Brad Watson - Miss Jane

“You didn’t take out the little squiggly things.”

“Why should I?”

“It’s the rooster jism,” Grace said. “Sperm.”

“It is not,” Jane said, looking again at the eggs in the bowl with revulsion.

“Well, what would you know about it? You’ve never seen it.”

“That is just not possible,” Jane said.

“Sure looks like it,” Grace said.

WHENEVER HER FATHER would come to town to sell a cow at the stockyard, which wasn’t so often anymore, he would stop and pick up Jane and let her go along. It was always a Saturday, and he would always just pull up to the curb in front of the house and sit in his big cattle truck smoking cigarettes, until one of them would hear the cows in back complaining of being cooped up and go out to speak to him. If it was Grace, he’d nod and just say, “Tell sister to come on with me to the stockyard.”

“He must think I have an eye for cattle,” Jane said.

“What I figure is he knows he won’t drink till after the trading if you’re along,” Grace said.

Jane would try to talk to him but he had become a man of even fewer words. His lean and chiseled features now more lined, the jawline softer. Eyes seeming to go gray behind spectacles that gleamed in sun or streetlamp light like glass coins in filament frames. Just after the auction — and the loading of a cow if he’d bought as well as sold — he would go off by himself, come back, and begin to take furtive swallows from a pint bottle of liquor he’d acquired from some local purveyor or another hanging about the lot like a regular truck farmer. One evening they were driving back to Grace’s when a policeman pulled them over, ringing away at the bell on the roof of his car. Her father looked annoyed and puzzled. The policeman came up to the truck window and spoke to her father. Evidently he knew who he was. He looked around her father and tipped his hat to her.

“Ma’am,” he said, touching the bill of his policeman’s cap. Then, “Mr. Chisolm, did you realize you were exceeding the speed limit?”

Her father looked at the young man for a good long moment and said, “It’s getting late and I’m in a hurry to get home.”

“Yes, sir, I understand that. Have you been drinking, Mr. Chisolm?”

Her father just looked at him as if he hadn’t said anything at all. Jane took a furtive glance at the pint bottle lying beside her father’s leg on the seat.

“I need to get on,” her father said then. “I have to drop my daughter off at her sister’s house and then drive clear out to my place, a good five-six mile from here, and I like to get to bed early, you understand.”

“Yes, sir, I understand. If you could wait for just a minute, though, I’m afraid I’m going to have to write you a citation.”

“A what?”

“A ticket. For the speeding. I’ll let the drinking go, as you seem capable of driving, if you’ll keep the speed down.”

“All right, but I need to get on,” he said again then.

“Yes, sir, it will only take a minute.”

But when the officer went back to his patrol car to get his ticket book, her father simply put the truck into gear and drove on.

“ Papa ,” she said. She looked through the rear window at the policeman, who was standing there beside his vehicle looking after them as if someone had just asked him a question he had no idea how to answer.

Her father said nothing. Dropped her off. She kissed him on the cheek and said good night. He looked over at her then. His features had drawn themselves down into what looked like a permanent sadness, as if he no longer had the will or strength to pull them up into any expression but the forlorn. She wanted to say, Papa, how bad could it be? You still have the farm, the land. Others have it worse, for sure . But she knew what pride he took in having made something out of nothing, only to see it threatened by hard times. She supposed she could apply that thinking to not just the farm but his whole life. There now living alone with a woman who must seem a hostile stranger to him, and him a hollow one to her.

“Night, daughter,” he said, and drove on.

She watched his truck slowly gearing up the hill and away. Right in the middle of the road, but steady. The shadowed shape of his hat and head there in the truck’s cab, visible in the gaps between the oak boards of the cattle guard. She felt the ghost of an apprehension. He still looked strong but in many ways ten years older than he was. She had a sudden irrational fear that this would be the last time she ever saw him. But she fought that down, knew it was foolish, superstitious in some way.

Later, Grace would tell her that the story of the foiled traffic ticket had got around town. Apparently their father was quite the local character, and the young policeman suffered much derisive joking for having tried to give a ticket to Mr. Sylvester Chisolm.

THAT WAS HER LIFE there, in town. She stayed so busy and tired that it seemed like time didn’t matter anymore. Didn’t so much pass as disappear, like memories neglected and forgotten. Years can slip away in such manner, in such a life.

Somehow, even as the thirties wore on and things worsened, Grace held on to her business by cutting costs, undercutting competitors’ prices, shamelessly complimenting the women who came in, whether they were beautiful, plain, or just plain ugly, flirting furtively with the men (and sometimes more than flirting, Jane strongly suspected — from long lunch hours when Grace made her tend the counter, or sent her off to lunch at the house and when Jane came back she would see Grace turning the door sign to Open again).

Jane had wanted to put in a vegetable garden, and after first saying no, Grace changed her mind and practically ordered her to do it. At least she helped a bit with the canning. They pretty much gave up meat aside from a small cut of pot roast on Sundays. That was fine with Jane, who’d never eaten much meat, anyway. It made certain odors stronger.

She learned how to get along with Grace by holding her own in an argument and by getting out every now and then on a Saturday, for the whole day, wandering town, window-shopping, and having a modest meal such as a Chik Steak at the Triangle, only a nickel in those days — they used breaded pork loin but it tasted so good she couldn’t resist — and then going home. She would practice the fasting and dehydrating before an outing, as she had when she was a girl, so generally she was back home at Grace’s before the possibility of an accident, and well before the possibility of a “serious” one. She wrote home every week, and received in return the occasional postcard from her mother: the blank manila ones with nothing printed on them, not even a vertical line on the side where you wrote the address, the back side filled with her mother’s scrawl that read like a diary she might have written for herself or posterity: There’s no ice because the iceman’s truck broke down. One of the breeding cows died and your father does not yet know why it happened. Had rain most of last week, couldn’t dry a stitch of clothing on the line. Mister Chisolm (as she had always formally called her husband) had to shoot a fox that was getting into the henhouse, gave it to the Harrises for the skin although for all I know they ate it too. Your father is not up to hog killing anymore and had to hire Harris and his boys to do it, he knew it needed done but he didn’t really care one way or other, gave them half the hog for the job, a sunny winter day, thank the Lord. He is not exactly behaving himself , she would occasionally say, which Jane took to mean he was drinking too much more often.

They were just hanging on through these times, she wrote.

One ended with the odd mentioning, Crows flocking into the pines at dusk. I find it frightening, hard to sleep .