Miss Jane Read online

  “What is it?” Mrs. Chisolm said, propped up now against the pillows by the headboard and sleepy with exhaustion.

  He heard someone come up behind him and saw the girl, Grace, looking around his shoulder at the child, her eyes pinched. Then she left and he heard her open the door and go out, say something to her father in the main room. He spoke quietly to the midwife, asked her to pin a diaper on the child.

  Chisolm looked in from the other room. His long face half in shadow.

  The doctor picked up the diapered baby, who was crying with some vigor now.

  “What, then?” Chisolm said from the doorway.

  “Well,” the doctor said. “Let’s have Mrs. Chisolm nurse and then we’ll have a talk.”

  “About what?”

  “Good set of lungs, eh?”

  The doctor took the baby over to Mrs. Chisolm, who looked at him as if he were some kind of threat, but took the child and bared a breast and let it nurse. The baby suckled furiously and kept its milky blue eyes on its mother’s face, the infinite and divinely vulnerable eyes of an infant. Mrs. Chisolm looked as if she thought it to be some kind of potentially dangerous creature.

  WHEN HIS WIFE finally nursed the child to sleep and then dozed off herself, and the midwife had put the baby back into the crib, Chisolm went over to look. He loosened the diaper, gently raised the child’s bottom, leaned sideways so as not to block the light. The doctor watched him but didn’t come over.

  “Good lord,” Chisolm said. “What trouble have we gone and brought into this world now?”

  “Trouble for you and Miz Chisolm,” the midwife said. “But more trouble for the child, I expect, poor thing.”

  Chisolm didn’t look her way. He gazed at the child. The doctor was quiet.

  “I ’spec so,” Chisolm said. He called softly to his older girl, Grace. The girl came slumping in.

  “Get the doctor a plate like I told you. And some coffee.”

  To the doctor he said, “I’ll leave a little something in your buggy for the ride home.”

  The doctor nodded and touched a finger to his brow in a gesture of appreciation.

  Chisolm’s jug was empty. He pulled on a barn jacket, took a lantern from where it hung on a nail beside the door, went outside, and stood on the porch. Maybe an hour till the full dawn, just a sense of its light in the sky. Against that stood the black outline of trees west of the house and the fields to the south, silhouette of the barn’s pitch, and the shed. He lit the lantern and headed down the narrower of two paths into the woods behind the house, veered off that one onto an even more narrow and discreet one—no more than a game trail, at best—that led to his makings and storage. Light had begun to sift like faintly luminous dust into the trees. He could just make out the delicate shadowy patterns of the variously stubbled barks on the trunks, knots on limbs. Switch branches brushed his denim overalls like blind, limber tentacles noting his passing, allowing his pass. In a little clearing down near the creek was the squat figure of his still and the crude shed of rough lumber he’d built there with a heavy door and the padlock he left unlocked most of the time. Folks were aware of his habitual vigilance. He set down the lantern, removed the unhasped lock, and opened the door. He selected a jug from a middle shelf, set it on a broad stump near the fire pit. He went back into the shed and fetched a small pail of kerosene-soaked sawdust, shook some onto the blackened wood in the pit, put the pail up, closed the shed door. He took some gathered limbs from a small stack next to the pit, set them on top of the old logs, struck a match to the sawdust, watched the flames come up and catch the fresh pieces. He took up the jug and sat on the stump, pulled the whittled beech stick that served as his signature cork from its mouth, took a good swig, forced it down, coughed, recorked, and set the jug on the ground behind him, back from the fire. The throbbing heat of the whiskey filled his chest and drifted in blood up into his mind and opened a little door, just a bit. He let out a heavy breath, took his tobacco pouch and papers from his overalls bib, and rolled a loose cigarette, lit it with a slender stick he held to the flames for a moment, blew out the stick and set it aside, and smoked.

  For the devil of him, he couldn’t recall exactly when it had happened. He supposed he’d been drinking or he wouldn’t have entertained the idea. They’d had no need nor desire for another child. Would have gone elsewhere, if he could. Must have been that. A late hour, nowhere to go, an urge that overrode everything else. He thought, Ain’t I old enough yet to be over that?

  Then he hoped he wouldn’t ever be, just as quickly after thinking it’d be a good thing if he was.

  He hit the jug again, finished the cigarette, and dropped its butt into the fire now heating his shanks and knees against the chilly dawn threading down through the fragile canopy of pine needles and sparse-leaved hardwood branches. He sat awhile. The light turned smoky in among the trees. He took a mouthful from the jug and spat it into the fire, watched the brief roaring up of the flames, took another slug that burned down into his gullet and rose unchecked now into his mind, corked the jug, rolled another cigarette, and thought, What’s done is done.

  He heard something behind him and turned.

  It was his hound, ambling down the trail as if to come sit and share a sigh or two.

  “You got the face of bored sadness,” he said to the dog.

  The dog didn’t take umbrage. Came over beside his left foot and plopped down with a heavy sigh as if he were the one going through all the trouble on this evening.

  IN TRUTH, MRS. Chisolm had no memory of the act of the child’s conception, either. My lands, she said once to Jane many years later, after she’d been widowed and felt the memories of her life drifting about her mind like vapors: I cannot recall.

  But her solution was simple, really. The doctor had supplied her with a measure of laudanum for—he stressed this—only her worst days of the nerves. And it had been a day back that late winter of cabin fever and a spitting cold rain as she hurried to gather the few most-late greens (she called them sneaky greens, popping up long after what you’d thought the last would be) from the winter garden, canning and cooking, and an argument over money at the supper table, and him going out in the weather with hat and coat to his little shed beside his still to drink and smoke and curse about things general, and she had thought he’d be gone all night or incapacitated at the least, so she had taken a dose to help her sleep.

  All she remembered after that was waking well before daylight and feeling in herself that something had happened, and being so upset all she could do was leave the bed in a rage of silent tears. She rekindled the fire in the main room fireplace, then the large kitchen stove, made coffee, and sat drinking a cup while the bacon fried and grits bubbled, trying to pull herself together before he woke up, then made eggs and set a plate before him and went about her chores that morning in the relentless bitter late winter rain without a word. Feeling in her reeling mind that her body was already changing, taking itself away from her again, making another creature to push out into this unpredictable world.

  THE DOCTOR FINISHED eating, set his plate and cup in the sink, and went back into the bedroom. The midwife was still there, standing silent beside the woodstove.

  He asked of the midwife: “Mr. Chisolm?”

  “In there by the fire. Went down to his makings but come back a minute ago.”

  Chisolm looked up when he entered the room.

  “So just what is it we have here?” he said.

  “A little girl, I believe.”

  “You believe.”

  “I need to make a telephone call to an old friend of mine in Baltimore, a specialist, ask him some questions. I’ll be back tomorrow if possible, next day if not.”

  Chisolm said nothing, blinking at him.

  “Make sure the child is eliminating waste properly,” the doctor said. “If she isn’t, and especially if there is any swelling in her lower tummy, you send for me right away.”

  Chisolm nodded.

  “I d
on’t see any distension, meaning nothing seems to be dangerously out of place,” the doctor said. Chisolm stared at him, frowning, not seeming to really process this.

  “All right, not to worry,” the doctor said. “I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”

  HE FOUND THE JUG under the blanket he’d brought along to warm his legs. Made his way back through the dawning countryside taking his time, taking a pull on the jug every quarter mile or so. When he pulled up into the driveway of his house he was dismayed at what he saw. Tired deep in his bones and joints, and a little drunk, he sat there a moment taking it in: a wagon, two blanketed mules, a runabout pickup, one ragged buggy, and a smallish gaggle of people on the porch plus two in the ragged buggy, all awaiting his arrival. A small string of swaybacked horses stood tethered to the hog pen fence down the hill from the house. He dropped the blankets he’d used to cover his legs over the jug between his feet, and climbed down bending his stiffness as if simple movement were akin to heaving against a stubborn animal or heavy load.

  He tethered the Fox Trotter to the post, grabbed his medical bag.

  He called out, “Somebody take my rig around to the shed and put up my horse.”

  A young boy jumped down from the porch and ran up.

  “I’ll give you a penny before you go.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Thompson.”

  The doctor leaned in close, spoke quietly. “Mind the jug there under that blanket.”

  The boy grinned like a lovable imbecile.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t you get into it. It’ll make you sick.”

  The boy giggled in a strangely ecstatic way, as if something inside him had been too pleasurably stimulated, and ended with an odd hum, looking at the doctor sideways. My god, what made this one? the doctor thought.

  He stepped up onto the porch among the sagging, ragged group there.

  “How long you all been here?”

  “I been here since first light,” said an old woman whose goiter had swelled up to the size of a yellow squash. She had no teeth and sounded like she was talking with her mouth full. That was an odd paradox he’d noted so often that he hardly noticed anymore. But his senses were always more alive and alert when he was this tired.

  “My wife tend to you?”

  “She brought out some coffee and biscuits about an hour ago,” the goiter woman said. “We do appreciate it. Said she was going on back to bed for a while, tired out waiting up for you since early morning.”

  “All right.”

  Also on the porch were a boy with a broken arm from sleepwalking off the porch of their home, a man with a swollen, possibly broken ankle from stepping into a gopher hole, another leaned forward clutching his chest with what was probably a heart attack, and yet another with a giant blue-and-yellow-clouded goose egg on his forehead.

  And all these wretched souls came out of the womb perfectly normal, the doctor thought, looking around. Who can say what life will make of a body?

  “What happened to you?” he said to the man with the goose egg as he started into the house with his bag.

  “I hit him with the barrel of his own shotgun,” the woman sitting next to the man said. The man didn’t say anything, gazing in a dazed way straight ahead at nothing, looked about half conscious.

  “He said I hit him so hard he’s done gone blind,” the woman said. “I tried to shoot him with it but it wasn’t loaded and I don’t know where he keeps his shotgun shells.”

  “Won’t never, neither,” the man said in a whisper, not moving his head or his apparently sightless gaze.

  “Better hope I don’t,” the woman said. “Come home drunk again. I had the money I’d get my own gun or at least some shotgun shells for his. I’d stick him with a knife when he’s like that but I’m afraid he’d get it away and stick me.”

  “That’ll do,” the doctor said.

  He gestured to the old man clutching his chest. “Help him on into my office, I’ll be there in a minute.”

  He went inside his house and set his bag on the desk in his study, a kind of anteroom to his office where he saw patients, and drew a small amount of cocaine solution into a hypodermic. He was quiet through all this so as not to wake his wife. He injected the solution into a vein in his arm, then put the hypo away and rolled down his sleeve. He stood there over his desk for a few minutes, allowing the dope to start running through him, opening his eyes good, before taking up the bag and going into his office, where the older man sat in a chair, a young man standing beside him. He put a stethoscope to the older man’s chest. The older man, his stiff hair shorn in what looked like the feathers of a ruffled white hen, stared ahead and sieved a light breathing through his open mouth.

  “What happened?” the doctor said to the young man.

  “He just kind of sat down in the yard while we was on the way to the barn this morning,” the young man said. “I had to help him up.”

  “Where you been, Doc?” the old man said in a whisper.

  “Down at Chisolm’s, delivering a child.”

  The old man said nothing for a moment, then whispered out, “Ain’t she a little long in the tooth for that now?”

  “I reckon if Chisolm can still make it happen and she can still accommodate it, it’ll happen,” the doctor said.

  “Heh,” the old man wheezed. Then he said, Oof, like laughing hurt him.

  “Take it easy. You got arrhythmia going on in there. Means your heart’s not beating regular. I’ll give you something just to calm it down.”

  “All right.”

  “Is he gon’ live?” the young man said.

  “Of course,” the doctor said. “Just how long is always the question, isn’t it? I’ve seen young men your age die of a bad heart, too. Seen old men with bad hearts live on and on.”

  He administered a hypodermic and gave the young man some pills.

  “These here are nitroglycerine tablets. Make sure he keeps them on him and if he feels a pain in his chest, put one under the tongue. If he knows he’s going to be doing something ­strenuous—hard work, I mean—he can take one a few minutes before and maybe ward it off. Take an aspirin every morning.”

  “What if he just gives out like today?”

  “Make him go to bed till he feels better. Cut out the bacon.”

  “That’s about all he eats,” the young man said.

  “Just a new idea going around. Vegetables, cornbread, a little lean ham. Easy on the chores. Plenty of rest. No conjugal relations.”

  “What?” the old man said.

  “Fornication.”

  “Oh.”

  “Or if you do, take one of those tablets before that, too.”

  “Heh. I ain’t like old Chisolm down there.”

  “Equipment not standing like it used to, eh? Well, that’s the way it goes. Chisolm’s younger than you.”

  “Sometimes it just gets kind of thick,” the old man said.

  The young man snickered.

  “Well, just enjoy that, if you can, means you’re still alive,” the doctor said.

  “What was it?”

  “What?”

  “A boy or a girl them Chisolms had.”

  The doctor didn’t answer for a moment, then said, “Baby girl.”

  “Healthy, then?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Well, God bless ’em.”

  “I’ll pass that along.”

  Then he helped the young man help the older man out. The man with the goose egg on his head looked paler, and the goose egg larger, and he signaled for the man’s wife to help him into the office.

  “He can make it in on his own,” the woman said.

  “Suit yourself,” the doctor said. “If he dies, you know, the sheriff just might charge you with murder for knocking him in the head like that.”

  “Wouldn’t be nothing he didn’t deserve,” she muttered as the doctor closed the door to his office behind him. He sat the man down, examined the big bump.

  “I’ll
have to drain that off, if I can,” he said.

  The man said nothing.

  “You got a concussion, at best, but I’m worried you got bleeding still going on in there.”

  The man still said nothing. Then he said, slowly, “Just tell the sheriff she was lying. I dropped a ax head on myself splitting firewood.” Then he closed his eyes and stopped breathing, still sitting upright in the chair.

  “Well, damn,” the doctor said. He checked for a pulse, fingered the carotid.

  “You need to come in here,” he said to the woman still sitting on the porch. She looked at him hard for a moment, then got up and followed him in. She looked at her husband sitting dead in the chair.

  “Is he gone?” she said.

  The doctor nodded.

  “He said you were lying and that he dropped an ax on his own head chopping firewood.”

  “Well,” the woman said after a long minute. “You don’t need no help around here, do you? Cleaning, what-all? I got a daughter can do it, won’t cost you much.”

  The doctor stared at her in near disbelief. Then he said, “Got all the help I need right now. I’ll ask the coroner if he can use anyone.”

  “I appreciate it,” the woman said, and left the office, climbed up onto the seat of a buckboard behind a swayback mule. The doctor had the young man, who had not left yet with his ailing father, help him carry the dead man outside and lay him into the back of the woman’s wagon. He unwrapped the reins, traveled them over the mule, handed them to the woman, who looked as if she didn’t know what they were. Then he went back up onto the porch and motioned to the woman with the goiter. Before he closed the door behind them, he said to the rest on the porch, “She was just mad-talking. He dropped an ax on his own head, splitting firewood, by his own admission. You all know how it goes, long married.”

  All on the porch nodded and murmured. One said, “Lord, yes.”