Now in this moment she wished she had paid more attention when her mother was cleaning the fish, scraping out their insides, their small and delicate organs, had gazed on the mystery of them. And she wished she had asked her mother for one of the heads, so that she could peer closely at those gills, what they had instead of lungs, her father said, with their strange, blood-filled filaments that were apparently the secret to their magical abilities to live as they did.
She wondered what happened to a fish that was born without them. If it just floated to the surface of the water and died.
HER FATHER WOULD point things out to her. He knew the names of most trees, the oaks, elms, sycamore and sweetgum, the beech, pines, hickory, the maples, redbud, dogwood, the hollies, magnolia, swamp bay, cherry, cypress, pecan. Some shrubs, the buckeye, sweetshrub, huckleberry, sumac, snowbell. Flowers, lily of the valley, wisteria, joe-pye weed, jack-in-the-pulpit.
Of the mushrooms roosting in the loam and on the bark of trees live and rotten, he would only say some knew which ones you could eat but that he’d had an uncle who thought he knew them and died after making a mistake one day. “Stay away from them,” her father said.
When she would go into the woods with her mother it was for the express purpose of gathering edible plants and herbs for use in food dishes and medicinal potions. Chicory, dandelion greens, primrose root, wild strawberries, garlic, and wild onion. Teaberry, beechnuts, sassafras, blackberries, blueberries, rose hips for tea and jelly. She showed Jane how to prepare them, and when they were in the kitchen preparing for a regular meal she would call out the names of this one or that, and if Jane was unable to recall their uses and method of preparation, she would sometimes come over and pluck a single dark brown hair from Jane’s head and say, “You don’t want to be going around bald-headed for not knowing your lessons, do you?”
When she walked alone in the woods barefoot at midday after the noon meal she tried remembering the names of the trees and shrubs and flowers. She was fascinated by the mushrooms and their dry or slimy tops and delicate stems and gills beneath their caps. She liked to pop her toes against the ones that burst into orange dust that bloomed in the breezeless air. But it was the quiet, modest ones that were most interesting. If they didn’t want you to see them, you would not. They lived out their lives in shade and dampness, quivering when you passed and going so still if you happened to notice and squat down to take a closer look, to touch. One day she came upon a strange one that was not at all modest, growing straight up and tall with a small cap on its top. She broke it off at the base and took it home to show her father, but her mother saw it first and snatched it from her hand and threw it into the hog slop bucket.
“But what is it?” Jane said. “I’ve never seen one like it.”
“If you see another, you leave it alone,” her mother said, oddly angered.
“What’s it called?”
“It’s called a stinkhorn,” her mother said, “and aptly so.”
When she asked her father about it later, during one of their walks, and asked him why it grew straight up like that when all the others were short and round or flat like fat leaves growing from a tree’s bark, he said some called it the devil’s horn and some called it dead man’s finger. “There’s different shapes of it from just what you found.”
When she next saw Dr. Thompson she asked him about the stinkhorn and her mother’s reaction to it.
“Your mother was upset because she’s a modest woman and it so happens the stinkhorn mushroom resembles a part of the male anatomy or body, the part that is used in reproduction. In making babies.”
“Sure is a big’un,” she said.
The doctor said nothing, but rubbed his mouth for a moment and seemed to grip his jaw, then removed his shaded spectacles and rubbed the lenses on his shirtsleeve.
“Well, in fact,” he said, “there are varieties of the plant that resemble the complementary part of the female anatomy as well, in quite a lurid fashion.”
She didn’t know those words, complementary, lurid.
“Like mine?”
“No,” the doctor said. “Not really.”
“It’s what I’m supposed to look like, then?”
“Not exactly,” the doctor said. “It’s just people using their imagination. For the most part, anyway.”
He told her that he would explain it to her in more detail when she was a little older.
“What’s wrong with now?”
He fiddled in his vest pocket for his pipe and took it out, but only held it out from him and looked at it as if to examine it for flaws. Then he looked sideways at her.
“Soon enough,” he said. “When the time is right.”
She walked off, perturbed, but then came right back.
“I need you to tell me why I’m the way I am, why I’m different, or how I’m different. Why can’t I control myself?” She had learned this discreet term well enough over the years.
He looked at her a long moment, his eyes squinting that tired squint, a mote of some kind in there that was more than a speck of dust, more something in his mind than his eye. Then he nodded, said, “All right, then.”
They sat on the ground and he told her as best he could about what she did not have that most girls and women had. “First, there’s no ‘why.’ It’s just how you’re made. Inside you,” he said, “I believe you have just about everything, if not everything, that any other girl has. But on the outside you don’t have everything they do. Everything is kind of tucked up inside you, hidden away. And one thing you do not have is the little muscle that allows you to control yourself. It’s a squeezing muscle, see. And when you need to go potty, if you have the little muscle, then you can squeeze it and stop it until you get to a privy or bathroom or a good-sized bush to hide behind, you know.”
She nodded, serious. She was trying to form a picture in her mind of her insides, and make that match up somehow with what she’d been able to tell about herself from what she could see on the outside. It was like trying to imagine some very complex mushroom.
“What you have on the inside is just as complex — I mean it is just as much a wonder of a miracle of the human body — as anyone else. But it didn’t get to finish putting itself all together, didn’t get to finish itself up and get everything right, before it was time for you to be born. Or maybe I should say at some point, for some reason, it just stopped making itself into what it was supposed to.” He paused, looked at her looking back at him, her brow bunched down. “That’s about as best I can explain it to you at your age, Janie. I hope that helps a little bit. It’s not anyone’s fault, certainly not yours, and it’s not anything to be ashamed of. It’s just a difference, is all. And the only thing is that it causes you to have to live your life in a special way. To have less freedom to go to school and such as that. But it does not mean that you are not a normal little girl. You’re just a little girl who has to deal with more things than most little girls. And that will make you strong. It already has.”
“Can you fix it?”
“I hope one day someone can. But right now I don’t know. Well, I know they will one day. I just don’t know when. I know they work at figuring these things out all the time.”
Jane nodded, still trying to put together some kind of picture in her mind that made sense. She was coming up with something, although she had no idea if it was a fantastical idea or something close to what the doctor knew.