Miss Jane (14 page)

There was a woman sitting near them on the streetcar who looked back at them with a sour expression and got up to sit somewhere else. Jane saw her say something to the woman she sat down next to, and the other woman turned to look at them, too. The doctor stuck his tongue out at them and they looked horrified, but they stopped looking then. Everything seemed so loud, from people's voices to the car's bell, automobile engines and horns, and even the smells were loud, of exhaust fumes, the strange burnt smell of the sparking streetcar wires, all kinds of food cooking, and the savory smoke coming from restaurant kitchens and street vendors. It was like they were in a foreign country. The doctor seemed to be enjoying watching her experience it all more than he enjoyed being there himself.

They climbed the big white steps up into the hospital. It smelled sharply of what he said were sanitary chemicals, soap, and lots of human odors. Not a place where she would feel so self-­conscious about herself. They went straight into an examination room, which felt like a different
world
, something weirdly not like regular life.
She'd never been in a room that felt so starchy clean and white, with gleaming metal tables and bright light. She half expected to be packaged up as a specimen and shipped to the future or something. Then a tall man, even taller than Dr. Thompson, but thinner, wearing thick spectacles on a small nose, with a balding head and a crewcut, came in and said he was Dr. Davis. There was a nurse with him but he didn't even bother to introduce the woman, who wore a blank expression beneath her white cap and said nothing, just did what the doctor said like she was some mechanical person instead of a real one. Her hands were cold and Jane looked at her, momentarily startled by her, and the woman didn't even seem to notice.

Quickly, they had her on the table and in the stirrups, the sheet up, cleaned her good, and then she heard Dr. Davis murmur the usual words about cold, some discomfort, and so on, and she felt him using what she called the metal duck thing to look inside her. She flinched but soon calmed and turned her head to the side to see Dr. Thompson, who was watching the doctor. When he saw her looking at him he came over and held her hand. He patted it.

“Won't take long,” he said.

Indeed it didn't. Dr. Davis, out of sight behind the sheet and using his bright light and reflector, used some kind of blunt instrument to poke and probe her here and there inside, seeming to take care not to hurt her, to be gentle. Then he pulled everything out, stood up, told the nurse Jane could get dressed again, and went over to a sink to wash his hands. Dr. Thompson took a fresh diaper from a bag he'd carried and handed it to the nurse.

“If you wouldn't mind, madame,” he said.

The nurse suddenly turned into a human being, broke into a big smile, and said, “Not at all, Doctor!” Almost startled Jane into peeing on the tabletop.

Then Dr. Thompson went out with Dr. Davis and they stood
talking in low tones in the hallway. The nurse went back to being a mechanical person, putting the fresh diaper on Jane, gathering up the instruments, and putting the sheets into a hamper in a corner, and then she left without so much as a glance at or a word to Jane.
I guess she must be used to the likes of me
, Jane thought.

As they were leaving, Dr. Thompson said he was going to take her out on the town.

“What did the doctor say?” she said.

“Tell you in a bit,” he said.

They went to see the Pink Palace mansion, where the doctor said a strange old lady lived by herself, which was amazing. They went to the river bluff to see steamboats tied up and going by. They went to the zoo, where Jane was disappointed they didn't have any monkeys, but fascinated by the tiger and elephant, more so by the tiger, until the doctor told her that elephants were very smart and had long memories and were sad and cried when one of their loved ones was killed or died.

After the zoo they ate at what he said was a famous barbecue place before going to their lodgings. She didn't want the pork ribs, so she got the smoked chicken that fell off the bone, and was afraid she might never love fried chicken as much again after that.

They were staying at the old Hotel Peabody, a huge five-story building with an enormous lobby, and Jane had a room all of her own, right next to the doctor's room, with a door that adjoined them. He told her how they were going to tear the old hotel down, and that was too bad because a lot of interesting, important people had stayed there, and it stayed open and served as a hospital when the city was struck down by a yellow fever epidemic in the late 1870s. He said it was similar to what had killed her older brother William, before she was born.

“Now, if you need anything, or get scared in the night, you know I'm right through that door, you just come on in and wake me up.”

“Okay, but I'll be all right.”

“I know you will.” He gave her a kiss on the forehead.

“When are you going to tell me what that doctor said?”

“Tomorrow, on the way home.”

She sat up for a few minutes, wondering why he wouldn't tell her right away what the other doctor had said, although she knew in her mind and heart what he had to say, and why he hesitated to say it. That there was nothing they could do for her. She alternated between a kind of nameless dread and a forgetfulness borne of her fatigue from the day.

The sounds of people and cars and wagons on the street below went well into the night, and the soft glow from streetlamps cast shadows on the room's ceiling. It was the tallest ceiling she'd ever seen in her life, as if the room were meant to be a place for enormous people, giants, but then how would they get through the regular-sized door? She was thinking about people who came in through the door at a normal size but started growing then, becoming huge, giants, and as she passed through that image into sleep her body felt heavy, massive, so much so that she was unable to move, and sleep overcame her and moved through her like death.

Death Insurance

I
t was not quite the end of childhood, but something between that and whatever would come after. After Grace left, she'd been essentially alone on the farm. The Harris sharecroppers' children were either nearly grown or gone. The young tenant Lon Temple and his even younger wife had no children yet. She wanted to make friends with young Lacey Temple but she seemed hard to approach, somehow. So Jane was the only child around, and hardly ever went anywhere, the Chisolm girl who had something wrong with her, something mysterious, and who kept to herself with her family. Strange little bird.

She still had the thought, though, that maybe she could make friends with Lacey Temple, now that she was a little older herself. She walked down one afternoon, hoping to catch her alone. Lacey was sweeping her small front porch and wearing her bonnet, and when she looked up, startled, Jane saw a deep purple bruise on her cheekbone. Lacey set her broom aside and hurried into the house. Jane knew better than to follow. When she went home she commented on it to her mother, who stopped what she was doing and turned to give her a grim look.

“I knew that young fellow had a temper but I had hoped he wouldn't be the kind to do that.”

“You think Lonnie hit her?”

“Well, how else do you get a bruise like that?” her mother said. “And who else do you think would or could've done it?”

Jane said nothing. She'd seen her father slap her mother that one time. They were at the dinner table, just the two of them, supper done. Jane watched from the breezeway through the screen door. In the middle of one of her mother's rants her father stood halfway up from his seat, leaned over the table, and slapped her across the face, and she looked shocked but she went quiet and just sat there. In a minute they both began drinking their coffee again in silence, and the slap hadn't left anything more than a red mark that disappeared soon after.

“I wouldn't bet against that he knocked her down with a blow like that,” her mother said then, turning back to finish stirring her cornbread batter and pour it sizzling into the hot greased pan on top of the stove. The smell of the browning batter was delicious enough to distract Jane from her thoughts, but only for a moment.

“Papa ought to say something to him about it,” she said.

“Your papa is not the kind to interfere in other people's affairs.”

“What if he was to really hurt her, I mean bad?”

“I reckon the sheriff would come calling if it came to that,” and then she said no more on the subject.

That weekend, late Saturday afternoon, they had a visit from her uncle Virgil McClure, her mother's younger brother. Sometimes when he came by it was just for family matters and he would bring his beautiful wife Beatrice, with her abundant black hair, full lips, beautiful pale skin, dark brown eyes, and their two children, Little Bea and Marcus. But this afternoon he came alone, wearing his narrow-brim Open Road Stetson, and his business coat, and carrying the leather briefcase he used in his job
selling insurance for the Rosenbaum firm down in Mercury. There weren't all that many ways to get out of a farming life, but Virgil had the smarts to start selling insurance on the side and got good enough to do it full time. No one disrespected him for it.

He sat and had a cup of coffee with her mother while they waited on Jane's father to come in from the pecan grove, where he had been up on a ladder all day pruning and trimming. Spring would be coming soon and they hoped for a good, heavy crop this year, as the year before had been a light one. Jane loved the pecan grove, the way you crossed through a narrow strip of woodland between the cotton field behind the house and the view opened up to the beautiful gray-barked trees with their crazy limbs splayed against the sky and how they leafed out in spring, their long, narrow leaves so green in the spring and summer, like precise clippings from larger leaves when they browned, shrank, and fell in the fall. You could walk around the field and woods but she liked taking the path through them. She loved walking through the grove after harvest and searching for pecans they'd missed and cracking two together in her palms to get the sweet nut meat from those that hadn't rotted in the rains. She helped gather at harvest, and her father had explained to her how the catkins were the male flower and the little spiky new flowers were the female, and how they had planted two different kinds of pecan trees so that the differences between them would combine to make a robust crop. The wind would blow the pollen from the catkins to the female and the nut would begin to grow in the female flower, on the new growth. It was fascinating to Jane. It made the trees seem alive in a whole new way. They made their fruit, working together. It wasn't just some accident of nature. It made her wonder anew about the strange miracle of creation, how the world came to be,
and all the beautiful and strange plants and animals and insects that made it alive.

When her father came up onto the porch and into the house from the grove, he seemed surprised.

“Didn't expect you today, Virgil,” he said, and Jane noticed her mother shut herself down in the secretive way she sometimes did when she wanted to hide something from you. Jane went silent and tried to turn her ears toward their talk the way a dog or cat would when it heard something curious and interesting.

Uncle Virgil had a quiet, soft voice and an old country way of not moving his jaw or mouth much when he spoke so that his words somehow always seemed private and friendly. Intimate, like he was chewing softly on the words. Even when he was speaking of hard matters, such as a death or someone in trouble, he spoke in the same even voice, and somehow that carried a kind of authority, his expression consistently one of earnest interest, not like he was amused but like he took it all in stride as part of life. He had briefly been sheriff in the county and had been good at it but did not run for reelection, saying it saddened him too much to see all the hard things a sheriff has to see. But the experience had made him more even-tempered than he'd been before.

“Well,” he said then, glancing at Jane's mother and straightening his gaze onto her father. “I had me an idea. I don't know as you'd like to spend the money, but it's a pretty good arrangement and likely to help everybody out should there be an accident.”

Her father just looked placidly back at Virgil, waiting, seeming neither impatient nor overly interested. He could be a patient man when his work had gone well and he wasn't itching for a drink.

“What I'm talking about is something more and more farmers
are doing these days, and that's taking out accidental death and dismemberment policies on their tenants and sharecroppers.”

Her father still said nothing, although he leaned his head just slightly to the side and his eyes registered a combination of wary curiosity and heightened interest.

“I take it you want me to continue on,” Virgil said.

Her father nodded, only then taking off his field hat and setting it on the table beside a cup of coffee Jane's mother had set in front of him on a saucer. He brought the hot black coffee to his mouth and took a careful sip, set it back onto the saucer. Virgil did the same with his cup. Her mother occupied herself with mending a tear in the shoulder of a shirt she had in her lap.