Brad Watson - Miss Jane

“I hear you’re up and moving to town,” he said in his quiet voice.

“I guess so,” she said. “My sister needs help at her dry cleaner’s, I guess.”

They walked together back up the path toward her place.

“What about you and me?” he said.

She looked down at her feet in the soft earth of the trail she walked. It was into June now, and heating up every day, and the birds were most alive in the cooler shade trees deeper in the woods, their leaves still the deep green of late spring, and the sunbeams the trees allowed down through their limbs were slanted and cleaved through the general light, canted columns of yellow-gold with no substance beyond phenomenal beauty and perfect stillness.

“It’s complicated,” she said. “I guess it’s just not to be.”

He stopped her and gently turned her shoulders so she could face him.

“But why not? You can tell me.”

She felt the color rise in her throat and face and she thrust her tingling hands into the pockets of her skirt and said nothing.

“Is it something about me?”

Still she said nothing, and tried to calm herself into an attitude and expression that said nothing, gave nothing. She looked away.

“You know it’s not,” she said.

“Dr. Thompson told me you can’t have children. I don’t care about that.”

“You might, one day, Elijah. I don’t doubt you would.”

She shook her head and stepped away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s more than that, anyway. I can’t talk about it.”

“I’ll come see you in town.”

She shook her head. This was becoming too hard.

“No. Don’t.”

Neither said anything. And then he spoke.

“Won’t you give me a kiss before you go?”

She felt herself blushing again and was frightened. Then she nodded and stood still. Elijah Key walked over — he was barefoot, too, his feet grayish red with dust from the road and the trail through the woods. She thought he had nice feet. He moved closer, removed his eyeglasses, revealing undistorted his beautiful blue eyes. She thought he might kiss her on the lips and with tears forming in the corners of her eyes quickly gave him her left cheek, and he very gently put his lips there, and gave her a soft kiss in the hollow between her cheekbone and her mouth, lingering. She felt the warm breath from his nostrils as he kissed her cheek. He smelled sweetly of horses and clod dirt and hay. And then he said softly, “Good-bye, sweetheart.” He put his glasses back on and ran off down the trail at a trot. She hadn’t even noticed that he wasn’t wearing a shirt below his overalls’ suspenders.

Jane would ever be sorry she didn’t have a photograph of Elijah Key, and berated herself for not thinking to ask him if she could take his picture that day after he’d taken hers.

She thought there had been a catch in his voice, there in the leaf-dappled light on the trail. She thought she might weep, herself. But only for a moment. She swallowed it down thickly in her throat and walked slowly back to the house, seeing nothing until she arrived in the yard, which was empty but for the chickens let loose from their pen — her mother’s doing, no doubt — dawdling and pumping their heads walking around. The light in the yard so bright on them that at first they seemed like something else, otherworldly birds alighted there in a migration she might have been the first to see. Then she blinked in the hard light, held a hand over her brow to shade her eyes, and they were just chickens.

So in the fall of 1932, when she was sixteen going on seventeen, she went to live with Grace in town. Grace’s personality hadn’t changed much, but it did seem that she took things easier here, on her own. She’d married the owner of the dry-cleaning business, a man with the unlikely name of Noble Sidebottom. Then Mr. Sidebottom — who must have truly had quite enough of Grace — ran off with an even younger woman, leaving Grace the business, house, and automobile but not a word of good-bye. Took what cash they had, too. Grace said she figured they hauled off to Mexico, where life was cheap. Some afternoons she drank beer or gin and smoked cigarettes, right out on the front porch where anybody walking by on the sidewalk could see.

Weekdays, Jane worked as a seamstress in Grace’s shop, mending and hemming men’s britches and shirtsleeves, repairing the stitching in winter coats, vests. She had learned while living with her mother to make dresses, skirts, shirts from whole cloth. She sat at her machine and pumped the treadle with her foot, humming tunes of her own making as she worked. She kept the big washing machine going for the laundry customers, and hung clothes on the lines out back, and helped Grace iron when she could. It was hard work.

She had ended her habit of fasting, as she had to keep her wits to get everything done. She had little contact with others, anyway, outside her very controlled environment. She’d taken to wearing several slips beneath her dress, as many as five or six, hoping that would muffle odors, and a protective rubber garment. And perfume, a slight distraction. And it was Grace who gave the customers their items and took their money. Jane stayed in the back, working. Clients came to the shop to drop off or pick up items they’d had repaired or sewn, but she rarely saw them.

Their house, just a couple of blocks north of the new hospital, was one of those plain Victorian homes of plank siding painted white, with tall windows and a second, attic floor with dormers, where Jane made her rooms.

The streets were paved to just north of Fourteenth Street, so in all seasons Jane and Grace could hear the clopping of horses’ hooves when wagons and buggies passed, going to the hospital or down the hill to town, and also the chustling of old vehicles and the whining acceleration of the newer motorcars owned mostly by townspeople who lived in the outlying areas. At all hours of the day and night came the plaintive steam whistles of freights and passenger trains plying the tracks along Front Street, south to Hattiesburg and the coast, north to Columbus and Tupelo, east to Birmingham, west to Jackson. To Jane, who’d never heard trains so close with such regularity, the wailing whistles and the banging of cars together in the rail yard, rumbling out of the valley in all directions, was comforting. Up in the attic apartment, her windows open spring, summer, and fall for breeze, she heard these sounds, along with the sloppy hard-edged language of men walking home from the saloons in late evening, and she felt most times as if she had little real privacy, so accustomed she was to the quiet farm with its occasional cow or bull sounding off, bellowing at the moon or calling a calf or hailing a harem of heifers, a horse blowing a big flappity sigh, restless in its stall, a dog barking, an owl hooting now and then, and the startled songbirds’ calls in its wake, or their silence. Coyotes. Crickets. Cicadas. Tree frogs, and bullfrogs down by the cattle pond. And during quiet moments in the summertime, the breezes rustling the full-leafed stalks in the cornfield.

If she was to stay there and live in Grace’s attic, then she was to be the primary cook, washwoman, and cleaning woman, in spite of the fact that she put in a full day six days a week at Grace’s shop for meager wages, as well. Grace was hard in her determination not to be soft in a world where men expected that of women so they could have their way.

In one of her more callous moments, she said to Jane, “You don’t know how good you have it, not even having to think about dealing with a man pawing at you all the time, bossing you around.”

They were in the kitchen, Jane having cracked several eggs into a bowl to scramble them. Grace leaned over to look into the bowl.