Mister called from outside the locked door, “Why you taking so long in there?”
“Hush up, Mister,” she heard Hattie whisper, and then the sounds of her pulling him out of the room over his protests. She waited on the front porch until the doctor came home from the emergency call he’d made, and asked him to take her home.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“Yes,” was all she would say in reply. But after that she didn’t want to play with Mister, and would demur when the doctor offered to take her to his house for a visit. Sometimes she would ask him if he would just take her on a drive in his car or a ride in his buggy, since she didn’t want him to think she didn’t like him anymore. If he had other patients to see she would wait outside until he came back out and took her home again. If there were other children about she would stay in the car or buggy and decline their offers to come play.
Her parents and other members of her family had got to where they never said anything to her about her “problem,” except to tell her quietly to go change herself if she forgot about it, especially before a meal or if someone was dropping by for a visit.
But now she thought about it quite a lot, through the winter and into the spring. How she was different. It descended more deeply into her mind that she was the only one made the way she was made. That she was strange. She became accustomed to that flushing sense of shame that could come on and heat your face and make your scalp tingle and make you want to cry.
Summer came early, and then came on hard in June. It was very hot. She took to wearing light dresses and leaving off her diaper, and staying outside in the shade most of the day, hopping behind a bush or tree when she felt something coming on, instead of out in the open as she had when she was younger. She kept with her a catalog page she would tear a piece off of, use, and discard. And she would feel that flush of shame whenever it happened, and her mind would bristle with the sense of that strangeness. Ever since the day playing checkers with Mister, she had taken to washing her own diapers down at the creek instead of letting her mother or Grace take care of it. She would not put them in her mother’s boiling pot for sterilizing washed undergarments until all the others’ had been removed.
She was past her sixth birthday that November before it occurred to her that no one had even mentioned the possibility of attending school the next year.
She went to where her mother sat mending a shirt on the front porch.
Her mother looked up as she stood there.
“What’s the matter?”
“I guess I won’t be going to school next year like the rest.”
Her mother stopped her mending, though she looked down at it for a bit before meeting her daughter’s eye again.
“No,” she said. “I don’t see the sense in putting you through it.” Then, more to herself, she said, “Most girls, I’d say it’s a waste of time, anyway.” She looked a long moment at Jane again and said, “We will have to figure out something that you can do.”
Her mother and Grace taught her simple sewing, her mother offering single-word corrections now and then, while Grace did the hands-on teaching. Jane’s hands were small and clumsy and she pricked herself, her bottom lip trembling when she tried not to cry. Be patient, her mother said, and she tried, and got better. The idea was it might be something useful in life when there was no more mother, no more father, nothing but the farm, which would probably be sold by her older siblings. It was understood that Grace would have to make do on her own soon enough, as well. Either get married or go to find work in town.
She got better at sewing and soon even enjoyed it, applying a child’s blind concentration to the task, from mending seams and sewing patches into quilts, up to eventually using the machine to make simple smocks and skirts and then dresses. She liked the rhythm of pumping the machine’s treadle to keep the stylus going and guiding the material through. She had to stand to reach it with her foot. Everything else disappeared from her mind. She was more like her father than her mother. He did not mind work, easily focused on a task.
Perhaps as a consolation for not having school to look forward to, she was given freedom to wander about the whole place as she wanted. She walked the path through the woods that were charmed with their strange stillness and the scents of various plants and rich earth beneath moldering leaves. She walked the path down to the beaver pond, which was so much prettier in its wooded canyon than the cow pond sitting in the open and surrounded by hoof-cleaved muddy banks at the edge of their south pasture. She came out and sat on the hill above those woods and watched, at the juncture of field and woods down below, a pack of scruffy stray dogs that she imagined were the wild dogs she’d been cautioned about. They skirted the field in a silent little troop, tongues lolling, then disappeared into the undergrowth again, as if they’d been a ghost pack not really having been there except in her own mind.
HER FATHER TOOK her fishing one Saturday afternoon when the bream were on their beds, down at the beaver pond. They walked the trail slowly, her father guiding the tips of their two cane poles through the tree limbs and saplings and shrubbery along the trail, and sat in the shade over a bed and pulled out more than a dozen of the broad, snub-nosed sunfish, wriggling. They were bluegills and bigger ones her father called shell crackers. The tug on her line ran a current from the line and pole straight through her body, a long-lined static shock, and she soiled herself in excitement. Her father only laughed a little and told her to toss her undergarment aside and lift her skirt and go for a little cool wade down the bank at a clear and shallow spot. When she hesitated, he said, “It’s safe there, go on.” Her mother had forbidden her to go down to the pond by herself and said the water was dangerous, as if she had a morbid fear of it herself. Her father came over, found a stick, and told her to beat the grass near the edge before stepping through it, to scare off any snake that might be resting there. She whacked at the grass, waited a moment, hesitating again, looking at the smooth brown surface of the water. “Go on, now,” her father said again. She carefully took a step in, ankle-deep. The cool water on her skin, the cool mud of the bottom squishing up between her toes, was delicious to her senses.
“Now, how’s that?” he said.
“It’s grand, Papa,” she called back, and when she came out again he gave her a little one-armed hug, an expression of sentiment so rare in their household that it sent her senses singing all over again, and brought the beginning of tears to her eyes, which she hid by walking away and picking wildflowers on the little hill above the pond and bringing them back to him.
“That’s good,” he said. “Your mama can set them on the table for our supper.”
That evening they had a big mess of crisply fried bream and her father showed her how to nibble on the crisp, salty tails, which Grace said was disgusting but they ignored her. The delicate white meat peeled easily off the fishes’ thin bones and you could pull the whole skeleton and head away, which seemed in its simplicity almost a miracle.
“Why haven’t we done this before?” she said, and her father said he guessed he’d just got out of the habit, and they would have to do it again soon.
“I think your mama got tired of them,” he said.
“Well, tired of cleaning them, maybe,” their mother said, frowning at being called out.
As her father rose to go be by himself, and Grace and her mother began to clean the table and wash dishes, she sat looking at her own, with its two beautifully symmetrical, cleaned fish skeletons lying there in a thin film of congealed grease. It occurred to her what a very strange creature a fish was, a thing that lived in the water, underwater. And somehow breathed water, which would kill a body fool enough to try it, though she’d once wondered if she could sift it carefully through her lips and make that work, and when she’d mentioned it to her father, he’d blanched and said, “Don’t ever try that.”