She loved the taste of cool buttermilk more than anything in the world. And her favorite after buttermilk was butter on hot biscuits, and after that, butter on hot cornbread, and after that, fried chicken, and after that, apple pie and the rare treat of homemade ice cream, and after that, and later on, fried bream from their own pond. Especially the crisp, salted tails.
Between the ages of four and five, she began to make sure she was the last to sleep. It made her feel safer to be the last one awake, watching and listening to the world settle into the evening quiet and dark. The steady breathing, snoring, sleep-mumbling of the others made her feel more awake and alive, and that was a kind of safeness, too. An owl hooted down in the woods and she hoped no one would die. She studied the pale palms of her hands in the darkened room. The skin there gave off a light as soft as starlight on birch bark. How private, the palm of one’s hand. How intimately one knows it. So she may have said, had she the words.
She was a guardian over the slumbering household in her sole awareness of it, and in that comforting role she could finally let go and sleep herself. Although one night, when she was just dropping into that long dark nothing where for an unknown time you ceased to exist, and from which may never come back, it was so hard to get over the idea of that — for every night she said her prayers, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take—she heard the low growling of something, a growl of something that sounded massive, slow, and fierce passing just below the window of her room. Some unspeakable monster. Her heart seized and she shouted out. Grace sat up in her bed, looking around for whatever was the cause of it, and her mother and then her father came running from their beds across the breezeway. Her mother came to her bedside, while her father remained in the doorway open to the breezeway and glittery moonlight slanted on the unpainted boards there. Her father took a lantern around the house to look for tracks. But there was nothing, they said, there had been no beast.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” Grace said. “I was sound asleep till she started yelling.”
“Why would you imagine such an awful thing?” her mother said.
“It could have been a bear,” Grace said.
“Not only would we’ve heard that,” her father said, “we sure would’ve smelled it. Nothing stinks quite like a bear.”
But Grace surprised her by lying down beside her until she could go back to sleep. She even teased her with a lullabye she made up: Hush, little girl, now, don’t be a’feared, wasn’t nothing but an old bear you hee-rd. That got her giggling and soon she relaxed and went to sleep, and when she woke up Grace was still there, snoring lightly on top of her bedcovers in her nightgown. She watched her till she blinked her eyes awake. Grace looked over, grumpy again, muttered something to herself. Then said, “How could you know what a bear is when you’ve never seen or even heard one, far as that goes?”
“It was you said it was a bear,” Jane said. “Have you ever seen one?”
“I’ve seen worse,” Grace said.
“Like what?” she asked, fascinated.
“Haven’t you?” Grace said, being mysterious. “In your sleep?”
“No.”
“You will.”
But her only nightmares would be about the nameless beast she had heard, her sleeping mind imagining it in all kinds of forms, none of which she was ever able to recall upon waking.
Light of the Gathering Day
By late spring of the year she would turn six, a more complex awareness of her difference had begun to shape itself in her mind like the root of some strange plant down deep in the woods. She had moments when she felt like a secret, silent creation, invisible, more the ghost of something unknowable than a person, a child, a little girl. More than once she felt the light slap of her mother’s hand against the back of her head, the voice saying, Snap out of it, have you gone deaf and dumb and blind, now? For a second it was as if something just as ethereal as herself, a harsh and spiteful guardian angel, had snatched her back into the world against her nature, then whooshed away again on invisible wings.
She began thinking about what it would be like to go to school. She couldn’t go the following year because of her late November birthday, but she began to wonder what it would be like, among strange children — and adults — who did not know about her. Would her mother or father tell them and would that make everything all right? She had played a game of checkers one day with Mister, the doctor’s housekeeper’s son, out on the doctor’s back porch. They’d been watching the doctor’s new peacocks in the yard, but Mister got bored and suggested checkers. She said, “When did he get those peacocks?”
“I ’on’ know,” Mister said. “Recent. It’s a strange bird.” They watched the birds, several of them, peck about the yard and stand every now and then to fan their tails. “Said he just liked to watch them. Mama says he’s been lonesome since his wife died.”
He was a skinny boy, with his hair clipped close to his head and baggy clothes that’d been handed down from his cousins.
“They sure are pretty,” Jane said. She could see their deep, shiny blue neck feathers gleaming in the sunlight.
Mister went to get the board and chips. She was a bit sketchy on the rules, so when Mister made one of his pieces a king she insisted that he allow her to make one of hers a queen.
“Ain’t no such thing as a queen in checkers,” he said. They were on the back porch just off the kitchen, and Mister’s mother Hattie kept a close eye on them.
“If you get to be a king, then I get to be a queen,” she said.
To which Mister replied, “That ain’t how the game works. You got to get all the way to the top. And they call these pieces ‘men’ and that’s why it’s a king when you get it there. Plus, you stink.”
“What?”
She’d become so accustomed to her accidents that unless she was in public she sometimes didn’t even attend to them right away.
Then Hattie came out where they were and told him to hush, he was being rude.
“Well, she does,” Mister insisted, and that got him a light whack on the noggin and a scolding, and by that time Mister’s words had sunk in and Jane had become acutely self-conscious and smelled herself. She got up and ran inside the house to the doctor’s indoor privy, stripped off her diaper, cleaned herself, ran water in the tub, and scrubbed the garment with soap, rinsed it, squeezed it as dry as she could, washed her hands, then put it back on, cold and wet against her skin beneath her skirt. Then she rinsed the tub good and turned off the water.