers from his overalls bib, and rolled a loose cigarette, lit it with a slender stick he held to the flames for a moment, blew out the stick and set it aside, and smoked.

For the devil of him, he couldn’t recall exactly when it had happened. He supposed he’d been drinking or he wouldn’t have entertained the idea. They’d had no need nor desire for another child. Would have gone elsewhere, if he could. Must have been that. A late hour, nowhere to go, an urge that overrode everything else. He thought, Ain’t I old enough yet to be over that?

Then he hoped he wouldn’t ever be, just as quickly after thinking it’d be a good thing if he was.

He hit the jug again, finished the cigarette, and dropped its butt into the fire now heating his shanks and knees against the chilly dawn threading down through the fragile canopy of pine needles and sparse-leaved hardwood branches. He sat awhile. The light turned smoky in among the trees. He took a mouthful from the jug and spat it into the fire, watched the brief roaring up of the flames, took another slug that burned down into his gullet and rose unchecked now into his mind, corked the jug, rolled another cigarette, and thought, What’s done is done .

He heard something behind him and turned.

It was his hound, ambling down the trail as if to come sit and share a sigh or two.

“You got the face of bored sadness,” he said to the dog.

The dog didn’t take umbrage. Came over beside his left foot and plopped down with a heavy sigh as if he were the one going through all the trouble on this evening.