Brad Watson - Miss Jane

She could see Elijah watching her when she danced with other boys, her light thin figure in her homemade dress, her straight dark hair long and loose, her darkling blue eyes. She could see the stick-thin figure of her father, too, hat held in both hands, in the moonlit doorway.

She kept a few sprigs of mint leaves in the pocket of her dress, chewed them gently, then stored them in her cheek, as a man might a small bit of chewing tobacco. The mint kept her dehydration from giving her bad breath, and drew what moisture there was in her body to her mouth and her lips, allowing some minimal conversation. She smiled and laughed with the boys who danced with her, and seemed happy. In the pale quivering candlelight their faces seemed luminous, their voices melodic, just a bit out of sync with the modest movements of their lips in speech.

She was hardly even conscious of how the other girls were now jealous, and certainly couldn’t be bothered to care. It flickered in and out of her awareness, a coruscation of whispers and glares.

When she danced with Elijah Key, she was happiest. He would speak to her softly, leaning close to her ear: “How did you decide to start coming out like this? You’re so pretty. But you seem a little strange.”

“I am strange,” she said.

So she delighted, allowed herself to be delighted, in this attention, in the public intimacy with Elijah Key, in her flirtation with other boys, in the flaunting of herself before the other girls. Even though she knew this was something with no long life ahead of it, she was able to press into the moments of pleasure in the movements of her own body. She understood somehow that she was lucky in her special way to love these events without the complicated, pressing question of physical love, to absorb life from the center and its periphery at once, so she could for a while take it all in with the sweet fullness of the entirely human and the utterly strange, without apprehension or fear.

Chisolm stood in the open double doorway and watched as the young folks made their awkward ways together. He was glad to see that the boys still acted like gentlemen with the girls, the way it had been when he was young. He pulled his hat down low on his brow so he wouldn’t seem to be staring, but he kept his eyes on his daughter, sitting there in a chair off to herself a bit, and even that made his heart heavy in his bony chest. It was hard for him not to feel he was somehow responsible for the child’s condition. He was ten years older than his wife and she’d been too old to have another, yet he’d had his way with her. Drunk. Too tight-fisted to buy a fling with a two-dollar whore. And the curse of it all coming down not on him, not on the wife, no matter how they both felt that at times. It came down on this girl here. Innocent. Pretty. And pretty much doomed to a disappointing life lived alone. But here she was, game, willing to risk her pride just to be like everyone else for a while. To be a regular girl going to a dance, dancing with boys.

The community center had been a large old barn, and everyone had pulled together to shore it up between his youth and Jane’s. Gone was the old hayloft where couples would sometimes sneak away for a little sparking. Now it was entirely open to the high ceiling, like a rustic cathedral, and there were polished wooden floors instead of hard-packed earth still smelling faintly of cattle and horse manure. When he’d met Ida at one of these dances almost forty years earlier he’d been about as full of himself as a twenty-seven-year-old farmer and aspiring cattleman could be, living as a single man working land his father had sold him without interest, on time. He knew he would do well. And feeling that way made others think the same about him. If he’d been the man he was now, mentally anyway, he never would’ve got her attention, and maybe that would have been a good thing, except that who knows what worse may come down the pipe at any time?

The old loft doors were thrown open to let out the heat, draft a breeze. The light came from crude Japanese lanterns and candles inside flues on stands affixed to the walls. So the light was adequate but romantically soft. The same as when he’d been young. Some of the ladies involved in the restoration had argued for keeping it that way. The men pretended not to be sentimental and argued for gas lamps but they’d given way easy enough. Who wasn’t sentimental about his romantic youth? And now his daughter was making sure she had it, even though it would no doubt be brief, and end with a swift finality that would indeed be hard to endure.

After his daughter’s first time there, when no one had ventured to ask her onto the floor, they rode home in silence. He thought she was trying not to cry, doing a damn good job of it. Just knowing that made it hard for him to control his own emotions.

And so he was relieved, his heart felt lifted, lighter, when at the second dance he saw the Key boy go over and speak to her, hold out his hand, lead her onto the floor. He was worried about that boy, but in the moment grateful, too. Then he remembered the first time — maybe it was the first time, hard to know for sure after all the years — laying eyes on young Ida McClure, only to see she was standing still and flagrantly staring at him and didn’t bother to avert her eyes when he caught her at it. Gave him such an instant rise he’d had to step out and subside before going back in, his will set against an obvious passion, to ask her to dance. Yet when they’d got on the floor it happened again and she brushed against him, he’d thought by accident but later realized it probably wasn’t, and locked her eyes on his in a way that just about took him over the edge.

Now he wanted to rush onto the floor and grab his daughter by the hand and pull her out of there, but summoned the restraint to stay where he was, peering at them to detect anything improper. It didn’t seem so. She looked flat-out blissful, and the boy seemed happy and bashful.

Well, of course he didn’t have a flagrant seductress by the hands out there, like he, Sylvester Chisolm, had nearly forty years ago. You could look back on a love and recall so clearly when it was good, joyful, wild. And also in some gray area you retained the images and moments marking decline. How could a man keep a woman from hating him for the very thing she wanted from him in the first place? Especially if both were disposed to darkness of spirit? How had he not known it, when they were young? Or maybe the question was, how had he managed to ignore the truth? Well, when you’re young you want what you want, right then, and that would be the simple truth of it.

It was over, then, the members of the little band putting away their instruments, people bustling to wagons, a few trucks and cars. He let Jane and the Key boy talk for a bit, not minding as long as he was looking on nearby, not minding that the others were clearing out, as he disliked a crowding of vehicles as much as if not more than a crowding of pedestrians all trying to get somewhere or away. And on the way home she still seemed as she’d seemed on the dance floor, just full of bliss, and not talky except to say, “Thank you, Papa, I had such a good time.”

“You enjoy the dancing, then.”

“Oh, I do,” she said. “So much. I’ve never had so much fun.”

“Not even as a little girl, when you had no cares?”

“Not even,” she said. “But even a little child has worries.”

“I guess I’d forgotten that, if it’s so. I guess most grown-ups do forget, at some point.” After a bit he said, “And you have no worries now, about how all this might turn out?”

She didn’t answer, and looked away, so he let her be. They were quiet the rest of the brief ride home then, his thoughts drifting away as they tended to do more and more often. He sat alone on the front porch, smoking and sipping a bit. Jane came out to sit with him for a little while, unable to go straight to sleep. Then she kissed him on the cheek and went in. His wife came out momentarily. He looked up at her standing there.