by Brad Watson
So, what would he tell her he had heard about her? He wasn’t a native, with lots of friends. What did anyone outside her family and Dr. Thompson (and Emmalene and Hattie’s family, she supposed) really know about her? Her guess was they had some general idea, something in the general vicinity of her condition, her history.
She let her eyes linger on Gordon Ray, standing there waiting on her, now checking his watch. It wasn’t yet five-thirty but it was close. He pushed his hands back into his pockets, rocked a bit on his heels. He looked pleased, possibly a little nervous. She felt sorry for him, just then. But she also allowed herself to be pleased that a man would want to ask her to dinner, knowing or having heard God knows what about her. And then she left from the same door she’d come in through, around the corner and out of sight of Schoenhof’s and Mr. Gordon Ray, and took the long way around to where she’d parked the little yellow Ford, got in it, and drove up the hill and out of town. Feeling light, in a way, as if she’d escaped a difficult situation. And as far as she knew, she probably had.
She supposed she would have to refrain from taking lunch in town for a while, in order to avoid running into Gordon Ray. She would rather seem to be mysterious than cruel. She felt sorry for him, but of course she was not exactly sentimental about loneliness.
SHE STOPPED AT Dr. Thompson’s house on the way home and told him about her encounter. He grew serious, leaning forward and listening as if she were giving a lecture on something. When she finished he sat back, his expression relaxing, as if he were thinking on it.
“I know who that young man is,” he said. “I believe he’s not from around here, originally. I believe he moved here from Tennessee.”
“That’s what he said.”
“You know people in Mississippi and Alabama can be a little snooty toward people from Tennessee.”
“How come is that?”
“I don’t know for sure. But my guess would be they think it’s not quite Deep South, not quite Appalachian, kind of a state without a clear pedigree.”
“What about Louisiana?”
“France, lower part. Northeast part pretty much east Texas.”
“Georgia.”
“Oh, kind of piedmont in the north, Florida cracker in the south. Middle part’s Southern, I guess.”
“Well, what about Florida, then?”
“Florida? Florida is nothing. Just what folks slipped and slid down into the swamps, couldn’t hold on up here.”
She laughed. They’d made a game.
“People sure can get picky about all kinds of silly things,” she said.
“You got that right. I expect it would have been all right to go to dinner with that boy. Then again, you’re probably right, he’s probably been a little lonely and probably would have pressed you to get serious. Probably sooner than one would like, given he must be closer to forty than not. Wants to start a family.”
“That’s what I figured.”
He said, “You know, the Greeks believed that physical love was the lowest form of love. That true love was akin to divine love. Or something like that. That pure love between two people existed on a higher plane.”
“What did they mean by that?”
He looked into his glass, shook the ice, and shrugged.
“Well, they were pantheistic, of course. I guess they meant that the highest form of love somehow transcended physical love. Was more powerful. I guess I mean to say that, if you get down to it, you have loved. You’ve had love. And as I understand it, or it seems to me, anyway, that once you have something like that, you have it forever. So it doesn’t matter that you were not allowed to stay with or even marry that Key boy. In fact what you had with him, and still do in your memory, in your mind, is something greater than many people have in the end, when they find themselves trapped in the business of love and marriage. Do you understand?”
“I’m sure I will,” she said. “Someday.”
“What will you do with the rest of your life, Janie? When you’re truly alone.”
“I have been studying that.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ve been studying it all my life.”
They were quiet then, looking frankly at one another without discomfort. Interrupted by the call of one of his peacocks over near the edge of the woods.
By this time, as he’d predicted, the doctor had far more peacocks than he could count. The yard was populated with cocks and hens as if it were some kind of strolling park in a big fancy city like New York or Paris, France, birds the leisure class of a Sunday afternoon. No doubt the doctor’s reputation as an eccentric had been greatly enhanced by their presence.
“How come the foxes and coyotes don’t get them?” she said.
“ ’Cause they can fly, I guess. Run pretty well, too. Listen, now, are you hungry?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. Thinking about eating at Schoenhof’s gave me an appetite.”
She stayed for supper.
After eating, between late afternoon and evening, they sat in the back yard while he had another glass of bourbon. She agreed to join him if he made it mostly water and ice.
“Don’t tell Hattie I’ve allowed you to corrupt me,” she said.
“Aw,” he said. “I know she takes a nip from my supply now and then. At least she doesn’t try to hide it by watering it back up to where it was in the bottle.”
He went into the house and came out, hobbling just a little, handed her the drink. A cock flew by so close it almost startled her into spilling bourbon onto her blouse.
“Good lord!” she said.
The cock landed on a tree limb at the edge of the yard with a honking sound. Dr. Thompson laughed, sat down.
“You know,” he said then, “you being startled like that reminds me. When I was a boy, for a while when I was small, I was afraid of things. I don’t know why. But I was afraid of just about everything. I can’t even say exactly what, just generally afraid. My parents were worried. I was an only child. I may have been adopted, but if I was they never told me. I don’t much favor either one of them, never did. Anyway, we lived on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama, in a big house, with woods nearby, like these. My father was a surgeon and I think he wanted me to follow him in that. Anyway, at some point I grew curious about those woods and gathered up the courage to go into them by myself. At first I was afraid of every sound and every little motion from this critter or that. Scared of the swoop of a bird, which would come out of nowhere, it seemed, not like when it happened in our yard. But gradually, as I did overcome my fear, and was able to sit quietly in a little clearing, or in the crook of a small tree, or beside a creek or whatever, I started to study the animals—mostly squirrels and chipmunks and armadillos, every now and then a fox or raccoon—and the birds. Study their habits best I could, I mean. And then I became mostly fascinated with the birds. I became so fascinated with them that I completely forgot about my fears. I just about forgot everything else that summer. I must have been eight or nine, I don’t know. Maybe ten years. I’d had some kind of elementary science at school, I think. And my father gave me a copy of Audubon’s book, and a BB gun, one of the first Daisys, I think, and some old surgical tools, and helped me in my crude efforts at dissection. I was fascinated by how these birds’ bodies were put together. How complex it was. I would pluck their feathers before dissection and study how the parts of their bodies fit into one another, before I removed the skin and then after. I would carefully skin them. I never did skin them with feathers for stuffing. I wasn’t interested in that. I made drawings.” He laughed at himself. “I decided I wanted to become a zoologist, pure science, much to my father’s disappointment. He thought I would grow out of it, though, and I guess I did.
“In any case, there was a bit of a cooling of my interest, as I got older. And then I met Lett and medicine seemed like the pragmatic choice. And she wanted to live down here.”
Their glasses were empty and they went quiet, the doctor seeming lost in thoug
ht.
“You’re kind of talky, Ed,” she said. “Have you got into your medicine again?”
He mocked her expression. “Maybe a bit.”
“I should go on,” she said. “I don’t like to drive in the dark.”
One of the peacocks called loudly from the trees, another called back, and the others made a contest out of trying to join in, and then after a raucous bit of that all was quiet. Even the songbirds calmed down.
“The birds are going to sleep for a while,” the doctor said. “Roost in the trees down there. Maybe you should give it up and roost in the guest room here tonight.”
She thought about it.
“I might.”
“Good.” Then he said, “There’s just enough light left. Let me show you something. Come on.”
They walked to the edge of the yard, around Hattie’s cabin, then onto a trail into the woods, moving a bit slowly given his stiffness and her town shoes. The woods were pristine, had never been cut. She wished she had walked with him here before and couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t. The path declined through thick brush and then opened out into an expanse of mostly pine, sweet gum, and birch trees. The trees’ high, broad canopy had kept down most of the undergrowth, so that you could see almost the length of this little narrow forest. And there in the relative clearing, standing very still and watching them as if they had interrupted a party, were dozens of peafowl. For a moment it took her breath. Several of the cocks took steps toward them, stopped, and seemed to shudder throughout their bodies, and up went their long tails, fluttering, shimmering even in what little light was left in the day in these shadows.
“My god,” she said, “they’ve gone wild.”
“They were never tame,” the doctor said. “Not really.”
He knelt carefully down and brushed away leaves and pine needles and scooped up a small handful of dusty earth.
“This is what you do with my ashes when I’m gone,” he said, and tossed it into the air toward the birds, who seemed to come out of their trance at that. Some took flight toward denser foliage, and mixed in with the blustering of their wings made sounds like the little honk of a horn and a barking sound, almost like a wild turkey. Some squawked like a quieter imitation of a crank being turned to start an old car.
“You know one of the most interesting things about birds, Janie? It’s that most of them, all but ducks and geese and a few others—but all songbirds—” then he stopped himself, shook his head. “I may be a little loose-lipped with my bourbon and, uh—it’s brought out the awkward scientist in me.”
“No, tell me what you were going to say.”
He looked at her sideways.
“All right, then. I was going to say they don’t have obvious genitalia. It’s mostly on the inside. The males and the females have this little puckering down there, called the cloaca, and when they’re ready to mate the cloaca swell up, and they simply press their little puckerings together and the male’s sperm finds the female’s eggs and, voilà, baby birds. Do you know what they nicknamed this kind of mating, with birds? They call it a cloacal kiss. Now, don’t you think that’s just kind of endearing?”
She looked at his long, bushy-browed, kindly face in the fading light.
“I do,” she said. “Maybe I’m part bird.”
The doctor had a good little quiet laugh at that.
In a moment, she said, “How about the peacocks?”
“They’re that way, too.”
She could see them, becoming silhouettes as the light became dimmer in her vision, here and there in their roosts, settling in. She looked back toward the trail.
“It’s getting dark.”
The doctor said, “All you have to do is pretend that you can see in the dark, and then you can.”
She made a sound.
“No, really. Just relax your eyes. There. Like that. You see what you can see? You see the trail? You look for what is not the trail. See it?”
“I think I do.”
“All right, then,” he said. “That’s all you need.”
“Okay, then.”
He hesitated, then said, “You once asked me why I got those first birds.”
“I remember. You were lonesome.”
“I was. But really I got them simply because they’re beautiful, they’re strange. People don’t know what to make of them. I liked that. I suppose their role in nature is to help control the populations of the things they eat. They’re good regulators. And to feed the occasional fox or coyote, no doubt. But I like to think they really exist just because they are oddly beautiful. And are killed out of jealous envy. I like to think they enjoy the fact that we think they’re beautiful. I like to think they’re vain. I like to think that they think we think they’re gods, and that the reason we gaze at them in such wonder is that we are worshipping them. Look at them in there. Like shadows, spirits.”
He turned to her, looking unabashedly happy, his face a pale moon in the darkening woods.
“That’s what I like to think,” he said.
Toward the end she did not fear death, even as it took Dr. Thompson at the age of seventy-four, when she was just thirty-five herself. Somehow he had helped her in that way, too. He left her his house, his woods, money in the bank. He left her to provide a living for his housekeeper, Hattie. If Jane did not want to move in, he wrote, she could just hold on to it until town encroached to drive the price up to premium.
She stayed home, went to town as rarely as possible, grew tomatoes, butter beans, snap beans, yellow squash, onions, sweet corn, and the field corn she fed to the chickens. Greens well into the fall. Her hands, long and thin and strong, worked the good black garden soil. Occasionally one of her plump beefsteak tomatoes would shape itself into some kind of vaguely sexually suggestive conformation, which she would study with interest, standing or kneeling in the garden. Whenever she found one of these on the vine, ripe, she plucked it, studied it in a moment of wonder, and ate it there in the garden heat, her face flushed, the juices from the ripe fruit running down her chin and onto her bony sweating breast.
Her sharecroppers drifted away into time. Fields fallow, meadowed, becoming slowly the brambly woods they’d once been long ago.
Grace, who’d moved to New Orleans after Mercury’s brothels were closed during the war, wrote to her once from there, describing her new place of employment (Fancy, she wrote, but Minnie just had the most class), and then no longer wrote, not even in return to letters from Jane, until one letter came back to Jane with the words No longer at this address written on the front of the envelope beneath her return address.
Grace was finally rid of her despised family for good, was what Jane figured, although she was hurt that her sister had not at least made her an exception.
The occasional brief letter or postcard she got from Belmont’s or Sylvester’s wife in Wyoming was nearly incomprehensible. She had never seen mountains. Never seen endless prairie with no trees.
Cicadas pulsed in the heat of the day, and in the late afternoon, so loud as to overwhelm everything else, the very pressure in the air seeming to swell with their mad song. The all-but-every-day afternoon storms in the summer. Cyclone weather in spring, summer, and fall. Once she stood in the breezeway in such a bile-green darkness and lashing downpour that she was sure the roaring was a cyclone somewhere in the low black sky above, but if so it did not touch down and afterward the skies cleared to moonlight on puddles in the yard like broad, shallow ponds gleaming.
Sometimes there was a feeling of deep sadness, of being alone in a world that seemed all but empty of others. Occasionally she felt a momentary fear that something was going to happen, and she was not allowed to know what it was or understand it. She thought that it might be death, the fear of it. The expectation. An almost annoying sense of dread. She would have wept in such moments but for some reason the tears would not come, as if the expression of grief itself had abandoned her, the ability to express it too deeply sunk into her mind and heart. S
he had let it settle in so, in order that it might shrink to a nothing, like some miraculously benign and reticent tumor. But it had not.
She sat on the porch and watched the world around her. The yard, the shed, the garden, the empty pig pen beyond that. Pasture. Pond. Woods. A magnolia she had planted after her father died, along with a row of camellias that flowered every spring. So there were songbirds and squirrels, doves in the yard as well as flocks that flew swiftly over in the early fall, and wild ducks circling in dark, descending swoops to the ponds in winter. Quail bursting up in blustering coveys when she walked the pasture fence lines.
At the age of fifty-eight, simply to give herself a pleasurable vice that brought on memories, she looked for and found her father’s old cigarette-rolling machine, bought tobacco, and took up smoking in the afternoons and after her supper in the evenings. Never inside the house—except in winter, by the fire—but on her porch, as her father had so enjoyed doing, along with a little apple brandy from a bottle purchased in town, judging it not as good as what her father had used to make on his own.
The doctor’s wild peacocks left the confine of his woods as people and subdivisions indeed began to encroach upon the property, and they rapidly spread their territory out into the country, eventually into the woods around her house. As if they sensed the presence of someone they found familiar. They would leave the woods and strut and peck about the yard.
Sometimes their call in the distance, from down in the woods, was the loud, AhAHHah, and sometimes a call she did not like so much, a chilling, OWWWwww, that was far too much a cross between a yowling cat and a crying child for her comfort.
But the strange, guttural, jungle call that came late in the evenings, sometimes, a rhythmic, Oof-a-oof-a-oof-a, she loved to hear. It would lull her to sleep. She had made her bedroom area in the old living room and mostly kept to that side of the house. Her sleep was early, sound, and she woke early to the dawn and its first, smoky light. Moving about became slower, more effortful. She had lost interest in food and felt weak but not hungry. She would lose her breath in a task. Odd occasional dull pains behind her breast, and into an arm. Tingling hands.