“It’s been a long time,” he said then. “I don’t even remember them, really. I’m sorry for bringing it up.”
She didn’t say anything, wanting to walk away now but unable to make herself do it.
“I used to hate it — school, I mean,” he said. “That’s one thing I thought about you before. That you were lucky they let you quit. Whyever they did.”
“You like it better now?”
“It’s getting a little better,” he said. “So don’t you know how to read and write?”
“Yes, I do.”
“So you learned that without even a whole year of school. Yeah, I remember you coming just that one fall, but you were just first grade and I was already in fourth. I’ve seen you at church every now and then. You must not like it much, either, no more than you go.”
She shrugged. “It’s all right.”
“What about numbers?”
“What about them?”
He laughed. “How’d you learn numbers without school?”
“Tending my papa’s store.”
“That’s what I thought.”
He looked at her for a moment with that curious smile again.
“You’ve just about grown up. You don’t have a secret boyfriend, do you?”
“I don’t have any friends at all.”
He looked almost alarmed at that. Then as if he were thinking. Then as if he couldn’t decipher his own thoughts into a reply. Then, “I guess it’s hard to have any friends out in the country, if you don’t go to school. I guess it was that way for everybody, back when they didn’t even have schools up here, and folks had big families. They just got along knowing each other.”
“That’s the way it is with me, I guess.”
“I guess they’d know some people from going to church, though.”
“I guess so.”
“But you don’t have to do that very often, either. I’m feeling a little jealous of your freedom.”
“Huh,” she said, then shut her mouth.
“Are you an atheist?” he said then.
“What’s that?”
“I thought you were smart.”
“I just never heard of it.”
“It’s somebody doesn’t believe in God.”
“No, then. Though I really haven’t thought about it. I just thought everybody believed in God.”
“Well, everybody I know says they do.”
Then they were silent and awkward for a minute. She realized she was staring at him. He squinted at her.
“Don’t do that,” she said, teasing. “I can’t see your pretty blue eyes.” Then she couldn’t believe she’d said that.
He blushed and looked down, then reached into his bib pocket and pulled out a pair of thick-lensed wire-rimmed eyeglasses, hooked the earpieces over his ears.
“I hate wearing them,” he said, with a kind of gloomy grin. “I was hiding them, didn’t want you to see.”
“I saw you take them off one time before y’all came into the store.”
“Oh. Well.” He looked at her again. “My pretty blue eyes are blind as a bat.”
“They just got bigger and bluer,” she said, and they laughed.
“I’m glad I put them on, now, so I can see yours. They look like — I’ve never seen blue eyes like yours. They almost don’t seem real.”
“Well, they are. My papa and Dr. Thompson told me they haven’t changed a bit since I was born. I guess that’s a little unusual.” And thought, Like everything else about me.
“Do you know about the dances?” he said.
“What dances?”
“The ones at the community center. Damascus.”
“Oh. Right. Grace told me.” They were at a loss for a brief while, like social animals, after a greeting, gone into other distractions.
Then he said, “Are you happy with it?” Kind of soft-voiced, like he didn’t know how she’d respond.
“With what?” she said, her own voice quieter, too.
He hesitated, then shrugged again, glanced back at the corn, said, “Everything, I guess. Your life.”
She didn’t know what to say. She’d never put a word to the sadness she could sometimes feel, especially in the last couple of years, that would linger at the edge of her thoughts like the invisible ghost of someone she thought she recognized but didn’t know who it was, some kind of familiar she couldn’t quite grasp.
SHE COULD TELL he liked her. She would see him, in the store, or passing with his family on the road near their house, and other times like the first time they talked, when she would bring a little bite to eat and think of it secretly as their picnic. In her mind their encounters were episodes in a casual courtship. Yet it occurred to her that he probably didn’t think of them that way at all. And she was embarrassed and felt foolish, and worried that he may have told others — boys, if not girls — about his occasional odd visits with the mysterious girl Jane Chisolm.
She didn’t want him to think that way about her.
And so, during the autumn she turned sixteen, she began going to the community dances. Elijah Key had told her about them and, slowly, a desire to take part had grown stronger in her until it became a resolve to do so. She was tired of being alone. She realized that, aside from her occasional, innocent encounters with Elijah Key, she’d been bored for some time. Maybe the encounters weren’t so innocent, if she looked forward to them so much. And sometimes planned them, truth be told. Well, she always did. She would not eat or drink anything on the morning of a day she thought she might run into him. So she could linger with him for a while without worry.
She had been a spritely young girl, slim and a bit lank-haired but with a sweet face and good humor, but by now had grown taller and begun to take on a gaunt, dark-eyed beauty, and moved with a kind of natural grace, as a leaf will fall gracefully from a tree in barely a breeze.
When she made up her mind to attend the dances, her parents were surprised, but she seemed to want it so much they gave reluctant permission. “It’s only going to be a heartbreak one day,” her mother said.
“It’s just dances.”
“What about when you get older than the others and have to stop going or look foolish?” her mother said. “And I don’t know how you’re going to manage it, anyway, you know.”
“It’s just working against the loneliness,” her father said, “like any child living on a farm.” His wife said nothing and returned to her work.
She and her father stood there on the porch, silent, looking out at nothing. He seemed slack-jawed, not so much silent as mute. His eyes empty.
“Are you all right, Papa?”
He took his hat off and ran a hand through his hair, made a grimace, put the hat back on.
“Nothing to worry about, daughter,” he said. “You go on to those dances, try to have yourself a good time. Of course, I’ll be keeping an eye on you, if you don’t mind.”
He went on down the steps, as if there were really nothing more to say. Or nothing more he knew how to. She watched him disappear into the shadows of the work shed, head down, maybe mumbling to himself.
For an entire two days before the evening of a dance, she fasted. First thing on the first morning, she dosed herself with castor oil followed by a little buttermilk, just to have something on her stomach, and stayed in the privy until she felt herself emptied out. She spent the entire next day beneath a tree in the middle of the pecan grove, or beside the fishing pond, or lying in the middle of her favorite little clearing in the woods. She would take along a piece of bread and maybe bacon, but scattered the bread for the birds, tossed the bacon to the fish or along a trail for some fox or stray dog to surprise upon.
Not thinking. Just being, or simply being, Jane. As when she was younger. On the first day she would allow herself to sip a little water from time to time.