Brad Watson: Miss Jane

IN TRUTH, MRS. Chisolm had no memory of the act of the child’s conception, either. My lands , she said once to Jane many years later, after she’d been widowed and felt the memories of her life drifting about her mind like vapors: I cannot recall .

But her solution was simple, really. The doctor had supplied her with a measure of laudanum for — he stressed this — only her worst days of the nerves. And it had been a day back that late winter of cabin fever and a spitting cold rain as she hurried to gather the few most-late greens (she called them sneaky greens, popping up long after what you’d thought the last would be) from the winter garden, canning and cooking, and an argument over money at the supper table, and him going out in the weather with hat and coat to his little shed beside his still to drink and smoke and curse about things general, and she had thought he’d be gone all night or incapacitated at the least, so she had taken a dose to help her sleep.

All she remembered after that was waking well before daylight and feeling in herself that something had happened, and being so upset all she could do was leave the bed in a rage of silent tears. She rekindled the fire in the main room fireplace, then the large kitchen stove, made coffee, and sat drinking a cup while the bacon fried and grits bubbled, trying to pull herself together before he woke up, then made eggs and set a plate before him and went about her chores that morning in the relentless bitter late winter rain without a word. Feeling in her reeling mind that her body was already changing, taking itself away from her again, making another creature to push out into this unpredictable world.

THE DOCTOR FINISHED eating, set his plate and cup in the sink, and went back into the bedroom. The midwife was still there, standing silent beside the woodstove.

He asked of the midwife: “Mr. Chisolm?”

“In there by the fire. Went down to his makings but come back a minute ago.”

Chisolm looked up when he entered the room.

“So just what is it we have here?” he said.

“A little girl, I believe.”

“You believe.”

“I need to make a telephone call to an old friend of mine in Baltimore, a specialist, ask him some questions. I’ll be back tomorrow if possible, next day if not.”

Chisolm said nothing, blinking at him.

“Make sure the child is eliminating waste properly,” the doctor said. “If she isn’t, and especially if there is any swelling in her lower tummy, you send for me right away.”

Chisolm nodded.

“I don’t see any distension, meaning nothing seems to be dangerously out of place,” the doctor said. Chisolm stared at him, frowning, not seeming to really process this.

“All right, not to worry,” the doctor said. “I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”

HE FOUND THE JUG under the blanket he’d brought along to warm his legs. Made his way back through the dawning countryside taking his time, taking a pull on the jug every quarter mile or so. When he pulled up into the driveway of his house he was dismayed at what he saw. Tired deep in his bones and joints, and a little drunk, he sat there a moment taking it in: a wagon, two blanketed mules, a runabout pickup, one ragged buggy, and a smallish gaggle of people on the porch plus two in the ragged buggy, all awaiting his arrival. A small string of swaybacked horses stood tethered to the hog pen fence down the hill from the house. He dropped the blankets he’d used to cover his legs over the jug between his feet, and climbed down bending his stiffness as if simple movement were akin to heaving against a stubborn animal or heavy load.

He tethered the Fox Trotter to the post, grabbed his medical bag.

He called out, “Somebody take my rig around to the shed and put up my horse.”

A young boy jumped down from the porch and ran up.

“I’ll give you a penny before you go.”

“Thank you, Dr. Thompson.”

The doctor leaned in close, spoke quietly. “Mind the jug there under that blanket.”

The boy grinned like a lovable imbecile.

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t you get into it. It’ll make you sick.”

The boy giggled in a strangely ecstatic way, as if something inside him had been too pleasurably stimulated, and ended with an odd hum, looking at the doctor sideways. My god, what made this one? the doctor thought.

He stepped up onto the porch among the sagging, ragged group there.

“How long you all been here?”

“I been here since first light,” said an old woman whose goiter had swelled up to the size of a yellow squash. She had no teeth and sounded like she was talking with her mouth full. That was an odd paradox he’d noted so often that he hardly noticed anymore. But his senses were always more alive and alert when he was this tired.

“My wife tend to you?”

“She brought out some coffee and biscuits about an hour ago,” the goiter woman said. “We do appreciate it. Said she was going on back to bed for a while, tired out waiting up for you since early morning.”

“All right.”

Also on the porch were a boy with a broken arm from sleepwalking off the porch of their home, a man with a swollen, possibly broken ankle from stepping into a gopher hole, another leaned forward clutching his chest with what was probably a heart attack, and yet another with a giant blue-and-yellow-clouded goose egg on his forehead.

And all these wretched souls came out of the womb perfectly normal , the doctor thought, looking around. Who can say what life will make of a body?

“What happened to you?” he said to the man with the goose egg as he started into the house with his bag.

“I hit him with the barrel of his own shotgun,” the woman sitting next to the man said. The man didn’t say anything, gazing in a dazed way straight ahead at nothing, looked about half conscious.

“He said I hit him so hard he’s done gone blind,” the woman said. “I tried to shoot him with it but it wasn’t loaded and I don’t know where he keeps his shotgun shells.”

“Won’t never, neither,” the man said in a whisper, not moving his head or his apparently sightless gaze.

“Better hope I don’t,” the woman said. “Come home drunk again. I had the money I’d get my own gun or at least some shotgun shells for his. I’d stick him with a knife when he’s like that but I’m afraid he’d get it away and stick me.”

“That’ll do,” the doctor said.

He gestured to the old man clutching his chest. “Help him on into my office, I’ll be there in a minute.”

He went inside his house and set his bag on the desk in his study, a kind of anteroom to his office where he saw patients, and drew a small amount of cocaine solution into a hypodermic. He was quiet through all this so as not to wake his wife. He injected the solution into a vein in his arm, then put the hypo away and rolled down his sleeve. He stood there over his desk for a few minutes, allowing the dope to start running through him, opening his eyes good, before taking up the bag and going into his office, where the older man sat in a chair, a young man standing beside him. He put a stethoscope to the older man’s chest. The older man, his stiff hair shorn in what looked like the feathers of a ruffled white hen, stared ahead and sieved a light breathing through his open mouth.

“What happened?” the doctor said to the young man.

“He just kind of sat down in the yard while we was on the way to the barn this morning,” the young man said. “I had to help him up.”

“Where you been, Doc?” the old man said in a whisper.

“Down at Chisolm’s, delivering a child.”

The old man said nothing for a moment, then whispered out, “Ain’t she a little long in the tooth for that now?”