by Brad Watson
“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.”
She turned to face him. He looked down, took out his pocketknife and a little piece of wood he was carving on. Trying to cut back on the pipe-smoking.
“I believe it’s what he had in mind,” he said.
“Had in mind,” she said.
She looked out over the yard, at the work shed, the now-empty hog pen and its ramshackle fencing, the pasture sloping down to the cattle pond, no cattle there in the midday sun. Hardly seeing it all, really.
“Jane,” he said. “You’re a hearty person, your condition has no real effect on that. You have no unhealthy habits that I know of. It is likely that you will outlive your sister and brothers, and be alone one day. Without family, if you were able to live a less restricted life—” He stopped there.
Jane said quietly, “This has come to feel pretty normal for me.”
It had come over her, some sense of what it would be like to be truly alone. Her mother had become someone who seemed barely there, anyway. The doctor was fading a bit, no denying it now. She felt a heaviness, an almost fluid infusion of a palpable isolation. She would always be the odd one, the one with the secret. Who hurried from company without a word, returned a while later as if nothing were unusual about it. Who had taken to wearing several slips beneath her skirts, and a bit of perfume, in a ridiculously vain attempt to mask the fact of her body, her embarrassment.
But did it matter, really, anymore? She had now lived nearly eight years since moving to town, since giving herself up to the truth of what her life would be. A year out here with her mother, alone, and half a year alone since her death. And she intended to stay. She was not unhappy, she wouldn’t put that word to it. In fact she would not know how, even at her young age of just twenty-four years, to start over. To become someone else entirely. But she took an oblique tack.
“Even if they could make it work, you know I cannot pay. I know my father left that money to me but it seems right that I would manage it, in case others need it in a bad time. For something practical.”
The doctor looked away and took a deep breath as if to calm himself. His right hand shook a bit and he placed his left hand there to still it. He closed his pocket knife and put it away in his vest pocket.
“I’ll pay,” he said.
“No.”
“I will,” he said. “You understand, Jane. You have always been more than just a patient, to me. Lett and I had no children. I have no one to leave anything to, when I go. I have no one in my life, not here anyway. And no close family left, no one I even really know among them anymore. If you would let me at least do this for you, I would feel as if I have someone in this world who might see me as more than an affable stranger.”
“You’ve never been a stranger.”
She looked at him. She thought that indeed he might love her, in some way. The love of one human being for another, which does not demand classification or mode.
“He did it on purpose, didn’t he?” she said. “I’ve thought so, ever since the day.”
The doctor looked straight out over the yard, stone-faced.
She said, “You know yourself what can be done and what can’t. Don’t you? If you just own up to it. You want me to see these people because they’re the best experts, but you have been talking to them, corresponding with them, all of my life. You would know if they were able to fix me. Has your doctor friend in Baltimore actually given you some kind of confirmation?”
“What if they were at least able to repair the incontinence?”
“Has your friend actually suggested good odds on that? The man in Memphis said the way I’m made makes that highly unlikely. Has that changed?” Then she said more softly, “What are the odds, Ed? I think you want to believe it, but I think in your heart you either suspect or know that at this point they still cannot. What would be the point, if we’re honest?”
He looked startled, emotion in his face. Then looked away.
She thought of her father and her mind felt inflamed with unchecked emotions. She looked out to where she’d left the tomato worm. It was gone, leaf, stem, and all.
“I don’t want to make your life more complicated,” he said. “I thought, possibly, just the opposite, in the long run.”
“Well,” she said after a moment, as if to the yard, or to the strangely ravished, vanished worm, the billowing sky, the somewhere-feasting little wild bird—probably the flicker that was gone now from the apple tree, silent.
“Well,” she said. “It’s not complicated.”
They were quiet then in the still of the afternoon. The storm that had threatened seemed to have lost its strength and moved away. And then the doctor got back into his truck and left. She watched him drive off in a late afternoon light that seemed flickering, like the clickety light in a motion picture, color draining as if it, too, were in black-and-white, controlled by a steady hand turning a handle to keep the world in motion, by and by.
What the doctor had said to her, about caring for her. Some part of her was trying to absorb it, to understand how he had always helped her to feel less alone in the world. Less strange.
Dear Ellis,
I presented Miss Jane Chisolm w/ new possibility of at least marginal surgical repair to her condition. She is skeptical, and unwilling to bother without a greater degree of certainty on our parts. No more exploratory action, I’m afraid. She does have a good measure of her parents’ obstinacy, in addition to her own very independent nature. I offered to pay for it, myself. I cannot abide the idea of not at least trying. Finding out what can or cannot be done. Perhaps it is selfish, but I cannot abide such stubbornness, damned country stubbornness, when there is absolutely no practical reason not to seek the medical certainty, and every reason to move ahead should it be possible to do so.
I did not and never have even brought up the idea of colostomy. Personally, I wouldn’t see it as enough improvement, especially considering the risks for infection, etc. All things considered, she’s been very lucky in that way.
She believes her father caused his own death, w/ purpose. It would be impossible to know, of course, given his condition and habits. Beyond the philosophical sense, of course. How much this may have to do with her decision, I couldn’t say. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a powerful influence.
Such quiet in this house in the evenings, with my Lett gone now almost twenty-two years. I have not and I suppose will never entirely surrender my grief. My peacocks, now so numerous, are a comfort though they are at least half-wild and sometimes their calls and cries bring up a feeling of loneliness as much as comfort. A strange beauty. Sometimes I wonder should I get a dog, maybe, and wonder why the hell I never did, especially after Lett died. I suppose it makes no sense to avoid it now simply because I’d most likely outlive it. But I probably won’t go to the trouble, at this age. Janie Chisolm would take it in, I believe, but I wouldn’t want anyone to be beholden.
Ed
Otherworldly Birds
And then there was the long quiet afternoon of autumn, then middle and late winter. Crows angling curious over the fields. Hawks hovering for mice exposed in sparse cover. A light cold breeze. Hard frosted soil. Evergreen pines seen through bare limbs of oaks, sycamores, sweetgums, hickories, maple, poplar, beech. The crooked, crazed, leafless pecans in the neglected grove, the weathered barn, rusted roof tin, rusted barbed wire, implements. Huddled cattle. Weathered grazing horse and mules. Gray scudded sky. She’d made arrangements for Harris, with new help from the return of Mister, to take on another twenty acres. Another eighty came under the hand of a man named Moss and his family, who were friends with the Harrises. The doctor had recommended she take on more colored people instead of whites. “More reliable, more trustworthy,” he’d said. “You learned that the har
d way.” Moss was a big man, with a good sense of his own dignity. She gave him halves, and let him and Harris use of any of her father’s equipment they might need, at any time, if they promised to maintain it. She would pay for fuel and major repairs. She told him that if he needed to add on to the cabin the Temples had once occupied, she would supply him with lumber and nails.
All she really had to worry about was preparing her garden and making it good the following summer. She used money from her father’s final crop and cattle sales to get through the winter, although, it being only her, there wasn’t much cost. She kept her insurance money in a safe-deposit box in town. Days, she could take walks, and talk to Harris or Moss, or Emmalene, or Mister if she caught him out and about. Sometimes she ran into him in the woods, her walking, him hunting with his mutt dog for squirrels. He was still skinny and comical. Even though they’d been childhood friends, he always took his hat off when he spoke to her. He seemed a bit of a rascal, even so, and she didn’t doubt what Hattie had told about his rather active nightlife in town. It being still winter, he would disappear down to there when he could, and when he came back Mr. Harris his grandfather would be cloudy for a few days about it.
She discovered, on a dark shelf in the back of the shed beside her father’s still, several jars of his apple brandy. Had her mother not even known it was there? Jane would have a little, sometimes, in the evenings on the porch or beside the kitchen stove in winter.
She asked Dr. Thompson if he would recommend a good radio, and the next time he visited he simply brought her one. She set it up in the kitchen, as the only electric outlet was in the bulb socket there. Sometimes she convinced him to come by and stay for dinner, if he had stopped by earlier in the day on his rounds. They would have a little of her father’s apple brandy afterward, and listen to a program. Then he would make his way home before too late. If she thought he’d had too much to drink during the day, which was rare enough, she kept on him until he agreed to sleep in her parents’ old room across the breezeway. Always, she would hear his car or truck crank up before she could even rise to make coffee, and hear him grinding off down the drive and out onto the road.
Sometimes she would stop in at his house and stay for supper there. Hattie was always glad to see her. She had never married, never had another child. She had grown stout, like her mother Emmalene, but unlike Emmalene she was of a lighter disposition. Jane supposed her life here, as the doctor’s housekeeper and helper, was a good bit easier than the life her mother had led growing up and growing old, a midwife and the wife of a sharecropper. Well, of course it was.
She went into town often enough that people began to be friendly (beyond the general sense) to her, speak to her by name, know what she liked to order in the cafés. She would fast beforehand as always, so as not to worry about that. And so they were relatively normal outings. Driving her yellow coupe in her high fog was a kind of dreamy delight. She drove slowly, the world going by like a slow-motion moving picture in color.
Mercury had become populous enough that she was not thought strange for appearing only now and then. Even the somewhat scary-looking woman who ran the ticket booth at the movie theater, pale and skinny with garish makeup, knew her and made small talk. The woman had the voice of a crow. The Phipps couple who owned and ran the Triangle Restaurant were so nice to her—they had known her father—she often had to argue before they would let her pay for a meal. She threatened to stop coming if they didn’t stop doing that, and they laughed and complied.
She never ate or drank much, in case she wanted to linger in town a little longer, later.
It was inevitable that men would start to notice her. She wasn’t the greatest beauty, not as pretty as she’d been as a girl, but she wasn’t plain and certainly not ugly, so she noticed a fair number of men taking notice of her. And they would make eye contact, smile, nod, tip a hat, say, “Morning,” or “Afternoon.” She learned to give the faintest smile and nod in return, so as not to encourage anyone if she could help it.
But one man started to stand out, and she thought he might be running into her—or passing by, she supposed—on purpose. Then he seemed to show up wherever she had her lunch. Whether the Triangle, or Schoenhof’s, Pointer’s Grill, the diner in Woolworth’s, he seemed to show up soon after she’d taken a seat—generally she sat at the counter, being alone—and sat a few stools from her, and if she glanced over he would catch her eye, smile, and nod. He was a slim gentleman, somewhat older than her but hard to say how much, as he had a young face even though his short-clipped hair was beginning to show some gray. He wore eyeglasses, the small and round wire-rimmed kind. Clean-shaven. Nice suit. His hands, she noticed once, were slim and looked strong without bulk. Hands used to handling things but not workingman’s hands.
Finally one day as she left the grill he came out behind her and said, “Excuse me, Miss Chisolm?”
She startled. How did he know her name? Which she asked him.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I asked Mrs. Phipps.” He held out his hand. “My name is Gordon Ray, I work at Citizens Bank. I knew your father, and was sorry to hear of his passing.”
“Thank you,” Jane said. “Did you do business with my father?”
“Not much. I was just a teller back then. Before everything got so hard. We’re lucky to still be in business, I guess.”
“Yes. Well, my father wasn’t so keen on banks there toward the end, I guess.”
“No one was, Miss Chisolm.”
They stood there awkwardly for a moment. She emboldened herself and took a good, frank look at him then. He was handsome in a clean, precise, and conservative way. His eyes seemed intelligent and even kind. But she was wary of what seemed his persistent interest in her. She sensed he was a man who would be kind to a woman. But the question was always there: What did he, or would he, expect in the long run?
“Well, it was good to meet you, Mr. Ray.”
“Gordon, please.”
“Well, you can call me Jane, then. I have noticed you around.”
“Yes.” He laughed, a bit awkward. “Not a whole lot of options in the lunch department downtown, I guess. And I’m not married so I usually eat out at noon.”
“Yes.”
“And you? Do you live in town?”
“No, I live on my family’s farm, but the sharecroppers are doing all the farming these days, so I’m free to come in every now and then.”
“Would you ever like to stay for dinner? I would be honored to treat.”
She hesitated. But then her family’s tendency to be direct won out.
“Mr. Ray, I must tell you that I have never been on a date with a man in my life, dinner date or whatever kind of date.”
He kind of laughed.
“Better late than never.” Then added, “Truth is, I haven’t had a whole lot of dates myself.”
Jane looked at him. Yes, he was the friendly, awkward type.
“Living up in the country as I do, I have to be home early,” she said. “Or in any case I don’t like to arrive near or after dark.”
“I eat early,” Gordon Ray said.
All right. She pushed the family bluntness further.
“Mr. Ray, have you not heard anything about me? There must be lots of single young women in this town you could ask out to dinner.”
“Not as many as you might think, Miss Chisolm,” he said, with a kind of wan smile. “Especially if, like me, you don’t put on the he-man act. I come from Tennessee, and believe me I’m all man, but I’m not the kind to go strutting around like some circus wrestler, if you know what I mean. I’m a quiet type. Sometimes Southern women, if you’ll forgive me, don’t quite know what to make of men like me. Sometimes they get the wrong idea. But I assure you I like women very much.”
She stared at him for a second, then laughed, and he joined in.
“Well, I got your dander up, didn’t I?” she said. “But you didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I said have you not heard anything about me, and since you are sensitive to people making assumptions about you, surely you won’t mind the direct question.”
“I’ll answer you, if you’ll let me do it over dinner at Schoenhof’s.”
“Are you sure you’re not a lawyer instead of a banker?” Jane said. But then, for some reason she did not entirely explore in the moment—as close as she would come to a whim—she didn’t exactly decline, said she would try to make it but that she had to be home by seven and had a busy afternoon scheduled already. “I hope you won’t be offended if I’m not able to come,” she said.
“I do hope you can, though. I’ll hope to see you there,” he said, with a big smile. He shook her hand, touched the brim of his hat, and strode off the one block to his bank with a good bounce in his stride.
Well, she thought, he’s an optimistic fellow, if nothing else.
She felt like she’d just participated in something like an emotional boxing match, and it felt good, like good exertion. But it had also made her anxious. She was glad of her earlier fasting that day, more than ever.
She occupied herself that afternoon at the new Carnegie library, browsing books and magazines. At around four-thirty she looked up, went outside, and was surprised to realize that the anxiety she’d felt earlier had disappeared. She felt an odd calm in her blood. She felt hungry now and a bit faint, but not dangerously so. She walked slowly back into the center of town. Thinking, if in a cloudy way. She went down to Front Street and into the pharmacy on the corner across and one block down from Schoenhof’s. Where she could see out the window from the magazine rack and have little risk of being seen back. In a while, she saw him walk up and stand near the restaurant’s door, looking up and down the street. Hands in the pockets of his nice suit. He didn’t pull out a cigarette to smoke. Didn’t seem like a man of vices, anyway.
She mulled the question, Just what would come of this? Surely it could be simple friendship. That was possible between a man and a woman, wasn’t it? Yet he had said he was “all man,” and just what did that imply? Well, she knew perfectly well what it implied. Especially given the way he had shadowed her, the way he introduced himself to her, the way he had been so politely insistent upon this “date.” And, possibly, he was a man with something to prove.