As the moon had risen high above the farm now, illuminating the plow and disc, harrow, baler, and the high sharp peak of the barn’s roof and the shed and outhouse off to the south of the yard and the shadowed chairs on the rough-hewn floor of the veranda, he walked over to the shed and retrieved the jug he’d set there earlier and brought it back to the veranda, where he drank from it and rolled cigarettes until the moon was down at the tips of the pines in its descent. He calmed a bit, but it wasn’t long before he resumed his low and angry conversation with demons real and imaginary in his mind. He hardly noticed when his wife came out and fetched the girl, hadn’t noticed she’d been over by the door, sitting in the shadows. Hardly heard their sibilant voices just inside the house, listening instead as he was to the louder voices inside his head.
IN THE KITCHEN her mother whispered, “You take care you do not get his ire up.” And she looked at Jane with a hard expression until Jane turned and left to go back to bed. Jane could still hear her father talking to himself and his people, a low murmuring that became the murmurings of small crowds of faceless people who had lost their way to wherever they were going and occupied the evening’s crepuscular landscape, not understanding they had passed from one kind of living into another, unrecognizable one.
Essentially Normal
Despite Jane’s isolation, she began to be interested in boys. It was a slow, gradual accretion, this new awareness. Of boys as boys, that is, strange creatures, like another species retaining the general physical qualities of her own but with hidden secrets, secret differences. Significant perhaps in some way to her in particular. She saw them when they passed by in buckboard wagons on the road sometimes, or at the occasional sermon she deigned to attend, and sometimes they would come with their fathers to shop at the store. She wondered, feeling foolish as she did, if they had heard that she often tended the store and had come along so as to see her. She had begun to notice them in a different way. Almost in the way a forest animal or bird, at rest and hidden safely away, may take notice of a new animal walking through its woods, walking upright, carrying with it some strong, exotic scent.
She did have a sense that she herself must be some kind of mysterious creature. People must gossip, for her mother gossiped about other people at times. Grace never had, of course. Grace had despised most of them to the point of disinterest, as far as Jane could tell. Jane could imagine coming upon some boy, somewhere, alone, maybe like in the clearing where she’d seen Grace meet and do it with the Barnett boy. They would both stop in their tracks, surprised. He would come closer to her. But then unlike the dumb Barnett boy he would be like Lon Temple with Lacey, tender, and would ask if he could touch her, but in innocent ways, on the cheek or her arm or hand.
This was all soon accompanied by a kind of discomfort, a swelling or tightness in her lower belly, like things being squeezed up in there, and when she mentioned it, her mother stopped what she was doing and looked at her with eyebrows raised, and it seemed to Jane that she was looking at her in a way she hadn’t before. When a few days later she noticed what looked like blood in her diaper, she was frightened. Her mother said she needn’t worry, but seemed not to know how to talk to her about it and looked worried enough about it herself.
Soon followed a visit by Dr. Thompson, who sat her down and asked her some questions, examined her bloody diaper, and probed at her belly with his long, knuckly fingers.
“Well,” he said, “you are becoming a woman, after all.”
“What do you mean, ‘after all’? Besides, I’m only fourteen years old.”
“Comes to lots of girls even younger, and some closer to your age. A few even later, though rarely. Depends on the individual. Anyway,” he said, and sat to look her in the eye, “it is a good thing. In your case, see, even though we believed you wouldn’t have trouble with it, we couldn’t be entirely sure. Reasonably sure but not absolutely.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“I was concerned about the possibility of a blockage. Of the blood not being able to come out.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It could have been a serious problem. But now I don’t believe we have to worry about that anymore.” He pulled his pocket watch from his vest pocket, checked it, then settled himself in his seat, looked squarely at her again, and explained to her as best he could about menstruation. Though he didn’t talk beyond the bodily mechanics of it.
“And it happens for the rest of your life?” she said.
“No, at some point in a woman’s life, later on, it stops. And then she can no longer have children. It’s a natural thing because then she’s too old to have children without endangering her life or the child’s.”
She sat looking back at him, wondering whether to tell her secret. His kind, familiar, and calm gray eyes then set it free, and she said, “I know how people make babies.”
“Well, I did give you that pamphlet drawing, but of course there’s more to it than that.”
“I know that, too.”
He said nothing, his own bushy eyebrows gone up.
“I have to wonder how you know it.”
She told him, after making him promise he wouldn’t tell, about Grace and the Barnett boy. She didn’t tell him just then about Lon and Lacey Temple.
“I see,” he said.
“How come Grace didn’t have a baby, then, from that?”
“It does not always result in a child. Sometimes it just doesn’t take.”
“I know it won’t ever happen to me.”
Again he was gazing at her in that way he had of making her feel she could trust him with just about anything. Then he sat back and cleared his throat, and looked down at his hands as if to see that he held something curious there.
“Well. I believe that you have everything you’re supposed to have, inside. But whether or not you will ever have children—” He stopped and just looked at her for a long moment, which made her scalp prickle. “I guess I should speak plainly. It would be hard for a man to deal with the way you’re different. And even though you have everything inside of you that you need, I don’t know that the act of intercourse — that is what happened between your sister and that boy — would actually be possible, or at least not in a way that would result in your conceiving a child. Or if you did, I’m not sure you’d be able to carry it through gestation — the time it takes to grow inside you before coming out into the world.”
“I know that, too.”
“Do you, Janie?”
She didn’t answer, thinking. It was coming on late afternoon, and for a moment it was like she was in a dream she sometimes had, where it’s the gloaming coming on and the trees are a beautifully darkened green and the sounds in their shadowed crowns begin to rise like some kind of otherworldly singing inside of herself.
Yet outside the window now the trees were nearly bare in their early December secret trembling.
He put a hand on her shoulder.
“You’re essentially a normal child, Jane, as I’ve said. Complicated, but essentially normal.” He looked at her. “I’ll bring you something more to read about all this, what we’ve talked about. With more pictures. It’ll help you understand.”