Brad Watson: Miss Jane

She said nothing to anyone about her feeling that this child Jane’s condition could’ve come from the sinful way in which she was conceived. No matter a man and woman be husband and wife. If the wife doesn’t even know it’s going on, it’s a sin and an abomination to the woman and the punishment would not be a death but something to linger, to remind you of what you had done or allowed done, either one. And in God’s eyes does it really matter who was to blame, and who could say she did not bear her share of the blame, putting herself in such a state that he could do what he did without her awareness, much less consent? Being a man, he considered their long-ago vows consent enough, and that thought sent her out to the woodpile to chop kindling till she could see again, so blind she felt in her rising and inexpressible anger. When she had spent her rage, kindling chunks around her as if the woodpile had exploded and left her standing, she buried the ax in the block and stalked off out the back yard and down the main trail in the woods to the fishing pond. She stood there looking at the smooth brown surface of the pond, arms straight at her sides, and thought she could go back up, fetch a heavy piece of mechanical scrap and a rope, tie it about her waist, and walk into the water until submerged and will herself to fill her lungs with the silty water. She let her mind imagine the scene, the moment. Then, in angry tears again, she stripped off her clothing, leaving on her shoes, and waded in to her neck, dunked herself, and swam out deeper. She held her breath as long as she could, then blew it out, her body sinking deeper, until in a panic she pushed herself back up to the surface, broke out of the water, and bobbed there, treading water. She slung hair from her eyes and saw her husband on the bank where she’d entered, his arms limp at his sides, watching her. She watched him, feeling like a wild animal caught in the open by a strange human creature, until he turned and walked back up the bank on the trail, out of sight. Only then did she swim in and put her clothes back onto her wet, clingy body, feet squishing in her sodden shoes, feeling at least a little bit mollified, as if his having witnessed her act was at least a warning, an act of emotional revenge. She was washed clean in body, if not entirely in mind.

IN THE FALL of 1918 there came news of the flu epidemic. Several cases down in Mercury left people alarmed, and when a local child seemed to have come down with it, officials closed the school and Grace was free to perform her babysitting duties full-time.

Ida Chisolm took advantage of Grace’s presence to disappear into the woods and gather a large basket of echinacea and ginseng root. She slipped off to a neighbor’s farm to beg some fruit from their pomegranate tree and, not finding them home, scuttled away like a desperate thief with several pomegranates tucked into the folds of her apron. She set into a constant, haranguing administration of tea from the herbs and doses of a syrup she made from the pomegranate seeds stirred into drams of her husband’s precious apple brandy, which Grace and Jane resisted, grimacing, but she put her own grimacing face into theirs and told them in a cold voice to drink it or die. “I will not have death visit this house again until it is mine own,” she said in her ominous way. She looked up to see her husband watching her from the other room, looking wary and maybe even a bit worried by what must seem her obsessive manner. Well, let him think I’m crazy , she thought. Somebody around here has to practice good common sense . She got up and went over to him, took up the tin cup he was using to sip whiskey, and poured a measure of the syrup in there, too. Looked him in the eye. “Drink it,” she said. He shrugged and did as she said.

They did stay healthy, and she looked at them all in defiance for their lack of faith. The school reopened in late fall but she forbade Grace to return just yet, saying she didn’t trust the ones saying the worst was over. Dr. Thompson, during one of his visits, said he couldn’t disagree with her on that.

“I’d rather lose a year of school than risk the sickness myself,” he said. “I’ve seen people with it, and I’ve seen them die of it. Children do seem to be less at risk than young adults. If I were you,” he said to Sylvester Chisolm, “I’d wear a mask whenever I went to town to trade.”

“Mask?” Chisolm said.

“Gets close and crowded in the cattle auction at the stockyard, doesn’t it?”

The doctor went to his car and got his bag and from it brought a square surgical mask with string ties. He gave it to Chisolm. Ida Chisolm watched all this as if witnessing some kind of introduction to a ritual, her shoulders hunched as if against bad luck or a jinxing.

“Wash it good, tie it above your ears and then behind your neck.”

Chisolm looked askance, took the mask by one tie string between finger and thumb, and examined it.

“I’ll think about it,” he said. He went to hand it to his wife but she drew back and shook her head.

“This is not your regular ague,” the doctor said, leaning forward and putting on his serious face. “This one is killing people. Not so bad here as in town, and not so bad in town as in big cities. But if you get it, you’re in trouble all the same.”

And then they heard, not two weeks later, that the doctor’s own wife, who had been spending a lot of time in Mercury proper with her family and, it was said, going to society parties and such, had become a victim of the illness. Dr. Thompson tended to her along with the regular hospital doctors and nurses in town, but it did no good.

“You see what good newfangled medicine does for a body, now,” Ida Chisolm said.

Mrs. Thompson was buried in the cemetery on the east side of town after a service at her family’s church, and after all the people who’d come to the funeral were done, Sylvester Chisolm went over, Ida Chisolm following, reluctant, little Jane nearly hidden in the folds of her voluminous skirts. Then Jane broke from her mother and ran to her father’s side. Ida felt a chill in her heart as the doctor reached to take the child in his own arms. He smiled and pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear.

“I’ll be all right,” he said to her father. “Thank you for coming today. It’s good to lay eyes on this little angel at such a time.”

“Say you’re welcome,” Chisolm said.

“Okay,” she said.

“You need to say it,” he said.

“It’s all right,” the doctor said. “She said it with her eyes. Why don’t you bring her along sometime when you go to town? I’ll have our Hattie make a pie. And she can play with her little boy.”

Ida Chisolm tried to speak in protest but only a nearly silent croak emerged.

“What’s his name?” Jane said.

“His name is Mister. He’s the same age as you.”

“All right,” she said, with the kind of kerplunk finality of a child.

“Bright little thing,” the doctor said. “I always wished Lett and I had had children, but now I suppose it’s best we never did.”

“Is Mister your little boy?” Jane said.

The doctor and Chisolm laughed at that, and little Jane laughed with them. Then the doctor looked over at Ida Chisolm glaring at him from where she stood a few feet away.

“I appreciate you all came,” the doctor said, looking past her to where Grace sat in the bed of their buckboard. Like her mother she wore a black dress and black bonnet that hid her face. “The Mrs. seems upset.”

Chisolm said, looking over at her, jaw set, “She did consent to come along, but I’m afraid that death does not become her.”

THAT EVENING, the doctor sat in his study with a tumbler of Memphis bourbon on ice. Earlier in the stealthy departure of dusk and standing on his porch he’d heard the calling of a young mockingbird down in the virgin woods behind his house. On the randy hunt, he supposed. Wouldn’t be long lonely, not down there. Had half a mind to walk his trail through them all the way down to the lake, as if following the looping flight of some dreamed night bird, in dry moonlit undergrowth, step from the canopy to come upon open water and a calling loon. Though he feared it would take him too deeply into his sadness to escape. He ate a tin plate of supper left in the stove warmer by the young woman Hattie he’d hired to keep his house and cook when it became apparent that he and Lett were living a practical separation. He’d come home once too often to no supper, no fire in the hearth or cookstove, a house with dust balls fairly rolling along the baseboards like little animated creatures. This Hattie, the midwife Emmalene’s daughter, with her illegitimate child, he’d taken pity on her and admired what seemed an admirable dignity about her, advanced for her young age. He’d had a patient one day who’d observed her child Mister playing in the yard by himself and then said something about colored people not caring for their family. Sometimes he was astonished how often he forgot people’s cruel ignorance, people who’d never been anywhere but the little hamlets where they were born, raised, and would die. Not that he hadn’t known plenty of so-called sophisticated people with the same attitude. He’d said, “You know that the smartest thing about you, Heck, is probably your pecker.” Even Heck had to laugh at that, being treated as he was for a case of gonorrhea.