Miss Jane (22 page)

She rode into town with Mr. Chisolm next time he went in for the stockyard and store supplies. Went with him into Tom Lyle's big grocery and wholesale, where he made his order to pick up on the way home. When that was done she told him she would stay in town and do a little window-shopping on her own. Maybe get some fabric from Klein's.

“All right, then. I'll be done in a couple of hours.”

“I'll be at the corner there.”

He stood there looking at her.

“What?” she said.

“Don't get yourself run over by a train or something.”

“Ought to hope I don't hitch a ride on one.”

“To where?”

“Away.”

As soon as he'd rounded the corner in the truck, the two cows shuffling for footing, making the occasional forlorn moo, she caught the streetcar toward the west side and got off in a neighborhood of what was once grand homes, now all looking a bit spooky with their mostly Victorian styles, most built just after the war when Sherman had burned almost everything down. Mrs. Eugenia Savell's house was one of the few exceptions, having served as a hospital for both Union and Confederate troops during the battle. Which was part of what made the story of dancing ghost soldiers even spookier: It was said the ghost ladies were dancing with soldiers blue and gray, infinitely polite to one another in death, all sanctioned murderous allegiance no longer lingering in the spirit world.

The Savell mansion sat on a hill on a large lot, surrounded by an ancient-looking fence that looked to have been made of iron spears. The gate stood open. The house itself was not in the Victorian style, but some kind of Greek Revival. It loomed there, columns crumbling, the oddly pink plaster faded, cracked, chunks fallen off here and there and lying in pieces in the weedy grass around the house. She made her way up the brick walkway, peavine weed growing up through it. A monstrous live oak stood to one side of the house and, ironically enough, a woman's-tongue tree just out from the gallery, its dried pods clattering in a bit of breeze. Ivy was taking over the house, climbing the peeling columns and ruined plaster, curling into closed windows beneath what looked like rotted sash. She realized she didn't even know if
this woman was still alive, much less still plying her trade, if you could call it that. She only knew of it because her own mother had pointed out the house one time when she was smallish, told her the stories, scaring her. She never forgot it. Still, she was amazed she knew how to find the place, walked right to it as if she had a map in her mind. She lifted an old boar's-head knocker and clanked it against the door a couple of times, and waited. She heard footsteps, not heavy but light. Then the doorknob rattled, turned, and the big door opened just an inch or so. She could see wiry white hair and a red-veined eyeball there. After it looked at her for a good long bit, the door opened and what had to be Mrs. Eugenia Savell stood there in a ratty nightgown and an oversized pair of worn men's house slippers, ankles and shins a crazy map of blue vein lines and bursts. Her liver-spotted hand on the door was long, blunt ends on fingers with yellowed uneven nails. She stared at Ida Chisolm in a long silence, in the face, then up and down. Her face lined and wrinkled as old cottonwood bark. Her eyes, though red-veined and cupped in softer, bruised depressions, alert and intelligent.

“You've come to me about someone else,” she said.

“I have.”

“Come in, then. Follow me.”

The old house was heavily cluttered with something between junk and odd collectibles, so numerous they had to follow a path through it all, and through a big open kitchen filled with potted plants, some taller than a man, and into a sunroom in the back, filled with other, more exotic plants like elephant leaf and bamboo, and a ficus big enough to shade a picnic were it out in the yard.

“Sit,” the woman said, pointing to a sofa she'd hardly noticed
for all the foliage. Mrs. Eugenia sat herself down in an old wooden wheelchair. When she saw the expression on Ida Chisolm's face she cackled and said, “You know I'll need it one day. Right now, it's just kind of fun.” Then she said, straight-faced, as if she'd been asked a question, “It was my husband's.” She leaned close, grinning, the wrinkles closing up around her cheeks and eyes. “I did covet it, while he was still alive.” Then went serious and said, “Is this about your husband?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Child?”

“Yes. Daughter.”

“How old is she?”

“Sixteen.”

“Don't tell me any more. Let me have your hand.”

She took her visitor's hand in her larger, almost leathery one, closed her eyes, and went silent. Ida could see her eyeballs moving back and forth behind the papery lids.

“Something is wrong with her?”

A lump came into her throat and she couldn't speak. Tears came to her eyes and so she closed them. When she opened them again and wiped tears with the back of her free hand, she saw Mrs. Eugenia looking straight into them, saying, “She's not sick.”

“No.”

“But she is afflicted.”

Nodded. Said, “I want to know if she will ever be better. Normal, like other girls. Women.”

She thought Mrs. Eugenia would close her eyes again but instead she continued to look deeply into hers. Then she dropped Ida's hand and rolled her chair backwards, stopped, looked at her again, then out the window. Ida followed her eyes and saw that,
oddly, the back yard was a beautiful garden, as immaculately tended for its flowers and hedgerows as the front was ignored. They sat there like that for what seemed minutes, silent. Until Mrs. Eugenia finally turned her chair by pushing on one wheel to face her again. The look of resignation in her face said everything.

“I don't see a change,” she said then.

“Will she die?”

“Not young.”

Ida nodded again.

“She is strong. Even stronger than you,” Mrs. Eugenia said then. “She may even be relatively happy in life. Unlike you.”

Ida then laughed a curt laugh of her own.

“Nothing to be done about that, I suppose.”

“We are who we are,” Mrs. Eugenia said.

“Yes.” The bitterness now settling back deep in her heart, having lifted a bit in some silly, futile hope that a crazy old woman would tell her that her daughter would undergo a miracle and become whole. She reached into her purse.

“What can I give you, Mrs. Savell?”

“Call me Mama Jean,” Mrs. Eugenia said. “It's my common name.”

“All right.”

“If you have a dollar, it would help me with my groceries, and some fertilizer.”

Then again, it was all strange enough to be true. She found a silver dollar in her change purse and laid it carefully into the surprisingly smooth palm held out to her, and the long, thick fingers closed over the coin, opened again with Mrs. Eugenia looking at it as if she'd made it appear there by sleight of hand.

“Mama Jean,” Ida said, “I wonder. There's a story that the
ghosts of old soldiers would visit you and your husband, and the ghosts of ladies in the town, and would dance here in your parlor.”

Mama Jean looked blankly at her as she posed the question, then blinked and looked at a spot in the other room.

“Not since I sold the piano to pay for my husband's funeral,” she said.

Ida showed herself out. She could see a storm coming over Sand Mountain to the south. Sky full of hazy blue light above, a strange deep blue almost black in the hills, and silent, as if it meant business. They would have to hurry to get home before it hit. The creek would be up in such a rain, if it didn't dump all of itself into the valley where the people of this town sat awaiting it, powerless like all of God's children on this earth, who needed such reminding now and then that they were mortal. Ida Chisolm didn't.

The Boy with the Camera

E
lijah came over with a Brownie camera one day and took some pictures of her on their walk. He mailed the film to town to have them developed and printed. One, his favorite, was of Jane looking over her shoulder at him in a flirtatious way, and she made him give her the print of that one, she thought it was so funny. “But it's my favorite one,” he said. “Well, you just get yourself another one made up,” she said.

Her mother and father, demure in their greetings but not impolite, watched them from the front porch as they would pause and turn to one another, as the Key boy would sometimes take her hand when he spoke to her.

After having seen the photograph and thinking about it as he sat before the fireplace late into an evening, her father had an idea to send Jane into town to live with her sister Grace, who was now proprietor of the dry-cleaning operation she'd started out with as a seamstress. Chisolm worried that living in town might afford Jane less freedom to get out and about—at least here she had roam of the property without socializing if it wasn't ­convenient—but thought it might be a good thing to separate her from the Key boy, for the good of them both.

“Better to have her upset with me than have her heart broken by that boy one day,” he said to himself.

“Of course,” his wife said, surprising him. He hadn't known she was in the room. He looked at her, a bit irritated by her sneakiness and her sarcastic tone.

Things were getting no better moneywise, either. He would worry less, maybe, if she wasn't around, if she was in town learning how to live off the farm, moving toward learning how to be on her own in the world. Once he'd really thought about it, he couldn't imagine she'd want to live on this farm by herself when he and the wife were dead and gone.

And to himself he admitted he was drinking more. Craving it more. Slipping off to his makings shed more often. But after a few drinks he would forget or not care about discretion and bring the jug or jar back up to the house. He worried about her seeing that.

His wife suggested that Jane could take in some sewing, maybe from some of Grace's customers, to help out with expenses. She might build up a little business of her own that way.

They presented Jane with the idea the next afternoon before supper. She looked at them, sitting there at the kitchen table beside which she stood, listening. Her face had taken on the kind of look she'd put on as a child, when something upset her.

“I'd rather just stay here,” she said. “I can earn my keep.”

“Well,” her mother said, deliberately not looking at her. “We think it's the best thing for now.”

Jane went into her room and sat on the bed, hearing her father go out again and her mother get to work on the meal. In a while, she got up and went back into the kitchen to help. Her mother stopped to look at her, then went back to what she'd been doing.

“You could take in some sewing work, like I said, just to help Grace out a little,” she said. “She practically raised you, anyway.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Jane said. “But don't make me leave right now. Please. Not just yet.”

Her mother looked at her long enough for Jane to feel the room begin to close in on them, the outside world to disappear from her senses. “And why do you want to stay here, with just us? Why do you want that so much just now?”

“I'm not like Grace. I've never wanted to get away, restless. Let me stay at least through the spring. For the dances, then. I had such a good time.”

“Maybe you are restless,” her mother said. And they stared at one another until her mother stood up to leave the room.

“If you would watch those peas on the stove,” she said as she left, “I'd appreciate it. Don't let them boil over. I need to get out of this house for a bit.”

“All right.” Although she said it softly and her mother didn't appear to be listening, reaching for her tin of snuff up on the mantel before going out onto the porch to sit by herself for a while.

THERE WERE
LIGHT
breezes passing through the hay stalks, cotton bolls beginning to bloom, the corn leafed out deep green. Jane walked with the doctor down into the woods and around the fishing pond and he talked about his love for fried fish and potatoes and patted his growing belly. Occasionally he pulled his briar pipe from his vest pocket and loaded it with tobacco and stopped to smoke leisurely while she waited. He was getting on in years, not really old but seemed so to Jane, and he stopped often to catch his breath and sigh out about how he knew he
was
n't
really getting old, but he sure wasn't young anymore. When they came out of the woods and walked down to the pasture below the house, he paused in his gait, knocked ashes from his pipe, and said, “Well, I
have put off showing you this, or giving you the information that I promised I would, but from what your parents say, you and the Key boy seem to be courting in earnest, and so I thought I should not put it off any longer.”

She listened, her ears burning with what she half knew and feared he was going to say.