Her father did as the doctor said. His face became serious as he held the thing in his mouth for a moment.
“Go on, chew.”
He looked sideways at the doctor, then began to chew. His eyebrows went up again, and then he swallowed.
“What, Papa?” Jane said. “What’s it like?”
“I can’t really say,” he said. “You’ll just have to see for yourself.”
She tipped the shell up and slid the oyster into her mouth, held it there a moment looking like she thought it might explode, then she bit into it, and the doctor watched her eyes get big with what he knew was the actual explosion of salty juices bursting onto her tongue and cheeks and the cold strange taste overwhelming her palate. And then it was down.
She stood there very still for a moment, then looked at her father, then the doctor. They were all standing there with big grins on their faces.
“What?” she said.
“Well, how’d you like it?” her father said.
“I do like it,” she said. “But sure does seem like you’d have to eat a whole big bunch of them things to make a meal.”
Her father smiled and the doctor laughed out loud and reached for another and began to shuck it.
“Sure enough,” he said. “But the ocean’s full of them. All over the sandy floor of the big Gulf of Mexico. And every other ocean in the world, far as I know. Let’s have us a bounty.”
But she and her father would have only a couple more each.
“Keep some, then,” the doctor said before he angled himself into his car seat to go. He put several into a small croaker sack and put some ice in with them and set them down onto the ground at their feet. He took a couple out, shucked them, and set them on top of the sack with their tops loosely covering them. “Don’t like them raw, I tell you what, they’re even better battered and fried.”
Her father shook his head.
“I don’t think I could get the wife to touch them,” he said. “Otherwise I might try that.”
“Well, you get a notion to try one that way, just come on over to the house this evening. I might just fry some up myself. Or get Hattie to. Course, they say a raw oyster’ll put the lead in your pencil.”
“What’s that mean?” Jane said.
The doctor grinned, touched his hat, turned his car about in the yard, and trundled off toward the road. Then he stopped, put it in reverse, backed up. Chisolm came over to the window.
“I need to talk to you about something. Not tonight, but in the next day or so,” he said.
“All right.”
“It’s about little Jane,” he said. “I want to have an expert take a look at her. I’ll tell you more when I come back by.” He smiled. “When I’m a bit more sober.”
“Good enough, Doc,” Chisolm said with a grim smile of his own. He backed away from the car and the doctor drove on.
THEY WATCHED HIM go till he was out of sight and they could only hear the car speeding up and its wheels bumping on the rutted road.
“Always something new in the world,” her father said.
Jane grabbed one of the shucked oysters from the top of the sack. The young tenant Lon Temple and his even younger wife, Lacey, leased eighty acres on their place and Jane had been looking for an excuse to try to make friends with Lacey, since she seemed so young for a farm wife.
Ice-cold oyster in her hand, she ran down to show it to her, keeping her hand clapped on top of it, the sticky wet coolness of it against her palm. She knocked on the door of the cabin, then knocked again, and in a minute Lon Temple came to the door and stood there looking at her. She was surprised, thinking he’d be in the field like her father and mother had been. He was a shortish, square kind of man, square face, small eyes, and a small mouth. She’d always thought he looked a little peevish. His young wife Lacey she couldn’t tell much about from spying because she wore a bonnet outside most of the time.
“I wanted to show Lacey something,” Jane said. She lifted her hand, revealing the oyster, and held it toward him.
He just looked at the thing in her hand.
“Lacey can’t come out,” he said. “She’s not feeling well.”
“Oh. Can I help?”
“She don’t need no help but what I can give her. What the hell is that thing there?”
“It’s an oyster. You eat it, raw, like this. Dr. Thompson said it’ll put the lead in your pencil.”
Temple looked angry then.
“What the hell?” he said.
Then he shut the door.
“Mean little son-of-a-whore,” Jane said to herself, echoing words she’d heard her mother mutter about him. She looked at the oyster, and popped it into her mouth, chewing as she climbed down the porch steps. Even then she had to stop for a moment, the sensation of it was so strange.
She went back up to the house and stood there in the yard, then walked in a kind of daze back to the pecan grove, found some leftover nuts in their smooth brown shells, held them in her hands, rolled them between her fingers and thumbs and into her palms, savoring her tongue’s memory of the new strange thing, the taste of it lingering even in her teeth. The light began to fail and fall about her like a weightless, silvery, disintegrating rain. She felt flushed by it down to the very tips of her toes.
All things of this nature, apparently unrelated — torrential storm, the burst of salty liquid from a plump and ice-cold raw oyster, the soft skins of wild mushrooms, the quick and violent death of a chicken, the tight and unopened bud of a flower blossom, a pack of wild scruffy dogs a-trot in a field, the thrum of fishing line against the attack of a bream, and peeling away the delicate frame of its bones from the sweet white meat of its body, a smooth and hard oval nutshell rolled in a palm, the somehow palpable feel of fading light — were in some way sexual for Jane. Not that this was how she would or could have expressed it, especially at that age. She felt it inside herself, though, as deeply and truly as a lover. She fell into the grove’s rough, tall grass and into darkness, some charged current running through her in pleasant palpitations of ecstasy.
Mortality
Eldred O. Thompson, M.D.
North Poplar Road
Mercury, Miss.
Dear Ed,
I have, as I hope you know, been taking careful notes from your letters, concerning your monitoring and examinations of the Chisolm girl in your care. Recently I put them together in the most assimilated fashion I could and sat down with colleagues — and even managed to get the busy Dr. Young into the meeting. We had your notes, your drawings. We met quite a while, for meetings in this place — a good half hour or more. I must tell you that Dr. Young and the others — and I concurred — concluded that it is highly improbable anything can be done here to correct the girl’s condition, at this point in time, given what we know about what’s possible, surgically. I will say that Dr. Young raised an eyebrow at me and told me that he thought, and certainly hoped, and had good reason to think, that we or others to follow us will soon have the knowledge, skill, and means to correct her particular condition, but it is impossible to know, just now, exactly when. Dr. Young did say he was certain that a young woman he examined in the past few months has a condition almost if not identical to your Miss Chisolm’s, down to the length of the common channel, and he chose not to — could not with any degree of confidence for success — operate. I would imagine that, if there is anything definitive to learn by having someone in Memphis (I recommend Davis) examine her, it would be to find out whether or not sphincter work is possible, at this point. We doubt it.