“I’ll be durned if I don’t think more people been coming by the store since she started keeping it more often,” her father said, laughing a little bit. He said to her, “You remember what I said, though, about strangers or rough-looking types. You don’t open up for them, you hear?”
Sometimes a neighbor man, vaguely familiar, would not tell her what he wanted and only ask her to get her father. “I can get you anything you want, sir,” she would say. And the man would act as if he were deaf or stupid, until she went to get her father, and he would tell her to stay put or go to the house, he would take care of this one.
Later she’d come to realize the man was there to purchase liquor. There was a locked cabinet at the very rear corner of the store that she was never given a key to.
The only time she didn’t run out to the store to meet a customer was when she had just had an accident and had no time to clean up, and she hated that.
She liked to go into the smokehouse after the meat had cured and stand beneath the big bodies of meat hanging from hooks attached to fence wire that was secured around the joist beams. The sides of bacon, roasts, hams, and rib slabs turned so slightly in the thin strips of light that leaked between the board siding that she may have imagined it, as she did the spinning of the earth itself as she stood stock-still in the middle of the yard, causing her mother to call out from the breezeway, “Jane! Come in this house and cool your forehead. Have you gone feebleminded on me?”
There was a small two-room storage shed that contained odd discarded objects the family no longer used. Jane was told to stay out of there, might be snakes or wasps or things that could fall off of shelves and knock her in the head. So she did, though sometimes she tried to see through the windows. The panes were too dusty for her to make out much. One day she went in against the rules and saw a dust-covered little red wagon high on a shelf, and wondered why it was up there and she’d never been allowed to play with it when she was younger. And then her father told her it had belonged to her older brother William Waldo, who’d died of the fever just a few years before she was born, and that her mother had made him put it up on that shelf and wouldn’t let anyone so much as touch it, much less play with it.
“Why did she want to keep it, then?” Jane said.
Her father gave her a long look, blinking his eyes, and shook his head. He looked away. “She loved him best,” he finally said. “You have to keep that in mind when she’s acting ornery. Losing that little boy broke her heart.”
She kind of nodded.
“He was just three years old, going on four,” her father said. He leaned down to tug on her blouse where it had gotten twisted a bit. Then he looked her in the eye, his gray eyes there but hardly seeming to really look at her. He was seeing something else. Maybe the dead boy William Waldo. Then he said, “That’s when a child is most precious, you see. Kind of between being a baby and a little boy or girl. It’s when they seem like little angels. It’s the hardest time to lose one. I do believe.” He patted her shoulder and went off, leaving her there feeling something she hadn’t felt before. Only later would she identify it as grief. The gift of it given from her father, and her mother, too, to her.
THEY WOULD MAKE the trip to Memphis after all, she and Dr. Thompson. She did not know that he had been vacillating on the idea for some weeks, only that he up and said to get ready for the trip. Her mother and father seemed tense and didn’t want to discuss it. She was so excited about taking the train ride to Memphis that she felt little or no apprehension about the fact that they were going to see a doctor up there, someone who would supposedly know more about what was wrong with her than Dr. Thompson himself. She doubted that. But the trip sure sounded like fun. She’d never been farther than to town, and never been on a train.
They rode coach to Jackson, then switched to the Chicago train for the ride to Memphis. Though the ride would be relatively brief, the doctor got them a private compartment anyway, so that she wouldn’t have to worry about accidents. The rolling countryside to Jackson was pretty, the bright and rusty leaves fluttering down from the trees along the railway. On the northbound to Memphis the land flattened out once they veered close to the Delta. The doctor got her a soda pop and some peanuts and had himself a beer as they rode, throwing the peanut shells out the window and making her laugh and join in like a game.
In Memphis, they caught a streetcar to what the doctor said was the medical college. It was a big, square, red-brick four-story building. Jane had never seen anything quite like it. But then they’d seen lots of big buildings, hotels and civic buildings, on the way there through town. Her neck just about got a crick from looking right and left every block.
There was a woman sitting near them on the streetcar who looked back at them with a sour expression and got up to sit somewhere else. Jane saw her say something to the woman she sat down next to, and the other woman turned to look at them, too. The doctor stuck his tongue out at them and they looked horrified, but they stopped looking then. Everything seemed so loud, from people’s voices to the car’s bell, automobile engines and horns, and even the smells were loud, of exhaust fumes, the strange burnt smell of the sparking streetcar wires, all kinds of food cooking, and the savory smoke coming from restaurant kitchens and street vendors. It was like they were in a foreign country. The doctor seemed to be enjoying watching her experience it all more than he enjoyed being there himself.
They climbed the big white steps up into the hospital. It smelled sharply of what he said were sanitary chemicals, soap, and lots of human odors. Not a place where she would feel so self-conscious about herself. They went straight into an examination room, which felt like a different world, something weirdly not like regular life. She’d never been in a room that felt so starchy clean and white, with gleaming metal tables and bright light. She half expected to be packaged up as a specimen and shipped to the future or something. Then a tall man, even taller than Dr. Thompson, but thinner, wearing thick spectacles on a small nose, with a balding head and a crewcut, came in and said he was Dr. Davis. There was a nurse with him but he didn’t even bother to introduce the woman, who wore a blank expression beneath her white cap and said nothing, just did what the doctor said like she was some mechanical person instead of a real one. Her hands were cold and Jane looked at her, momentarily startled by her, and the woman didn’t even seem to notice.
Quickly, they had her on the table and in the stirrups, the sheet up, cleaned her good, and then she heard Dr. Davis murmur the usual words about cold, some discomfort, and so on, and she felt him using what she called the metal duck thing to look inside her. She flinched but soon calmed and turned her head to the side to see Dr. Thompson, who was watching the doctor. When he saw her looking at him he came over and held her hand. He patted it.
“Won’t take long,” he said.
Indeed it didn’t. Dr. Davis, out of sight behind the sheet and using his bright light and reflector, used some kind of blunt instrument to poke and probe her here and there inside, seeming to take care not to hurt her, to be gentle. Then he pulled everything out, stood up, told the nurse Jane could get dressed again, and went over to a sink to wash his hands. Dr. Thompson took a fresh diaper from a bag he’d carried and handed it to the nurse.
“If you wouldn’t mind, madame,” he said.
The nurse suddenly turned into a human being, broke into a big smile, and said, “Not at all, Doctor!” Almost startled Jane into peeing on the tabletop.
Then Dr. Thompson went out with Dr. Davis and they stood talking in low tones in the hallway. The nurse went back to being a mechanical person, putting the fresh diaper on Jane, gathering up the instruments, and putting the sheets into a hamper in a corner, and then she left without so much as a glance at or a word to Jane. I guess she must be used to the likes of me, Jane thought.