Brad Watson: Miss Jane

Jane dealt with what business there was on the farm, totting up the Harrises’ crop, selling off to a neighboring cattleman what beef stock her father hadn’t already sold. Selling his cattle truck and buying an automobile, a little yellow Ford coupe, for occasional trips to town. By the fall of ’39 she was considering whether to take on another tenant or sharecropper to farm or raise cattle on the land her father had always used himself.

Then an oddly hard cold set in one week in early December, and her mother slipped from the house in the middle of the night. The next morning Jane found her lying in the shorn cornfield, clothed only in her thin nightgown, curled up with her frozen fists to her face, her eyes shut and mouth open as if to take her last breath or mutter some kind of unimaginable prayer.

Jane called Dr. Thompson first, then Mr. Finicker at the funeral home. There was now a more or less permanent preacher at the Methodist church in Damascus and she decided just to let that man come if he heard about it and thought he ought, but made no direct attempt to contact him herself. She figured her mother would have left it at that, if it’d been her decision.

Dr. Thompson and Finicker arrived together, with two young men to help remove her mother from the field.

“Do you want Finicker to take her on to his place?” the doctor asked, to which Jane, after a moment’s hesitation, said yes. Funerals in homes were becoming a thing of the past in some quarters and the thought of having her mother’s funeral there, in her own home where she had so often been so unhappy, just seemed too dreary. Finicker’s men carried her mother on a gurney out to his long funeral car. She stopped them before they closed the door, reached in and pressed a penny onto each of her mother’s shrunken, shriveled eyelids. The men looked at her in something like muted astonishment. Then she stepped back and watched them drive her mother away into eternity, vested with her toll to the other side.

Then she was indeed alone, though Dr. Thompson still visited often. She made her own occasional visits to her tenants, to check in. She put in her garden. One day in July she stood beside the tomato row in a mild state of wonder, watching a doomed tomato worm eat her best plant. The worm’s fat, segmented body was studded with the rows of pure white cocoons that had grown from wasp eggs laid under its skin. They looked like embedded teardrop pearls or beautiful tiny onion bulbs growing from its bright green skin. Inside the cocoons, wasp larvae sucked away the worm’s soft tissue as casually as a child drawing malt through a straw. The worm seemed entirely unperturbed. No doubt a tomato worm is born expecting this particular method of slow death, a part of the pattern of its making somehow, something its brain or nerve center, whatever it has, is naturally conditioned to recognize and accept. Just as a person hardly registers, until near the end, the long slow decadence of death.

She bent over to dab sweat from her brow with the hem of her skirt. It was July-hot, but a bearable breeze lilted through the clearing where their house and barn and outbuildings had stood since long before her birth, a breeze hinting at something more from the large cumulus that seemed to grow by the minute, a towering mountain of billowing white to the south, its center like tarnished silver.

She heard what sounded like the doctor’s pickup coming down the main road, then its wheels bumbling across the bridge over the creek, beyond the trees between there and the house. Its engine churned it up the hill. She knelt and used her thumb and forefinger to pluck the worm from the leaf of the tomato plant — rolled it into her long narrow palm and cupped it there, feeling its weird little stumpy legs work against the tender skin, tickling, an odd stimulation. She snapped off the leaf stem where it had been dining and carried it to the edge of the yard, set it down, let the worm grapple back onto it. It set to eating again right away. For the worm, this stem and leaf were the whole world. Some bird would snatch it up directly. She walked quickly toward the house as the doctor’s pickup appeared around the corner of their long drive, a thin drift of red dust rising behind it. In the room she’d slept in growing up, she dabbed a bit of her best perfume onto her wrists, her neck, and dropped her soiled undergarment into a pail she kept covered in the corner, sprinkling in a bit of her cheaper perfume before replacing the lid. Washed herself with water and soap from the basin on the back porch and went back outside.

The blue pickup was parked there in front of the house. The doctor got out then, fanning himself with his hat. He spoke to her and joined her on the front porch, and she fetched them both glasses of sweet tea with chips of ice. A flicker sang its hard staccato song from a high limb in her mother’s beloved apple tree, singing against the softening light of the hot afternoon. The doctor sipped his tea, rocking, that closed-down expression on his noble but slightly birdlike face, eyes narrowed above his beak.

“You might as well tell me what it is on your mind,” she finally said.

He looked at her as if he’d been interrupted in thought, as if he’d been alone there on the porch with those thoughts. Not atypical. He smiled. He was a kindly man. Then he took on a serious look as if the thought in his mind had indeed become about her. He took a sip of his tea, ice chips tinkling against the glass, and set it down.

“All right.”

And he told her. He’d kept up with things, through his friend in Baltimore. There’d been a lot of progress since she was a little girl. He thought it was time they asked another specialist to examine her.

“The very best, so that you can know without doubt whether or not it’s possible to correct your condition. Or to do anything about it.”

“With surgery.”

“Yes.”

He said the work being done in Baltimore was remarkable. New developments every year. He didn’t think anyone in the country would be able to examine her with greater certainty than the men there.

“It may still not be possible yet. It may still be too complicated. You’ve been through this before. But they’ve made great advances in the last ten years, and I think the emotional risk is worth it. I think we should be aggressive. And if they cannot correct it now, they may at least know enough to give you a good idea of when they might.”

He spoke his words in a serious manner but still, as always, with the kind of gentle thoughtfulness that was his hallmark as a man and a doctor. His keen eyes in the squint they took on when he was talking seriously. As if he’d got a mote in his eye.

Her father’s eyes had seemed so haunted, there near the end. For years had, really.

She peered at the doctor a moment, then looked away, feeling strangely perturbed and not bothering to hide it.

“No doubt expensive,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Of course, now you have the money from your father’s insurance policy.”

She looked up.

“Did you speak to him about this?”

“I mentioned, years ago, when you were born, that he might put something away toward the possibility.”

“Recently, I mean.”

“I did tell him, when he asked a couple of years before his death — while you were living in town — that I thought the odds were getting better.”

After a moment of looking at him as if he’d said something incomprehensible, she stood up and walked to the edge of the porch.

“What are you saying?”

“Just what I’m saying.”

“About my father, I mean, and the insurance policy.”

“Just that I believe he would have wanted you to use the money for this, if you wanted.”