Miss Jane

by Brad Watson

  “Now, how’s that?” he said.

  “It’s grand, Papa,” she called back, and when she came out again he gave her a little one-armed hug, an expression of sentiment so rare in their household that it sent her senses singing all over again, and brought the beginning of tears to her eyes, which she hid by walking away and picking wildflowers on the little hill above the pond and bringing them back to him.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Your mama can set them on the table for our supper.”

  That evening they had a big mess of crisply fried bream and her father showed her how to nibble on the crisp, salty tails, which Grace said was disgusting but they ignored her. The delicate white meat peeled easily off the fishes’ thin bones and you could pull the whole skeleton and head away, which seemed in its simplicity almost a miracle.

  “Why haven’t we done this before?” she said, and her father said he guessed he’d just got out of the habit, and they would have to do it again soon.

  “I think your mama got tired of them,” he said.

  “Well, tired of cleaning them, maybe,” their mother said, frowning at being called out.

  As her father rose to go be by himself, and Grace and her mother began to clean the table and wash dishes, she sat looking at her own, with its two beautifully symmetrical, cleaned fish skeletons lying there in a thin film of congealed grease. It occurred to her what a very strange creature a fish was, a thing that lived in the water, underwater. And somehow breathed water, which would kill a body fool enough to try it, though she’d once wondered if she could sift it carefully through her lips and make that work, and when she’d mentioned it to her father, he’d blanched and said, “Don’t ever try that.”

  Now in this moment she wished she had paid more attention when her mother was cleaning the fish, scraping out their insides, their small and delicate organs, had gazed on the mystery of them. And she wished she had asked her mother for one of the heads, so that she could peer closely at those gills, what they had instead of lungs, her father said, with their strange, blood-filled filaments that were apparently the secret to their magical abilities to live as they did.

  She wondered what happened to a fish that was born without them. If it just floated to the surface of the water and died.

  HER FATHER WOULD point things out to her. He knew the names of most trees, the oaks, elms, sycamore and sweetgum, the beech, pines, hickory, the maples, redbud, dogwood, the hollies, magnolia, swamp bay, cherry, cypress, pecan. Some shrubs, the buckeye, sweetshrub, huckleberry, sumac, snowbell. Flowers, lily of the valley, wisteria, joe-pye weed, jack-in-the-pulpit.

  Of the mushrooms roosting in the loam and on the bark of trees live and rotten, he would only say some knew which ones you could eat but that he’d had an uncle who thought he knew them and died after making a mistake one day. “Stay away from them,” her father said.

  When she would go into the woods with her mother it was for the express purpose of gathering edible plants and herbs for use in food dishes and medicinal potions. Chicory, dandelion greens, primrose root, wild strawberries, garlic, and wild onion. Teaberry, beechnuts, sassafras, blackberries, blueberries, rose hips for tea and jelly. She showed Jane how to prepare them, and when they were in the kitchen preparing for a regular meal she would call out the names of this one or that, and if Jane was unable to recall their uses and method of preparation, she would sometimes come over and pluck a single dark brown hair from Jane’s head and say, “You don’t want to be going around bald-headed for not knowing your lessons, do you?”

  When she walked alone in the woods barefoot at midday after the noon meal she tried remembering the names of the trees and shrubs and flowers. She was fascinated by the mushrooms and their dry or slimy tops and delicate stems and gills beneath their caps. She liked to pop her toes against the ones that burst into orange dust that bloomed in the breezeless air. But it was the quiet, modest ones that were most interesting. If they didn’t want you to see them, you would not. They lived out their lives in shade and dampness, quivering when you passed and going so still if you happened to notice and squat down to take a closer look, to touch. One day she came upon a strange one that was not at all modest, growing straight up and tall with a small cap on its top. She broke it off at the base and took it home to show her father, but her mother saw it first and snatched it from her hand and threw it into the hog slop bucket.

  “But what is it?” Jane said. “I’ve never seen one like it.”

  “If you see another, you leave it alone,” her mother said, oddly angered.

  “What’s it called?”

  “It’s called a stinkhorn,” her mother said, “and aptly so.”

  When she asked her father about it later, during one of their walks, and asked him why it grew straight up like that when all the others were short and round or flat like fat leaves growing from a tree’s bark, he said some called it the devil’s horn and some called it dead man’s finger. “There’s different shapes of it from just what you found.”

  When she next saw Dr. Thompson she asked him about the stinkhorn and her mother’s reaction to it.

  “Your mother was upset because she’s a modest woman and it so happens the stinkhorn mushroom resembles a part of the male anatomy or body, the part that is used in reproduction. In making babies.”

  “Sure is a big’un,” she said.

  The doctor said nothing, but rubbed his mouth for a moment and seemed to grip his jaw, then removed his shaded spectacles and rubbed the lenses on his shirtsleeve.

  “Well, in fact,” he said, “there are varieties of the plant that resemble the complementary part of the female anatomy as well, in quite a lurid fashion.”

  She didn’t know those words, complementary, lurid.

  “Like mine?”

  “No,” the doctor said. “Not really.”

  “It’s what I’m supposed to look like, then?”

  “Not exactly,” the doctor said. “It’s just people using their imagination. For the most part, anyway.”

  He told her that he would explain it to her in more detail when she was a little older.

  “What’s wrong with now?”

  He fiddled in his vest pocket for his pipe and took it out, but only held it out from him and looked at it as if to examine it for flaws. Then he looked sideways at her.

  “Soon enough,” he said. “When the time is right.”

  She walked off, perturbed, but then came right back.

  “I need you to tell me why I’m the way I am, why I’m different, or how I’m different. Why can’t I control myself?” She had learned this discreet term well enough over the years.

  He looked at her a long moment, his eyes squinting that tired squint, a mote of some kind in there that was more than a speck of dust, more something in his mind than his eye. Then he ­nodded, said, “All right, then.”

  They sat on the ground and he told her as best he could about what she did not have that most girls and women had. “First, there’s no ‘why.’ It’s just how you’re made. Inside you,” he said, “I believe you have just about everything, if not everything, that any other girl has. But on the outside you don’t have everything they do. Everything is kind of tucked up inside you, hidden away. And one thing you do not have is the little muscle that allows you to control yourself. It’s a squeezing muscle, see. And when you need to go potty, if you have the little muscle, then you can squeeze it and stop it until you get to a privy or bathroom or a good-sized bush to hide behind, you know.”

  She nodded, serious. She was trying to form a picture in her mind of her insides, and make that match up somehow with what she’d been able to tell about herself from what she could see on the outside. It was like trying to imagine some very complex mushroom.

  “What you have on the inside is just as complex—I mean it is just as much a wonder of a miracle of the human body—as anyone else. But it didn’t get to finish putting itself all together, didn’t get to finish itself up and get everything
right, before it was time for you to be born. Or maybe I should say at some point, for some reason, it just stopped making itself into what it was supposed to.” He paused, looked at her looking back at him, her brow bunched down. “That’s about as best I can explain it to you at your age, Janie. I hope that helps a little bit. It’s not anyone’s fault, certainly not yours, and it’s not anything to be ashamed of. It’s just a difference, is all. And the only thing is that it causes you to have to live your life in a special way. To have less freedom to go to school and such as that. But it does not mean that you are not a normal little girl. You’re just a little girl who has to deal with more things than most little girls. And that will make you strong. It already has.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “I hope one day someone can. But right now I don’t know. Well, I know they will one day. I just don’t know when. I know they work at figuring these things out all the time.”

  Jane nodded, still trying to put together some kind of picture in her mind that made sense. She was coming up with something, although she had no idea if it was a fantastical idea or something close to what the doctor knew.

  SHE WOULD HOLD a mirror beneath herself and stare for a long time, studying herself there. She had seen her mother naked, and her sister Grace, too, but not really up close. It was not the kind of thing she could ask to examine, to use the doctor’s word.

  But she longed to do just that. If she could only look closely at Grace, and then again at herself, it would satisfy such a curiosity. So she got up her courage one day and asked Grace, bluntly, if she could see her down there.

  “I mean take a real good look,” she said. “An examination.”

  Grace looked offended, even baffled.

  “Find you some girl your own age, if you want to play doctor,” she said before heading off toward the barn and her smokes.

  Sometimes she was frightened, in a heightened way, briefly, as if some panic were about to take hold of her, and she would run, just run, until she outran it, or wore it out, and she would find herself way out in the middle of a pasture, with a curious, half-startled cow looking at her, stopped in its cud-chewing, like she was some kind of creature it had never seen before. Then she would notice the other cows, all turned to look at her, their chewing interrupted, some with long pieces of grass hanging from their mouths, their big brown eyes on her as if in wonder about how she’d suddenly appeared in their midst, a tiny creature from some other world. They’d wait to see what she would do. She would think in that moment she could do anything. She would move slowly to pluck a long piece of Johnson grass and chew on the sour end of it, let it hang from her mouth. The cows would take notice. She would stand very still. When she moved again they would startle, as if she had suddenly become human again.

  Then, calmed, she would walk in the woods by herself.

  She loved most being in the woods, with the diffused light and the quiet there. Such a stillness, with just the pecking of ground birds and forest animals, the flutter of wings, the occasional skittering of squirrels playing up and down a tree. The silent, imperceptible unfurling of spring buds into blossom. She felt comfortable there. As if nothing could be unnatural in that place, within but apart from the world.

  There were innumerable little faint trails her father said were game trails. Animal trails. Their faint presence like the lingering ghosts of the animals’ passing. There was a particular little clearing she believed she had discovered, only her, filled with yellow sunlight on clear days, its long grass harboring primroses and wild sunflowers. A meadow she considered to be her very own, her place. The eyes of all the wild, invisible animals watching her. Time was suspended, or did not exist. She could linger there as long as she liked and when she returned from it no time had passed at all since she had stepped into the clearing and then awakened from it. That’s what it was like.

  The meadow did not exist if she wasn’t in it.

  THE SPRING AND summer storms were terrifying and thrilling, with sudden gusting winds, thick waves of rain, bone-jarring thunder, lightning that made everything for an instant like the inside of a vast glass bowl of bright blue light, or crackled across the sky as if to crack it open to the heavens, or boomed so near so sudden, leaving smoking trees in the woods or the edge of a field. There was a wooded area her father left open to the cattle so they could hide in there during storms. The rain flooded the flat yard, creating rivers where before there seemed no natural depression in the ground. Wind howled around the house in long, bending moans, moving against it like a flooding river, so that she feared it would rip the whole thing from its columns of foundation stones. And always, after, the yard and the fields beyond were littered with stripped branches and leaves, arboreal detritus and debris, and often, in the yard, some animal drowned from the sheer volume of water in such a brief time, a stray housecat caught out in it, or a bird, or a possum.

  She would sit alone on a branch in a hickory nut tree near the pig pen, watching the hogs, sows, and piglets. Beyond that the cattle grazed in the pasture beside the pond, in their massive, slow, ponderous bodies. With their stupid, wary expressions. They startled easily.

  She’d seen the hogs mount the sows in their pen. The hogs seemed almost to try to tender up the sows before they got to it, bumping the sows’ behinds with their noses, rubbing up beside them, bumping their heads gently, almost like a kind of kiss. The boars’ big pink things with the curled tip would come poking out. She went a little pop-eyed first time she saw that. They did not look like stinkhorns. And when they would mount the sows, the hogs didn’t seem to move much, every now and then pushing against her bottom, shuffling their comically tiny hind feet toward her in a little two-legged dance. And the sows stood as still as they could, just kind of staring ahead, their ears canted forward, and then after the hog got down they would kind of stand next to each other until another sow or boar came up, curious, and broke the spell.

  When she asked about it, her mother seemed surprised and shocked, but the others only laughed at her questions.

  She had seen dogs going at it, too, of course. A female would stray from a neighboring farm and have a small pack of males trailing along, nosing her. The female always seemed a little sullen, as if to say, I suppose I’m ready for this, although I’m not sure about it. She would be evasive without actually running away. The male had always to follow the female around, patiently impatient, attentive, until the female would stand still long enough for him to mount her. Then it was quick, with great purpose, the male’s eyes wandering off either in pleasure or distraction, she could not tell. The female’s eyes kind of sideways like she was thinking and not able to quite figure it out.

  She had never seen their hound or Top doing it. What she didn’t realize was the hound was too old, stupid, and lazy, and Top, having been a stray, had been fixed by whoever he had first belonged to, before he was run off or ran away on his on.

  Birds fluttered themselves together while on a branch in a tree and then fluttered apart and looked a little bewildered. The birds did not truly understand their compulsions at all. She thought maybe they would actually forget they had done it pretty much just right after doing it. Birds are the most distracted creatures in the world, she thought. She could figure that much. Bird brains. The rooster, too, hopped onto the backs of the hens, who seemed to bow down for him and lift their tails, and he clawed and grappled and flapped his wings and pushed himself at them, and you couldn’t really see much because of all their feathers, just the thrashing around. If they let that hen keep her eggs they would have chicks.

  She was never able to come upon cats going at it. They were as secretive and mysterious about this as they were about anything else, if not more so. Although a female in heat seemed truly tortured by the condition. She did not want what needed to happen to actually happen but if it didn’t happen soon she was going to lose her mind. But somewhere, sometime, it always happened, for the female would disappear and no longer be seen creeping through the y
ard yowling in a low growly way, shoulders hunched. You might hear them down in the woods, screaming like tiny panthers. And then later there would be kittens.

  She spied on Grace and her mother, when she could, after their baths, while they were dressing. If they saw her they stiffened and turned away or shut the door. Then she would take the shaving mirror from the wall over the pump sink out back and, down in the woods, set it on the ground, pull up her skirt, and examine herself. She hadn’t been able to tell enough about Grace or her mother to see much difference, but she could tell she was different, all the same. Well, she’d long known she was different, but she wanted to know more.

  When she asked the doctor to tell her more, at first he looked a little exasperated, then said he would try to show her.

  He came back the next day with a book in which there were drawings of the female genitalia. He let her study it. She asked questions about some of the details, and he answered her bluntly. She looked at it for several minutes, the drawing. Then she closed the book and said, “I’ll be back in a minute,” and ran off for the shaving mirror, book in hand. Down in the woods, squatting over the mirror, she looked back and forth between the image there and the drawing in the book. At this point, she was mostly just fascinated by seeing what she was seeing. She didn’t feel a shock, or anything bad, just then. She closed the book, returned the mirror to its place, and went back out front where the doctor was waiting. She handed him the book and thanked him.