Miss Jane

by Brad Watson

  She shrugged. “It’s all right.”

  “What about numbers?”

  “What about them?”

  He laughed. “How’d you learn numbers without school?”

  “Tending my papa’s store.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  He looked at her for a moment with that curious smile again.

  “You’ve just about grown up. You don’t have a secret boyfriend, do you?”

  “I don’t have any friends at all.”

  He looked almost alarmed at that. Then as if he were thinking. Then as if he couldn’t decipher his own thoughts into a reply. Then, “I guess it’s hard to have any friends out in the country, if you don’t go to school. I guess it was that way for everybody, back when they didn’t even have schools up here, and folks had big families. They just got along knowing each other.”

  “That’s the way it is with me, I guess.”

  “I guess they’d know some people from going to church, though.”

  “I guess so.”

  “But you don’t have to do that very often, either. I’m feeling a little jealous of your freedom.”

  “Huh,” she said, then shut her mouth.

  “Are you an atheist?” he said then.

  “What’s that?”

  “I thought you were smart.”

  “I just never heard of it.”

  “It’s somebody doesn’t believe in God.”

  “No, then. Though I really haven’t thought about it. I just thought everybody believed in God.”

  “Well, everybody I know says they do.”

  Then they were silent and awkward for a minute. She realized she was staring at him. He squinted at her.

  “Don’t do that,” she said, teasing. “I can’t see your pretty blue eyes.” Then she couldn’t believe she’d said that.

  He blushed and looked down, then reached into his bib pocket and pulled out a pair of thick-lensed wire-rimmed eyeglasses, hooked the earpieces over his ears.

  “I hate wearing them,” he said, with a kind of gloomy grin. “I was hiding them, didn’t want you to see.”

  “I saw you take them off one time before y’all came into the store.”

  “Oh. Well.” He looked at her again. “My pretty blue eyes are blind as a bat.”

  “They just got bigger and bluer,” she said, and they laughed.

  “I’m glad I put them on, now, so I can see yours. They look like—I’ve never seen blue eyes like yours. They almost don’t seem real.”

  “Well, they are. My papa and Dr. Thompson told me they ­haven’t changed a bit since I was born. I guess that’s a little unusual.” And thought, Like everything else about me.

  “Do you know about the dances?” he said.

  “What dances?”

  “The ones at the community center. Damascus.”

  “Oh. Right. Grace told me.” They were at a loss for a brief while, like social animals, after a greeting, gone into other distractions.

  Then he said, “Are you happy with it?” Kind of soft-voiced, like he didn’t know how she’d respond.

  “With what?” she said, her own voice quieter, too.

  He hesitated, then shrugged again, glanced back at the corn, said, “Everything, I guess. Your life.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She’d never put a word to the sadness she could sometimes feel, especially in the last couple of years, that would linger at the edge of her thoughts like the invisible ghost of someone she thought she recognized but didn’t know who it was, some kind of familiar she couldn’t quite grasp.

  SHE COULD TELL he liked her. She would see him, in the store, or passing with his family on the road near their house, and other times like the first time they talked, when she would bring a little bite to eat and think of it secretly as their picnic. In her mind their encounters were episodes in a casual courtship. Yet it occurred to her that he probably didn’t think of them that way at all. And she was embarrassed and felt foolish, and worried that he may have told others—boys, if not girls—about his occasional odd visits with the mysterious girl Jane Chisolm.

  She didn’t want him to think that way about her.

  And so, during the autumn she turned sixteen, she began going to the community dances. Elijah Key had told her about them and, slowly, a desire to take part had grown stronger in her until it became a resolve to do so. She was tired of being alone. She realized that, aside from her occasional, innocent encounters with Elijah Key, she’d been bored for some time. Maybe the encounters weren’t so innocent, if she looked forward to them so much. And sometimes planned them, truth be told. Well, she always did. She would not eat or drink anything on the morning of a day she thought she might run into him. So she could linger with him for a while without worry.

  She had been a spritely young girl, slim and a bit lank-haired but with a sweet face and good humor, but by now had grown taller and begun to take on a gaunt, dark-eyed beauty, and moved with a kind of natural grace, as a leaf will fall gracefully from a tree in barely a breeze.

  When she made up her mind to attend the dances, her parents were surprised, but she seemed to want it so much they gave reluctant permission. “It’s only going to be a heartbreak one day,” her mother said.

  “It’s just dances.”

  “What about when you get older than the others and have to stop going or look foolish?” her mother said. “And I don’t know how you’re going to manage it, anyway, you know.”

  “It’s just working against the loneliness,” her father said, “like any child living on a farm.” His wife said nothing and returned to her work.

  She and her father stood there on the porch, silent, looking out at nothing. He seemed slack-jawed, not so much silent as mute. His eyes empty.

  “Are you all right, Papa?”

  He took his hat off and ran a hand through his hair, made a grimace, put the hat back on.

  “Nothing to worry about, daughter,” he said. “You go on to those dances, try to have yourself a good time. Of course, I’ll be keeping an eye on you, if you don’t mind.”

  He went on down the steps, as if there were really nothing more to say. Or nothing more he knew how to. She watched him disappear into the shadows of the work shed, head down, maybe mumbling to himself.

  For an entire two days before the evening of a dance, she fasted. First thing on the first morning, she dosed herself with castor oil followed by a little buttermilk, just to have something on her stomach, and stayed in the privy until she felt herself emptied out. She spent the entire next day beneath a tree in the middle of the pecan grove, or beside the fishing pond, or lying in the middle of her favorite little clearing in the woods. She would take along a piece of bread and maybe bacon, but scattered the bread for the birds, tossed the bacon to the fish or along a trail for some fox or stray dog to surprise upon.

  Not thinking. Just being, or simply being, Jane. As when she was younger. On the first day she would allow herself to sip a little water from time to time.

  At some point in the second day there would be an almost hallucinatory clarity in her vision, in the presence of things around her, in the sounds, of birds and farm work and dogs barking, the sounds of the livestock, and of people talking.

  Even the breezes gently rustling leaves in the trees made a sound that seemed to fill her mind in an intoxicating way, as if the very tips of the leaves were tickling her awareness, a temptation of the senses that she allowed to wash through her, to flush her with calm anticipation.

  This had not just a little to do with her strange, alluring grace in those days.

  She walked about in such a dreamy, distracted state that her mother let her know that she’d checked her laudanum bottle to make sure the girl had not got into it.

  The afternoon before her first dance her mother said to her, “You can’t get too friendly with these boys, Jane.”

  Jane said nothing, just listening, oddly calm in a way her mother seemed to find unsettling.
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  So she went on, “Do you understand? You’ve long known it.”

  When Jane only smiled, her mother stood up in mild exasperation to walk away. As she did she said, “You have to be careful. It might not only be you that gets hurt.”

  “Dr. Thompson said he believes they’ll be able to fix me one day. I could have a regular life with a man someday.” Though he hadn’t said exactly that.

  Her mother stopped and looked at her long and silently.

  “Believing is a matter of faith,” she said. “Not certainty.”

  Jane had never seen the look in her eyes she saw then. She almost looked empty. And for the first time Jane could remember, she saw her mother as a woman whom life had made not just hard but also exhausted and plain. Older-looking than her years.

  Then, as if she could read the unspoken words in Jane’s eyes, her mother’s expression darkened again. Her own eyes glistened, about to shed tears.

  “What would you know about ‘life with a man’? And what of your little experience in this world would make you think it such a fine thing?”

  Jane watched her go out the back door, feeling more sad for her than abashed at being upbraided. Her mother’s words weren’t able to dispel the deeply calm pleasure she felt in these new days, this new self.

  She did not wear a diaper to the dance, only a little padding as if for possible light menstruation, so there were no bulky undergarments to interrupt her slim figure or graceful movements, and she’d made herself a light, more slim-fitting dress and wore a pair of shoes her father had bought for her in town after drawing an outline figure of her foot on a sheet of school paper to show the shoe salesman there. They were hardly more than slippers with a low heel.

  She attended two dances before any of the boys got up the courage or got past their bashful curiosity to ask her to dance, but that was good, since it allowed her to study their movements so she could mimic them later. And then, finally, Elijah Key did ask her. She had seen him standing against the wall in the shadows of dim light from the Japanese lanterns the organizers had hung in the hall. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and probably had no idea she was there. A little later she saw him again, spectacles on, looking at her. Maybe someone had mentioned her. Seeing her seemed to surprise him into something like shyness. Then, when she let her attention wander that second night, wander as it tended to do in her state of mind, she looked up and there he was, standing in front of her and holding out his hand. After he danced with her, some of the other boys also began asking her onto the floor. She felt something then she’d never felt before. The pleasure of flirtation, though she didn’t even know the word. The boys liked her, and she liked them. But if any one of them seemed about to like her too much, she had her way of withdrawing just enough. Like a scrap of paper the wind keeps breezing just out of reach. Her oddly calm, distracted state seemed to fascinate them into stupid muteness, and when she would fix her gaze upon her partner that boy looked dumbstruck, as if thinking he might be falling in love. But she was so obviously democratic in the dispensation of her new, strange charm that none of them was moved to any sort of foolish words.

  She could see Elijah watching her when she danced with other boys, her light thin figure in her homemade dress, her straight dark hair long and loose, her darkling blue eyes. She could see the stick-thin figure of her father, too, hat held in both hands, in the moonlit doorway.

  She kept a few sprigs of mint leaves in the pocket of her dress, chewed them gently, then stored them in her cheek, as a man might a small bit of chewing tobacco. The mint kept her dehydration from giving her bad breath, and drew what moisture there was in her body to her mouth and her lips, allowing some minimal conversation. She smiled and laughed with the boys who danced with her, and seemed happy. In the pale quivering candlelight their faces seemed luminous, their voices melodic, just a bit out of sync with the modest movements of their lips in speech.

  She was hardly even conscious of how the other girls were now jealous, and certainly couldn’t be bothered to care. It flickered in and out of her awareness, a coruscation of whispers and glares.

  When she danced with Elijah Key, she was happiest. He would speak to her softly, leaning close to her ear: “How did you decide to start coming out like this? You’re so pretty. But you seem a little strange.”

  “I am strange,” she said.

  So she delighted, allowed herself to be delighted, in this attention, in the public intimacy with Elijah Key, in her flirtation with other boys, in the flaunting of herself before the other girls. Even though she knew this was something with no long life ahead of it, she was able to press into the moments of pleasure in the movements of her own body. She understood somehow that she was lucky in her special way to love these events without the complicated, pressing question of physical love, to absorb life from the center and its periphery at once, so she could for a while take it all in with the sweet fullness of the entirely human and the utterly strange, without apprehension or fear.

  Some Other Ghost

  Chisolm stood in the open double doorway and watched as the young folks made their awkward ways together. He was glad to see that the boys still acted like gentlemen with the girls, the way it had been when he was young. He pulled his hat down low on his brow so he wouldn’t seem to be staring, but he kept his eyes on his daughter, sitting there in a chair off to herself a bit, and even that made his heart heavy in his bony chest. It was hard for him not to feel he was somehow responsible for the child’s condition. He was ten years older than his wife and she’d been too old to have another, yet he’d had his way with her. Drunk. Too tight-fisted to buy a fling with a two-dollar whore. And the curse of it all coming down not on him, not on the wife, no matter how they both felt that at times. It came down on this girl here. Innocent. Pretty. And pretty much doomed to a disappointing life lived alone. But here she was, game, willing to risk her pride just to be like everyone else for a while. To be a regular girl going to a dance, dancing with boys.

  The community center had been a large old barn, and everyone had pulled together to shore it up between his youth and Jane’s. Gone was the old hayloft where couples would sometimes sneak away for a little sparking. Now it was entirely open to the high ceiling, like a rustic cathedral, and there were polished wooden floors instead of hard-packed earth still smelling faintly of cattle and horse manure. When he’d met Ida at one of these dances almost forty years earlier he’d been about as full of himself as a twenty-seven-year-old farmer and aspiring cattleman could be, living as a single man working land his father had sold him without interest, on time. He knew he would do well. And feeling that way made others think the same about him. If he’d been the man he was now, mentally anyway, he never would’ve got her attention, and maybe that would have been a good thing, except that who knows what worse may come down the pipe at any time?

  The old loft doors were thrown open to let out the heat, draft a breeze. The light came from crude Japanese lanterns and candles inside flues on stands affixed to the walls. So the light was adequate but romantically soft. The same as when he’d been young. Some of the ladies involved in the restoration had argued for keeping it that way. The men pretended not to be sentimental and argued for gas lamps but they’d given way easy enough. Who wasn’t sentimental about his romantic youth? And now his daughter was making sure she had it, even though it would no doubt be brief, and end with a swift finality that would indeed be hard to endure.

  After his daughter’s first time there, when no one had ventured to ask her onto the floor, they rode home in silence. He thought she was trying not to cry, doing a damn good job of it. Just knowing that made it hard for him to control his own emotions.

  And so he was relieved, his heart felt lifted, lighter, when at the second dance he saw the Key boy go over and speak to her, hold out his hand, lead her onto the floor. He was worried about that boy, but in the moment grateful, too. Then he remembered the first time—maybe it was the first time, hard to know for sure
after all the years—laying eyes on young Ida McClure, only to see she was standing still and flagrantly staring at him and didn’t bother to avert her eyes when he caught her at it. Gave him such an instant rise he’d had to step out and subside before going back in, his will set against an obvious passion, to ask her to dance. Yet when they’d got on the floor it happened again and she brushed against him, he’d thought by accident but later realized it probably wasn’t, and locked her eyes on his in a way that just about took him over the edge.

  Now he wanted to rush onto the floor and grab his daughter by the hand and pull her out of there, but summoned the restraint to stay where he was, peering at them to detect anything improper. It didn’t seem so. She looked flat-out blissful, and the boy seemed happy and bashful.

  Well, of course he didn’t have a flagrant seductress by the hands out there, like he, Sylvester Chisolm, had nearly forty years ago. You could look back on a love and recall so clearly when it was good, joyful, wild. And also in some gray area you retained the images and moments marking decline. How could a man keep a woman from hating him for the very thing she wanted from him in the first place? Especially if both were disposed to darkness of spirit? How had he not known it, when they were young? Or maybe the question was, how had he managed to ignore the truth? Well, when you’re young you want what you want, right then, and that would be the simple truth of it.

  It was over, then, the members of the little band putting away their instruments, people bustling to wagons, a few trucks and cars. He let Jane and the Key boy talk for a bit, not minding as long as he was looking on nearby, not minding that the others were clearing out, as he disliked a crowding of vehicles as much as if not more than a crowding of pedestrians all trying to get somewhere or away. And on the way home she still seemed as she’d seemed on the dance floor, just full of bliss, and not talky except to say, “Thank you, Papa, I had such a good time.”